Daka Fal Walked The World

[Joerg]

I was surprised when I read the slightly rephrased description of the role of Daka Fal during the Greater Darkness. The changes aren't that big compared to the text in Cults of Prax, but my impression of Daka Fal being a fixture in the Court of the Dead already when Orlanth and his companions arrived down there in Hell was shaken by the revised text.

CoP says 

Quote

It was then that Daka Fal appeared and taught them how to separate the living from the dead. He taught the living how to test a creature to see if it is truly alive or if it is a phantom spirit.

Cults of RuneQuest #2 The Lightbringers (CoRQ2) says

Quote

It was then that Daka Fal walked the world and separated the living from the dead, setting each in its place, making known to all their duties and affairs.

Heortling Mythologies gives this credit to the Silver Age hero King Heort, a (Kolating?) shaman in his own right, the human victor at the battle of I Fought We Won at the transition from the Greater Darkness into the Silver Age.

Now King Heort probably qualifies as the shared mythical ancestor of all Heortlings regardless of their actual lineage, which makes an identification as an incarnation of Daka Fal somewhat less upsetting.

Heort was a shaman, which means he would have been in touch with spirits, much like Daka Fal provides this contact with the spirits. The old Cults of Prax version could very well have meant that shamans like Heort could have met the shamanic entity Daka Fal in the Spirit World (or that Daka Fal appeared in their dreams or before their Fetch as a sending) and have learned the secrets of separating the Living and the Dead from one another, and then to have carried this into (their respective bits of) the Surface World (and by sending the dead there, the Underworld).

 

But the new version tells us otherwise.

Quote

Daka Fal walked the world.

Or what was left of it after the Gods War, slowly re-knitting under the administrations of Arachne Solara, applying the very matter of Annihilation that she had devoured in the shape of the Devil that had been sent to Hell by his Devil counterpart to glue the remaining shards of reality back together into a single whole, into a continuous Surface, with missing pieces re-emerging from mostly forgotten memories or just from some necessity of context. The seams of the new world would provide a stage for all the necessary consequences of adjacent reality, and over Time accrete a history solidifyng their reality.

Daka Fal is not only one of the Dead who need to enter the afterlife and remain there, he is the archetypical dead, and the one to receive all those who followed his path of mortality. He was there to receive the Lightbringers on their way to former Wonderhome where dead Yelm held court over all the other dead gods.

That Daka Fal walked the world at the end of the Greater Darkness is just another indication how wrong and unrelatable the Greater Darkness was. Here we have the first Dead, walking about and really admonishing his (involuntary) followers to recognize their station and to go where they were welcome in their new stage of existence.

Being dead is a stage of existence in Gloantha. It is different from complete annihilation (of any traces of self), or from transcendent ascendance to the Ultimate (the Source of all energies) through mysticism, to Liberation. The Dead are still a part of Glorantha, and in many cultures they make up a vaguely recognizable "body" of remains that may intrude into the world of the Living during their assigned holy day, like the procession of the Dead from the Nochet Necropolis into the city and the households of their descendants where they can demand the hospitality one has to give to visiting kin from afar.

Most Gloranthans, including even the majority of the Malkioni with Hrestoli roots, believe (and experience) re-incarnation of the dead, of entering a place of waiting in the Underworld before entering life in the Surface World again as a newborn. It doesn't matter whether you assign Ty Kora Tek's halls of the weiting dead like the Theyalans or whether you regard re-incarnation as being swept along Yothbedta's stream like the Kralori.

Daka Fal does not mind re-entry into Life, but until that time comes, the dead need to remain in their assigned place. To not do so means weakening the very cosmos that their rebirth would take place in.

 

[Darius West]

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

I was surprised when I read the slightly rephrased description of the role of Daka Fal during the Greater Darkness. The changes aren't that big compared to the text in Cults of Prax, but my impression of Daka Fal being a fixture in the Court of the Dead already when Orlanth and his companions arrived down there in Hell was shaken by the revised text.

Don't get too bent out of shape by this Joerg.  Consider; Before Time the whole conception of location and movement is a lot less concrete and a lot more plastic and malleable.  The relations of the creatures of that world may have a conception of the 3 dimensions of space, but there is no 4th Time dimension yet, thus it was far easier to be in two places at once.  Much later in the Second Age, this  offended the God Learners, who set about constructing the Monomyth specifically to retro-engineer Time into their mathematical model so their minds could cope with all the temporal contradictions.  The monomyth is an artificial timeline superimposed onto static information.  If you move within the environment without Time, then things seem to move too.  Your internal movements count too, thus you cannot pause the God Time unless you can freeze your own organs and blood supply.  Some mystics can, no-doubt, achieve this.

[Joerg]

4 minutes ago, Darius West said:

Don't get too bent out of shape by this Joerg.  Consider; Before Time the whole conception of location and movement is a lot less concrete and a lot more plastic and malleable.  The relations of the creatures of that world may have a conception of the 3 dimensions of space, but there is no 4th Time dimension yet, thus it was far easier to be in two places at once.  Much later in the Second Age, this  offended the God Learners, who set about constructing the Monomyth specifically to retro-engineer Time into their mathematical model so their minds could cope with all the temporal contradictions.  The monomyth is an artificial timeline superimposed onto static information.  If you move within the environment without Time, then things seem to move too.  Your internal movements count too, thus you cannot pause the God Time unless you can freeze your own organs and blood supply.  Some mystics can, no-doubt, achieve this.

The concept of Pluripresence is fairly clearly delineated in Arcane Lore (which is a bit of a notable exception in that otherwise rather opaque or arcane volume of the Stafford library). While Grandfather Mortal/Daka Fal might be classified as the Erasanchula (runic origin) of the Man form rune, his mythical reach is rather limited, and thereby also his pluripresence.

Daka Fal became the deity of staying dead while maintaining a presence in the Spirit World.

His primary presence is as the judge/receptionist of the Underworld in the Halls of Judgment, an inescapable waypoint when accessed from the Surface World on most routes, including not only the stairwell path behind the Gates of Dusk but also weird backdoors like Alkoth or the Koravaka necropolis in central Esrolia.

His other important manifestation is as lord of the Axis Mundi through which people interact with their ancestors. That aspect has a nearly unlimited pluripresence wherever and whenever people interact with their ancestors.

Giving him a (however metaphorical) corporeal existence in the sorry remains of the Surface World of the Living at the culmination of the Greater Darkness is quite a break from the two aforementioned manifestations to me. 

 

Unrelated to Daka Fal, but since you mentioned it and I started this thread:

TLDR of the following spoilered blabbering: There is a progression of the Ages and a spiralling of lesser cycles throughout Godtime, then there is a discontinuity caused by the conception and later birth of time leading to the Snowball Glorantha with an orthogonal TIme vector into Entroy that cannot be inverted.

Spoiler

I disagree quite vehemently with your statement that there is no "temporal" dimension in the cycles of Godtime. It is just that Godtime events aren't one-dimensional nodes in Godtime, but rather multi-dimensional buffers around an archetype that may pierce through the conceptional borders of the Ages of the World that signify the progress of Godtime, to remain in the logic of simple applied topology.

I envision that progress as a shape identical to that of the Spike, with a wide and rather diffuse base in the depths of the Creation Period and the primeval Darkness Age and tapering towards a singular point which would be the inevitable singularity as culmination of the Greater Darkness but averted through the Ritual of the Net (and the concurrent but independent I Fought We Won event of the Surface World) and then its release in a Glorantha-shaped snowball globe, its spatial dimensions possibly with a horizontal ring of the ocean surface stretching out into the immeasurable eternity beyond, with the orthogonal dimension of Time as the heartbeat of the yet unborn child of Arachne Solara and the dead Devil in the Underworld.

Some texts identify that devil as Wakboth (e.g. the Sourcebook), others as Kajabor (e.g. Cults of Terror). I tend to regard the entity beneath the Block as Wakboth, having used his possession of Moral Evil to overcome the otherwise equal (or previoous existence as) Kajabor, but that too is really just a volume (or rather hypervolume) inside the topology of Godtime.

In my model, Godtime myths have an angular coordinate indicating the "position" of the myth on the various cycles that apply - the major cycles of the ages, indicated as elevation in the Spiral Map of Belintar depicted in Arcane Lore, with the Void gap a permeable discontinuity to return to the same locations regardless which age. This is a projection of Godtime locations onto a helical hypersurface rather than the whole truth. All mapping is just a reduction of dimensions by projection.

Thus we have two rather separate myths how Kalikos pushed back the Sky Dome after Jagrekriand had toppled Umath into the North Pillar which upheld the Sky Dome - no idea whether these pillars were an original part of the World Machine or a hasty patch by the Elder Mostali after the birth of Umath had lifted the Sky Dome off its axis, the Spike. One ties into Umath's original invasion of the Perfect Sky, accompanied by the fall of planets and the population of the Sky Dome with stars, the other is firmly set into the Ice Age of Valind's domain during the Middle Storm Age/Lesser Darkness with Kalikos de-frosting the Sky Dome. This may or may not be the same event space as the arrival of the Unholy Trio with their son Wakboth from the gap in the northern edge of the world - these two archetypes buffers of influence might just overlap in space and progress through the Ages.

There clearly are lesser cycles in Godtime, such as a concept of days, years, cycles of fertilization, growth, and ripening that gain in importance and difficulty as Godtime progresses towards singularity. Both Zzabur's turnings of the sands of time and Plentonius's Yelmic dating system acknowledge such Godtime cycles and even assign a measure of regularity to them.

This doesn't create mythical uniformity in all locations, either. Both Vithelan and Dinal aldryami experiences of Godtime don't report an absence of the Sun, but the Kralori acknowledge a deriliction of administration from the sun.

In my model, the Hero Planes as mapped by the God Learners represent layers (or rather combinations of paths into layers) that signify the progress of Godtime. These layers are something like averages of this progress, with paths like the Lightbringers' Quest starting in the Greater Darkness but visiting locations during the Westfaring that seem to be situated in the Lesser Darkness or possibly even in the Golden Age.

For instance, the Lightbringers carrying off Eurmal from the Black City of Introspection (or whatever) has all the markings of Malkion's Fifth Action, with the death of Eurmalkion delayed a little bit on the Lightbringers Path until EurMalkion passes through the Gates of Dusk. Which in turn is the same event as Grandfather Mortal experiencing Death in the Golden Age. And poor Eurmal is present in this event in three roles - the killer, the killing tool, and the victim. How can we even expect rational behavior from this wretch?

Locations (on the Surface World of the Hero Plane and in lesser accuracy also the Outer Worlds of those planes

 

[mfbrandi]

6 hours ago, Joerg said:

 

It was then that Daka Fal appeared and taught them how to separate the living from the dead. He taught the living how to test a creature to see if it is truly alive or if it is a phantom spirit.

It is funny, I always read this as DF wandering around Prax saying, “You’re dead, you have to go downstairs — it is the new rule — don’t worry, just stick with me. No, not you — you are still alive, you have to stay here. You’re ‘not sure about that one’ — but didn’t you just put your hand right through it, and isn’t it trailing ectoplasm? Amateurs!”

“Daka Fal appeared” meaning Daka Fal was previously unknown, but then there he was among us bossing us about, and things started to make sense. Rather than Daka Fal appeared to me in a vision and told me how it was to be. If it is the myth of the origin of the separation of the living from the dead (and of why Grandma shouldn’t be turning up for dinner, every Friday — not since “the incident”), why would he already be in the other place? (Yelm complicates matters by setting a new trend if …)

If consistency in myth is important to anyone reading this(!), then GM continued his wandering after being killed (he disappeared from the tales of the Gods, not from the “world of the living” of which there was not yet any concept); later DF turns up and sends the dead — including himself — underground; later still, the philosophers say, “Aha, GM = DF, why didn’t we think of that before?” (Doesn’t explain Yelm underground, but maybe you could use dead Yelm’s location to explain the appropriateness of dead people being sent to the underworld. It is the sun getting karked that means DF has to go underground — one more reason for him to resent the gods.)

[Joerg]

1 minute ago, mfbrandi said:

It is funny, I always read this as DF wandering around Prax saying, “You’re dead, you have to go downstairs — it is the new rule — don’t worry, just stick with me. No, not you — you are still alive, you have to stay here. You’re ‘not sure about that one’ — but didn’t you just put your hand right through it, and isn’t it trailing ectoplasm? Amateurs!”

“Daka Fal appeared” meaning Daka Fal was previously unknown, but then there he was among us bossing us about, and things started to make sense. Rather than Daka Fal appeared to me in a vision and told me how it was to be. If it is the myth of the origin of the separation of the living from the dead (and of why Grandma shouldn’t be turning up for dinner, every Friday — not since “the incident”), why would he already be in the other place? (Yelm complicates matters by setting a new trend if …)

And I would have been fine with an Axis Mundi popping up in the family hearth, with his spirit giving instructions how to establish this kind of connection from here onward, and how to deal with those decaying uncles and aunts that wouldn't leave.

 

1 minute ago, mfbrandi said:

If consistency in myth is important to anyone reading this(!), then GM continued his wandering after being killed (he disappeared from the tales of the Gods, not from the “world of the living” of which there was not yet any concept);

GM explicitely entered the Underworld, marking the path for Yelm, and then receiving first Yelm and later on more and more dead deities, such as Flamal, and countless mortals who behaved after receiving death. It was Nontraya (Vivamort) who led the rebellion of the dead. It was Nontraya's arrival in Prax that caused Tada to hide Eiritha beneath her hills. It was Nontraya who sent Ernalda into the "She Is Not Dead She Is Sleeping" burial. It was Nontraya who encountered Wakboth, and paid with his soul for continued existence, becoming Vivamort.

Gagarth took over a sizable portion of Nontraya's dead for his Wild Hunt. 

1 minute ago, mfbrandi said:

later DF turns up and sends the dead — including himself — underground;

Stlll, "Walking the World" has something shambling about it that "appears" doesn't necessarily connotate. It also makes his efforts a serial task rather than a divine act ab principio, similar to the Lightbringer missionaries who took two centuries before everyone they met had realized that the Dawn had happened. 

1 minute ago, mfbrandi said:

later still, the philosophers say, “Aha, GM = DF, why didn’t we think of that before?”

The Philosophers know Malkion the Sacrifice.

 

1 minute ago, mfbrandi said:

(Doesn’t explain Yelm underground, but maybe you could use dead Yelm’s location to explain the appropriateness of dead people being sent to the underworld. It is the sun getting karked that means DF has to go underground — one more reason for him to resent the gods.)

From how the cult is written up, he received his appointment as Judge of the Dead from the gods when everyone else went on their merry way to the Gates of Dawn. And that without any hope for a Persephone to offer him company, due to the bloody Compromise. He might have welcomed Teelo Estara hoping that she might be it.

[mfbrandi]

9 minutes ago, Joerg said:

It was Vivamort who led the rebellion of the dead. It was [his] arrival in Prax that caused Tada to hide Eiritha beneath her hills.

Ah, but this is part of the “blame chaos for everything” strand of myth, not the “wasn’t it confusing before we learned what x meant?” tales. Disappointingly, I am part of the myths don’t have to be consistent or coherent taken in totality faction. They don’t because in Glorantha they are fiction, not history (Your Mythology May Vary) — even if the gods are real. Call us the Ægyptians (or the Viriconians).

Still, the game of trying to make it all hang together is most definitely fun — well, fun up to the point where people start inventing “different kinds of truth” and variant logics to make it work. That is not how the game is played. “Did I miss? Let’s make the goal bigger.” No!

I missed.

22 minutes ago, Joerg said:

without any hope for a Persephone to offer him company

But Daka Fal isn’t Hades (divine ruler). S/he is just Minos (mortal judge), so DF is not “due” one. And anyway, we are not super-keen on the marry your rapist trope, are we? (Not that it hasn’t cropped up in Glorantha, before!)

[Joerg]

9 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

I am part of the myths don’t have to be consistent or coherent taken in totality faction. They don’t because in Glorantha they are fiction, not history (Your Mythology May Vary) — even if the gods are real. Call us the Ægyptians (or the Viriconians).

I agree - myths as shared between Gloranthans are re-tellings of a collection of personal experiences of interactions with said archetypes (deities, events, meaningful places...) which are real in Godtime but may be perceived differently depending on context, and often on personal previous encounters (having a heroquesting nemesis).

The Monomyth presentation of Godtime has returned, the multitude of names has been dialed back a bit. That makes such statements about Nontraya/Vivamort possible again, creating a smaller web of entity-to-entity relationships (while still upholding the Shakespearian comedy of errors schtick that a boy in drag playing a girl in drag is unrecognizable to a character familiar with the boy in drag girl without camouflage).

Daka Fal gets a much shorter stick than Flamal, a fellow Form Rune victim of Death.

9 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

But Daka Fal isn’t Hades (divine ruler). S/he is just Minos (mortal judge), so DF is not “due” one.

He is one of the Erasanchula (original rune source entities), but due to receiving Death has lost his Infinity.

Oh yeah, DF gets to send Yelm into his ashen bed every night. Adding nanny duties with a petulant child to the abandonment in the Underworld. 🙂

GM found fulfilment with Uleria/TIlnta/Yothbedta in life, and is barred from that forever. Lets have a little sympathy for the Underworld clerk. All the Earth goddesses have shampoo days when they go to sleep rather than passing his throne. Kahar got the beautiful dragon woman just for sitting still, something DF is renowned for (usually depicted on his throne).

9 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

And anyway, we are not super-keen on the marry your rapist trope, are we? (Not that it hasn’t cropped up in Glorantha, before!)

Grandparent Mortal is Persephone abandoned.

 

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

Grandparent Mortal is Persephone abandoned.

I especially like that bit.

[Squaredeal Sten]

9 hours ago, Darius West said:

Don't get too bent out of shape by this Joerg.  Consider; Before Time the whole conception of location and movement is a lot less concrete and a lot more plastic and malleable.  The relations of the creatures of that world may have a conception of the 3 dimensions of space, but there is no 4th Time dimension yet, thus it was far easier to be in two places at once.  Much later in the Second Age, this  offended the God Learners, who set about constructing the Monomyth specifically to retro-engineer Time into their mathematical model so their minds could cope with all the temporal contradictions.  The monomyth is an artificial timeline superimposed onto static information.  If you move within the environment without Time, then things seem to move too.  Your internal movements count too, thus you cannot pause the God Time unless you can freeze your own organs and blood supply.  Some mystics can, no-doubt, achieve this.

It is hard for us to deal with the mystically different pre-Time situation. To me, no time also implies no sequence and no causation.  But obviously in Gloranthan myth that is not so, because there is plenty of causation and even sequence in the myths.   There is no need to imagine freezing your own blood supply, clearly that was not the ore Time situation.

Orlanth uses Death to kill Yelm, that is causation.  Orlanth's contests with Yelm precede that killing, so there is sequence. 

So I am left with Time as the ordering of  the actions of men, just as you might start with a basket full of pieces of yarn all tangled, and then you might take them out, straighten them and lay them out side by side or end to end or in a matrix and weave them together.  

But the godtime myths, being generally pre Time, seem to stay in the basket.  Even though in myth we clearly have divine parentage: Umath is the father if Orlanth, so there is sequence and causation.  We have a young Orlanth put in a pit by his bad uncles, and a later Orlanth who has learned his capabilities.  .  I suppose that " no time" means that in the godtime that was not necessarily before or after Orlanth's contests with Yelm. but any two strands legend could cross anywhere.

So I understand the God Kearners' impulse to order myth, because now in Time that is the only way we can understand things.

 

 

 

[kalidor]

14 hours ago, Joerg said:

I was surprised when I read the slightly rephrased description of the role of Daka Fal during the Greater Darkness. The changes aren't that big compared to the text in Cults of Prax, but my impression of Daka Fal being a fixture in the Court of the Dead already when Orlanth and his companions arrived down there in Hell was shaken by the revised text.

CoP says 

Cults of RuneQuest #2 The Lightbringers (CoRQ2) says

Heortling Mythologies gives this credit to the Silver Age hero King Heort, a (Kolating?) shaman in his own right, the human victor at the battle of I Fought We Won at the transition from the Greater Darkness into the Silver Age.

Now King Heort probably qualifies as the shared mythical ancestor of all Heortlings regardless of their actual lineage, which makes an identification as an incarnation of Daka Fal somewhat less upsetting.

Heort was a shaman, which means he would have been in touch with spirits, much like Daka Fal provides this contact with the spirits. The old Cults of Prax version could very well have meant that shamans like Heort could have met the shamanic entity Daka Fal in the Spirit World (or that Daka Fal appeared in their dreams or before their Fetch as a sending) and have learned the secrets of separating the Living and the Dead from one another, and then to have carried this into (their respective bits of) the Surface World (and by sending the dead there, the Underworld).

 

But the new version tells us otherwise.

Or what was left of it after the Gods War, slowly re-knitting under the administrations of Arachne Solara, applying the very matter of Annihilation that she had devoured in the shape of the Devil that had been sent to Hell by his Devil counterpart to glue the remaining shards of reality back together into a single whole, into a continuous Surface, with missing pieces re-emerging from mostly forgotten memories or just from some necessity of context. The seams of the new world would provide a stage for all the necessary consequences of adjacent reality, and over Time accrete a history solidifyng their reality.

Daka Fal is not only one of the Dead who need to enter the afterlife and remain there, he is the archetypical dead, and the one to receive all those who followed his path of mortality. He was there to receive the Lightbringers on their way to former Wonderhome where dead Yelm held court over all the other dead gods.

That Daka Fal walked the world at the end of the Greater Darkness is just another indication how wrong and unrelatable the Greater Darkness was. Here we have the first Dead, walking about and really admonishing his (involuntary) followers to recognize their station and to go where they were welcome in their new stage of existence.

Being dead is a stage of existence in Gloantha. It is different from complete annihilation (of any traces of self), or from transcendent ascendance to the Ultimate (the Source of all energies) through mysticism, to Liberation. The Dead are still a part of Glorantha, and in many cultures they make up a vaguely recognizable "body" of remains that may intrude into the world of the Living during their assigned holy day, like the procession of the Dead from the Nochet Necropolis into the city and the households of their descendants where they can demand the hospitality one has to give to visiting kin from afar.

Most Gloranthans, including even the majority of the Malkioni with Hrestoli roots, believe (and experience) re-incarnation of the dead, of entering a place of waiting in the Underworld before entering life in the Surface World again as a newborn. It doesn't matter whether you assign Ty Kora Tek's halls of the weiting dead like the Theyalans or whether you regard re-incarnation as being swept along Yothbedta's stream like the Kralori.

Daka Fal does not mind re-entry into Life, but until that time comes, the dead need to remain in their assigned place. To not do so means weakening the very cosmos that their rebirth would take place in.

 

Where did you read that text?  It is not in the lightbringers Cult book or prosopaedia.

[Joerg]

7 hours ago, kalidor said:

Where did you read that text?  It is not in the lightbringers Cult book or prosopaedia.

P.81 CoRQ2,

Quote

When the Greater Darkness came, it was the time for all 
mortality to join with their ancestorut many resisted. They 
lived in hopeless fear amid the disintegrating world where Chaos 
seeped or howled in, unable to separate life from death anymore. 
It was then that Daka Fal walked the world and ,,,

I stumbled across this line following the WIR tbread on rpg.net,

[Akhôrahil]

On 9/24/2023 at 6:48 AM, Joerg said:

That Daka Fal walked the world at the end of the Greater Darkness is just another indication how wrong and unrelatable the Greater Darkness was. Here we have the first Dead, walking about and really admonishing his (involuntary) followers to recognize their station and to go where they were welcome in their new stage of existence.

I ran a more advanced Daka Fal shamanic initiation than the ”fight an Ancestor” one , where the PC followed the path of Daka Fal, getting killed by Humakt, getting offered (and refusing, because oh boy if the player had accepted…) the ”gift” of Vivamort, ending up in the Underworld (and having to asset his authority when Yelm arrived) and returning to the world to separate the living from the dead (I tossed in a second Vivamort/Nontraya encounter there, because what better symbol of false Life?), and after concluding the initiation heavily suggesting that in a way, the shaman would only truly be completing the quest by eventually dying again.

Edited September 25, 2023 by Akhôrahil

[mfbrandi]

4 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

the shaman would only truly be completing the quest by eventually dying again

… so the shaman remains on their heroquest (with the heroquest light in their eyes) for the rest of their life. I think I prefer your suggestion to the recent one of shamans as champion phubbers (which would make them just like most of us).