How accurate is the Western Myth?

[bronze]

Wondering the Western Myth the most inaccurate and false myth of the Glorantha. Stafford himself stated Zzabur myth, the principal source of the Western myth, is false. Just as false as the Chaotic myth. 

How credible is Zzabur? How much has been said by him can be reliably believed? Is he the greatest liar in the entire history of Glorantha, overshadowing even Eurmal? 

Stafford also stated the Red Goddess myth is false, too. Does it confirm she has been an evil Chaos deity all along? 

Edited October 18, 2023 by bronze

[metcalph]

41 minutes ago, bronze said:

Wondering the Western Myth the most inaccurate and false myth of the Glorantha. Stafford himself stated Zzabur myth, the principal source of the Western myth, is false. Just as false as the Chaotic myth. 

Nope.  What was said was: 

Quote

Some myths are obvious lies. The story of Zzabur the
Sorcerer is clearly false, for no mortal born of woman and
fathered by man will live forever.

Cults of Runequest: Mythology p4

That is well short of all Western mythology is a lie.  Zzabur may himself believe that he is a mortal based on a false syllogism but it does not follow from that that the whole western mytholy is a complete fabrication.   Then only a few sentences later, Greg says:

Quote

But it is not necessary to lie intentionally. Well-meaning
misinformation is common. People naturally wish to conceal
their secrets from outsiders and have done so since the start of
the humanities. Indeed, some philosophers say that Idealism
and Hope themselves are just necessary lies, created by the
good gods to give people something to live for.

Ibid p4

 

 

 

 

[John Biles]

Saying which is more true is hard in a world where Heroquesting can prove contradictory things in the hands of different people.

And those contradictions are baked into the Godtime by the Great Compromise itself.

[Nick Brooke]

You need to learn to read Greg better. He is speaking in-world, and makes several obviously untrue statements in his explanation of why truth is inconsistent. Later in that same section, his Gloranthan narrative voice says: “Similarly, the myth of the Red Goddess is a lie. We all know that violating the Cosmic Compromise and changing the God Time lets Chaos back into the world and threatens the destruction of the cosmos.” This, too, is self-evidently “not the whole truth,” however confidently it is stated by whatever number of Gloranthan narrators. Untruth is inescapable.

[scott-martin]

16 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

makes several obviously untrue statements

That said, ZZabur is one of the greatest of all Gloranthan liars, possibly surpassed only by Greg himself. And all great lies coexist comfortably with the truth. It makes them more convincing.

[svensson]

It's as accurate as it needs to be for your table.

IMG, NOBODY has a 'monomyth' that is completely correct, subjective and without bias or editing. There is no 'scientific method' in Glorantha, and every single piece of knowledge has some kind of agenda, bias, viewpoint, and so forth. There are no fact-checkers, and it wouldn't occur to anyone to do so. EVERYTHING is propaganda or hearsay, if not outright lies. There is absolutely no source of information that is dispassionate and completely objective. And the Gods are no help. They're the sources of most of the bias and prejudice, after all! Each deity is limited to only their actions and their perceptions within the Godtime framework... and each deity looks at the same event in VERY different ways.

I look at it like my all-time favorite Star Trek character, Elim Garak: "Everything is true. Especially the lies..."

Now, YGMV and all that. Your game is gonna be way different than mine. As the old saying goes, 'No set of rules, setting, milieu, or adventure survives contact with a referee intact.... And even fewer of them survive contact with Player Characters at all!' 😁

Edited October 18, 2023 by svensson

[French Desperate WindChild]

there is a difference between lie and [no truth], and it is very easy to no tell the "truth" without lying when you talk about a myth

If you tell the myth without lying, you just tell what you see/feel/understand. But, you may have not seen a particular fact, you may have not understand the "true" reason( if there is one reason) explaining why this god/entity did this fact.

 

Elmal priests don't lie when they refuse "Yelmalio = Elmal" they just say what they learnt from their elders and experiment during their ceremonies and can't see (or refuse to accept they are wrong) what yelmalian see (if Yelmalio = Elmal is the truth)

in the other side, Yelmalian don't lie when they say "Yelmalio = Elmal" because what they saw/understood convinced them that was the truth (even if Yelmalio = Elmal is not the truth).

 

now... is there any truth ? is there different versions of the godtime, some with Yelmalio is Elmal, and some with Yelmalio is not Elmal ? maybe even some where there is no Elmal, or no Yelmalio ?

 

[John Biles]

11 hours ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

 

now... is there any truth ? is there different versions of the godtime, some with Yelmalio is Elmal, and some with Yelmalio is not Elmal ? maybe even some where there is no Elmal, or no Yelmalio ?

 

There is one Godtime but it contains contradictory truths.  The more people who believe a truth, the easier it is to reach and relive correctly.

You can prove that Zorak Zoran is Shargash, naked, but it won't be easy unless you have a large community that already believes that.

You can prove that Yelmalio = Elmal, that they are not the same, that Yelmalio is the little brother of Elmal or vice versa, that Yelmalio and/or Elmal were created by the God Learners, and thus should both be avoided, etc.

[Cassius]

9 hours ago, John Biles said:

You can prove that Yelmalio = Elmal, that they are not the same, that Yelmalio is the little brother of Elmal or vice versa, that Yelmalio and/or Elmal were created by the God Learners, and thus should both be avoided, etc.

Perhaps, however, not everything can be proved.

There is a difference between "there is no (single) truth" and "anything can be true". The God Learners experiments clearly showed us that there were theories about deities that were false (I'm thinking of the Goddesses Switch). In Glorantha, there is a mythological reality: you can say various things about it, but you can't say just anything about it.

[Nick Brooke]

In other words, there really was an elephant in the room with all those blind men.

[David Scott]

On 10/18/2023 at 1:39 AM, bronze said:

Wondering the Western Myth the most inaccurate and false myth of the Glorantha. Stafford himself stated Zzabur myth, the principal source of the Western myth, is false. Just as false as the Chaotic myth. 

How credible is Zzabur? How much has been said by him can be reliably believed? Is he the greatest liar in the entire history of Glorantha, overshadowing even Eurmal? 

Stafford also stated the Red Goddess myth is false, too. Does it confirm she has been an evil Chaos deity all along? 

This covered in the Understanding Mythology chapter, Four Ways to Experience These Stories, Reading (page 76): This is the weakest method of experiencing myth.

I'd suggest re-reading the Understanding Mythology chapter. It may place the elephant for you.

 

[Joerg]

In the end. everybody is interacting with elephant armor or ornaments - masks of a deeper truth. None of the anthropomorphic depictions are absolute truth, they are similes/parables.

My "sorcerer's" understanding of these things are an archetype space intersecting with contextual spaces created by cult expectations and personal experiences of those who interact with the myth. God Learaner questers may have had mythical roles inflicted on them by the ongoing rites, without deeper understanding of these roles except for a very strong idea about the power or boon they would have entered the environment.  This detachment from contextual space may have made their questing a lot harder as they would not have been able to enjoy the "easy" or "well-trodden" paths used by the cults without penalty, but it made them a heck more flexible.

The Arkati way is to identify fully with the cult and ritual you enter the hero plane with, until you reach a crossroads that may require a different identification. These aren't exactly masks, but ways to change identification and context.

Nothing of this applies to the Invisible God, though - there are traces of his deeds in Godtime, but there is no presence you can meet. This is similar to the how people experienced the Closing - you deal with the change, but you cannot reach the cause of the change.

[Akhôrahil]

I don't know what "accurate" even means in this context. What is it that you test the myth's correspondence against?

[bronze]

How much of Zzabur Says is truth? He looks as if naturally taking credit for everything. He comes off as the single most unreliable narrator of the Gloranthan mythology. 

[Richard S.]

7 hours ago, bronze said:

How much of Zzabur Says is truth? He looks as if naturally taking credit for everything. He comes off as the single most unreliable narrator of the Gloranthan mythology. 

Why do you think he's unreliable? Frankly I don't think he takes much more credit than others like Orlanth or Yelm do, he's just a bit more arrogant about it.

[g33k]

On 10/17/2023 at 5:39 PM, bronze said:

Wondering the Western Myth the most inaccurate and false myth of the Glorantha. Stafford himself stated Zzabur myth, the principal source of the Western myth, is false. Just as false as the Chaotic myth. 

How credible is Zzabur? How much has been said by him can be reliably believed? Is he the greatest liar in the entire history of Glorantha, overshadowing even Eurmal? 

Stafford also stated the Red Goddess myth is false, too. Does it confirm she has been an evil Chaos deity all along? 

It is a fools' errand to try to pin down "the truth" within Glorantha; it is more "relative" (by far) than General Relativity.

It is possible in Glorantha for two different mutually-incompatible "truths" to both be provably-true, via heroquesting to the Godtime.

The search for a single, reliable, incontrovertible "Truth" was at once the source of the GL's vast successes (so it was obviously true, or it wouldn't have worked) and the source of their utter ruin (so it was obviously false, or it wouldn't have destroyed them).

 

7 hours ago, bronze said:

... Zzabur ... comes off as the single most unreliable narrator of the Gloranthan mythology. 

No; that honor belongs to Greg Stafford.  

 

[svensson]

8 hours ago, bronze said:

How much of Zzabur Says is truth? He looks as if naturally taking credit for everything. He comes off as the single most unreliable narrator of the Gloranthan mythology. 

Most prophets, even those in a world where magic is routine, are generally poor historians. They lack objectivity and, in some cases, the ability to reason.

Zzsabur was preaching to a society [-ties] for whom the Orlanthi /Ernalda /Yelm axes did not penetrate to the depth they did in Peloria, Dragon Pass, Esrolia, etc. By  couching his Law Rune + Will power = Mastery philosophy in religious terms he took something frightening and made it... well, if not 'comforting' [nobody is 'comfortable' when it comes to Tapping, after all] then at least understandable. And placing that religious philosophy within the framework of castes, he neatly sidestepped the whole social injustice in the availability of magical training thing.

[svensson]

1 hour ago, g33k said:

No; that honor belongs to Greg Stafford.  

TRUTH!

 

[Joerg]

12 hours ago, bronze said:

How much of Zzabur Says is truth? He looks as if naturally taking credit for everything. He comes off as the single most unreliable narrator of the Gloranthan mythology. 

Zzabur is the butterfly whose wing-beats cause typhoons in the East Isles...

[scott-martin]

4 hours ago, Joerg said:

Zzabur is the butterfly whose wing-beats cause typhoons in the East Isles...

Summon the syndics; we must protect our land.

[bronze]

18 hours ago, Richard S. said:

Why do you think he's unreliable? Frankly I don't think he takes much more credit than others like Orlanth or Yelm do, he's just a bit more arrogant about it.

How Orlanth and Yelm have taken credit from others? 

Edited October 20, 2023 by bronze

[Sir_Godspeed]

22 hours ago, bronze said:

How Orlanth and Yelm have taken credit from others? 

It's a fairly common thing in Gloranthan myths and history for great events to actually have multiple explanations. The Sunstop is generally associated with Nysalor in Central Genertela, for example, but in other regions it's associated with other momentous events. These causes may all be true. This is true also for great events during the Godtime. So it's probably less of a "taking credit for the deeds of others" and more "claiming to be the sole perpetrator of great events" or the like.

This is going to get a bit speculative, but there's a few layers to this as well. For example, Orlanth's dragonslaying feat MAY have been co-opted from a dragonslaying event involving Vadrus. But then again, maybe the both did it, Orlanth's just stayed more famous. Or maybe at a certain point during the Godtime Vadrus and Orlanth were indistinguishable for a bit. It's myth. These things happen. 

Orlanth-as-we-know-him-in-time is quite possibly also sort of a syncretic deity from multiple different merged local deities and myths and mythlets that were unified into a single corpus and cult identity during the Dawn Age and the expansion of the Lightbringer Missionaries. This makes things a bit complicated, because on the one hand it might be a case of people simply rediscovering the full range of actions taken by a singular deity, or it might be a case of people merging together multiple godtime entities and their actions into one because there isn't really anything preventing them from doing so, and maybe even mythical events kinda changing "hands" from one deity to the other. Deities like Voriof and Varnaval and even the demigod Vingkot blur into Orlanth, for example. Compare this to what is happening in Dragon Pass with the local Elmal cult as it merges with a wider, more cosmopolitan Yelmalio cult that appears to incorporate a wider range of myths and powers, which may or may not be objectively accurate, but is at least fully functional.

This also appears to have occured for Ernalda (iirc. someone said the deity-we-know-as Ernalda originated in Saird, and merged with other regions "earth mother goddess" cults as it spread, or perhaps simply brought isolated, fragmented orphan cult communities back into the fold, depending on how you look at it.), and Yelm. Yelm's revival in the Dawn Age is a whole deal, subject to an epic work of religious propaganda which you can read, it's called the Glorious Reascent of Yelm. Yelm is arguably even more complicated than the others, in that he is not only possibly a syncretic or "revived" cult and deity himself, but also has a whole supporting cast of celestial sons and fragmentary "little suns" which is... just too much to go into here. Yelm may also have LITERALLY stole the credit for the deeds of other deities in that he may have usurped a previous regime to turn the Green Age into the Golden Age during the godtime. 

Then you get into the incredibly influential, scene-setting syncretism that occurs during the later First Age, during the World Council of Friends, when southern Orlanthi and northern Pelorians look at their respective mythologies and basically combine them. Murharzarm being killed by Rebellus Terminus and causing Yelm to disintegrate is interpreted as analogous to Orlanth killing the Evil Emperor. The important thing to take away here, is that this may or may not be accurate, but regardless of whether it is or not, *it seems to functionally work*.

But all of this is very out-of-universe thinking. Gloranthans don't think like this, abstracting and objectifying their gods. Arguably not even the God Learners did that. They believed in a single truth. They were very modernist in this sense. I think the closest we get to in-universe people thinking in a "postmodern" "reality-as-invented" are Iluminates and dragonnewts. 

Not sure if this helps your question directly, these layers of "constructivism" open for credit-stealing as a kind of creative act of mythmaking that establishes "truth" mostly through an after-the-fact "if it works, it works" logic.
These layers of constructivism can also be safely ignored.

[mfbrandi]

On 10/21/2023 at 10:33 PM, Sir_Godspeed said:

But all of this is very out-of-universe thinking. Gloranthans don't think like this, abstracting and objectifying their gods.

But, you know, why not? Our ancient world had its share of intellectuals discussing the nature and status of myth — including its rationalisers of myths. Sometimes, perhaps, as a way of attacking or debunking myth; sometimes as a mode of myth-making. Let us not lobotomise the Gloranthans.

[Sir_Godspeed]

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

But, you know, why not? Our ancient world had its share of intellectuals discussing the nature and status of myth — including its rationalisers of myths. Sometimes, perhaps, as a way of attacking or debunking myth; sometimes as a mode of myth-making. Let us not lobotomise the Gloranthans.

Generalizations like mine are to be taken with a grain of salt. I don't think that NO Gloranthan has ever had these thoughts, I just think they're likely very rare and confined either to the madman, illuminate or certain highly specific communities. 

Not only is it harder to relativize deities in societies where these kinds of abstractions aren't very common, it's probably also harder to do it since they might be viewed as signs of blasphemy or what some might call Godlearnerism, Chaos or just plain old disrespect. It's also, arguably, not the *point* of Gloranthan myths, which are participatory, experiental and educational more than they are categorizing and formalized. 

And of course... well, in Glorantha this stuff *works*, explicitly and pretty reliably. Who cares if Orlanth stole the myth of dragonslaying from Vadrus if the benefit it provides is practically applicable. You know? 

So I think there's a number of factors that would filter against high-concept, source-critical relativization of history and myth.

I could see some particularly clever/disillusioned Arkati or Illuminates thinking like I just did (as you said, they are certainly not lobotomized), tracing metanarratives and the like, but for one, I think they will struggle getting their points across to others, and more to the point of me using the generalization of "Gloranthans": I don't think there's any kind of wider society or culture that thinks like above. Maybe some demigods in the Outer World, who knows. As you said, even in our own world we have the critical voices looking askew at the big truths. They are, however, decidedly minorities.

Edited October 24, 2023 by Sir_Godspeed

[Cassius]

3 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Our ancient world had its share of intellectuals discussing the nature and status of myth — including its rationalisers of myths. Sometimes, perhaps, as a way of attacking or debunking myth; sometimes as a mode of myth-making. Let us not lobotomise the Gloranthans.

I'm sure these intellectuals would have had a very different discussion if they had seen their neighbour throwing a fire spear or a lightning bolt.