Power of the air gods

[Ian Absentia]

Movement/Change ≠ Disorder ≠ Chaos ≠ Movement/Change

!i!

[g33k]

2 hours ago, Jeff said:

I need to make it very clear - Air is not associated with Chaos. Any more than Fire/Sky or Darkness or Fertility are. The only element that has an intrinsic tie to Chaos is Moon and that is because the Red Goddess is a Chaos deity. 

1 hour ago, Ian Absentia said:

Movement/Change ≠ Disorder ≠ Chaos ≠ Movement/Change

!i!

 

Yes, I know.
🙂

I'm just YGWV-playing & riffing off @mfbrandi's speculation that "Air" could be calm&peaceful as its default state.

[Leingod]

On 11/15/2023 at 1:57 PM, mfbrandi said:

I wonder why it is always pitched that way. We could have said that before Umath, you were OK if you lived under the earth, deep in the sea, or on the other side of the sky, but that otherwise you were screwed — no place for the bats, the deer, and so on. Air’s separating sky and earth could have been pitched as a great act of altruism (Shu is a god of peace). Has Orlanth — the wet, fiery, blustering, thieving murderer — “infected” Umath (who wanted to be more like Entekos)? Have the Orlanthi made air into storm, the better to suit their own culture? Or … ? 😉

If there's any truth to that, it'll be the other way around: Orlanth's distinguishing feature from his brothers within Orlanthi myth is his facility with bringing about transformative change, rather than purely destructive change. It's attributed, at least in part, to his maternal heritage; one of his many names is Orlanth Larnsting, framing him as heir to his grandparent (a grandparent twice over in some ways, if you accept the story that it was Larnste who taught Aether and Gata how to bring Umath about).

In that dynamic, Orlanth is the one who tempers the unruly powers of the Storm, not the one who "corrupts" it (and in any case if it was any of Umath's sons who did that it would have been Vadrus, who led the Storm gods and their followers before Orlanth came into his own).

[Darius West]

On 11/15/2023 at 10:34 AM, bronze said:

Do the air gods possess inherent power over rain and lightening, respectively domains of water and sky deities? 

No.  These are powers wrested from other pantheons in battle.  Heler and Mastakos are both water pantheon deities who were incorporated into the Orlanth pantheon after Orlanth raided into the water realms.  Lightning Boy was originally from the light pantheon.  I don't know where thunderbolt comes from, as it seems to be a power innate to Orlanthi storm voices.  One might argue therefore that Thunderbolt is an inherent power of Orlanth, but not air gods in general.

[jajagappa]

2 hours ago, Darius West said:

I don't know where thunderbolt comes from, as it seems to be a power innate to Orlanthi storm voices.

Is it not Umath, his own father?

After all (GS p.106, reprint of old WF article): “He was born,” says a prayer, “with great noise, deafening, disabling, like thunder in a cavern, like living in a horn.” His visage, according to legends among the Rathori, “Rolled over the earth with anger, rumbled across the sky with greed, filled the space with his grey brows and thunder.”

 

[Richard S.]

I think there's some confusion since "Thunderbolt" could refer to either the noise of thunder or the Rune spell Thunderbolt (which is really a lightning bolt).

[Darius West]

2 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Is it not Umath, his own father?

After all (GS p.106, reprint of old WF article): “He was born,” says a prayer, “with great noise, deafening, disabling, like thunder in a cavern, like living in a horn.” His visage, according to legends among the Rathori, “Rolled over the earth with anger, rumbled across the sky with greed, filled the space with his grey brows and thunder.”

 

Thunderbolt might be tied to having the primary air rune?  Or maybe thunder alone is?  IN either case, it seems odd that air elementals don't have a thunder power if that is the case. 

[Malin]

Let's not forget that these stories of Umath's birth are told by people who were not present at the time, but were crafting them untold time after the fact. By this time, Orlanth already had the lightning as one of the more imposing weapons, so it would make sense to apply the same to his father.

Another thought is that the "thunder" in Umath above is the sound of dry thunder, not the bolt that hits the ground.

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, Malin said:

the “thunder” in Umath above is the sound of dry thunder, not the bolt that hits the ground.

“Dad” is firing blanks — a rumble made by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing?

[Leingod]

12 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

“Dad” is firing blanks — a rumble made by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing?

Yelm wished that was all it was.

[soltakss]

On 11/14/2023 at 11:34 PM, bronze said:

Do the air gods possess inherent power over rain and lightening, respectively domains of water and sky deities? 

No, not all air deities have powers of rain and lightning. Don't forget that Lightning was originally a power of Umath before Shargash picked lightning bolts from his skull after he killed him, so Orlanth simply regained the stolen powers of Lightning from the Sky Deities.

Gloranthan deities are quite specialised. Not all Air deities are deities of Storm and not all Stom deities have weather magic. Storm Bull, for example, is a hot dry wind and doesn't get powers of Rain or Lightning. 

[Ynneadwraith]

On 11/16/2023 at 12:09 AM, Ian Absentia said:

Movement/Change ≠ Disorder ≠ Chaos ≠ Movement/Change

!i!

This is certainly the case in the present day, but who's to say that was the case when Umath created the Middle Air. Perhaps the Red Moon is simply following an age-old process of basal rune-genesis, but has yet to shed her chaotic association. 

'Perhaps' might be doing a lot of lifting there, but who knows the mechanism by which the primal  runes were born. Chaos is the mother of them all, is it not?

On 11/15/2023 at 9:57 PM, mfbrandi said:

Have the Orlanthi made air into storm, the better to suit their own culture? Or … ? 😉

Now we're getting into some interesting ideas! IMG the Great Compromise not only forbade the gods from directly interacting with mortals, but made them in many ways subservient to them. Heroquesting, to me, is essentially a route into the mythic source-code of the universe (if you'll pardon the prosaic analogy). Pre-compromise, the source code wrote itself. Post-compromise it cannot, but can instead be edited by mortals (wittingly or unwittingly).

The question becomes 'how much of that source code is intact, and how much has been edited by people with their own cultural lense/propaganda goals/misunderstandings?'. How much of what we know now is 'true' as it once was, and how much is a result of the meddling God Learners (or the meddling of everyone else!)? If the source code has been edited, does that mean it becomes true?