The utility of the Seven Mothers cult?

[Darius West]

1 hour ago, Ali the Helering said:

Seriously though, this requires the deity to be stupid to the point of drooling imbecility, as a willing victim of Pascal's Wager!  In such a circumstance the term 'worship' doesn't apply since the deity has no worth beyond being a victim of manipulation on the level of grooming. 

In such a circumstance the word 'deity' is inappropriate - maybe 'dumb mana resource'? 🙃

Well in Glorantha we might somewhat see the Malkioni treating deities in the fashion of a dumb mana resource, especially in the Second Age.  The Godlearners even substantially rewrote some deities because they were crap.  Remember, having worshippers, even bad ones, seems to be a net benefit to deities.  And for their part, deities seem to be in a sort of Before Time stasis field (see Orlanth and Ernalda being dug up at Whitewall by the Lunars), and their ability to interact with the world is very limited.  When you think about it, deities and worshippers are symbiotic to the point where it isn't clear who is parasitizing whom. 🙂

[Ali the Helering]

I think that there is a simple ethos difference here, arising from why one plays/got interested in Glorantha.  Back in the (ie Greg's) day it felt far closer to a RW Late Bronze/Early Iron environment.  I have to say that I have far more interest in that than in the functionalist concepts that have come to dominate the more recent era, which is why I and several other grognards are looking further afield these days.

Therefore I shall let this conversation continue without me, since I don't want to take it down side issues folks aren't interested in.   Grognards unite, you have nothing to lose but your setting!  😁😆

[mfbrandi]

On 2/1/2024 at 9:13 AM, Ali the Helering said:

Back in the (ie Greg’s) day it felt far closer to a RW Late Bronze/Early Iron environment.

I don’t know whether this is true — we may be romanticising our pasts and imagining our younger, snottier selves to have been more sophisticated than we were — but I do think it puts a finger on an important point: if we are interested in myth and we want Gloranthan myth to function for Gloranthans like RW myth does for RW believers, the “the gods are real” should mean that Gloranthan believers stand in relation their gods as RW believers do to theirs, not that Gloranthans stand in relation to their gods as we do to actual oil fields, middle-sized dry goods, tanks, and warlords.

• The RW Bronze Age was not for its inhabitants the age of myth: “once upon a time” is always a before that isn’t history, and “Faerie” is not reliably located on any map.
• A Gloranthan might say, “I saw Orlanth once across a crowded room, and I swear he winked at me.” But the same Gloranthan might also say, “Of course, it might have been some stranger in woad.” Plausible deniability is important. Similarly, “I was in the presence of the Devouring Mother … but I had taken a shitload of mescaline.”
• “Divine” magic works in Glorantha. Sure, but so do mysticism and sorcery.
• If you were in a Sherlock Holmes story, he would just be a know-it-all coke head. The charm comes from his being in the story while we are not.

Do we want the player characters to be like Xanthippe and Socrates, or do we want them to be like Medea and Jason, or even — perish the thought — Hera and Zeus? Can we really have it every way, or will that inevitably take the shine off of some element? I am not sure we can have gods as part of the ordinary furniture of the world and have the made-up religion feel like religion. If we want to tell realistic tales of the believers (and maybe we don’t), then keep their gods offstage. That — certainly — was easy at the end of the 1970s.

As always, don’t read too much confidence into my waffle. I may have everything completely wrong … again.

Spoiler

Note that I am not trying to make the point that RW gods “don’t exist” (whatever that means), but clearly RW religion does not depend on bumping into Yahweh down the pub now and then so we can be reassured of their “reality.”

Edited February 2 by mfbrandi
? → .

[Techpriest]

On 1/30/2024 at 1:28 PM, jajagappa said:

I think this is often the hard question/issue to get across successfully in a modern game where we don't have active deities.

Perhaps when coming from other RPGs there is an expectation that these are simply transactional, utilitarian arrangements (in exchange for X worship, I get Y spells that are relevant to my occupation and balanced vs other deities)?

Whereas what Glorantha offers is a way-of-life in accord with the deities that help your culture (vs. you the individual) prosper.

It's also important to look at the gods as to how they fit into the world and with PC's themselves. Spell lists aren't everything - look at cult skills, and spirit magic, and rune magic all together and that gives you a much better idea of what a cult does. We've already discussed the runespells but the spirit magic of a cult tells you a lot too - and the Seven Mothers have initiates at their temples who know a lot of different magic and can teach a lay member it at a mark up. Spells you wouldn't normally have access to are available there. Skill wise they're very focused on civilization. They teach reading and writing, understanding other people, and how to speak a common language.

Looking at it all together this gives you a cult where no element (except Air) is left out. Where you all speak the same language and can learn its script together. Where your magical need is offered - at a price, but still there (I'd assume initiates pay normal prices), and always open. The Seven Mothers have a Mother that covers most aspects of life (Mother Maiden Crone, Fool Warrior Sage). The cult accepts everyone as a lay member, where they can get food, healing, and shelter. That's big. "We Are All Of Us" isn't just a statement for them, it's what the cult is about. It is for everyone. 

[Joerg]

8 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

Seriously though, this requires the deity to be stupid to the point of drooling imbecility, as a willing victim of Pascal's Wager!  In such a circumstance the term 'worship' doesn't apply since the deity has no worth beyond being a victim of manipulation on the level of grooming. 

In such a circumstance the word 'deity' is inappropriate - maybe 'dumb mana resource'? 🙃

In the pre-Christian understanding of the world, if you perform the rites and sacrifices properly, the deity is bound by its nature to comply. If results fail to appear, another deity must have interfered, and the deity won't receive sacrifices for this task any more as it has become too weak.

Nature phenomena are powerful, but they don't tend to have much in the way of personality or cunning. The many stories of out-tricking the devil harken back to the pre-Christian magical practices, and show a powerful but still limited entity that humans interact with.

[Ali the Helering]

41 minutes ago, Joerg said:

In the pre-Christian understanding of the world, if you perform the rites and sacrifices properly, the deity is bound by its nature to comply.

I am afraid it rather depends on the pre-Christian tradition involved.  (Come and attend my lectures in Manchester, starting on the 19th!)   

 

44 minutes ago, Joerg said:

If results fail to appear, another deity must have interfered, and the deity won't receive sacrifices for this task any more as it has become too weak.

Interestingly, even though Christians are (horribly) prone to blame the devil or demons for the failure of prayer to make everything wonderful, very few adopt them as new spiritual mascots!  

I have a 13th century BCE statuette of Asherah, and two (highly evangelical) Christians have told me that they are most concerned that her 'evil, demonic power' will influence my sermons.  Just wait till I start invoking Azathoth....

[Ali the Helering]

Manchester in the UK, blessed by the persistent presence of my patron, Heler!

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

Nature phenomena are powerful, but they don't tend to have much in the way of personality or cunning. The many stories of out-tricking the devil harken back to the pre-Christian magical practices

You don’t actually say that the Devil is lacking in cunning, but the juxtaposition suggests it, so let’s run with it.

Two kinds of stories/fantasies:

1. The Devil is made out to be stupid and Everywoman can trick him (no Mensa membership required).
   The giant ain’t all that and any Tom, Dick, or Jack can take it down.
   — The story’s version of the threat is smaller, so we can feel bigger and safer.
    
2. The Devil is very tricky indeed, but with a bit of luck and a following wind is fooled.
   The dragon is as dangerous as feared and then some, but the dice are kind, the heroine’s high-risk strategy comes off, and it is slain; the best models still say that 99 times out of 100 the dragon eats.
   — The little person wins, but the story is more exciting because she should have failed.

(There are, of course, other kinds of stories.)

Perhaps the second story is always in danger of collapsing into the first.° Probably Goliath never stood a chance against David. But games are a safe space to fail: the players aren’t going to get eaten by the dragon, so the characters can be allowed a big chance of getting toasted and eaten.

When we are playing “my god is bigger than your god,” we should take care not to judge a god’s power by its achievements — the gods that make it to the altar are the gods that got lucky: 100 other gods of the same power and with the exact same play book/character sheet went straight down the throat of Kajabor, but no one remembers them.
 

—————————————————————————
° For good reason? We don’t want it to be dumb luck that the heroine wins, so the temptation is to make it plausible that she wins. The way to fix it? Show that intelligence went into improving the odds: this is the best strategy — idiots lose 9,999 times out of 10,000 — but it is still a losing strategy more than half the time, maybe a lot more than half the time. “It is a slim chance, but it is the only real chance we’ve got.” Maybe.

[Sir_Godspeed]

17 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

You don’t actually say that the Devil is lacking in cunning, but the juxtaposition suggests it, so let’s run with it.

Two kinds of stories/fantasies:

1. The Devil is made out to be stupid and Everywoman can trick him (no Mensa membership required).
   The giant ain’t all that and any Tom, Dick, or Jack can take it down.
   — The story’s version of the threat is smaller, so we can feel bigger and safer.
    
2. The Devil is very tricky indeed, but with a bit of luck and a following wind is fooled.
   The dragon is as dangerous as feared and then some, but the dice are kind, the heroine’s high-risk strategy comes off, and it is slain; the best models still say that 99 times out of 100 the dragon eats.
   — The little person wins, but the story is more exciting because she should have failed.

(There are, of course, other kinds of stories.)

Perhaps the second story is always in danger of collapsing into the first.° Probably Goliath never stood a chance against David. But games are a safe space to fail: the players aren’t going to get eaten by the dragon, so the characters can be allowed a big chance of getting toasted and eaten.

When we are playing “my god is bigger than your god,” we should take care not to judge a god’s power by its achievements — the gods that make it to the altar are the gods that got lucky: 100 other gods of the same power and with the exact same play book/character sheet went straight down the throat of Kajabor, but no one remembers them.
 

—————————————————————————
° For good reason? We don’t want it to be dumb luck that the heroine wins, so the temptation is to make it plausible that she wins. The way to fix it? Show that intelligence went into improving the odds: this is the best strategy — idiots lose 9,999 times out of 10,000 — but it is still a losing strategy more than half the time, maybe a lot more than half the time. “It is a slim chance, but it is the only real chance we’ve got.” Maybe.

Controversially: it probably also took less to impress people in the past, because gigantic virtual spectacle driven by a professional class of story-inventors and special effects people wasn't a thing. So St. George killing a dragon the size of a RL Nile crocodile was plenty impressive enough. Someone outwitting the Devil with some clever wordplay or practical jokes was plenty impressive enough. The idea of villains with plans within plans wasn't all that common.

And ironically, these more down-to-earth feats could relatively easily be paired with ludicrously massive events like a global Flood or someone killing the sun because a cosmic sense of scale was not only less understood, but more malleable and plastic. 

Or in other words, the devil is as smart as the storytellers need him to be. The hero is as strong as the storytellers need him to be.

How does this affect Glorantha? Not sure, but imho we can take comfort in that stories, even of "true" events conform to the world-understanding of whoever is transmitting the story. I'm sure the conflict between Orlanth and Yelm feels more grand in a literary urban culture than among a band of hunter-gatherers, even if it still boils down to "storm killed the sun".

[mfbrandi]

23 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Controversially: it probably also took less to impress people in the past, because gigantic virtual spectacle driven by a professional class of story-inventors and special effects people wasn't a thing.

Happily, stories require zero SFX budget, so we have had tales of universal floods, parted seas, and the shooting down of multiple suns for thousands of years.

23 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

So St. George killing a dragon the size of a RL Nile crocodile was plenty impressive enough.

I am fully confident that I wouldn’t stand a chance against a single jaguar. We don’t need Gojira to put the protagonist in a very sticky position. It is all relative.

23 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Someone outwitting the Devil with some clever wordplay or practical jokes was plenty impressive enough.

I wasn’t trying to suggest that stories of the first kind were (always) a matter of incompetence on the part of the storyteller, and I did suggest a motivation: making the scary thing less scary.

Of course, humans of limited intelligence (me, not you) do find it difficult to portray a Devil who is smarter than us and then a protagonist who is smarter still. Often perhaps, the best we can manage is quicker — “I would have thought of that, eventually, but not at speed and with my soul at stake.”

My main worry was the temptation to make the protagonist tougher than the villain they beat, but possibly I was too oblique.

Edited February 3 by mfbrandi
ain → y

[Ynneadwraith]

I was always of the understanding that historic polytheism was quite a practical thing. You did offer worship to a deity primarily for a concrete achievable outcome. This article explains it well.

However, in practice this works out to function a lot closer to what Ali is describing.

The reason is the time period we're thinking about isn't one of post-enlightenment impersonal cause and effect. It's a time of deeply personal cause and effect.

So, let's think of our oil well. But this oil well isn't a modern unthinking contraption of metal and plastic. This oil well is a person. It is capable of being insulted. If it is insulted, we do not know for certain what the consequences could be. Perhaps it is a terrible oil well, and everyone knows it is a terrible oil well, but if we insult it we might be cursed to never draw oil from the ground wherever we go ever again. Or get turned into deer and eaten by our own hounds. Perhaps a more powerful god will protect us. Perhaps our insulted oil well will take it's grievances to an even more powerful god that doesn't like us. Perhaps the oil well is not as weak as we thought (and it is a good, it's certainly more powerful than us at any rate).

Can we take the risk?

That's how you end up with Greeks worshipping Ares even though everyone knows that Ares is terrible and everyone just wants him to go away. He gets worshipped so he doesn't get insulted, even if everyone really much prefers Athena.

Sometimes someone will be brave and say 'you know what, I believe Athena will protect me'. Due to random chance, maybe that person gets hit in the eye with a spear and everyone goes 'see, we told him not to annoy Ares, we must keep up our sacrifices'. Maybe he survives and nothing bad happens for a while. No plagues. No famines. No random horrible circumstances (rare in the ancient world). Maybe people start believing that Ares isn't as strong as they used to believe. 

This is how worship lived and died in the real world. Largely through random coincidence and popular superstition.

In Glorantha there's a bit more to the feedback loop. Sometimes God's genuinely do leave their calling card for actions they've taken. However, I still think there's a lot of superstition involved. Which god caused this thing to happen? Why did they do it? What did we do to offend/please them? Can we do it again/stop it from happening?

[mfbrandi]

5 hours ago, Ynneadwraith said:

This is how worship lived and died in the real world. Largely through random coincidence and popular superstition.

Obviously, superstition, stupidity, and consequent false belief are found IRL. But is this what religion is and/or was?

• Frazer’s account of the magical and religious notions of men is unsatisfactory: it makes these notions appear as mistakes. (p. 1e)
• Every explanation is an hypothesis. But for someone broken up by love an explanatory hypothesis won’t help much. — It will not bring peace. (p. 3e)
• A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. (p. 3e)
  — Aunty Ludwig, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough

In trying to think what it is like to be a 7M initiate, perhaps we should be more Wittgenstein and less JGF. I say this as the staunchest of atheists.

[Sir_Godspeed]

People aren't generally optimizers, but "sufficient-izers". To borrow from economic theory, we're usually not "Homo Economicus". Our understanding of choices is limited, our perspective flawed, and the amount of effort we're willing to put in to achieve some goal is definitely limited as well. 

A lot of cults in Glorantha probably survive because they are "good enough" for their worshippers, and changing cult to something potentially more materially optimized would just be too much hassle. 

(and to reiterate what Jeff said, cults aren't just packets of spells, they're communities that open up social benefits.)

[Ali the Helering]

12 hours ago, Ynneadwraith said:

This is how worship lived and died in the real world. Largely through random coincidence and popular superstition.

I am afraid this is post-Enlightenment rationalisation.  

 

12 hours ago, Ynneadwraith said:

I was always of the understanding that historic polytheism was quite a practical thing. You did offer worship to a deity primarily for a concrete achievable outcome. This article explains it well.

However, in practice this works out to function a lot closer to what Ali is describing.

Actually, I think you are conflating and inverting the process.  The concrete and achievable outcome IS that you are part of the community, NOT that you get personal sparkly special effects from the deity.

2 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

and to reiterate what Jeff said, cults aren't just packets of spells, they're communities that open up social benefits

Exactly so.

[Ali the Helering]

13 hours ago, Ynneadwraith said:

This article explains it well.

I am afraid that I have to part company with you on this, because while Bret is an expert on matters of mail armour (seriously!) and was a lecturer for a course on mythology (although I really don't understand what he means by 'teaching mythology surveys') for a variety of sessions over the course of three years, that was over a decade ago, and scholarship moves on.

His writings are interesting, but even he classifies some of them as completely one-sided, and therefore I would approach with caution.

My writings and lectures are, of course, completely balanced and utterly rational.🙃

 

[hipsterinspace]

People often forget the utility of common rune magic, especially Heal Wound, which means that even if you’re just part of the missionary cult—not one of the specialist individual Mother’s cults—there is still plenty of useful magic available to you. Add to that the Jakaleel shamans being able to teach an initiate just about any spirit magic (plus cultists of the associated Etyries can trade spirit magic spells), and the potential to transfer into more specialized cults down the line, it’s not a bad deal magically. Add to that the social benefits of conversion, especially in a place like occupied Sartar, and it’s understandable why some people took that bargain despite the hostility of their kinfolk.

Edited February 3 by hipsterinspace

[Joerg]

5 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

My writings and lectures are, of course, completely balanced and utterly rational.🙃

Care to share some links or examples? We can only benefit from more sources.

[Ali the Helering]

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

Care to share some links or examples? We can only benefit from more sources.

I am in the process of completing material for a course on The Religions of Ancient Israel (with apologies to Ziony Zevit whose title I have purloined) which I will be delivering at the College of the Nazarene, and I will happily make it available once done.  They have rather panicked, and have advertised it as Religion (singular rather than plural)😡

I will see what else I can dig out from my past stuff, but unfortunately much of it has transmigrated to silicon heaven after hacking by the friends of a malicious ex-.......

[Darius West]

On 2/2/2024 at 2:43 AM, Ali the Helering said:

Manchester in the UK, blessed by the persistent presence of my patron, Heler!

How does it compare with Bergen in Norway.  There is a joke in Bergen that an American was in town and he had been there a while and asked a boy "Hey kid !  When does it stop raining here?"  To which the kid replied "I don't know mister, I'm only 12."