Speculations on early Malkioni writings in mostly unpublished fragments continued

[Joerg]

  Over in Runeblogger's thread about the inspirations for some of the uniquely Gloranthan races we landed in the territory of nearly unpublished early Malkioni material by Greg, with a genealogical chart provided by Scott Martin. Rather than derail that topic further, I thought geekery about that stuff might be better off in a new thread.

 

10 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Phlia vanishes at the moment the vadelites emerge and her children also vanish from the narrative (or are transformed), which is suggestive.

As a Tilnta, she might not have been fit for conflict, but Malkion himself was born from the flight of the Vadrudi which was anything but not non-violent. Still, Aerlit and Warera united in love rather than conflict, so he might have been eligible as companion for a Love goddess.

The story about the disappearance (and even more transformation) of her children is new to me. The Serpent King history (and its full text excerpts Hrestol's Saga and its unfinished sequel Faralz and Hrestol on Brithos) name Phlia as mother of the Maklioni upper castes, with the Dronars separated out as children of Malkion and a land goddess (Kala, goddess of the hill or mountain range in southern Brithos which become the homeland of one of the three Vadeli tribes, and remain as islands after Zzabur broke the world).

Faralz' and Hrestol's Saga on Brithos has barbarian Vadeli raiders inhabiting wild parts of Brithos, and a cameo appearance of forest people just before the fragment cuts off.

 

11 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Phlia vanishes at the moment the vadelites emerge and her children also vanish from the narrative (or are transformed), which is suggestive. The children of Malkion have three mothers. The children of Vadel have three fathers.

Children of Vadela rather than the male explorer we encounter in Revealed Mythologies and Middle Sea Empire?

 

The early narratives about Seshnela and its inhabitants are written in a style that reminds me of the more magical quests of the extended Arthurian body of sagas, with a lot more interaction with deities and practically all main protagonists with divine ancestry no more than three generations away.

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

a genealogical chart provided by Scott Martin

May as well reproduce it here for easy reference:

Edited April 17 by mfbrandi

[scott-martin]

My thought on the Multiple Malkion Mommies is that this is how a civilization tries to have it both ways. On one hand, they want to present the four-caste system of temperament as universal. But historically, caste boundaries and functions have migrated ("the gunas revolve") and people that come into the system via conversion or conquest need to be sorted. The wives of Malkion narrative helps to absorb the immediate tension without fully resolving it . . . becoming a centre of weird interpretations if not outright philosophical "pestilence." 

(Now there is one key weird interpretation of my own to swallow here up front: I do not believe vadel orientation is inherited in anything like a continuous line back to the founder/ress. While many people who currently revel in the label were born into that system, it is usually more productive to think about periodic vadel irruptions or revivals that precipitate when the community is under some form of strain. This is why I tend to talk about "vadelists" or "vadelites" as a philosophical sect or cultural repertoire and avoid the "vadeli" with its tribal or genetic connotations.

[I am increasingly convinced that the way of "brithos" is a similar overlay and not a fundamental category in itself. But this is weirder and more controversial, hence the square brackets.])

The version in question begins in the allegorical Forest of Ontal. Phlia is the abandoned patriarch's foster mother and ultimately the mother of 30 unnamed children undifferentiated except by gender. They aren't caste paragons. They're just people. I doubt ancestor worship along these lineages matters much. IMG they provide a way to talk about the multiplicity and recombinant diversity of the "wareran tribes" who occupy most of the northern continent and spread to other places. Phlia eventually vanishes once the world is populated and Malkion goes looking for her. This particular version of the narrative compresses his search ("far and wide did Malkion wander") so that almost immediately after Phlia disappears he is "beset by the [v]adeli, who were jealous of his stature and wisdom." They then take him (south) into slavery, where in a variation on the Joseph prophetic motif he has a series of dreams that put him in contact with the divine world and help him invent the caste tools.

[I believe the caste tools are more useful as dimensions of consciousness, like tarot suits.]

The sequence ends with the sword, the murder of the vadelite king and the flight of the prophet. A new section begins. Aerlit, literally the god of the father, knows that the caste tools are difficult for the first family of Malkion (children of Phlia) to bear, so he sends Yena to be the second wife and bearer of caste lines. While I vaguely remember seeing the classifier "Wambla" elsewhere in the dynastic charts (they may simply be more Worlis), as you note air women are rare in the chronicles so she could be some other type of subtle entity. In this version, caste birth goes Dronar -> Talar -> Zabur -> Gwymir, with Menena somewhere in there too. 

Note that in this version it is the sword story . . . and not the "scepter" (wand) or "scales" or even the plow . . . that fulfils the series. Note also that because Malkion the Captive only dreamed four tools, Menena has none. Note further that the warrior caste of Gwymir doesn't seem to make it off the island. Here in the modern world most people talk about the children of "Horal," whom as we see married into the family and built a kind of birthright.

These people (minus "Horal" of course because the caste paragons are as yet unmarried) together build the city of Malkionwal. After a while Yena goes home and in her absence Malkion has his third wife with the daughter of the local river king, which is where waertagi come from. While I'm sure some people count them as a "sixth" (or even fifth) caste, this particular chronicler does not do this. They remain another people apart.

Now what is interesting is that on the facing page there's another family tree titled "Dukes of the Horali." This one has Malkion with his two primary wives and this time the descents are marked. Menena is the only child of Yena who matters in this one. The lines of Phlia ultimately produce Horal as well as the Neleos who founds Neleswal and Hepedal who founds Hepedwal in the south. In this version, as you know, Horal is one of the initial "colonists" or exiles. Froalar, the fourth colonist, descends from Phlia through a female line, Eule who is a sister or cousin of this particular Neleos, as well as formally through Talar.

[At this time I do not see much evidence that the talars are exalted above any other caste. This may be what goes "wrong" with the Frowal colony.]

There is a strange loop in the narrative where Neleos appears as both the father of Warera Triolina and as the founder of Neleswal. Since the western sea in this version is consistently the sea "of Neleom," I would not be surprised if this reflects some textual corruption or hidden secret that they would rather not leave open. "Neleom" may be a lost inflected form of the name, possibly a genitive or unusual gender situation. The historical Neleos may also have taken a few cues from the hero cult of his nephew Froalar and identified himself with a god. In this scenario, we might start seeing prototypes of rebel erasanchula projected from the dawn age experiments backward into some tumult of early creation: "Xemela" identified with a goddess, the fall of "Dadamus" and the mysterious "Desdoram," and so on. Once they figured out how to embody caste principles through the quasi-shamanic Yena techniques, it was an easy leap of temptation to identify with elemental factors . . . and then through elementary combination fill the world with new recombinant principles.

But that's a side note. To wrap up before my conference calls start, I don't think about DANMALASTAN much these days except as a kind of abstraction of how the early castes propagated and came to inhabit the bodies of the children of Phlia, the colonies. Anything deeper is locked in the libraries of absent Brithos and the people of the island do not share.
 

[Eff]

42 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

[I am increasingly convinced that the way of "brithos" is a similar overlay and not a fundamental category in itself. But this is weirder and more controversial, hence the square brackets.])
 

This does seem to scan with God Forgot and Malaskan Philippe's apparent caste-hopping.

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

On one hand, they want to present the four-caste system of temperament as universal. But historically, caste boundaries and functions have migrated (“the gunas revolve”) and people that come into the system via conversion or conquest need to be sorted.

To everyone else, what follows may be blindingly obvious but I can never keep it straight in my head — although somewhat British, I am very bad at it: class structures always elude me (and then kick me in the arse).
 

• Indo-European Varnas

1. Priest-Kings
2. Warriors
3. Workers (producers)
    

• Rig Veda

1. Priests (Brahmins)
2. Warrior-Kings (Kshatriyas)
3. Workers (Vaishyas)
   ——————————————
4. Servants (Shudras) — the outsiders, the conquered people (including those in India before the Indo-Europeans)
    

• Malkioni

1. Wizards (Priests)
2. Nobles (Kings)
3. Soldiers (Warriors)
4. Workers
    

Roughly correct?

So the Malkioni four — rather than adding Doniger’s “transcendent fourth”° — is a splitting out of the Indo-European three/Vedic top three into four to eliminate the shifting hyphenates? I wonder why, exactly. Keeps it all in the family, anyway.
 

———————————————————
° “Three (or more) forms of the three (or more)-fold path in Hinduism” in Wendy Doniger, On Hinduism

[Ian Absentia]

41 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

So the Malkioni four — rather than adding Doniger’s “transcendent fourth”° — is a splitting out of the Indo-European three/Vedic top three into four to eliminate the shifting hyphenates? I wonder why, exactly. Keeps it all in the family, anyway.

Separation of church and state?  But not for the usual reasons.  Keeping the materialists complacent content by giving them what they think they want, while preserving control over what they should want.  And I imagine the materialists think the same of the spiritualists in return.

!i!

Edited April 17 by Ian Absentia
No need for such cynicism

[Eff]

An alternative way of looking at it:

 

1. zaburs: Energy workers. 

2. dronars: Matter workers.

3. gwymirs: Obsoleted.

3a. horals: Matter-to-Energy workers

4. talars: Mediators.

5. vadelas: [REDACTED] workers. 

5a. hykims: [REDACTED] workers.

5b. seshnas: [REDACTED] [REDACTED] workers. 

5c. Pending.

6. menenas: Talent Recruitment and Development.

There is definitely a space 7, and maybe an 8.

[John Biles]

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

• Rig Veda

1. Priests (Brahmins)
2. Warrior-Kings (Kshatriyas)
3. Workers (Vaishyas)
   ——————————————
4. Servants (Shudras) — the outsiders, the conquered people (including those in India before the Indo-Europeans)
    

• Malkioni

1. Wizards (Priests)
2. Nobles (Kings)
3. Soldiers (Warriors)
4. Workers
    

Roughly correct?

So the Malkioni four — rather than adding Doniger’s “transcendent fourth”° — is a splitting out of the Indo-European three/Vedic top three into four to eliminate the shifting hyphenates? I wonder why, exactly. Keeps it all in the family, anyway.
 

———————————————————
° “Three (or more) forms of the three (or more)-fold path in Hinduism” in Wendy Doniger, On Hinduism

The Malkioni either assimilate you or declare you Krljarki or however it's spelled and try to wipe you out.

(Though you could argue that women effectively are the Shudra caste of the Malkioni system.)

 

[metcalph]

2 hours ago, Eff said:

3. gwymirs: Obsoleted.

Gwyymirs were a rank of elite Brithini warriors in Arkat's Saga and the narrator of that tale hoped to become one but thought Arkat would become one first.

[metcalph]

4 hours ago, Eff said:

This does seem to scan with God Forgot and Malaskan Philippe's apparent caste-hopping.

Malaskan Philippe is an Officer, not a Warrior.  Even where he's commanding troops, he's always described as a Talar.

[Eff]

8 minutes ago, metcalph said:

Malaskan Philippe is an Officer, not a Warrior.  Even where he's commanding troops, he's always described as a Talar.

Referring to him being described as a pupil of Zzabur in the Guide. Hypothetically possible in the right Gloranthas, but suggestive.

[Joerg]

Interesting to see an actual "deeds of Malkion" story rather than "he came, married and sired" which is what we have in the Brithos story in Revealed Mythologies.

Vadeli(tes) as slave takers - first time I see this come up in the context of early Malkioni stories (outside of the Six Tribes of Danmalastan narrative, which seems to be a lot younger). But then what we have there is mainly the Double Belligerent Assault which kills Talar and his son Hoalar, resulting in Gresat inheriting the royal seat of the first Talar of Brithos.

(BTW: I think of Brithos as the diminished island left after Zzabur flooded the majority of Brithela, if only of my deduced linguistics of Greg's place names with -ela meaning "land of" and -os meaning "coastal lands of".)

I am away from my sources, but I seem to recall that Gresat's Brithos was embraced by three forests, one of which may well have been Ontal's. In the story of the Brithos Civil War - triggert by the death of Gresat - between Menena's descendants of Horalwal and Zzabut's forces, Zzabur's forces somehow overcome the forest and invade the five castles of Horalwal from an unexpected direction.

The conflict is ended when the descendants of Menena (a lot more than the two named children, Yingar the messenger and Hrestol's father-in-law, and their offspring, two sons of Yingar and three daughters of the Duke of Horalwal, each inheriting one of the Horalwal satellite castles) summon their ancestress who then confronts her sibling Z(z)abur (again) confirming his disqualification from ruling the Brithini by caste law, leaving that role to talar Alos, a nephew of dead Gresat whose parents were lost to the Vadeli assault, too.

 

Neleos and Neliom: in Hrestol's Saga, Yadmov (the son of talar Neleos) claims that (unlike Frowal) Neleoswal is part of ancient Brithela rather than Seshnela, with the land bridge drowned by the Neliomi Sea. This might be a case of the sea taking the name of the drowned land.

[metcalph]

3 hours ago, Eff said:

Referring to him being described as a pupil of Zzabur in the Guide. Hypothetically possible in the right Gloranthas, but suggestive.

Pretty sure that's Ostorious Archmagus, not Talar Malaskan Phillippe, you are thinking of

Edited April 17 by metcalph