Considering the Transition into Time, and the Recollection of Pre-History

[Cynics Ban]

The nature of Time in Glorantha, and the transition between Got Time into History has always been one of the most intriguing aspects of the world. I'm considering a campaign set in the earliest years of the First Age in an attempt to explore the individual and societal drama that could arise from such a profound material and metaphysical change to the world.

Has anyone else here given some thought to how a person or community, who existed before Time began make sense of themselves and their surroundings immediately after the Great Compromise? I would imagine recalling the events of pre-History akin to the recollection of a profound but intensely chaotic dream in which only powerful impressions and momentary flashes could be grasped. It's fascinating to consider how these strong impressions and vague yet overwhelming memories must have shaped individuals and the events which have led up to the Third Age.

[John Biles]

We know many communities needed outside hep to make sense of the new reality, which is why the Orlanthi religion spread over a huge area.

The rising of the Sun was a critical moment.  People who had never seen the Sun or had only seen a weak sun substitute now saw the real thing and many had probably forgotten *it ever existed*.

It had to be an utter shock. 

 

Edited May 20 by John Biles

[Malin]

I always saw the sudden presence of "time" in particular as almost a form of prion disease. Once you had grasped the concept, your life and memories were profoundly altered, to the point of not being able to truly grasp what life had been like before. Being able to measure and chart as FACT something which had previously only BEEN might have ushered in a new drive to order reality to make sense of it. The closest I can think for myself is that what if we suddenly gained the ability to fully remember, record, sort and chart our dreams each night? Not control, no, but to have that ledger of your unconscious life would change us. A thing that has been nebulous and vague before would now be as clear as the waking life.

I can see early society as one in upheaval, as people grasped the concept of time at different paces. Suddenly all the old stories might not make sense, how did people do that much in a lifetime? Wasn't many things happening at once? Grandfather's tales must be misremembered or embellished. A whole life of experiences falling into jumbled place, especially for those who had lived a long time. It must have been such a temptation to accept the word of anyone who had a clear vision of what had been, what was, and what should come. Suddenly you don't had to take personal responsibility for your memory, you had to trust the Founder, Missionary, Prophet, etc... If everyone prescribed to/remembered the same story, all the chafing of "surely this wasn't how/when it happened" would go away. If community helped physical survival during the Great Darkness, I suspect it helped with spiritual survival during the Dawn.

That's probably the reason for the obsession with rulers, eras and the time they ruled. Large numbers would have been tossed around, how long was the Golden Age again? A thousand years? A million? How long did Yelm rule? What gods are there? How are they related? What did they do, and in what order? In a way, for me, this is where the first seeds of the God Learners were sown. In those people who tried to make sense of the vastness that was now suddenly Knowable instead of just Being.

I am reminded of people like Swedenborg, who went in and charted the whole Swedish Dynasty back to Noah's Ark, just to have names, numbers and order, fitting many ancient Mediterranean legends into Swedish prehistory (like Atlantis). All to make a cohesive Kingdom Story.

 

Edited May 20 by Malin

[metcalph]

I really don't think the transition was sudden.  All throughout the Gray Age, people  had been coping with some form of sequential time and apart from the Sun, the Dawn was little different from what was before.  The real point of departure was before the Great Darkness but very few people survived that to notice any difference.

[Ynneadwraith]

I'd always conceptualised it as the ability to, from our perspective, step backwards or forwards in time/causality (which was a lot looser back then). A little like living in a permanent heroquest. If you wanted to step into the event of Flamal and Ernalda's courtship you could, much in the same way that we would walk in from one village to the next. Without time, every single event ever was happening all at once and you could travel to any of them at any point you pleased.

Where this gets really scary is when you consider that Chaos folks like Ragnaglar, or Kajabor, or even lowly broo could do this too. Because they were not bound within time either. So if you were a regular human at this point in time and you fought a broo, that broo could just keep coming back again and again to that event over and over and over. It's a lovely system while everyone is all happy and good, but the moment someone uses it to terrorise someone it becomes a horrific weapon to wield. The thing that broke the World Machine was malice.

How this interacts with Death is a tricky one, as you could see that as the first tendrils of time creeping into the world. A change that isn't easily walked back from.

This sort of ups the stakes of I Fought We Won, as it's not just about beating chaos, it's about beating chaos all at once in exactly the moment that the web of time fell upon the world. Only at that point did everything become fixed, and you couldn't just go and replay things over and over to change the event. That's why so much of the world and the gods are dead or ruined, because this was the best they could get to in the moment when the trap was sprung.

[Joerg]

Except for those under heroic leadership already in the Gray Age, the advent of Time was a release of Greater Darkness trauma that kept them in an almost zombie-like state of mind, repeating their survival methods over and over again even when the rebirth of the world of light made things easier - after all there also always was the rebirth of the world of darkness. Well into the second century the Lightbringer missionaries encountered groups of people who remained stuck in their trauma, like the Hagolings.

There were a number of such awakeners - they include the horse warlords of Peloria (for all the nastiness some of them still carried along), King Dan at Hrelar Amali, various groups of the Serpent Brotherhood among the Hykimi of the West, Waha in Prax, the Brithini, their colonies, and their Waertagi allies, and of course the surviving people of the Unity Battle and their Kingdom of Night with their participants in I Fought We Won and teh parallel unity alliance in the Elder Wilds.

[soltakss]

The Sun came up, and the world was reborn. But, apart from that things carried on as before. The Grey Age was one of waiting. After I Fought We Won there wasn't a lot of mythical stuff, that was building up to the Dawn.

[Tatterdemalion Fox]

Shut one eye and cover it. The Great Darkness is a catastrophic weather event that nearly causes humanity to go extinct. The Vent roars, and the sky is choked with clouds. The sun is gone. Nothing grows. Winter stalks the land, but ash rains from the sky and the winds are still. Society falls apart. The great Lightbringer cultural explosion happens because they have a narrative that explains what happened: the gods all died, but in the underworld they won, and now they have returned, and that’s why we can grow crops again. Heort and Lord Victory Nightbrother maintained an almost impossible continuity of society (or, in either case, successfully convinced their people that they were heralds of the old order, the mythic time of the gods), which made their societal structures very appealing to bands of survivors all across central and western Genertela.

The future shall be like the past. Which one? All of them.

Shut one eye and cover it. The sun really did follow the Theyalan missionaries. They had Orlanth’s Mandate, after all. The imagery of Orlanth breathing life back into Ernalda’s lungs is a deep metaphor for the process of reanchoring the shattered fragments of reality back into the Net. If Glorantha has ever felt patchwork to you— if certain elements feel thin, or unreasonable when placed together, or like lacunas on the map: blame the missionaries. Their failures in the east are particularly galling. The people in the places they went almost certainly were preexisting, but they were lost, outside themselves, without self— and then the sun rose, and they knew themselves as part of a new world, a world they had not been a part of before.

Which one? All of them.

Shut one eye and cover it. Time is being spun by something with eight legs or excreted by something with six legs and radial symmetry. It is an artificial framework and an attempt to stop the world from shattering. What went down at Castle Blue was a screaming match over the books and the dice before Orlanth sulkily conceded that Sedenya understood the game being played, but only because she’d been briefed by the GM.

Which one? All of them.

One day, Kimantor sat up. The wool blanket slid down the place where he had the silhouette of a six-pack. He sniffed the air, and then he listened as hard as he could, so hard that he could hear the breath of insects, then hard enough that he could hear silence, then hard enough that he could hear the noises inside of silence, and what he heard inside that was—

Norinel shifted in her sleep, then, and rolled over, dragging the blanket with her shoulder. He leaned down and kissed her cheek. (He would remember that moment, the way she looked with her brow scrunched up, the rumples of the blanket in the dark, the shape of her breath, the scent of her skin; the moment itself came back when he least expected it, over and over again.)

“We won,” he whispered in the dark. In the shadows, there was a movement, a sign of blessing, and Kimantor bowed his head in honor of his father. Then the moment was gone, and he rested the shape of his unobserved head against the wall of the cave chamber, cold and dry and solid.

”And we have so much work to do.”

[Professor Chaos]

The mere fact that people and animals did not ALL starve to death in the complete absence of the sun suggests that natural processes of vegetative growth are not dependent on photosynthesis in Glorantha.

After all Yelm is not anything at all like what in our universe is understood as a stellar object but a God and the stars are not fantastically distant other suns but other Gods so why do plants need sunlight at all?  

So what if the whole Birth of Time is just Lightbringer propaganda?

Everyone already had a sense of time because things were always born, grew and died in a rhythmic fashion that could be measured in one way or another - then Yelm came back from his holiday in hell and it suddenly got a  lot easier to see properly for half the day and also gave everyone a much simpler way to measure duration than it was between when the yellow beans start sprouting and the chickens stop moulting.

As people being able to jump about time because there is no time I can't see that at all - causality and duration still apply.

 

[Tatterdemalion Fox]

1 hour ago, Professor Chaos said:

The mere fact that people and animals did not ALL starve to death in the complete absence of the sun suggests that natural processes of vegetative growth are not dependent on photosynthesis in Glorantha.

The Aldryami still found the Greater Darkness to be incredibly, civilizationally traumatizing. The Brown Elves (which is to say, the deciduous elves) all buried themselves beneath the earth and slept long, slow dreams of death; only the Green Elves (which is to say, the evergreens) remained to fight the servants of the Taker. Halamalao was vitally important to them during this time, the bringer of light without heat. So there's still some connection to necessary Light here.

[Akhôrahil]

On 5/19/2024 at 10:45 PM, Cynics Ban said:

Has anyone else here given some thought to how a person or community, who existed before Time began make sense of themselves and their surroundings immediately after the Great Compromise? I would imagine recalling the events of pre-History akin to the recollection of a profound but intensely chaotic dream in which only powerful impressions and momentary flashes could be grasped. It's fascinating to consider how these strong impressions and vague yet overwhelming memories must have shaped individuals and the events which have led up to the Third Age.

"Wow, causality, that's new! I'm not sure I approve."

[John Biles]

8 hours ago, Professor Chaos said:

The mere fact that people and animals did not ALL starve to death in the complete absence of the sun suggests that natural processes of vegetative growth are not dependent on photosynthesis in Glorantha.

After all Yelm is not anything at all like what in our universe is understood as a stellar object but a God and the stars are not fantastically distant other suns but other Gods so why do plants need sunlight at all? 

I'd say there's several answers to the survival problem:

1.  Alternate source of Light - the lesser sun, Star Captain, Mahome's Magical Hearth, Yelmalio lived on your tula.

2.  Water existed before light, so things in the water don't need it, so you lived on fish or even became fish

3.  Trolls taught you how to eat anything.

4.  Barntar's secrets of plowing air into earth to make it fertile; who needs Ernalda's ex husband?

5. Eithera's power sustains the plants; the herdbeasts eat them, you eat the herdbeasts.

6.  Uralda led your people to someone to take care of you and her cows.

7.  Humakt taught you the secret to live off death.

 

[Joerg]

11 hours ago, Professor Chaos said:

The mere fact that people and animals did not ALL starve to death in the complete absence of the sun suggests that natural processes of vegetative growth are not dependent on photosynthesis in Glorantha.

Photosynthesis happens - it is the direct absorption of Source energies channeled through the Fire rune by the sun and other celestial entities by the plants of Light (i.e. fire plants, earth plants, water plants, but not darkness plants aka funghi).

The Earth as well as the Sea provide energies from the Source through their respective runes, too. Earth was weakened (asleep), but not completely unyielding. Sea actually gained a lot of momentum with the Greater Darkness (the implosion of the Spike), but directed most of that momentum into containing the Chaos Rift. Still, the Breaking of the World was the event that revived Choralinthor in the middle of the Greater Darkness and returned a means of survival and life to the residents that had been absent before.

11 hours ago, Professor Chaos said:

After all Yelm is not anything at all like what in our universe is understood as a stellar object but a God and the stars are not fantastically distant other suns but other Gods so why do plants need sunlight at all? 

In the Green Age, Flamal was the primary mediator of energies from the Source to the Plant Life of the Cosmos, the Axis Mundi whose top reached into the Source at the upper edge of the Cosmos and that shone on the Surface World. As Aether was born, he became the medium through which the life-giving yet destructive energies of the Source were filtered, and in turn the Three Brothers were put out to mediate the Light (at least above Dara Happa - we know of other local orbs of light, with Ehilm for instance nesting in the treetop of Flamal).

Sunlight is the most abundant source of Source energies when the daystar is up in the sky. Even at night, Lightfore sheds some light, although significantly less than the Sun Disk. And some Lightfore remained in the Sky almost throughout the Greater Darkness, except when even Dayzatar had to leave his post (closest to the Source) to recover his favorite nephew.

11 hours ago, Professor Chaos said:

So what if the whole Birth of Time is just Lightbringer propaganda?

That would undercut Lunar mythology just as much as it would Lightbringer and Dara Happan cosmology. Granted, this is the syncretic cosmology started by the Theyalans and finalized by the Second Council, then spread through the Bright Empire, and the first century after the Dawn was different in many ways, but the Dawn was a major shifting point.

11 hours ago, Professor Chaos said:

Everyone already had a sense of time because things were always born, grew and died in a rhythmic fashion that could be measured in one way or another - then Yelm came back from his holiday in hell and it suddenly got a  lot easier to see properly for half the day and also gave everyone a much simpler way to measure duration than it was between when the yellow beans start sprouting and the chickens stop moulting.

Yes, there was (and still is) a concierto of cycles, and a (human/mortal?) concept of countability of cycles, in Godtime, before the Birth of Time. The deities from Godtime experience the whole of Godtime in their existence. The Red Goddess, born within Time, waxes and wanes with the cycles to enable her presence within Time. In doing so, she has attained the Cycles as her defining feature and with that illuminated understanding she has become the mistress of cycles.

Weird as it may be, but even during the Sunstop of the Golden Age of Godtime there was a concept of days and seasons and agricultural cycles.

11 hours ago, Professor Chaos said:

As people being able to jump about time because there is no time I can't see that at all - causality and duration still apply.

Causality becomes subjective. The protagonist of a path experiences the mythical stations in sequence, regardless whether these stations have different contexts in other sequences. If two paths intersect twice, there is an even chance that the protagonists of both paths experience these encounters in the same sequence or in the opposite sequence.

Arkat received an unhealable wound during one of his explorations of Godtime. In a later exploration of Godtime, he was in the position to deal this wound, and he did.

Orlanth's Lightbringer Quest (the standard form taught by the Lightbringers) has the questers visit stations that we know from pre-Greater Darkness context, like the city of introspection where they pick up Eurmal who was about to be sacrificed. Orlanth encounters Lhankor Mhy and Issaries and Chalana as if they are strangers, and for purposes of this quest they are, even though they have long accompanied him and his successors starting with VIngkot as thanes of the Storm Tribe.

What exactly are the myths where Orlanth befriends Lhankor Mhy and Issaries? Or do the Lhankor Mhy and Issaries of the Lightbringers' Quest merge retroactively with the Lhankor Mhy and Issaries of the Storm Tribe, different incarnations that collapse into one each through the encounter on the Lightbringers' Quest? You could create such a "quantum" causality if that fits your way to narrate Godtime better.

[Malin]

I love that by reading these threads I can truly get into the Lhankhor Mhy mindset. I imagine that most debates here have probably happened somewhere in Glorantha as well, once upon a time.

[Memestream]

I'm going to echo the sentiment that Time was a gradual happening, and I think there are textual reasons to believe this given the events of the Gods' Time, which often concern references to changes in creation.

Eurmal's discovery of Death/The First Sword strikes me as particularly germane among them. Strictly within the text of Glorantha, it was a new thing("had not been seen before"), and it was a thing that changed the essence of those it touched forever after. Grand Father became Grandfather Mortal, Yelm stopped shining forever and became bound to a cyclical progression, same story for the Red Moon. Pretty much every manifestation of Time traces back to Death. If there had been no Death there would have been no Wakboth, no Lightbringers' Quest, no Cosmic Compromise, no Web of Arachne Solara.

Outside of the text of Glorantha, particularly within the Western Mystery Tradition, swords are symbolic of the process of discretion itself(the better part of valor). A sword separates, flesh from flesh, body from soul. This is also represented in the faculty of the intellectual mind, which is able to assess and process things as discrete parts of a functioning whole. The intellectual mind is also the seed of Time as a measured system which can be accurately recorded and defined, just as Death/The First Sword is the quickening/akindling of the chain of causality which culminates in Time. 

I don't think this is an accidental convergence of Glorantha lore with Earth originated occultism. All of the woo(a term I use endearingly) lines up more or less perfectly.

"Death needs time like a junkie needs junk"
"Death needs time for what it kills to grow in, for Ah Pook's sweet sake." ~ William S. Burroughs

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, Memestream said:

“Death needs time like a junkie needs junk”

Ah Pook the Destroyer. Arkat the Destroyer.

Edited June 7 by mfbrandi
added image

[EricW]

Wasn't the Nysalor project an explicit attempt to return the gods age? This implies a lot of people missed the old days - even though there are strong hints that Time is what keeps the Devil from escaping the Block. Given the Sunstop and the divine incarnations which appeared during the Battle of Night and Day, the followers of Nysalor came perilously close to overturning Time and releasing the Devil. 

 

[mfbrandi]

9 hours ago, EricW said:

Time is what keeps the Devil from escaping the Block.

Only in time is escape possible. Without time, there is no before and no after, no was imprisoned and now is free. But in time, at least, the Devil is distributed and progressive, creeping—escape probably will happen, but it hasn’t happened, yet, and Dubya is spread pretty thin. In the hell of no time, the Devil is everything everywhere all at once.

Or to take the contrary position: in time, the Devil is clearly seen everywhere in the inescapable evil of the mundane world; in God Time, the Devil is curiously absent, uncontactable. It is almost as if the gods dumped Dubya out of their world and made him our problem.

The Devil: you don’t want the cake, but you don’t want to have to eat it either.