Magic for western culture

[Joerg]

1 hour ago, radmonger said:

Brithini and Vadeli worry much less about Rightness as they have enough wizards that everyone gets blessed. They still have laws, but exile or execution are the punishments, not being pushed to the back of the line when spells are handed out.

To Brithini and Vadeli, a positive Rightness is their ticket to avoid aging.

[radmonger]

58 minutes ago, metcalph said:

Although the Brithini have Menenas, many other Malkioni such as the Rokari ("Women typically belong to the caste of their father." Guide p48) , the Aeolians and the Vadeli do not.  

Maybe it is useful to steal an idea from Six Paths, and distinguish between Menena and menena. Menena, with a capital M, is the magically supported Brithini secret. In lower case  it refers to inherited, and inheritable, caste status without caste restriction.

The daughter of a Talar can give birth to a Talar, and while unmarried lives as a noble, likely with that occupation in rules terms. But they don't inherently rule, and are not legally restricted in who they marry.  If married to a Talar, they can, however, do the things their husband cannot. 'Who will rid me of this turbulent Zzaburi?' is a question that is likely to have the answer 'me, darling'.

The wife of a peasant can labour in the fields, and hold a spear in the militia that backs the full-time warriors. Only in the most dire of emergencies would a Dronar be told to take the place of their wife.

The daughter of a Talar who marries a Horali will produce sons who are theoretically entitled to be declared as Talars at birth. However, that will normally only be the case if there is expected to be a vacancy. Should it be the case that it is the actions of the Horali that cause that vacancy, then that is just more evidence of the regrettable state of the cosmos in this age.

 

 

[metcalph]

14 minutes ago, radmonger said:

Maybe it is useful to steal an idea from Six Paths, and distinguish between Menena and menena. Menena, with a capital M, is the magically supported Brithini secret. In lower case  it refers to inherited, and inheritable, caste status without caste restriction.

Unfortunately the people making judgements on the matter are Rokari Wizards who would be one of the last people in Glorantha to accept gender fluidity.  That's not to say it doesn't happen in Seshnela - it almost certainly does.  But the legal and cultural framework are going to be actively hostile to the practice.

Edit: I did once write about the Rokari of Pasos and Nolos accepting Caste transformations in return for huge sums of money.  Unfortunately the object of the satirical attack - indulgences - doesn't mesh well with the current thinking of Malkionism.

Edited August 26 by metcalph

[radmonger]

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

To Brithini and Vadeli, a positive Rightness is their ticket to avoid aging.

All of both are unaging, despite their radically different moral perspectives. So that clearly cannot be the case at an individual level, even if outsiders sometimes think so.

On the other hand, at the societal level, perhaps it is. The Talars rule wisely, the warriors are fierce and loyal, the worker's dilgent and obedient. So there is enough economic surplus to educate the Zzaburi who ensure that will remain so for the forseeable future. And the Vadeli have some similar deal, but with different classes and virtues, and perhaps the necessity to exploit outsiders

Edited August 26 by radmonger

[radmonger]

8 minutes ago, metcalph said:

Unfortunately the people making judgements on the matter are Rokari Wizards who would be one of the last people in Glorantha to accept gender fluidity.  That's not to say it doesn't happen in Seshnela - it almost certainly does.  But the legal and cultural framework are going to be actively hostile to the practice.

You could have basically the same system without sexual fluidity. It just means all, rather than most, women are menena. Menena with the capital is a theoretical abstract ideal no mortal woman could live up to. And precisely because none could, there is no need to worry about the possibility of a Rightness that is not going to happen. So restrictions, and moral pleadings, only apply to other castes. The doings of memena are hardly ever mentioned.

Of course, for an RPG, any playable human society will have players playing women. So it is only wise to treat that as a baseline.  Where sexism exists, it will not take the form of no women ever being assigned to those castes; that is the play-ability equivalent of saying 'this land does not exist'. Instead, perhaps women of those castes may get held to higher standards. 

 

 

[Joerg]

1 hour ago, radmonger said:

All of both are unaging, despite their radically different moral perspectives. So that clearly cannot be the case at an individual level, even if outsiders sometimes think so.

On the other hand, at the societal level, perhaps it is. The Talars rule wisely, the warriors are fierce and loyal, the worker's dilgent and obedient. So there is enough economic surplus to educate the Zzaburi who ensure that will remain so for the forseeable future. And the Vadeli have some similar deal, but with different classes and virtues, and perhaps the necessity to exploit outsiders

For their respective societies' collective understanding of Rightness, strict individual adherence to the tenets of that caste in its society ensures that they remain unaging. These same methods don't work for people not born into their societies.

There are plenty known cases of Brithini who became subject to death by aging after changing their ways (by virtue of them no longer being around) e.g. in the Seshnelan histories. Fewer cases have been reported from the Vadeli, but that may be an observation bias.

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, radmonger said:

The doings of memena are hardly ever mentioned.

I like your work in this field, of course with the camel-sized caveat that "every sect and most communities will differ to some degree."

My current conception of orthodoxy among the immortals is that strict brithinists conceive of everyone with a rigid caste descriptor as "male," there are no other pronouns. All are celibate under normal (ritually observed) conditions and over time may become smooth like a doll if they aren't already. I don't know about that. I've never had reason to undress one. But in this model just about everyone outside the rigid caste system is "female" or a breeder. The pronouns for woman and foreigner are functionally identical. This means that all of this talk about who is having babies and how they are assigned is talk about "women" and their work. For reproduction, if such a thing is desired, is required an importation of someone from outside the system: a woman or foreigner. These are the spirit "brides" of the dawn age caste fathers.

Vadelists by their nature have been observed to invert this concept in various ways. People in between who strive to emulate immortal praxis will make room for gender as their needs and talents will accommodate . . . IMG the mothers tend to cultivate their own system apart, doing their doings under and around the willful ignorance of the fathers, probably without the notion of ritual immortality. (They have other consolations more in line with the matriarchies of srvuela, Greg loves a secret matriarchy.) They look like a separate religion within whatever the local state apparatus happens to be, largely tolerated because masculine authority is too busy sorting all the boys to pay attention. 

They are ironically one of the primary ways magic in western culture is transmitted because the line between a free mother and a witch is razor thin. Menena.

 

Edited August 26 by scott-martin
kate bush reference

[Eff]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

All are celibate under normal (ritually observed) conditions and over time may become smooth like a doll if they aren't already. 

∅Ω!

Much of this discussion is conditioned on accommodations I find not worth making, but something that did pop up on a reread of Revealed Mythologies is that none of the big four castes fits their stereotypical role all that well. Horali are "fighters who chase[d] away the troublesome forces that [had begun to] plague the land", which would only seem to cover outsiders and people approaching the limits of or actually engaging in improper behavior. There's nothing about drones growing food, or indeed about eating period, but they are expected to be literate enough to "record information". Zzaburi "were given the task of being responsible for the energetic well-being of the people", which obviously plays into the role of wizards as Roman Catholic priests and so if you care about canon, is definitely superceded. 

What this does suggest to me is that "caste magic" has a significant amount of room to contravene people's expectations from the stereotypes, if you're at the point of improvising something for play rather than patiently waiting for the dispensation of the official story. 

[scott-martin]

3 minutes ago, Eff said:

none of the big four castes fits their stereotypical role all that well

Yeah, I am only in this thread briefly myself but MMGF points toward a complex historical situation where time is the medium through which the gunas (varnas (jatis) revolve, or as Tight Indigo Trousers (pbuh) responded in her Arrolian Annotations, "love is a banquet on which we feed." AGWV.

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

My current conception of orthodoxy among the immortals is that strict brithinists conceive of everyone with a rigid caste descriptor as “male,” there are no other pronouns. All are celibate under normal (ritually observed) conditions and over time may become smooth like a doll if they aren’t already.

When there is only one sex and one pronoun, mistranslations by the two-sexed may be common. Once you have achieved perfection, an all-female, slow-breeding, parthenogenetic “race” may be the perfect stopping point. (“Memena” is clearly “men” stuttered through unfamiliarity: there is no occasion to use the word.) Smooth like a lizard.

[Nevermet]

15 hours ago, Richard S. said:

Yeah it does break down a bit on the smaller scale. "Any given Malkioni community" was a bit of a stupidly broad phrase for me to use, sorry. However I think your observation about sustainability is probably exactly what led the darkness-era Brithini settlers to abandon their old ways - they just didn't have the numbers to keep things going like they always had. I think nowadays my percentages are probably roughly true on the kingdom and provincial scale, but as you zoom in talars, horali, and zzaburi will concentrate in the cities. Maybe something like 60-70 dronars for every talar in rural areas, while urban populations could be closer to 20-30 dronars per. Just spitballing here, I'm no sociologist.

On a related note, I think that Old Hrestolism probably had new adults test into one of the four castes rather than it being assigned only by birth (though talar kids probably did have an advantage at becoming talars themselves). I imagine that a lot of the minor schools still do it that way, outside the influence of the Rokari and New Hrestoli.

I think it probably boils down to initiating into the cult of Hrestol. From Jeff's notes, we know that his initiates can ignore caste restrictions as long as they act with "Justice", and they get some Rune magic from him. Otherwise I think the benefits of the class are largely dependent on your own actions and how much your community supports you. So long as you're Just you can do just about anything, but God isn't going to hand you the world on a platter.

Eh, sociologists are not to be trusted 😉

and to be clear, I didn’t think anything you said was stupid.  It’s just trying to imagine how Malkioni social order makes sense can happen a few different ways.  I could easily imagine that for a population of 1K, about 20 rulers and administrators makes sense, but doing that would require the polity to do other things.  
 

also, kaxtorplose is quite weird in being a small temple/fortress/city that organizes itself according to what it considers a “pure” Malkioni religion (i have thoughts on that which would require a new Manirian Scratchpad thread)

[Sir_Godspeed]

Rokari Zzaburi are celibate right? Is it like with the Brithini where the fourth son becomes a Zzaburi, or are they recruited in some other fashion? Does it lean more towards recruiting mostly from Talari families?

[metcalph]

5 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Rokari Zzaburi are celibate right? Is it like with the Brithini where the fourth son becomes a Zzaburi, or are they recruited in some other fashion? Does it lean more towards recruiting mostly from Talari families?

It hasn't been defined.  I think that like the Pythagoreans, they abstain from sex to heighten their magics. As for their selection, magically marked children were taken to become Rokari regardless of birth at one point in writing.  Although this becomes hard to sustain for scribes. 

[metcalph]

A possibility that has occurred to me is that the Great Wizards of Seshnela (as opposed to the ordinary scribes etc) are spawned magically in various otherworldy places and deposited furtively at the doorsteps of temples to the Invisible God.

[radmonger]

On a completely unrelated note, delivering a newborn infant safely and untraceably to a temple door is a service provided by the local version of the Lanbril cult, at a merely extortionate markup.

 

[Sir_Godspeed]

17 hours ago, metcalph said:

It hasn't been defined.  I think that like the Pythagoreans, they abstain from sex to heighten their magics. As for their selection, magically marked children were taken to become Rokari regardless of birth at one point in writing.  Although this becomes hard to sustain for scribes. 

I'm imagining a scenario where some of the Wizards follow astrological signs to define at which days it's auspicious for a future sorcerer to be born. Poor woman who suddenly has Three Wise Men turning up at her door with a bunch of doodads to test the tyke with.

[metcalph]

Thoughts on the Wizards caste in Seshnela.

I think the wizards caste includes not just the magicians and scribes but the full range of academic disciplines (alchemy, medicine*, pharmacy, law etc).  Under the influence of the White Wizards**, members of the caste are forbidden to marry but this prohibition is selectively enforced.  As a student, the caste member is forbidden to marry or express sexual desires.  Graduates may take a common-law spouse and start a family with the firm understanding that such relationships be kept out of sight of their caste leaders.  People aspiring to be leaders in the Wizard caste or even a teaching position must take the vows of the White Wizards (or similar) and refrain from sex.  That usually means the dissolution of their relationship.  

Children of the relationship are presented to the Wizards at the age of five for the examination.  About 20% (ie those who have an INT of 16+ with runic bonuses assumed to be spread equally) will be trained as Wizards.  The others (INT 15-) will be taught one of the other disciplines with scribecraft being the most common.  They are also taught some sorcery but never expected to be very impressive.

*Although medicine is a lore and reserved for members of the Wizards caste, midwifery and other knowledges are trades that can be learned by commoners as any fule kno.

**Late edit: I am thinking that under the God Learners, the wizards caste had not such silly restrictions but Rokar and his successors felt that they lost their way because of this.  Hence their decision to impose the mystical discipline of the White Wizards upon the Caste to inhibit future disasters.

Edited August 28 by metcalph

[metcalph]

Just another post thinking out aloud here.  This time about the limits on the Talars.

The Talars own everything in practice and well as in theory.  However to make the Talars care about their property, Rokar imposed limits on how they may dispose of their property.

The Talars own the physical wealth of their fief.  However only the commoners can handle that wealth.  The Talars may not touch coins or other objects of exchange.

The Talars own the magic of the community.  They can tax the worship given to the Gods for their benefit.  But only the Wizards can use those energies for their spells.  

The Talars own the lives of their inferiors.  Only the soldiers can carry out the taking of life.

[jajagappa]

21 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

I'm imagining a scenario where some of the Wizards follow astrological signs to define at which days it's auspicious for a future sorcerer to be born. Poor woman who suddenly has Three Wise Men turning up at her door with a bunch of doodads to test the tyke with.

The Irrippi Ontor sages have some wonderful astrological magic that would likely work well for this.

[Jeff]

This moved rapidly away from magic for Western cultures and into Western culture itself. Lets start with a few caveats:

Any time we talk about the West (or about Kralorela, Pamaltela, or whatever), we are at the fringes of the RuneQuest setting. People love debating these cultures but the actually amount of games set there are vanishingly few (which makes sense given that there have never even been published scenarios set in any part of the West - not even Handra Liv).

Put Revealed Mythology aside for awhile. Malkion's core teachings were that the cosmos can be understood rationally by mortal humans, and that human society can be rationally organized so that mortal humans can be the masters of their own fate.

Like Socrates and Plato, Malkion reasoned that all mortal human societies have various specialist castes - those that do the work, those that defend the community, those that work magic, and those that govern the whole community. So a properly organized society should have an appropriate number of those specialists, a means of recruiting and training them, and they should do what they are trained to do instead of trying to do things better handled by others. If done exactly correctly the community and its members can achieve immortality. 

Everything else in Malkioni society is derived from that.

[g33k]

On 8/26/2024 at 3:43 AM, Joerg said:

Geographical mobility of caste members in the various Malkioni societies is rather under-documented ...

Of course, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

I think MGF suggests that this is a "no canon" situation; each table is not merely invited to pursue their own preferred answer... they are required to do so!
😉


Also, I'll observe FWIW:

On 8/26/2024 at 2:00 AM, John Biles said:

The answer to 'this community doesn't have enough talars to avoid inbreeding' is, I think 'there are other Malkioni communities you intermarry with'.

That could work; but also:  in a magical & a-scientific world like Glorantha, it's 100% possible that ideas like "inbreeding" have no real validity... relying (as they must) on other (non-DNA) mechanisms, one could even suggest that "proper caste behavior" is sufficient to entirely prevent Glorantha's "inbreeding-analogue."

Or maybe there's a sorcery-spell...  Ernalda has "Bless Pregnancy" & other fertility-magic, no reason for Sorcery not to have the answers that Westerners need.

[PaulJW]

All religions in the our own history work at two levels - the ideological and the practical.  The ideology may teach certain things but the reality amongst those people who subscribe to any religion is that many (probably most) do not conform to the ideal.

If you take the Hindu caste system as an example.  Many academics now believe that the caste system never existed in a pure form except in Hindu mythological texts.  The reality was always that caste rules were bent and frequently broken in practice.  Many people who were not part of the warrior caste fought in wars and were often recruited in large numbers into the armies.  Those people who were of the warrior caste held a special privileged position, were highly trained and had access to the very best equipment.  This certainly set them apart but, when war came, they were never the only ones who fought.

In my opinion, even a fairly devout dronar butcher would pick up a meat cleaver and fight if a wolf pirate kicked in his door and threatened his family.  

In many ways it is the potential gap between ideology and reality that interests me most about western religion in Glorantha.

As to magic, I'd agree with the general feeling that non-zzaburi caste westerners would generally join cults.  These are likely to be regulated such that only some cults are suitable to some castes and that certain castes may not rise to rune level whereas others must aspire to.  The more henotheist a sect it the more the boundaries will blur and the more you are likely to end up with something more hybrid than truly western.

Only the pure Brithini would reject all cults and all forms of shamanism across all castes.  In their society only the zzaburi perform magic and they only perform sorcery.  They are the only sect that rigidly adhere to the letter of the lore of a purist caste system in my view.  But, then again, that is probably why they are dying out.  They are desperately clinging on to a way of life that essentially became impractical as soon as time dawned.

In practical terms it is worth saying that most medieval societies really struggled to raise large armies as a proportion of the total population (even without any caste restrictions).  Historians argue over the numbers but the English army at Agincourt was around 8,000.  Now, it had taken a major national effort to field that many men on foreign soil (and the ramping up of big debts).  The population of England at that time was 2.5 million.  8,000 out of 2.5 million is 0.3%.  The total number of titled nobles in all England at that time was around 100 men (i.e. people with the title of king, duke, earl or baron).  The total number of actual knights were no more than around 1000 tops.  So the nobles and knights of medieval England, in total, accounted for 0.04% of the population.  If you throw in the gentry (untitled manorial lords, from amongst whom you'd get your men-at-arms) you get up to maybe 0.5% of the population.  That said the medieval English economy could support a lot of clergy - around 1 in 50 adult men were members of the clergy in some capacity or other (about 2% of the adult male population).  So, in reality, in medieval England, 2% or 2.5% of the population might possibly have been classified as nobles, knights or priests, or members of their families and hence potentially members of these 'castes'.  That means around 98% of the population would basically have been 'dronars'.

In a medieval society where agriculture was not as efficient as it is today, you needed a very large rural labour force just to keep everyone fed.  And that is just in medieval times where we have reasonably comprehensive documentation of what everyone did.  Back in a bronze age society, at which time agriculture was certainly no more efficient, you would need a dronar population of at the very least 95% I would say.  Anything else isn't really realistic.  So out of 100 people in a western society, maybe 2 or 3 might be a fully fledged talar, horali or zzaburi (and that's probably being generous).

Edited August 29 by PaulJW

[Joerg]

5 hours ago, Jeff said:

Malkion reasoned that all mortal human societies have various specialist castes - those that do the work, those that defend the community, those that work magic, and those that govern the whole community. So a properly organized society should have an appropriate number of those specialists, a means of recruiting and training them, and they should do what they are trained to do instead of trying to do things better handled by others. If done exactly correctly the community and its members can achieve immortality. 

Everything else in Malkioni society is derived from that.

Did Malkion create his laws for mortal humans (and were there such mortal human societies to take as his example)?

Was mortality a problem when Malkion came to the Logicians and gave his laws? Sure, the world was no longer perfect, and entities that used to be around were no more (weren't doing anything new to add to Godtime), like e.g. Umath or Mostal. These Laws were made in the Golden Age, a period where/when you had to work for your food, unlike the Green Age where/when food would be created (grown) for you as you desired it.

Also, the initial Logician society had something other than castes for specialisation - they had their tribes of specialists, for writing, building, exploring, sailing, communicating and introspection. This too had been the organisational logic instituted by Malkion to organize his people(s).

Back in the Golden Age, letting birth decide what caste you would grow into probably had no draw-backs. The Logicians had their divine and/or runic ancestry giving them advantages for their future tasks, and were masters of accumulating, preserving and teaching knowledge to put it into practical use.

The arrival of mortality was a shock for the Logicians. Although the sorcerers were able to reverse Death by accident or disease by resurrection, they were unable to reverse the deterioration and death brought by old age. And there were not always enough sorcerers with enough magic to perform the other reversals, either.

Immortality by orthopraxis was a deal that followed the Fifth Action, long after the castes had been established. Previously, the reward for orthopraxis was an existence without existential worries, a happy (joyful?) existence.