Book of the 4 Suns: Sun of Everything, Sun of the Parts

[scott-martin]

Sometimes the knot of Cold Sun discourse contains strange thread, as a recent brilliant quip demonstrates. The solar consciousness a lot of us take for granted or struggle to describe may only be an isolated local event, the sun of the north. And while every planet may have a north, surely this implies that most planets provide access to other directional modes for living . . . right? Luckily we have Revealed Mythologies as a larder of these alternative directions. Let's review what they have to say about the sun seen from these divergent angles and then circle back to the northern quadrant.

This was initially going to start in the west but why lead with the footnotes? Save them for those who care to read through to the end. Isolated references to the southern sun, on the other hand, are more interesting because they seem to survive largely because they defied easy monomyth typing, like undigested fossilized seeds in a dragon's belly. The god learners, steeped in their version of the sun, just couldn't figure them out.

Kendamalar is of course one of the old gods whose interaction generates the southern world. We first meet him as part of a binary with "dama," the dark or unperceived side of being: through these two the dichotomy of death/life dark/light disembodied/embodied spirit/human emerges out of the busted theoretical unity we can experience in the shamanic trance but not easily talk about here in the aftermath. This is however a side story for specialists and other insiders only . . . the way most doraddi interact with the kendamalar is in their sacred time where he emerges as the negating evolution of tamakderu, who is the liquid evolution of dama. We have two versions of this ritual that vary at this particular point. Sometimes the sun is the "rival" that renders the entire dama/tamakderu world obsolete ("their" rival, negating the whole notion of domesticity) and sometimes he is only tamakderu's problem ("my" rival). 

If the sun is exclusively the water's rival then you have a situation where he is what breaks up their cozy domestic partnership. He is the home wrecker wooing the night away from its wife . . . out of the old parental role into a new relationship between abstractions that together approximate the vanished langamul world. Furthermore kendamalar is explicitly described as an alternative to the noruma (coincidentia oppositorum, man+woman, androgyne) of mainline shamanic consciousness, teaching his people how to operate independently, without the community support that the pamalt system celebrates. Like an island in the sky, he needs no fuel. He is his own fuel. He has no shadow he can see. Other sources suggest that he spends a lot of time thinking, that he dislikes "mere women" (he likes and is patron of dudes however) and that he maintains a certain "prideful" intellectual isolation from the community, which in turn sees him as unhappy.

The triumph of pamalt is that even this introverted turn is accepted and integrated into the system, albeit from a distance. Out there up in the sky, he lives as the sun. Or did until the world broke and he variously left or was murdered, which happens all the time in doraddi sacred time rites where the goal is to replace / recollect the old kendamalar as a fresh varama and so gift the world with a new sun. The basic narrative resembles the northern story in some respects (the sun lives high until brought low, what goes up must come down) but the twist is that the culprit is not necessarily the person who ends up solving the problem as we see in the LBQ. Bad Man shamanism knocks him down as a tempting weak link in the cosmos. Noruma/Pamalt shamanism cannot undo the crime and bring him back (they can't or won't do anything the same way twice, "we did that before") but can transfer his "essence" to a fresh receptacle and restart the world for the next cycle, a new sun who rises to inherit from the old one that got used up, stumbled and went out. We can try it again now.

Where is the cold sun in the south? The short answer might be that varama is always rising every morning to follow the tracks of yesterday's kendamalar. Inheritance and more importantly succession are assured, unlike the north where the imperial solar cult monopolizes all the splendor to the point that the young dudes, like freud's primal horde, need to plot regicide to get their share. And in this reading the important thing about solar consciousness is not that it's stuck on a fixed route from birth to noon to death but that it keeps happening day after day, world without end. "Be glad," for getting hung up on the constraints is by definition slavery, a garangordic perversion or "bad shamanism" in its fresh form.


--[]--

I like the easy mental rhyme from "kendamalanar" (alternative form of kendamalar) to "kendamarin," the eastern axis mundi, because we know less about the southeastern interaction than just about anything else in glorantha. But while alluring, it's probably just a coincidence, right? The kendamalanar as sun at noon, the equinox, the center of the universe that never rose and will never fall. The kendamarin as the sky's zero point that partakes in nothing (none of the four quarters) and informs everything, like the perfect yelm they imagine in the north they once had and lost forever. 

There are a few jokes here before we continue. First, of course, people in the north who mourn the constant sun at noon have only to look to Polaris for intellectual comfort. Polaris is neither a hot sun (dad) nor a cold sun (son) but something else entirely, a different way to interact with the sky dome independent of day, night or the hours in between. I have no idea whether any historical sun domes venerated him directly or what aspects of polestar consciousness the sun dome incorporated or rejected. That's for experts and other people who care a lot. Second, the east is by definition as close as we get the place where the golden age allegedly never ended, the sun was never murdered or reached the level of gravitational pomp to attract murder. 

To the extent to which Vith could commit any form of error, it was in capturing the sun in the far east. We can ascribe motivations like greed or prudence to this but to me it simply reflects a lack of confidence in cosmic affluence: there is no point in grabbing anything that is available everywhere at all times for free. This may be part of what old map makers were thinking about when they colored the east gold and called them a "solar" empire. To the extent to which the east is fallen, it is indeed solar and imperial. The original east may have been quite different. We know it was a lot larger, as big as the mind can stretch and maybe bigger. Maybe it's as simple as understanding that the "east" is where people want to live the morning forever, the land of endless youth and the young god vibrant and free from imperial entanglements like death. 

Anyhow zzabur claims to have sent the shock through that and now their sun mostly travels like ours. But their story must be very different from what they say in Dara Happa or even the pure horse liturgies. We might even respond to it as an abstraction, a "poetic" contradiction. We had the sun for a while. It got out and went on its way. By the time it gets to the hsun chen federation of proto-kralorela we can barely recognize it. Maluraya is what it is. You can be there now. Anything else is shades of twilight falling. Cool story bro.

--[]--

While I personally love the alchemical read on Western Sun, my sympathies are pretty clear. We probably need to flag this approach as an effort to construct and apply an "internal logic" to stories primitive people persist in telling. Why do these stories follow these particular patterns? What can we gain from studying these northern fairy tales? It's sticky stuff, veering into realms of the "romantic," gothic, parastructural or occult. And once you so much as glance in that direction, it's contagious. We internalize the folkloric pattern and incorporate elements into our personal narrative. Suddenly we were living on the northern continent with them all along and all our enlightened mentality was the import, the overlay. 

Sure but so what? It really starts with the account we have from the deep west where physics comes from: the sun is the original source of most ambient energy (ἐνέργεια), the deed impersonal and isolated from consciousness. This energy is originally unstructured but with observation and thought you can discern patterns that explain its activity. We don't identify with this activity or even call it "glorious." It's just stuff that happens. People who identify with it are sick in some way. Personification is neurosis.

But because this is the west, my own bias toward historical materialism is a valid approach. We can track influences. As luck might have it, early Western writers happened to know people who identify with the sun. These were the neighboring pony people who among other things figured out how to domesticate the horse, which they consider sacred to the sun, and ultimately got incorporated into the Dangan theistic federation. Their god is the "ehilm" that informs the archaic western sources. The linguistic similarity between this entity and the "yelm" of modern Dara Happa has been variously read be evidence of a shared original ancestor, early Bright Empire mythic engineering, a God Learner trick, cruel coincidence or something else. However, since extant translations of Plentonius refer to "yelm" and the Greenwood has expanded to eliminate the archaeological record bridging the two solar centers, I sadly need to relegate the later historical scenarios to the realm of dumb theory, unless of course the documents have been altered or we find horse burials in the former forest. (Maybe this is something solar-identified characters will explore in a Hero War journey to the west.)

Those who subscribe to the danmalastan hypothesis can ponder whether there was a historical "ehilm" who was originally of the erasanchula and fell but we are not weighing in on the danmalastan hypothesis here. It is equally possible that Khordavu's family or religious tutors actually originate in the Dangan zone and once again the great Plentonius is consciously or cravenly doctoring the record to shore up domestic dynastic support. For now, a big MGF prevails! Either way, the Bright Empire would have reinforced and refined symmetries across regions in their doomed reinvention of continental mythology . . . for example, IMG the storm/solar rivalry that now dominates the theistic monomyth (really just the storm side, the Dara Happans seem to reject the entire concept) was probably brought in from the seasonal Mrelar Amali rites where the original struggle was construed as being between ehilm and humakt, who may have once been depicted as both air and "water" or a rain god we might recognize as more helerlike today. Incorporating storm into the system comes later, via the previously underlooked trickster figure.

Where this becomes interesting is that people who know (altinelans) say that humakt was the god who forced himself into existence by pushing zrethus (sky, sky dome) and gata (earth) apart to make space. This is of course the western alchemical model where air/water evolves to mediate between fire and earth. Maybe humakt is also consciousness, a shamanic epiphany (ferbrith) of death and individuality, sure. But I like him here as an alternative perspective on the dragon who pushes the antique sky beyond the visible horizon, filling the space between with his blueness. Again, this is often attributed these days to heler the brisk and leaping god, and we can ponder also why magasta is also a death god and who he was at Mrelar Amali before they saw the ocean and met the triolini face to face. 

Ehilm on the other hand was actually the middle sun, according to people who know. The line starts with zrethus, the old sky, now-invisible "ether" (Aether). When a humakt (Umat) rises, a lodril descends and the sun is made. In years when the ehilm wins the seasonal rivalry, the land is happy until the cycle gives him a recalcitrant descendant in the form of the eurmal who brings things to an end and presumably a beginning. "Be glad." And so the eurmal is revealed to be a thwarted young sun who breaks the rules to get the generational inheritance he wants: when the sun gets stuck at noon, somebody needs to give it a shove. Maybe the ehilm was himself once a young sun, an ehilmalio so to speak. Humakt by definition has no direct descent.

It is objectively good in Glorantha not to get stuck.

Edited November 17 by scott-martin
typographic error allows slight massage throughout

[scott-martin]

APPENDIX ONE (PRACTICE)

Draw an imaginary line straight "down" from the zenith of the ideal sky dome and you will hit magasta. As above, so below. This is the blue streak's orbit. 

APPENDIX TWO (THEORY)

What is the blue moon? The ball or marker upon the running field of forbidden sport. Whose game was this and how is it forbidden?

Edited November 17 by scott-martin

[mfbrandi]

52 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

And so the eurmal is revealed to be a thwarted young sun who breaks the rules to get the generational inheritance he wants: when the sun gets stuck at noon, somebody needs to give it a shove.

Making our trickster — the lowercase “e” was deliberate, right? — the “parent” of Nysalor? Not juggling balls, but eyes.

Perhaps the Oedipal reading is a product of supergluing the Orlanthi and Dara Happan myths.° We can choose to read one famous myth°° as saying that it was irresponsible young gods running about the sky setting the world on fire who were the problem (too much of a good thing) and that a cull of grandsons leaving one chastened survivor was the answer. At this point in the metastory, the functions of sun and emperor seem to be distinct.°°°

The story of Yi also includes a woman who stole immortality and became the essence of the moon. No resonance there, then.

 

————————————————
° The cycle of the seasons doesn’t mandate sun-as-father (i.e. a ruler from an older generation).

°° Possibly with rationalising motivation added in that telling. Not a Gloranthan myth, of course, but lurking in the background, surely.

°°° So we can probably resist reading it as Yelm vs. Orlanth with a different victor. Neither the little suns nor their killer are after the top job, in contrast with Plentonius’s troublesome [suns|sons]. (Collapsing many suns into one is a way of saying, “Rivals? What rivals? Nothing to see here.”)

°°°° This footnote is free-floating. Don’t mistake excessive apparatus for scholarship. It is all a con.

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Kendamalar

Clearly a corruption (or prophecy) of “Kendrick Lamar”, whose surname is “Duckworth”. I designate this a New Gloranthan Mystery™ concerning the relation between , , and .

[scott-martin]

On 11/17/2024 at 4:36 PM, mfbrandi said:

The cycle of the seasons doesn’t mandate sun-as-father (i.e. a ruler from an older generation).

We could speculate about a strand of Bright Empire theology where Father or "High" Storm was nominally the elder element but if it existed at all it seems to have been utterly purged in the south along with all other vestiges of Loko Moko. The northwest may be a different matter.

However, diverse sources point to the Bright Empire putting a thumb on the solar side of the scale: Khorzanelm being the dominant partner in the condominium, Nysalor receiving "light" instead of "night" tutelage (keeping that rune to this day), storm and (proto) troll being natural class allies and so forth. Somebody simply has to move first. In my Fifth Age Glorantha setting (completely nonexistent until just now and completely nonexistent hereafter) Leo Steinberg's greatest and most controversial book of art history was / will be The Brightness of Nysalor.

Love the balls and the eyes. Follow the juggler.

One footnote to the parent thread: as a cult that exemplifies the fundamental spiritual technology of RECOGNITION, Cold Sun is naturally susceptible to a kind of existential anxiety that both drives people who ask too many questions out of the Dome (like disinherited children pushed out of the celestial order or "paradise") and then makes them receptive to recognizing their god in exotic contexts. Many, maybe even most, never come home, opting instead to trade their old religious identity for what they have in the far away lands. A few, however, come back with new revelations that the home community can reject, embrace or ignore. This means Elmal threads will be with you always and they will make people unhappy in the age old ways, but they are actually productive from a Cold Sun POV. It's what they want.


 

[Alex]

On 11/17/2024 at 7:39 PM, scott-martin said:

Sometimes the knot of Cold Sun discourse contains strange thread, as a recent brilliant quip demonstrates.

Oh, please!  You're embarrassing me!  (More, more!!!)

On 11/17/2024 at 7:39 PM, scott-martin said:

The god learners, steeped in their version of the sun, just couldn't figure them out.

I feel their pain.  The 'animist' parts of Glorantha are the ones I struggle with the most, partly because they seem so diverse, including even game-mechanically.  The 'animist' parts of the RW...  sorta the same!  You'd wonder why I'm so invested in a setting devised and discovered by a practicing animist.  D'oh!!

On 11/17/2024 at 7:39 PM, scott-martin said:

Second, the east is by definition as close as we get the place where the golden age allegedly never ended, the sun was never murdered or reached the level of gravitational pomp to attract murder.

Gasp!  Vith as...  a Yellow Dwarf star?1

On 11/17/2024 at 7:39 PM, scott-martin said:

To the extent to which Vith could commit any form of error, it was in capturing the sun in the far east. We can ascribe motivations like greed or prudence to this but to me it simply reflects a lack of confidence in cosmic affluence: there is no point in grabbing anything that is available everywhere at all times for free. This may be part of what old map makers were thinking about when they colored the east gold and called them a "solar" empire. To the extent to which the east is fallen, it is indeed solar and imperial.

And of course the present-day culture that manifests this error most deeply -- or, has proven the error of calling it an error by its skillful means and magnificence -- are the Kralori.  The Isles might done the same thing in the past, in different configurations and to different degrees.

[scott-martin]

10 hours ago, Alex said:

(More, more!!!)

Okay. I love the yellow dwarf theory because the morning sun, while delightful, just doesn't have the kind of searing output that burns plants and other fragile creatures around lunchtime (when the imperial yelm is in his glory) or the long afternoon (when the light is cooling but the air remains hot) . . . and the Gloranthan East never really gets anything but morning sun, which explains the persistent Sea of Fog that never burns off and so forth. It's a bright but not terribly hot corner of the world. We might even say that their sun is always "young" or even the opposite of "hot." 

People who claim to remember say that the temptation in this part of the world was to prevent the morning from ending, keeping the sun from getting big, old and arrogant. Because this also had the effect of leaving everyone else to freeze in the dark it was not good or welcome. In order for the world to be made of everything, we have to share. But the people who run the Gate of Dawn wanted it anyway, so they engineered a way to stop the sun there on the cusp of breaking back up from hell . . . until they were persuaded to let go. The conventional LBQ is silent about this for various reasons but a complete working of that rite would need to incorporate a negotiation with Theya / Thella (welsh or argentine pronunciation, one of those linguistic jokes that is also a key) to let the day begin. This might of course be a horrific prospect for innocent little Dawn but she bites her lip and acknowledges that history needs to happen, we may all turn into monsters before it's over. Anyway, the heortlings as a "theyalan" nation are shy about this. They may not even understand consciously how it happens because they are how it happens.

Then the next time as the sun matures, people who prefer pomp decide to stop the clock at noon over what they consider the center of the universe. We are told this causes consternation elsewhere and ultimately once again the balance of forces drags the yelm screaming and whining back on the doom spiral westward. This is one of the laws of gloranthan mythic physics: every empire that has a beginning (i.e. every non-"mystic" empire) has an end, even the perfected sky. Power corrupts. And so the sun of the center slides toward the Rausa gate, youthful brightness curdling as the world first dims toward the long lower-energy frequencies ("red shift" is more than an Alan Garner novel, revealing at last the mechanic behind why people from the uttermost west have lower SIZ and maybe why Kui Hui and the eastern giants appear so big) and then gets actively colder as the air wastes its radiant heat. The poetic genre changes from idyll to elegy. LBQ knows what to do here because the historical Harmast went to the "west" in search of an answer to the Bright Empire. You interact with the Rausans, get them to let you follow the dead sun down into the night so you can have that initial conversation. 

The sun at noon is interesting because the mathematical zenith is neither (east nor west) nor (north nor south). Dara Happa is too far off the sunpath to really be the center of the tangible universe and all the maps agree. The glowing Pamaltelan veldt has just as much claim and is even more luxuriously hot and verdant as long as you aren't addicted to bread products. Where the sun theoretically stops is the Magasta point that goes straight down to death, no long afternoon decline into night required or negotiations with any jumpers. All you need to do is succeed in falling. This might be how solarcide works but it's pretty esoteric and nobody really enjoys thinking about it except maybe the triolini and very few fans really enjoy talking about them. But maybe this will seed a few thoughts. Either way, for solar imperialists we can imagine this film rolled partially backward and then stopped to erase the "boyhood of yelm" male initiatory cults (redistributed into little suns) to present a figure who magically drops from on high (through the Polaris gate or whoever is the current access point in the precessional framework) without the sentimental embarrassments of the morning: by the time the sun shines over Dara Happa he is already mature and then when the moment passes he goes slow into the afternoon or fast into the pit.

After this cryptic + dense cosmological interlude we will all need a break so I think I will migrate some thoughts on the Wall (versus the Tent) here at some point. This will get into the archaic understanding of "foreign suns" and other droll topics.

Edited November 25 by scott-martin
photographic evidence

[mfbrandi]

7 hours ago, scott-martin said:

The sun at noon is interesting because the mathematical zenith is neither (east nor west) nor (north nor south).

The time into space thing is intriguing … and possibly a bit tricky. Ostensibly, we have extremes South and North and points of balance East and West. It would be possible to get overly wordy here, so maybe a picture will help … maybe! Plan, elevation, and wheel of the seasons:

Ostensibly our cycles are: East/morning -> Zenith/noon -> West/evening -> Nadir/midnight; South/Fire -> zenith -> North/Dark -> nadir. That would seem to make zenith = Earth (Cosmos) and nadir = Sacred Time (Chaos). Storm and Sea would be the subterranean seasons: Sea = birth from Chaos; Storm = disintegration into Chaos.

One could argue that the East–West cycle locates Fire at the zenith, but the South–North cycle locates Earth at the zenith. Maybe it doesn’t need to hang together. Maybe it is “evidence” for Genert = the Sun. (There is never really any evidence for anything.)

We might also try Chaos -> Cosmos goes up around all sides and Cosmos -> Chaos goes straight down through the hole in the middle of the World. Chaos re/entering the world is really Cosmos draining away. (Or not, as ever.)

Edited November 25 by mfbrandi

[scott-martin]

20 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Genert = the Sun

This whole thing is great but I want to start here. IMG we can make a strong case that Genert as erl king or "fourth corner" is one of those transitional figures like Styx marking the boundaries between elemental regimes, in this case the last development of parthenogenetic GA before fire rises to become sky. Call him a lodril or whatever you want but the point is that geographically the surviving sons of the Genert Waste are variously elves, horse nomads, griffons, eagle hsunchen, weird giants and similar solar-tinged figures of earth. Whether Genert was the old sun immediately before Yelm or any old sun at all may never be known. 

And because it only takes three points to describe a horizontal plane or earth dimension, any fourth "corner" that matters to cosmic evolution would manifest outside and perpendicular to that plane: "up" in this case (right hand rule) but also casting a shadow "down" for the first time. This is where a literature grad helpfully notes that the mythic ladies first experience the mysteries of gender as well as death; there is no difference. Genert, like a regional Flamal, is born a dying and resurrecting god. Before the world broke, he was unthinkable. His emergence is another way to think the breaking of the world. The erl king must die. This formula then establishes "north" as the direction of increasing cyclicality (the seasonal wheel) and "south" as its opposite. Pamalt is also an erl king in some phases of doraddism but Pamalt has yet to drift far enough "north" to die.

Those who interpret the sun stop as a sun swap might believe that the new sun (maybe the current yelm or maybe not) dropped in from the zenith, in which case they can debate whether this means this was a pure sky sun ("high" sun) from the gold world above the water cycle or a chaos sun from OUTSIDE. I tend to be more pragmatic and anything from that high up is going to be alien to my interests either way. But in the middle, you also do have the water cycle where inertia perpetually drags depleted cosmos (dead matter, chaos sludge) back down to the bottom of the world where the darkness digests as the watery part rises again around the inside of the sky (the "brisk and leaping god" or what we call evaporation) to make my golden eyes blue and ultimately fall again (skyfall) as rain to once again rinse the world clean on the way back down for another round.

Sun is very interesting because it enters into strong binary conflicts with just about every other element. In the archaic Dangan Rites its primary seasonal rival was the rain that supports another elf orientation. You could even speculate about fire/water being original elf "genders" in that part of the world but this probably oversimplifies their system too much. Then you have day/night when sun people construct a negative to contain everything their god is not, thus to the extent to which people see the primary conflict as light/dark then other material elements will be viewed as bit players in the cosmic drama, occasionally more "light" aligned but usually tainted with "darkness." Sky/earth has chauvinist overtones and while generative ("marriage") the results are imperfect, creating sun/storm as the new seasonal dichotomy when proto Orlanth enters the Mrelar Amali contests where the important things are the observance of Death and the perpetuation of Life.

So I might take the black slice out of your pie and then you have Northop Frye's quadrangle, yet another four-pointed figure that implies a fifth.

 

[mfbrandi]

Edited November 26 by mfbrandi
fixed image background

[mfbrandi]

14 hours ago, scott-martin said:

So I might take the black slice out of your pie and then you have Northop Frye's quadrangle, yet another four-pointed figure that implies a fifth.

Like this (where red = Moon = Chaos = Sacred Time)?

Edited November 26 by mfbrandi
fixed image background

[mfbrandi]

May as well continue the colour-coded representations of Glorantha:

Storm breaks the pattern by being the first creation via sexual reproduction. Viewed seasonally, the first creation without a reservoir of raw Chaos on hand. Whether this makes the world liveable or just breaks it is a matter of taste. The Moon restores balance (compromise) through the reinsertion of Chaos — a gift of Sacred/Time.

I owe you a Twins/Benu cosmogonic diagram — in effect a solar creation myth where the stars don’t come first — but I haven’t drawn it, yet. (I guess we could then imagine a Benu–Moon–SurEnslib alliance. Benu sings the stars into being but also portends the return of Chaos.)

Edited November 26 by mfbrandi
fixed image background

[mfbrandi]

As promised:

• We know She is a water bird, but She might be a wagtail, a heron, a kingfisher, or a goose.
• Creation is in pairs — liquid/solid and light/dark — converting Chaos into a balanced but static Cosmos.
• Air is a singular creation, unbalancing Cosmos.
• Air necessitates the return of a little Chaos to balance it.
• But there is no such thing as a little bit Chaotic. The writing is on the wall. Disintegration loops beckon.
• Of course you have to buy Moon being both celestial and Chaotic, the potential (Chaos) that manifests (Cosmos).
• If Storm had replaced Darkness, we would still have had our “perfect” four (albeit arrived at by dubious means).
• It is an experiment, not a heresy.
• Too many words!

[scott-martin]

5 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Like this (where red = Moon = Chaos = Sacred Time)?

I really like this. Yeah, I forgot Sun/Moon up there as the structural relation that splits experience into "real" and "unreal," true/illusion, the objective singularity of that big light in the sky versus the subjectivity of e pluribus lunae muove, out of many moons i move. So that would look like yours.

Raising the moon here like the girls in Prospero's Books who bring up the full length mirrors so Gielgud can wink at the camera is a trap door back to the old question of how the trace lunar element was structured in various parts of the world before the empire arose to consolidate, or maybe they haven't even heard about the empire yet. In the earliest sources before there was an Orlanth or an empire, people who know (people like the persistent altinelans) sometimes described the theogony as emerging from primordial nothingness like in Hesiod or some taoist text somewhere: before there was anything, there was the tangible absence of anything. It hints that anything is possible. Call it akasha as potential, the negative ground. Sure. We get that. The negative implies the positive and then through recombination the world can derive as many elements as it needs.

In this archaic model "sky" is the positive akasha, the "aether" or heaven if you enjoy the I Ching. Up. High. High plus "low" (earth, the gravity well of malkuth) yields air, all that stuff in the middle, and so it goes. Every new element reveals some unique aspect of its parents. We can think of this as a kind of boolean operation, selecting which unions and intersections and differences to keep or discard. Like the I Ching, it's a kind of computer.

Undifferentiated "sky" differentiates into a shiny side and a night side that oscillate. Entities are observed that have a sympathetic correspondence to one side or the other. People who love the day alienate the night. This insight recasts their experience: before they figured the world out there was a universal absence of day, a great darkness upon the land before the dawn. Various people take credit for the dawn and also distribute blame for the dark. This is the binary logic that drives the Bright Empire and its antithesis. You're either on the day side or you're on the night side, the high side or the low side, the bright side or the dark side. They try to organize everything in these terms. Maybe this is where the "power" oppositions come from but maybe that was a gift from magi making a pilgrimage from the east if you want them to have that instead.

At this time, the sun or consolidated carrier of everything Day was the rival of everything else. Again, there are only two flavors here: the light complex (Sun/Sky/Fire/Light/Center) and the dark complex (Air/Storm/Water/Earth/Dark/Periphery). The yang and the yin. Glorantha being a Greg concoction, yang overreaches and yin resurges to kick its ass. The outlaws pushed to the (water) margin always manage to overthrow the empire, at least so far. Liberated from the universal binary, they start noticing local differences in the light and shadow around where they live, habits and preferences of taste. The dark complex differentiates, but this time not into a strict binary so much as a multiplicity of entities. We discover that some people are "storm" people and do not wear horned helmets, some people are "sea" people and get dragged into what becomes the monotheistic adventure, some people are women (hmmm) and some people are trolls. All that stuff in the middle becomes the color wheel: black (the archaic "orange"), orange (the new "black"), glas (blue eyes, green eyes, gray eyes). 

We represent this temporally with all the seasons the rump light complex can't claim. Depending on where you live, you might need to track 3-5 of these seasons. Whatever summer is to you still belongs to the sun. Whatever belongs to the sun is your summer.

Yeah, but where is the "moon?" The blue moon is well enough documented as elementary Dark + Water, two flavors of yin in this model. Given the absence of "Nakala" as an active character in the archaic texts (the passive principle cannot easily act) it is tempting to consider the blue moon as the surface or mask of the underworld, the skin that forms around the absence. When she's down in the underworld we can't see her but we call her "Nakala." When we feel or see her presence, it is primarily as a fluid force and so we say "Zaramaka" and see "blue" when we see anything at all. (Depends on how many cones and rods you have, they're different on Indigo Mountain.)

She has a brother or husband or son to be her red counterpart. We know him today as Tol or Tolath, who as her binary twin is "male" and some would say he is light plus dark or sky plus underworld. His bright parts have largely been incorporated into the god of Alkoth, hell sky. The pieces that did not make the cut persist in the lonely places of the old west as the archaic red "moon" (planet). In the far north[west] where the sun barely glimmers red in winter, he may have been the rival who fought against night in the sacred earth rite and often lost, which gives the elves up there a different and more coniferous attitude. This gives him aspects we associate with death gods, including that relationship to the underworld. 

And yet he participates in the rite. We might call this doomed arrangement his "hill of gold." We might call him a "cold" sun who suffers. The imperial Alkoth cult does not care about my insights here, they say their god has always been a loyal son of Yelm and will always be. OK. I don't travel too often to Alkoth anyway so let them have their thing. Recordings of that big dance they do are good to put on sometimes though and someone who does all the math might reimagine something similar inside the northern Sun Domes. Something "shargashy." Bells for Tolat. For whom do the bells for Tolat toll? They toll for Tolat.

Then there's an archaic white moon presence in the archaic northwest, the "ava" or "erta." Unequivocably a death goddess, the bride of losers. Let's leave her alone for now. The early empire probably found her both shocking and fascinating as a mirror of their homegrown phenomenon but in their tribulations their version undoubtedly changed and then the ban made it difficult to reconnect with the organic source, the moon fragments left behind. Searching for these missing pieces is possibly the primary objective of imperial strategy IMG, they just wouldn't express it that way.

But moon is not sun. Sun rejects moon like sun rejects all lower elements as varied flavors of dark. At best, sun considers moon a parody of itself, a bizarro flawed duplicate or "fun house mirror," worse in some ways whether the reflection is accurate or not. Silver is not gold. White is not yellow, to once again quote the Moody Blues. Red is not yellow either, divergent in a different direction (i.e. "westerly," toward winter). Copper is not gold. Brass is not gold. Bronze (yellow-red or "orange," the metal of hu as air/death/water) is not gold. Red lo-metal (the metal of tolath and his sons, sky/death/water) is not el-metal. Gold is actually the metal with the narrowest shoulders. Everything else is the gold of "philosophers" if not fools.

Some people say that just as modern storm or "U" is what you get when you combine sky and earth, moon is the once-hypothetical blend of the other two elemental primaries, dark and water. When the line between dark (negative sky) and water blurs, we might say instead that moon's real father is simply sky after dark, positive sky negated, the other "ether." Let her keep the water, water needs more representation. But depending on how you roll the dice this means she might lean more toward the "blue moon" side of the lineage charts or the "red moon" side. We know her color. Note also that she rejects the water parent historically. Either way, she allows for a new direction, one that united negative and positive sky in one entity. 

We might call it "spirit" as opposed to all the other colors in our pie, which become various shades of "matter." Yes, even "light," while the least heavy and most transparent of the elements, is just super-rarefied matter, Einstein proved that. But the spirit that moves across the primal dark and the primal waters, dividing itself for its own delight, is consciousness. This is moon in itself. Whether it is the whiteness of the whale, the tomb or all of these are metaphors remains to the hero war to decide. What does she do? She moves. She is what moves it. The "blueness" in the blackness remains un-consciousness, the sea that churns. And yet she rises as we know, but that's another story.

Edited November 26 by scott-martin
if you're making one coil joke why not two, while we're in there why not smooth?

[scott-martin]

23 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Yeah, this is far more elegant than mine. Same truth, fewer words. Roger Caro's great work in photographs interpreted as taming an ox.

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Entities are observed that have a sympathetic correspondence to one side or the other. People who love the day alienate the night.

And yet the ones who stick in the mind are double:

• Our Lady of the Waiting Mouth: ever travelling but never moving
• Crepuscular Yelmalio: the cold glow when the sun is below the horizon
• Death-dealing Mallia: without her, life is impossible
• Dear old Uncle ZeeZee: the fiery darkness
• Rebellious Sedenya: the mirror and the light

That old ham Yelm should have been able to join the club but turned out to be more of an absence (Patrick Stewart) than a presence (Bill Shatner).

[Joerg]

18 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

May as well continue the colour-coded representations of Glorantha:

Storm breaks the pattern by being the first creation via sexual reproduction. Viewed seasonally, the first creation without a reservoir of raw Chaos on hand. Whether this makes the world liveable or just breaks it is a matter of taste. The Moon restores balance (compromise) through the reinsertion of Chaos — a gift of Sacred/Time.

I owe you a Twins/Benu cosmogonic diagram — in effect a solar creation myth where the stars don’t come first — but I haven’t drawn it, yet. (I guess we could then imagine a Benu–Moon–SurEnslib alliance. Benu sings the stars into being but also portends the return of Chaos.)

There is no cosmos without the Spike, aka Stone, as the Mostali will happily attest. From Stone came Lead, which means they had to produce the scaffold even before the Bowl of Darkness could emerge.

Storm after Darkness following Earth makes no sense in either cosmogony or the course of the Gods War on the Surface World.

[Joerg]

16 hours ago, scott-martin said:

She has a brother or husband or son to be her red counterpart. We know him today as Tol or Tolath, who as her binary twin is "male" and some would say he is light plus dark or sky plus underworld. His bright parts have largely been incorporated into the god of Alkoth, hell sky. The pieces that did not make the cut persist in the lonely places of the old west as the archaic red "moon" (planet). In the far north[west] where the sun barely glimmers red in winter, he may have been the rival who fought against night in the sacred earth rite and often lost, which gives the elves up there a different and more coniferous attitude. This gives him aspects we associate with death gods, including that relationship to the underworld. 

Weirdly enough, Tolat(h) is consistently associated with the South, the North is just his crash site. Thunder Delta is named after both deities breaking into the basement. One re-emerges in tatters, the other infused by the Underworld. The bright parts might have been acquired from Alkoth. The southern planetary sun and the Storm dude crashing was the midwifing for Tolath/Shadzor, a partial caesarian pulling him out before his twin, absorbing the Alkoth god and city.

Aether is Hell Sky when interacting with the Three Curious Spirits. Tolat is a bit the Unseelie taking regular absence from the lowest Hell front against Chaos, where we know dead Fire spirits stand guard aiding Darkness (CoRQ Mythology p.35). Possibly the recruiter for that duty, and quite possibly that's where some of the missing Planetary Suns are now.

17 hours ago, scott-martin said:

But moon is not sun. Sun rejects moon like sun rejects all lower elements as varied flavors of dark.

The Turning Goddess Sun was Day and Night, and her days carried over into the Sunstop irregularity enforced by the Mostali even though the fiery outer top of the Spike would have sufficed. Sure, it got overgrown, but arresting the Day setting of the Machine did not repair that.

The Fire Stick below the Sky turned upright, balance apparently still maintained while the central one - this Sun thing we are talking about - remained at the assigned place in the Middle Sky. But then Enkoshons entered from the South, blending blue and yellow into Alkor green as Oslira was put to a fluid rest, but the Sun thing still rose, without any regard for balance, yielding the Middle Sky to its newborn brother, both together lifting their father off pivot.

When did Water re-enter the surface? Who pushed Earth down first? Wasn't it rather Aether, forcing Lodril into the womb of Gata?

And did Sun not hide Aether from its realm, imposing the Golden Sun Dome in between? Sun was pushing away Aether, who had come from Darkness. But it was empty, and born into this vacuum was Storm, as the valve opened.

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, Joerg said:

And did Sun not hide Aether from its realm, imposing the Golden Sun Dome in between? Sun was pushing away Aether, who had come from Darkness. But it was empty, and born into this vacuum was Storm, as the valve opened.

The valve between this Sun-created vacuum and what? Is Storm the wind from nowhere? I often like to think so, but you may have something else in mind.

Distinguishing Aether from Air might be considered a newfangled innovation° — so Aether-as-bright–Air (born of Night and Darkness) might consider Fire/Sky the usurper, and Umath might be a “latterly darkened” Air getting back in after being robbed and pushed away by Sun. You wanted Storm earlier in the Cosmogony … I think. The coming of Umath is the return of the repressed/excluded.°° As Darkness stole Yelmalio’s Fire (we are told), perhaps Fire stole Storm’s brightness. See also S-M above on too many seasons at the arse end of the year. Hmm … There is intrigue among the souls elements and treachery.

 (IIRC — my mind is faulty and perverse — in the Egyptian sources, Air did everyone a favour in separating Sky and Earth. In its Gloranthan transformation, this had to be a drama and a trauma. Of course it did! 😉)

———————————————————
° No older than Aristotle?

°° Obviously, it goes against the grain for me to give Storm excuses, but one has to let these ideas work themselves out … and into the dustbin.

[Joerg]

Air - even Good Air (Entekos) polluted the Middle Sky, bringing in an Earth component. Whether Dendara or simply dust blown up from sun-parched droughts.

Aether is free-roaming plasma, energetic but even breathable. Sun is repressed plasma, bunched up into a ball or a disk, parasitically inserted between the Source and the world of Life. "Lifegiver" and protector from the Absolute?

The valve basically was what kept Umath in utero. With Earth and possibly even the Spike pushed down in the celestial coupling, the Chaosium seems to have taken up the import of raw Creation once more, releasing into the womb of Broad Earth like Aether had, too.

If you look at the Mostali castes, Aether's Tin is the only elemental metal that spawned three new ones - Celestial silver, Solar gold and Plutonic brass (which was an alloy rather than a metal, something new without introducing a new element). I wonder whether the metals (and mostali castes) corresponding to the Three Brothers were created in parallel by the five previous metals (Rock, Lead, Quicksilver, Copper and Tin).

You keep bringing up the Hill of Gold. When did this ongoing Gods War feature start? Did it have to wait for the Dismemberment of Yelm, or did already Reladivus stray there already shortly after Umath had been knocked out of the sky world?

55 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

You wanted Storm earlier in the Cosmogony … I think.

Not really. I was looking at the sun problem from a Mostali perspective, noticing that the sun left its assigned elevationas Enkoshons entered Dara Happa. Plentonic dating puts this after the birth of Umath, but Umath only really enters the Plentonic sphere of experience when he emerges from Stormgate, initiating a process which brings the stars to the sky dome, establishing the celestial city and the celestial river.

I wonder - when did Lorion start to rise, and was this rise accompanied by Veldara from the beginning? Is the Selenic blue glow just the return of Aether's tinny plasma?

[scott-martin]

9 hours ago, Joerg said:

Tolat(h) is consistently associated with the South, the North is just his crash site

Great to see you! I am trying to be better.

Once I would have thought the red planet was only worshipped closer to the southpath but was reminded recently that the people of the northwest (keeping in mind that all directionality may have shifted 45 degrees in the Ice Age Drift Hypothesis) acknowledged him too as lord of the underworld and as a "red moon" war god called at the time "Tol" but it's probably more authentic now to say "Vorthan." 

To the extent to which the blue moon does not appear in the archaic northwest but Naka(la) does, Tol/Vorthan is her husband. To the extent to which Naka(la) does not appear but the blue moon does, Tol/Vorthan is her twin brother. He is consistent. She is not. We know that the blue moon an sich is not a central figure in the Mrelar Amali rites or in the archaic texts before WBRM introduces the Duchy. She feels exotic, an imperfectly digested import.

So let her stay that way and reaffirm Naka(la) as the foundational western cult of the original dark from which all things emerge, the negative aether or black egg tattva in the Vedas. Zero. When most people in the archaic west interact with her it is as "the cloud of ignorance" or as the queen of the dead. This does not seem to be a cult the original Seshneg colonists carry with them. She seems native to the mainland, someone they encounter here on these shores around the time Hrestol gets a mother. Possibly this dynastic legacy is why a Nakala shrine gets built at Mrelar Amali if it wasn't already there in the first place: dead mother. (TKT est "nigra" sed formosa.) On the other hand, someone else could have brought her into the pantheon, maybe proto-"trolls" from the Dangim zone (now firmly "Halikiv"). This is veering dangerously off track as we do.

But early on Nakala always has a male counterpart to rule beside her. This is arguably her most important trait. Usually this male figure is Tol or Tolat. He disappears from the publishing for a little while, only reemerging when the Trowjang story gets picked up as a kind of geographical curiosity, an adventure seed. By this point he's lost his sister or wife. I suspect that this "detachability" of the two cults suggests that she was the primary focus of worship and as a god of war he evolved as a kind of pendant, a placeholder consort for the most recent winner or loser (depends on POV) of the earth contest. His identity comes and goes (like a "moon"), she is always herself. 

As the red warrior in the Mrelar Amali earth contest he would have then taken what we call the "fire" or "sun" role. We're told Ehilm was only a "minor part" of religion in the archaic ("dank") northwest so the red moon warrior would be a likely surrogate, feeding into "cold sun" dynamics (born to lose but trying anyway) and maybe we should not be surprised to hear a lot of solemn brass gongs in the fronelan Sun Domes. Anyway in rites like this we practically expect to see a key participant get a new name to reflect a change in mythological status. Maybe early on the living warrior was the varthan and after his sacrificial transfiguration he became the tolath. Either way, this archaic practice evolves since time, leaving a tangled web of barely connected fragments behind like the famous crazy wall made of photos strung together. Or the more famous Gods Wall itself but that's another story.

Anyway, the point is that something like native Tolath is fairly well attested in the archaic northwest. If anything, he's one of a relatively small set of things we DO know about that part of the world before wave after wave of creative myth engineering brought them more in line with one emerging imperial monomyth or another. I think one thing that happened was that the Tolath side of the cult was either suppressed for magico/political reasons (eliminating potential cult allies for marauding "loper people," artmalites or other strategic threats), exported to thrive elsewhere (possibly seeding or consolidating local red planet cults across the greater empire) or both. The Varthan side remains, somewhat truncated but extant.

But let's bring that 45 degree compass rotation back. If we believe that Glorantha was once oriented differently then it should come as no surprise that the archaic Tolath originated in what we would call the far southeast and "crashes" in the north. Maybe his original orbit was from southeast to northwest, which would put the "gate of dawn" roughly where we might find ruins of historical Enjalsu and the normal "gate of dusk" up around the original Vadrus Frozen Land. In this scenario, the archaic sun would have veered apocalyptically toward the relative "north" to crash in Thunder Bay . . . coincidentally leaving the blue moon plateau and maybe the cyclopean jade deposit that becomes Alkoth in its wake as well. For this to work, the hit would have needed to come from relative "south," possibly from some lost storm system east of the ultimate crash site depending on the vectors. If the impact was hard enough, the archaic sun could have been pushed not only toward its relative right but backward by some amount, which is a good way to really screw up the dome.

There are some problems with this model that don't have easy solutions. For one thing, we would expect an impact from the relative south to torque the axis clockwise, so the archaic "southwest" corner becomes the new gate of dawn when we are trying to move the old "northwest" down instead to become the new western corner. It's possible but unlikely that the sunpath was knocked so hard that it reversed direction entirely or spun 315 degrees to its current alignment.

And it's possible that the Artmal story incorporates details from multiple axial eras, in which case a hypothetical sunpath traveling from modern south to north could have once been a celestial reality. This model, while outrageous, would explain a lot of things that the current sunpath struggles with: why the (modern) northern edge is frozen and the (modern) south is literally on fire because this is what an abandoned gate of dawn looks like, why the "Jagekriand Event" left impacts in the (modern) north because all suns disintegrate at the dusk limit and so on.

In this model, there was a time when any moving celestial bodies emerged somewhere in the vicinity of lost Veldarahab and dropped beyond the original Dara Happa, possibly precessing multiple times before reaching their current (modern) east-to-west orbit. (These precessions may survive within GL "ages" of prehistory.) We could even theorize about a former sunpath that started in the modern northeast (Sortum), ended in the southwest (Mostal territory) and only had to rotate 45 degrees clockwise to line back up with modern Time . . . but this feels like an alien and evil world to live in, possibly more like what the archaic sky looked like from a hell perspective.

Maybe that's a key. When there was only one unified world, the center direction was enough and the sun never needed to move at all. But the introduction of sky dome motion initially forced a centrifugal consciousness, the sun moves "out" from the "in." Compass points came later and not everybody can remember with confidence how they really work. The intricacies of modern stellar rotation may tell us more. Or less! We live in a broken world most of the time.

But the notion of the original Tolat as a sun for the south, a southpath sun, has come up before and is still appealing. This would help explain what and why the southpath really is. Maybe it not only rotated but shifted (getting blown away from the Jagekriand impact?) and is now described as "highly erratic." Hell at night is really just the ghost of a prior aeon's sky.

Enough from me! We can observe that the blue moon has dropped out of discussion entirely, possibly by design. And then . . . 
 

4 hours ago, Joerg said:

when did Lorion start to rise

I currently suspect that an archaic Lorion was the "blue" rival to the "red" Tolath in their version of a seasonal cycle. (Who "they" are is another story.) This is why Tolath vanishes from the early published monomyth sources and Lorion emerges: the people funding the research grants wanted to promote "good guys" (cults that tended to be winners in myth and history or served some useful aspirational imperial function) and marginalize "bad guys" (losers, slaves, enemies). The important thing, though, is that this makes Lorion the "rising" or young sky of his age, so he would've started rising whenever this cosmological era begins and he would've risen from whatever compass point held the gate of dawn position in that era (maybe just "the edge" if this reflects a theoretical centrifugal era, in which case the lorionic force is what says all routes from the periphery converge at the zenith or "spike") and then at the crux becomes the "falling" sun we call Tolath, the red sun or afternoon. (Artmal retains this secret knowledge in the form of the spell vesper, which casts a dull evening red light. Perhaps he had other spells as well.) 

The Dangans probably experienced this as a cycle previous to the "current" (pre-monomyth) Hu/Ehilm rivalry and since it's likely that at least the Ehilm side of that dichotomy was not original to the rite, we might imagine a system where two mortal warriors are chosen to fight for the hand of the mother and we refer to them as Hu and Varthan until a winner is determined. A winning Hu is deified as Lorion. A winning Varthan is deified as Tolath. Losers are just losers. As foreign gods enter the mix some of these archaic forms drop out of active use . . . at a certain point, it just gets easier for the fans to talk about Orlanth and Yelm as rival husband protector candidates and that's all there is to say about it.

But we are dreaming a world older and stranger than the monomyth here with truth of its own. Remember, most of the water humans threw all their mythological capital into the MSE adventure and their records only survive now in fragmentary form and triolini archives and occasionally in the roots of very old trees. "Storm" humans have emerged to take their place, picking up aspects of the western Hu/Um(k)t and the western Ern or Eurmal and other pieces here and there. 

I keep using "hill of gold" here as both a Mrelar Amali seasonal fight where the blue god wins and the essential adventure of cold sun dudes who can never get their fire started and so need a story that makes sense of that. This makes the Tolath of the west a kind of cold sun figure to the extent to which he lost, but we need to be careful. First, I think the classical contest was actually rigged in favor of summer and against the winter contestant, to the extent to which it was rigged at all. We hear more about Hu as grim brooding figure in that part of the world (even today he would appreciate this) and almost nothing about the the varthan until much, much later. However, each probably had extended winning and losing streaks during which the year could be said to have a kind of bias. And we could concoct a scenario where all losers (or all winners) are Tolaths whose reward is to preside over the afterlife with the great mother.

Maybe the entire Lorion complex is introduced when the sramakites show up and start winning. Maybe original Hu never won but was the name they called losers who show up and fight with "honor." This would make proto-humakt a kind of "colder storm," which again he would enjoy. Contrast to the eurmal who steals heat. You see the charm of this golden thread behind the monomyth!

But the repetitive nature of standard Hill of Gold tells me that it is a composite myth developed to incorporate specific enemies of once-separate communities. This is just a way myths tend to evolve. Initially you might have one community built around dudes who got the fire beaten out of them by a storm god. Another community gets beat by a cold woman. Another gets beat by a dark god or some kind of proto trolls. (Remember, ZZ fans, Tolath is a red god and the master of Alkoth may or may not be friendly to your people.) They each tell that story. When they bring their gods together, the stories are combined and we tell them all as three separate incidents in the adventure of our shared god. They're repetitive. They add little fresh emotive content or insight. But all of us, no matter where we come from, can read our own mythic past in one of the verses. Since the physical pilgrimage site is in Saird, I would expect the three rivals we know about to be the important strands in the modern cult . . . but hints of others may persist, especially in the northwest or maybe around Teshnos.

Either way, the important thing about a conventional marriage contest ("earth rite" or Mrelar Amali seasonal fight) is that you want to win. Hill of Gold is one way to go on living after you don't win. I think it emerges after the inauguration of the original marriage contest (maybe a long, long time after) as a way to conserve spare dudes who otherwise feel they have nothing to live for. This incidentally explains why Yelmalio's wife is identified with Aldrya: his mythic function is to feed the tree, so to speak. As long is someone loses and becomes available for sacrifice, Falamal is served either way. The rite is always rigged in Falamal's favor until something goes very, very wrong. The institution of Hill of Gold may perversely be part of that wrong move (the records were lost in the devastation of Rist, you bastards) but we seem to have recovered.

Edited November 27 by scott-martin
bits strewn like alkoth here and there; the shadzorings ultimately align with dara happa and you know the rest

[scott-martin]

APPENDIX THREE (GNOSIS)

The "field of forbidden sport" is the old sky and especially the original southpath (which might also be the original sunpath), too confusing to talk about now and it will get you in trouble. But inscribing a map of this sky into your internal sky can be very useful as leverage. Blue Moon, who was not necessarily cultivated by MSE as an ally but demonstrably came out against EWF when it mattered, knows how to do this. On the other hand so do loper people and Sendereven navigators and maybe all "boat tribes" to one degree or another. What is the "boat planet?" How, where, when and why does it rise?

Or does it?

APPENDIX THREE A

The rausas revolve.

Edited November 27 by scott-martin
self evident

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, Joerg said:

You keep bringing up the Hill of Gold. When did this ongoing Gods War feature start?

I don’t think of light-without-heat (Cold without Darkness) and heat-without-light (Darkness without Cold) as a Gods War thing — not even as a pre-war mugging. I think of them as there from the beginning of the Sky-Underworld “opposition”: interpenetrating and “impure” from the get-go. 😉

[scott-martin]

10 hours ago, Joerg said:

Turning Goddess

Now we all know that after a mystic ordeal Elmal was revealed to us as the original sun god of the theyalans. And we know the mischief this created. Let's lean into it.

One of the next steps here is to duplicate this insight across the various ancestral pantheons. Surely that merman treading water on the edge of the whirlpool at midsummer noon with his head facing north has a sense of what that big light up there is, even if the leviathans down in the deep only rely on rumor and other hearsay. Who is the original sun god of the triolini? When they talk about Magasta as one of the tutors of Lorion ("gave him sky secrets taken from [a] dead [sun]") what exactly do they mean? While we're at it, who is Lorion's real mother? And what is the relationship between the zenith, the whirlpool, the spike and the streak that links them all together, the yarn on this crazy wall?

Likewise while we know something about the Pelandan lodril complex, they're awfully urbane in modern Nochet so the monomyth and its practical application the MOLAD have scraped the mythic landscape clean. No surprises and no way now to run the MOLAD on your own. But leave the city and head to the wildest podunk settlements, not even worth calling towns. Maybe you go up the volcano slope a ways. Collect the stories from the oldest women there. Who is the original sun god of the Esrolians? Was she a man or a woman? Where do yelornas come from? Why, once again, is it forbidden for a yelmalio to wear a dress?

Who else is missing? Who is the original sun god of the Praxians? The Pentites? (Maybe that's actually "Yelm.") The Kra Lor tribes? Even the trolls.

Edited November 27 by scott-martin
molad / mother

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

Either way, the important thing about a conventional marriage contest (“earth rite” or Mrelar Amali seasonal fight) is that you want to win.

“Cold [sun|son]” may be Theyalan argot for omi-palone. These sons of the sun are cold in the sense that earth mothers don’t get them hot. Their interests are elsewhere. If they lose the contest to jump the bones of the Earth, their hearts were never in it. You can imagine the snide uses of “lost his fire powers” by straighter-than-straight Lodrilite farmers. Aldrya appreciates an absence of Fire.

We can frame the Hill of Gold as a series of losses (and perhaps sometimes we should) but also — I have just now decided — as a series of refusals. “He has lost his weapons to Orlanth” is another way of saying that he refuses to do his duty as a warrior. Yelmalio is unmanly but not unmanned. Whatever he is supposed to do and to want to do, he would prefer not to. How can we not love him? In contrast, Elmal wants to do what is expected of him — the loyal thane — so how can we not despise him?