Are Lunars God Learners?

[Joerg]

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

If you have a Guided teleport that takes you across the ocean, it is easy. 

As proven by the mass migration of Jrusteli God Learners from Umathela and Jrustela to Seshnela, when not even communication worked any more?

Or is this idea just your dead horse that cannot get enough flogging?

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

On the other hand, the chariot of Mastakos is perfectly able to take people across oceans on Lightbringer Hero Quests, so why not just go south instead of west?

If I recall correctly, the chariot of Mastakos gets wracked on the first interesting step of the LBQ. Jagrekriand (aka Shargash) doesn't seem to want the Emperor back.

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

The Jrusteli routinely hired people from outside their culture and trained them.  All you need is a non-Jrusteli who decided to learn the secrets and use them against the Jrusteli like Herman did against the Romans at Teutorburg Forest.  It is far from unthinkable.

Actually a fairly good example, as there was a total news blackout after some point of Varus's return voyage orchestrated by Arminius. (Herman? A character from the Munsters, but not a Cheruskan name...)

But, as I said, they would have had these powers for themselves, too, and would have been able to communicate across the Closing. But that secret was lost... Lost to the Gift Carriers?

 

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

There are actually plenty of humans who worship Magasta too, and temples on many coastlines of the world. 

True. In Jrusteli times, they had even heard about one another, though few had ever met someone from across the sea. Dormal's Opening did more for Pamaltelan presence on the Genertelan shores than the Jrusteli empire ever allowed. (Or the Waertagi before them.) Free Men of the Seas? Only if you belonged to the Middle Sea Empire, otherwise it's at best galley slave of the seas

 

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

Each of those temples has a shrine to Mastakos that allows the use of those crucial teleport spells. 

Now what is your source for this? We know that Mastakos is already picky in giving out his teleport spells to his chief Orlanth - Guided for Thunderous, unguided for Adventurous.

Each of the Magasta temples has a shrine to Mastakos which grants Guided Teleport to whom? Under which version of the rules? (Which rules?) RQ, or HQ, or 13G?) From which write-up?

 

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

I can't see why Magasta or the Mer-folk would be anything other than pleased to have the Gift Bringers chase those with the Rune Quest Sight across the oceans wherever they needed to go so they never had to put up with God Learners again.  It just makes sense.

Sounds a lot like "this is how my Glorantha works, so make sure yours works like that too."

The God Learners worshipped Magasta, too, and his son Wachaza. Other than Tanian's Victory, the Middle Sea Empire cooperated with the seas rather than working against them.

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

But it doesn't affect the oceans that provide the continuum between the landmasses.  That is a landlubber's mindset.  All seagoing folk know that the ocean is a highway to the whole world.

All seagoing folk were wiped off the seas, and the highway had become an impenetrable wall, sweeping all sea-goers off the coast, into huge piles of wreckage or worse. Very few very heroic exceptions existed, and are named in the history of the Middle Sea Empire.

After the Closing had struck, there were no long range teleportation routes (and there is zilch evidence for such before). There were no re-usable heroquest roads to connect Pamaltela or Jrustela with one another or with Genertela. Three one-use Elder Race routes started the re-colonization of the remnants of Jrustela. It isn't clear how aware these Elder Races were of the whereabouts of their new homes.

The most potent magicians and heroquesters Glorantha had seen were cut off from one another. Yet some obscure avenger sect happily bypassed all of this. Explain.

 

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

There are HQ roads going almost everywhere, as the gods have been pretty much everywhere. 

Not true. There are HQ paths going almost everywhere, and back home again. There are very few "enter here and leave into the mundane world there" routes known - best known are the dragonewt roads, the Stormwalk path, Belintar's Bridges and his Fish Roads.

 

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

Just steal the info from the Jrusteli, or buy it through a third party prior to the commencement of the operation.  We know for example that the Agimori of Prax have a path, so why wouldn't their relatives in Pamaltela?

So the Agimori of Prax regularly visit Jolar or the Nargan Desert? That's news to me.

The Men-and-a-Half can go on a Heroquest Path connecting them to the Godtime places of their origin, but they have no way to leave Godtime for the Pamaltela of now.

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

Say, wasn't the Sunstop during the Battle of Day and Night? 

Nope.

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

 

But Ethilrist didn't use a homing point at all, and came back centuries later. 

Indeed. Which shows how reliable these routes aren't.

 

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

This doesn't really matter, as who knows what sort of exploits of the system that the Jrusteli developed,

The God Learner Emperors and their greatest sorcerers knew that they had no exploits (left) to keep in contact with their empire.

 

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

Or better yet, before the ocean gets closed the mer-men simply get an approrpiate number of Gift Bringers where they need to go using the Jrusteli's own transport network through the novel process of "buying a ticket", thus totally avoiding the closing. 

This postulated Jrusteli stargate (or however you want to call it) network never left any traces in the history of Glorantha. Unless it was the unspeakable secret destroyed by the Gift Carriers, this strongly points to the conclusion that there never was any such thing. But proving a negative is impossible. Pointing out the utter lack of canonical proof nonewithstanding.

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

Then there is the straight up option of divine intervention, after all the Gift Bringers were a total Deus Ex Machina, so why wouldn't the gods be directly involved, given that Zistor broke the Compromise and the gloves come off about then.

The name "Gift Carriers of the Sending Gods" does imply that the gods sending the carriers refrained from interacting directly.

 

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

What is it about Dara Happans that repeatedly makes them degenerate into chaos worship? 

As opposed to the Orlanthi who annually offer worship to Chaos in the Sacred Time?

There is no place or culture in Glorantha that doesn't stress the Compromise (or whichever convention they have for keeping their fragile quilt of a world patched together). There are many paths to self-annihilation, and few remain untested.

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

There is something very toxic at work in their culture.  Illumination sure as hell isn't wisdom (or compassion). In fact illumination's really just a license to riot, until the party's over and it all ends in tears... again...and again...

So Illumination is what makes Dara Happans act like Orlanthi?

 

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

Buffoonly?  That isn't a word. 

Possible. This isn't my native language, and mine has such words (and worse) for that minion of Gbaji.

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

 

http://glorantha.tumblr.com/post/96499741818/where-did-the-god-learners-come-from-when-and

Check paragraph 7. 

An anonymous web post is hardly canonical. But hey, I have a website with some weird theories, too. My Glorantha domain was hacked and destroyed, though, which explains its downtime.

 

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

The Forbidden Secret is the RuneQuest Sight Q.E.D.) 

This is the equivalent of a climate change denier's proof.

Name a source in a Chaosium, Moondesign or Issaries Inc. print publication, please.

Or does your Q.E.D. stand for "quod ego dixi"?

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

It is the RuneQuest Sight that defines who is and who is not a God Learner,

And yet Greg produced dozens of pages describing all the different groups and methods of the Second Age Malkioni under the Middle Sea Empire.

Unlike the Dragonspeakers, the God Learners have no such a specific extinction event. Other than parts of their lands drowning and barbarians taking the occasion for a revenge on the weakened remnants of the empire, there is no proof that all God Learners had been hunted down by the time the Red Moon rose. There is Bazkalia Oskor (Guide p.394), this Ralian bounty-hunter shaman whose career consisted of taking jobs on specific God Learners. She's still alive and active.

 

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

it is known to have disappeared with the Jrusteli and their empire. 

That much is factual - the RuneQuest Sight used to give spectacularly useful insights, and then it became all worthless, as if some heroquest (or bunch of heroquests, independent from one another but culminating in that effect) changed that. I have named some suspects - the Luatha, Godunya... and who knows what the dwarves were up to with the remains of Locsil.

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

As to whether it was the Gift Bringers or some other divine agents who ultimately detected and wiped out the God Learners, as far as I am concerned, I don't really care, because whatever you call them, the outcome was the same.

No more state-sponsored heroquesting for trivial or academic purposes. Still sorcerers at large dominating vast areas of Malkioni and mixed populations, but no longer under a single empire.

Loskalm and Tanisor are continuations of the God Learner activities, and to some extent, Ralios is, too. Tanisor follows Yomili's doctrine, refined and perverted by Rokar and his disciples, whereas Loskalm and Ralios build on Halwal's RuneQuested insights and newer influences, or older Arkati stuff not quite realized by Halwal in Ralios.

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

No more people with RuneQuest Sight (except Delecti who was hidden behind the Line of Death and protected by the Dragons for their own perverse reasons). 

Delecti was a sorcerer, or other such strange magician. He may have been Jrusteli-taught, just like Arminius was Roman-taught.

 

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

So maybe the Gift Bringers of Pamaltela weren't the ones responsible for the annihilation of the God Learners, but it is eminently likely that they weren't only found in Pamaltela and may have gone by other names elsewhere, but the motive, methods and outcomes were the same,

They certainly weren't the only ones who made the difference.

Halwal and Yomili obliterated one another, and probably the main portion of their foremost disciples as well, but elsewhere God Learner orders survived, e.g. in Kerantos in Jonatela, rescued from destruction and persecution by Jonat in exchange for aiding him to conquer (aka unify) Syanor.

I object to your "I have a hammer, so the problem must be nails" approach. The RuneQuest Sight was one symptom of several that came up with the God Learners, at least with the Malkioneranists. Whether the Makanists (aka orthodox Malkioni, as in Rokari and pre-Ban Loskalmi non-Irensavalists) relied on it the same way is already dubious. Whether all Malkioneranists did, is debatable, too.

The earliest God Learners who prepared the way for the Abiding Book did not have the RuneQuest Sight, and it isn't clear whether the sorcerers who burnt down much of Vralos about a decade later had it, either, but we call them God Learners.

But then things have been called "EWF" long before dragonspeakers had any power in Orlanthland by "well informed" people of the "quod ego dixi" school of proof. ("What I said")

[scott-martin]

9 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Jagrekriand (aka Shargash) doesn't seem to want the Emperor back.

I wonder what the pre-Sunstop LBQ looked like before being incorporated into the God Project (Erzanelm "knew that the Sacred One could never again rise from among the Many, and he was sad that Yelm was still confined to the underworld") or the Harmast redactions. Presumably the journey to the farthest West brought somebody back, but who? Either way, the Many ("suns") actively oppose at this point.

[soltakss]

1 minute ago, scott-martin said:

I wonder what the pre-Sunstop LBQ looked like before being incorporated into the God Project

There wasn't one.

Harmast bolted the LBQ together from a set of myths that he played around with when HeroQuesting. His was the first LBQ to be performed since the original.

Even the stages had to be put together. For example, there was no complete Journey West, there were just fragmentary Myths.

[scott-martin]

25 minutes ago, soltakss said:

There wasn't one.

 

So what good news did the "lightbringer" missionaries carry? Just IFWW?

[EricW]

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

Delecti was a sorcerer, or other such strange magician. He may have been Jrusteli-taught, just like Arminius was Roman-taught.

In Blood of Orlanth its pretty clear that Delecti the Inquirer was a senior God Learner Sorcerer who defected to EWF. As someone with both God Learner and EWF abilities, who survived the cataclysmic end of EWF, I think it would be difficult to argue that he doesn't or didn't at some time know the secret. 

Ralzakark is also mentioned in various sources as having been raised by God Learners in the second age, and immediately enslaving his rescuers, so its difficult to see how he wouldn't know the secret.

I've lost track of whether all this is still canon or not, but its evidence that a few uniquely powerful beings retained secret knowledge from the second age - though whether they can still use that knowledge is another matter.

[soltakss]

12 hours ago, scott-martin said:

So what good news did the "lightbringer" missionaries carry? Just IFWW?

In my opinion, they did what Harmast continued to do, spread the word about their myths to everyone they met. Sometimes, someone said "Yeah, we know that one, but we also know about this myth" and the myths were built up over the years. They  met Dara Happans and equated Yelm with the Evil Emperor and Rebellious Terminus with Orlanth, for example, by comparing the myths.

[jajagappa]

18 hours ago, scott-martin said:

I wonder what the pre-Sunstop LBQ looked like before being incorporated into the God Project (Erzanelm "knew that the Sacred One could never again rise from among the Many, and he was sad that Yelm was still confined to the underworld") or the Harmast redactions.

Some of the early material I've seen or heard of suggests that it was the LIFEbringers Quest before then.  And that Orlanth returned with Ernalda.

[jajagappa]

18 hours ago, scott-martin said:

So what good news did the "lightbringer" missionaries carry? Just IFWW?

If in fact it was the Lifebringer's Quest, then that Ernalda has returned with the bounties of Life!  And this likely helped knit together (to use the weaving analogy) the diverse Orlanthi communities.

[Joerg]

On 1/20/2019 at 4:06 AM, EricW said:

In Blood of Orlanth its pretty clear that Delecti the Inquirer was a senior God Learner Sorcerer who defected to EWF. As someone with both God Learner and EWF abilities, who survived the cataclysmic end of EWF, I think it would be difficult to argue that he doesn't or didn't at some time know the secret. 

The Mongoose Second Age material may have been a playable variation of Glorantha, but was rarely close enough to canon.

I had my moments of "how did they get this so wrong" over and over again when reading the Glorantha Second Age premise, starting with the book detailing Glorantha in the Second Age. The description of the EWF missed all the named characters prepared by Greg, but had a senile Vistikos Left-eye instead. (Which is about the same as having Friedrich Engels as the man in power in Soviet Russia...)

Much of the material built on these false premises and made the errors worse.

I didn't check out Blood of Orlanth for canonicity. If it was building on the material presented in Glorantha - the Second Age, it is hard to see how it could have anything to do with the Third Age material.

On 1/20/2019 at 4:06 AM, EricW said:

Ralzakark is also mentioned in various sources as having been raised by God Learners in the second age, and immediately enslaving his rescuers, so its difficult to see how he wouldn't know the secret.

For all his demigod status, there is a difference between enslaving say a nuclear scientist and being able to understand quantum mechanics and constructing a nuclear bomb by yourself. Ralzakark is steeped in chaotic knowledge, but hardly a student of the cosmic laws that enable sorcery.

On 1/20/2019 at 4:06 AM, EricW said:

I've lost track of whether all this is still canon or not, but its evidence that a few uniquely powerful beings retained secret knowledge from the second age - though whether they can still use that knowledge is another matter.

The operating system of Gloranthan magic broke down, and was replaced by something which allowed many a continuation of earlier stuff, but not the special cheats used by the God Learners. Removing the Zistor error from the World Machine may have been part of this, starting in 917 but coming to full effect with the Luatha intervention and subsequent upheavals only.

[Ian Cooper]

On 1/20/2019 at 12:19 AM, scott-martin said:

I wonder what the pre-Sunstop LBQ looked like before being incorporated into the God Project (Erzanelm "knew that the Sacred One could never again rise from among the Many, and he was sad that Yelm was still confined to the underworld") or the Harmast redactions. Presumably the journey to the farthest West brought somebody back, but who? Either way, the Many ("suns") actively oppose at this point.

I believe it was the Lifebringer's Quest and you can find it in the Book of Heortling Mythology (?). Orlanth goes in search of Ernalda, and she takes on a 'Arachne Solara' role, weaving the new shape of post-Compromise reality, resurrecting those that died in the God's War, and creating Time.

The Emperor is mentioned as one of the dead, but he is not who Orlanth sets out to recover.

In Greg's unpublished "Ten Women Well Loved", Harmast participates in the Lifebringer's Rites in the Sacred Time, to remake he world, not the Lightbringer's rites.

[Ian Cooper]

On 1/20/2019 at 12:49 AM, scott-martin said:

So what good news did the "lightbringer" missionaries carry? Just IFWW?

The Compromise in which the world was returned to life in a new spring, marked by the sun-disk which showed the passage of Time, and which was born aloft by Elmal, the torchbearer.

[Ian Cooper]

BTW, IMO the 'RuneQuest Sight' is an in-joke, it refers to the God Learners as being a bit like RuneQuest players, who want to 'measure' the world. After all, RuneQuest didn't have much of an in-game meaning at the time, other than to become a rune level.

I suspect the God Learner's secret is far closer to: "Language is a system of differences without positive terms", that is words are made up of a signifier (a sound or symbol) and a meaning, but that there is no correspondence between the two. There is nothing essentially cat-like about cat. This observation by the linguist Saussure, went on to be used by the structuralist movement who believed that much in the field of human sciences could be analyzed as a 'system of differences without positive terms'.

So the story "Orlanth kills Yelm, the world falls apart, Orlanth seeks out Yelm, Orlanth offers Yelm judgement, the world is reborn" is just "The Rebel defeats the Tyrant, things falls apart, the Rebel seeks out the Tyrant, The Rebel offers the Tyrant judgement, the world is made better" and we can replace the Tyrant with any god who rules without the 'will of the people' etc.

Big exponents of this theory are folks like Claude Levi-Strauss and Joseph Campbell. I think these are the God Learners, folks who explain myth in a structuralist fashion. Greg has often said that Glorantha's ages reflect his. The First Age is his naive youth where he discovered myth, the Second Age when he read a lot of books that purported to explain them, and the third where he realized that it's not that easy.

I would suggest the God Learners were defeated by the equivalent of Derrida and Lacan, the 'jouissance' of myth (in language the tendency of language to have syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations - the fact that we use metaphors such as 'he was a snake' break down the structuralist view). Nowadays, Levi-Strauss and Campbell are pretty much 'dead old white guy" theorists in the study of myth.

To act as a God Learner, to use the RuneQuest sight, is to see myth as a "system of differences without positive terms" . The monomyth derives from 'truths' but it is shorn of local understanding, of those 'pardigmatic and syntagmatic' associations. Elmal and Antirius may fulfill similar structural myths in this story, but all they other associations they have mean that a structuralist interpretation breaks down.

I think, for my part, Glorantha is a story over the ages of how structuralism fails to capture the essence of myth. It's not really an 'in-game' secret, it is an out of game one.

YMMV.

 

(For interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Lévi-Strauss#The_structuralist_approach_to_myth)

Edited January 21, 2019 by Ian Cooper

[Ian Cooper]

BTW, I think he used in-world texts a lot, over giving a God Learner account, in his later writings, precisely because he was rejecting the God Learner view. Yes, the hints of some ur-story are there, but I think he was focused on how the 'jouissance' of the text allowed him to take the same ur-text and create wildly different belief systems, and in that I think there is a lot of joy (and after all that is what jouissance implies).

[Sir_Godspeed]

1 hour ago, Ian Cooper said:

I would suggest the God Learners were defeated by the equivalent of Derrida and Lacan, the 'jouissance' of myth (in language the tendency of language to have syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations - the fact that we use metaphors such as 'he was a snake' break down the structuralist view). Nowadays, Levi-Strauss and Campbell are pretty much 'dead old white guy" theorists in the study of myth

Not to derail the conversation, but I think this is a bit of a misrepresentation of Levi-Strauss. His structuralist analysis of language and myth was not opposed to metaphors or metonymy, but rather was to a large degree dependent on them. LS would probably use "he was a snake" to explain how someone is called a snake because they have a RELATION (this is the key to his analyses, iirc) to something else that is similar to the relation a snake also has to something in ITS habitat. In this case, probably involving venom or ambush or so forth. The snake is venomous to another organism. The person behaves in a way that can be considered to be venomous (a metaphor in itself) to someone they interact with. Similar relation creates an interchangeability of actors.

I'm not a structuralist, by the way - and I agree with your overall synopsis (it's quite an inspired one), bur LS's "fall from  grace", as it were, has more to do with a post-modern realization that any one interpretive perspective becomes too rigid and too self-affirming when applied to real-life cases, and often misses important factors that can be picked up through different analytical lenses/approaches. If all you use is structuralism, all you're going to see is structuralism, as it were. It's the flaw of a lot of schools of thought.

To bring it back to Glorantha, I'm even tempted to say that the Hero Wars are eminently post-modern, in the general sense (as opposed to specific movements often labeled post-modernisms), since every approach, every thesis is essentially mashed together to see if it'll stick.

Edited January 21, 2019 by Sir_Godspeed

[Grievous]

I find it difficult not to see the God-Learners as pretty much post modernists themselves (though ultimately this is a pretty meritless line of consideration as we are talking about Glorantha here, not the real world).

I've linked this before on this forum, but I think this is a great comedic view into the God Learner Secret:

Edited January 21, 2019 by Grievous

[Sir_Godspeed]

14 minutes ago, Grievous said:

I find it difficult not to see the God-Learners as pretty much post modernists themselves (though ultimately this is a pretty meritless line of consideration as we are talking about Glorantha here, not the real world).

Not really. The God-Learners drew on a lot of sources, sure, but their goal was to set up an ultimate, objectively true framework and cosmic narrative, by diving into the essence of existence. Postmodernists actively oppose such notions. Vehemently.

[Ian Cooper]

42 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Not to derail the conversation, but I think this is a bit of a misrepresentation of Levi-Strauss. His structuralist analysis of language and myth was not opposed to metaphors or metonymy, but rather was to a large degree dependent on them.

To bring it back to Glorantha, I'm even tempted to say that the Hero Wars are eminently post-modern, in the general sense (as opposed to specific movements often labeled post-modernisms), since every approach, every thesis is essentially mashed together to see if it'll stick.

On your first point, I suggest you have at the deconsructionists over LS's guilt of innocence on that score, not me 🙂

But I agree that the Hero Wars is essentially a post-modernist conflict.

Though we may be digging a little deep for some tastes on this.

[Grievous]

42 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Not really. The God-Learners drew on a lot of sources, sure, but their goal was to set up an ultimate, objectively true framework and cosmic narrative, by diving into the essence of existence. Postmodernists actively oppose such notions. Vehemently.

That is a fair point. I do think what they did in the process to dissolve the myths as they found them is effectively some post modernist wizardry however, even if they were aiming at something beyond just deconstruction. In fact, I think that's the merit of post modernist thought in general, whereas the weakness is precisely in that it doesn't really seem to easily lead to anything very fruitful by itself. It is very much the "solve" part of the old alchemist's "solve et coagula", which is effective, but only part of the whole toolset... but here we are, veering out of Glorantha again.

[The God Learner]

21 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Not really. The God-Learners drew on a lot of sources, sure, but their goal was to set up an ultimate, objectively true framework and cosmic narrative, by diving into the essence of existence. Postmodernists actively oppose such notions. Vehemently.

I would say some of the God Learners had a world view equivalent to atheism, scientific thinking, industrialism, modernism and positivism. Atheism in the sense that the Gods are just big spirits to be studied and exploited but lacking any broader significance. This outlook also corresponds to a certain form of Enlightenment, and in the end ... the metaphysics reduces to the world being (ahem) a set of rules to be optimised for desired outcomes. Just a bit further on that road and they could have flipped into full-on post-modernism, ironically enough.

[davecake]

On 1/20/2019 at 8:02 AM, Joerg said:

There were no re-usable heroquest roads to connect Pamaltela or Jrustela with one another or with Genertela.

So essentially, Joerg, your thesis is that a magical road that enables travel to Jrustela is possible exactly three times by three different methods, but definitely no more times or by no other methods at all, even by mysterious powers capable of wiping out whole groups of God Learners?

 

[daskindt]

On 1/21/2019 at 5:59 AM, Ian Cooper said:

BTW, IMO the 'RuneQuest Sight' is an in-joke, it refers to the God Learners as being a bit like RuneQuest players, who want to 'measure' the world. After all, RuneQuest didn't have much of an in-game meaning at the time, other than to become a rune level.

I suspect the God Learner's secret is far closer to: "Language is a system of differences without positive terms", that is words are made up of a signifier (a sound or symbol) and a meaning, but that there is no correspondence between the two. There is nothing essentially cat-like about cat. This observation by the linguist Saussure, went on to be used by the structuralist movement who believed that much in the field of human sciences could be analyzed as a 'system of differences without positive terms'.

So the story "Orlanth kills Yelm, the world falls apart, Orlanth seeks out Yelm, Orlanth offers Yelm judgement, the world is reborn" is just "The Rebel defeats the Tyrant, things falls apart, the Rebel seeks out the Tyrant, The Rebel offers the Tyrant judgement, the world is made better" and we can replace the Tyrant with any god who rules without the 'will of the people' etc.

Big exponents of this theory are folks like Claude Levi-Strauss and Joseph Campbell. I think these are the God Learners, folks who explain myth in a structuralist fashion. Greg has often said that Glorantha's ages reflect his. The First Age is his naive youth where he discovered myth, the Second Age when he read a lot of books that purported to explain them, and the third where he realized that it's not that easy.

I would suggest the God Learners were defeated by the equivalent of Derrida and Lacan, the 'jouissance' of myth (in language the tendency of language to have syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations - the fact that we use metaphors such as 'he was a snake' break down the structuralist view). Nowadays, Levi-Strauss and Campbell are pretty much 'dead old white guy" theorists in the study of myth.

To act as a God Learner, to use the RuneQuest sight, is to see myth as a "system of differences without positive terms" . The monomyth derives from 'truths' but it is shorn of local understanding, of those 'pardigmatic and syntagmatic' associations. Elmal and Antirius may fulfill similar structural myths in this story, but all they other associations they have mean that a structuralist interpretation breaks down.

I think, for my part, Glorantha is a story over the ages of how structuralism fails to capture the essence of myth. It's not really an 'in-game' secret, it is an out of game one.

YMMV.

 

(For interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Lévi-Strauss#The_structuralist_approach_to_myth)

I think I love you.

Was not expecting Derrida and Lacan.

[Joerg]

12 hours ago, davecake said:

So essentially, Joerg, your thesis is that a magical road that enables travel to Jrustela is possible exactly three times by three different methods, but definitely no more times or by no other methods at all, even by mysterious powers capable of wiping out whole groups of God Learners?

Not White. These three travel Events we're most likely tied to another cosmic scale event, like the moonrise. We don't have a date for these arrivals in any source AFAIK.

Edited January 23, 2019 by Joerg
Android autofill

[EricW]

Given the magical upheavals at the time of the fall of Jrustela, is it possible that any heroquest roads were temporarily unusable? This would reconcile the existence of such roads with the sorcerers being unable to escape their doom.

[Joerg]

3 minutes ago, EricW said:

Given the magical upheavals at the time of the fall of Jrustela, is it possible that any heroquest roads were temporarily unusable? This would reconcile the existence of such roads with the sorcerers being unable to escape their doom.

The biggest and best known magical upheaval must have been the Closing (and the only one that affects those last attempts at communication between Jrustela and Seshnela). It was an anti-travel and anti-communication magic.

The dwarf mode of journey to Mostal's lost Seventh Workroom was explicitely named One-Time  Tunnel  Collapse. This doesn't sound like a re-usable heroquest road.

[soltakss]

On 1/24/2019 at 9:53 AM, Joerg said:

The dwarf mode of journey to Mostal's lost Seventh Workroom was explicitely named One-Time  Tunnel  Collapse. This doesn't sound like a re-usable heroquest road.

Of course it does. You just don't use the same tunnel twice.