ENGR As An Entity

[scott-martin]

(with apologies to St Johnny of Lydon . . . or is that Sâr or Sri Johnny since he ain't dead yet?)

Trying to pin down exactly when "Malkion" becomes the name of the Invisible God in various regions of the western diaspora I come up against the mysterious ENGR again as an archaic local cognonym, epithet or failed anagram. Who recognized him as ancestor by that name? What does that tell us about the true + secret history of the west? I have my thoughts but talk too much and they lead to places that get me roasted for blasphemy.

 

[Ian Absentia]

9 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

...I come up against the mysterious ENGR again as an archaic local cognonym, epithet or failed anagram. Who recognized him as ancestor by that name?

My immediate thought was the MGMT.  On a Moore-ian level, is this an expression of the creator of the fiction recognising the role of a co-author?  Or, mystically, the One God recognising the multiple facets of itself and its witnesses/agents, being MGMT and ENGR, or Greg and Sandy.  It's starting to sound awfully Mostali, frankly.

!i!

[albinoboo]

18 minutes ago, Ian Absentia said:

My immediate thought was the MGMT.  On a Moore-ian level, is this an expression of the creator of the fiction recognising the role of a co-author?  Or, mystically, the One God recognising the multiple facets of itself and its witnesses/agents, being MGMT and ENGR, or Greg and Sandy.  It's starting to sound awfully Mostali, frankly.

!i!

You could argue it is a gnostic position with two equals battling for control of Glorantha. 

Edited July 20, 2019 by albinoboo

[scott-martin]

6 minutes ago, Ian Absentia said:

MGMT

Ridgely uses EMI (Orchestral) as the devil card in her sonic tarot for a reason!

2 minutes ago, albinoboo said:

two equals battling for control of Glorantha

This is a great point. Sometimes Charlie was running the west so this may be his fault, the diabolical triton(e).

[Ian Absentia]

2 minutes ago, albinoboo said:

You argue it is a gnostic position with two equals battling for control of Glorantha. 

Nay, Malkion is but the witness to the Invisible God, as was the ENGR to the MGMT.  One being the agent, the other the event.

!i!

[metcalph]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

Trying to pin down exactly when "Malkion" becomes the name of the Invisible God in various regions of the western diaspora I come up against the mysterious ENGR again as an archaic local cognonym, epithet or failed anagram. Who recognized him as ancestor by that name?

He appears in Revealed Mythologies p25 when talking about Brithos.

As for the original question, Malkioni was a God who lived and died in the Gods War.  He is a fond memory among the Malkioni long after his death.  The Invisible God is a God beyond all Gods who always is and will be.  Makan is the Invisible God in Malkion's image, reasoning just like Malkion was in the God Time so the Invisble God must be.  He is a Seshnelan belief, well-understood before the Jrustelan diaspora and promulgated by the Middle Sea Empire with varying degrees of success around the world (ie The Loskalmi love Malkion, hate Makan and worship Irensavel the Hidden Mover, their name for the Invisible God).

So is Engr the name of Malkion among the Brithini?  No.  Brithos is a fairly recent settlement by the Zzaburi and would have been little more than a name picked from by the natives be they Kachasti or Vadeli.  The Brithini IMO have always known the Invisible God as the Invisible God and further elaborations of its properties as witless wafflings.  

 

 

[scott-martin]

17 minutes ago, metcalph said:

The Loskalmi love Malkion, hate Makan and worship Irensavel the Hidden Mover, their name for the Invisible God

Thanks! So as far as the original question goes, Malkion(eran) was loved in Loskalm by that name as of year ____ ST?

Edited July 20, 2019 by scott-martin
"by that name"

[metcalph]

28 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Thanks! So as far as the original question goes, Malkion(eran) was loved in Loskalm by that name as of year ____ ST?

The Kachasti settlers of Fronela in the Storm Age knew Malkion.

The various Dawn Age kingdoms of Nenanduft and Isefwal knew Malkion and worshipped Irensaval as a result of a visit by Hrestol.

The early Kingdom of Loskalm knew Malkion and worshipped Irensavel.

The God Learner Kingdom of Frontem knew Malkion, worshipped Makan and suppressed the worship of Irensaval.

The restored Kingdom of Loskalm knew Malkion, hated Makan and worshipped Irensaval.

[Sir_Godspeed]

Is the emanationist theology (or "Malkionology" in reference to Christology) of Invisible God/The One -> Ferbrith -> Kiona -> Malkion etc. a more recent "invention" than what is being talked about here?

From the Glorantha website, it seems Zzabur acknowledges these, which lead me to assume that this is an idea of very old provenance. Malkion is both the Invisible God and the Prophet, just at different stages and with different roles/names. What's interesting about this view is that different directions of Malkionism then disapproves of different emanational levels. Brithini Zzaburism disapproves of Malkion the Sacrifice (iirc), Irensavalism disapproves of Malkion the Creator/Makan (ie. Ferbrith or Kiona, depending on whether you consider the 2nd or 3rd action "creation", iirc.)

Or should this be seen as a reinterpretation of Malkion the Prophet's God-Time wanderings and teachings put into a larger cosmogenic context?

EDIT: Also, I thought Engr was Malkion (the Prophet)'s mother or wife or something?

Edited July 21, 2019 by Sir_Godspeed

[scott-martin]

35 minutes ago, metcalph said:

The Kachasti settlers of Fronela in the Storm Age knew Malkion.

The various Dawn Age kingdoms of Nenanduft and Isefwal knew Malkion and worshipped Irensaval as a result of a visit by Hrestol.

The early Kingdom of Loskalm knew Malkion and worshipped Irensavel.

The God Learner Kingdom of Frontem knew Malkion, worshipped Makan and suppressed the worship of Irensaval.

The restored Kingdom of Loskalm knew Malkion, hated Makan and worshipped Irensaval.

Thanks. I think the hurdle I had with your initial "The Loskalmi love Malkion" outside a historical perspective is the statement that "To the worshippers of Irensavel, Malkion was the evil and corrupt demiurge whose purpose was to keep people in the gross and bloated clutches of the material world." The cryptic 2007 observation that "Loskalmi are not Malkioni" is also in the background.

We out here would call the NHI a "Malkionist" philosophy because that's what the burden of the publishing tells us. I simply wonder whether the people of modern NHI Loskalm would call themselves "Malkioni" and identify with a name they associate with their particular devil. My suspicion is that the name came with the Return to Rightness, but in that scenario Nenanduft and Isefwal would have known him by another name. Or if they knew him as Malkion, they would have needed to discover his demiurgic identity within a particular historical context. 

Maybe they were the people who knew him as ENGR, although my current thought is that this is a private name used among the Waertagites and only occasionally shared with their land children or cousins. Or maybe they're the ones who use the Kiona / Ordelvis terminology, although I doubt that too. That feels more like an island taxonomy.

Maybe Hrestol brought Irensaval and/or Malkion to the north under those names. That's interesting too. Would love to know more. 

 

[scott-martin]

28 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

From the Glorantha website, it seems Zzabur acknowledges these, which lead me to assume that this is an idea of very old provenance. Malkion is both the Invisible God and the Prophet, just at different stages and with different roles/names. What's interesting about this is that different schism of Malkionism then disapproves of different emanational levels. Brithini Zzaburism disapproves of Malkion the Sacrifice (iirc), Irensavalism disapproves of Malkion the Creator/Makan (ie. Ferbrith or Kiona, depending on whether you consider the 2nd or 3rd action "creation", iirc.)

This is cool. The cryptic line in the Malkioni Glossary is that Hrestol originally worshipped Malkion(2) in the form of Malkion "the Founder." Of course this is also the text that notes that it was Waertag who Aerlit and Warera produced, contradicting other versions in which the Waertagites are either children of Malkion by yet another mother or an entirely separate tribe. So its accuracy is slippery. 

The most extensive list of Wives of Malkion that I have seen has Phlia Tilnta, Elela Triolina and Yena Wambla, mother of Menena. At least one version shows Phila as mother of the Horalites where Elela may be mother of Waertag, the original warrior brother Gwymir and the three other caste fathers we know about. 

So no ENGR there . . . but what had been preying on me is that some people in the genealogies are denoted "Engrion," which is the experimental caste-sharing council an early king of Brithela set up after seeing the derring-do the Seshnelans could get up to. (The next page, tantalizingly labeled "The Rebellion of Kaldes," is blank.)

However, going back a bit reveals that "It happened that in Seshnela after the Dawning, Duke Froalar married the Goddess of that land and became king. Through new laws from Malkion, who they called Engr, they had destroyed the castes and formed a single one called Engroni (knights)." So there we have that. Before Malkion in Seshnela they called him ENGR, which may well be the name they knew in the north. Maybe they were all ENGRovalini in those days, except the ones who weren't.

Edited July 21, 2019 by scott-martin

[Tindalos]

4 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

However, going back a bit reveals that "It happened that in Seshnela after the Dawning, Duke Froalar married the Goddess of that land and became king. Through new laws from Malkion, who they called Engr, they had destroyed the castes and formed a single one called Engroni (knights)." So there we have that. Before Malkion in Seshnela they called him ENGR, which may well be the name they knew in the north.

It may also be that Engr means "Man-of-All," the non-caste bound man. Hence Engroni being named after him.

[Sir_Godspeed]

My bad, I had a piece of misremembered wiki information. I got the impression that Warera was also called Engr, but indeed it's another name for Malkion.

I looked up in Revealed Mythologies, and it has a frankly bizarre version of events where Engr is mentioned. Specifically, it pg. 25. that deals specifically with the history of Brithos. For one, it explicitly states that the Vadeli were the native population of Brithela, descended from a goddess named Vadela (which at that point was a peninsula connected to Seshnela, prior to the Darkness). These Vadeli are then driven away by a group of newcomers:

"The union of Aerlit Kolate and Warera Triolin fructified in the birth of Malkion, also called Engr. Upon a series of wives he begot numerous children, who later fought with the Vadeli for possession of the land before the Great Dawning"
(I hope this does not excede the acceptable amount of text for quotation).

It then goes on to state that these battles sank the southern portions of Brithela, and the Vadeli since then hid away, terrified of the Malkioni magics.

There's a lot of weirdness here, and I would've loved to know from what perspective this text is written, as that might explain some of the weirdness. For one thing, this seems at odds with the idea of the Vadeli being a sub-tribe of the Viymorni through Viymorn's son Vadel (although Vadela might be Vadel's mother or something), but more importantly it seems to crash a lot with the generally presented location of the Vadeli as being in the south-west of Glorantha, in and around the Danmalastan-Pamaltela intersection, and around the Mostali lands in particular. The Republic of Zerendel, formed by Zzabur around the tribal holdings of the Enrovalini does not perhaps outright exclude the above version, but it does complicate things a whole lot. Lastly, it seems to imply that it was the "Malkioni" (not sure what to call them at this point) that "fired the first shot", not the Vadeli, and moreover the language used seems to imply - at least to my mind - that the "Malkioni" and Vadeli do not consider each other related at all. Perhaps implying that the whole shebang about "Six Original Peoples" is more of an after-the-fact classification system rather than "mythically accurate" (if such a thing can be said to be. I'm reminded of some research suggesting that the Twelve Tribes of Israel probably did not descend from a common male ancestor, and that the Abraham/Isaac story might be later historical justification for the Israelite kingdom's tribal confederation).

I know Revealed Mythologies has been superceded by later iterations of the myths, but this seems a bit of a too radical departure for it to simply be outdated. I suspect it's intentionally different, based on different historical/mythical accounts... but whose? Maybe I'm overthinking it.

Also, this leaves us another instance of someone named Malkion mucking about. This is hardly the transcendent intellect presented in the Zzaburi (or Old Hrestoli for that matter) chain of emanation from the One. Nor is it the aloof Malkion the Prophet/Ordelvis who sat in his Citadel of Thought being all-wise and stuff. This is a dude born from sexual union like anyone else, leading a war, it seems, for territory and resources.

EDIT: The closest I get is that Revealed Mythologies on pg.6. talkes about Malkion the Founder during the Fourth Action, as "going out among the six original peoples" and "duplicating runes" in Danmalastan. A very sanitizen version if we are to believe the later section on Brithos. That being said, there's nothing preventing a place-bound Malkion the Prophet (Ordelvis, Malkion of the Third Action) from being "reborn" (or emanating) as a baby born to Air and Sea Erasanchula (Engr, Malkion the Founder, ie. Makion of the Fourth Action). If Yahweh or Vishnu can, why not Malkion.

Perhaps this is the Malkion the Founder of which Hrestol spoke. A les sympathetic, more prosaic retelling of the ordering of Danmalastan, or the Republic of Zerendel (possibly greatly compressed as far as Gods Age narratives go).

Although it does make me think about the oddness surrounding both Malkion and Waertag having so much in common.

Heretical thought: Do the Waertagi hold Waertag and Malkion (the Founder or whoever) to be the same person? Wonder how Zzabur thinks about that, if indeed he does.

EDIT: Did some editing around the "weirdness" paragraph and added an entirely new paragraph about pg.6.

Edited July 21, 2019 by Sir_Godspeed

[metcalph]

38 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Thanks. I think the hurdle I had with your initial "The Loskalmi love Malkion" outside a historical perspective is the statement that "To the worshippers of Irensavel, Malkion was the evil and corrupt demiurge whose purpose was to keep people in the gross and bloated clutches of the material world." The cryptic 2007 observation that "Loskalmi are not Malkioni" is also in the background.

I would just substitute Makan for Malkion in the above sentence and reserve the use of Malkion for the God that lived and died in the Sotmr Age and not as another name for the Invisible God.  Given that Greg wrote about the Carmanian Malakinus at various stages in time (I make no statement about whether Malakinus still exissts), it seems unlikely to me that the Losklami would reject their identity as Malkioni and feel the Guide would have made a stronger statement about it if they did.  

 

38 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

 My suspicion is that the name came with the Return to Rightness, but in that scenario Nenanduft and Isefwal would have known him by another name.

The Brithini would have known the name Malkion.  The Brithini had settlements in Fronela and Seshnela.  Ergo Malkion was known in Fronela and Seshnela at the Dawn.

 

38 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Or if they knew him as Malkion, they would have needed to discover his demiurgic identity within a particular historical context. 

Malkion is not the Demiurge - Makan is.  Malkion is a God who was active inot the Golden and Storm Age s and died during the Great Darkness.  While he lived. he taught of the Invisible God (ie something Greater than Himself) but did not feel the need to describe any linkage between him and the Invisible God (The Seshnegi and God Learners say he was the Invisible God made Flesh, hence their name for the Makan being derived from Malkion, the Loskalmi would deny this I think).

38 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Maybe Hrestol brought Irensaval and/or Malkion to the north under those names. That's interesting too. Would love to know more. 

Irensaval is a descriptive title (like Unmoved Mover or the Logos) rather than an organic name (ie the Invisible God knows itself by this name and has told people to address it as such).  The Loskalmi would not say The Invisible God has sent us Prophets who told us to call him Irensavel".  They would say "In our studies of the workings of the Invisible God throughout time and mythology, the best desription of him is that of a Hidden Mover.  Therfore we shall refer to it by that name).

Hrestol didn't have a clue who or what the Invisible God was best known as.  He really didn't care either way.  What he did teach was a revised version of Henosis (Mental Unity with God) and used that to work wonders.  The philosophical material came much later from his disciples who were using the new spiritual tool to examine the cosmos.

[Sir_Godspeed]

I've edited my comment with a bit more information and thoughts. My apologies if that messed up anyone's initial reading.

[Sir_Godspeed]

10 minutes ago, metcalph said:

Malkion is not the Demiurge - Makan is.  Malkion is a God who was active inot the Golden and Storm Age s and died during the Great Darkness.  While he lived. he taught of the Invisible God (ie something Greater than Himself) but did not feel the need to describe any linkage between him and the Invisible God (The Seshnegi and God Learners say he was the Invisible God made Flesh, hence their name for the Makan being derived from Malkion, the Loskalmi would deny this I think).

This is partly what makes this discussion so difficult. Like real religious beliefs, this isn't something one can discuss "objectively". Everything is written from someone's perspective, often with accompanying terminology. And frankly it is doing my head in. 😅 Ultimately, despite how much I'd like them to, many of these pieces are not going to fit with each other, just like Gnostic and Trinitarian and Twelver Islamic Christology aren't just nicely going to slot together.
 

10 minutes ago, metcalph said:

Hrestol didn't have a clue who or what the Invisible God was best known as.  He really didn't care either way.  What he did teach was a revised version of Henosis (Mental Unity with God) and used that to work wonders.  The philosophical material came much later from his disciples who were using the new spiritual tool to examine the cosmos.

My impression of Hrestol is kind of a King Arthur-Buddha-Jesus character. Adventurist, spiritual, and more of a practice over technicalities kind of guy. That whole baggage came with his disagreeing disciples after he got crucified/swordified by the Brithini.

Edited July 21, 2019 by Sir_Godspeed

[metcalph]

1 hour ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Is the emanationist theology (or "Malkionology" in reference to Christology) of Invisible God/The One -> Ferbrith -> Kiona -> Malkion etc. a more recent "invention" than what is being talked about here?

It's explictly described as being a belief of Zzabur in the Zzabur says (Revealed Mythologies p4.  My problem with that is that it also links the changes in Malkion in the same terms which is something that a Brithini wouldn't acknowledge (Malkion went mad and died.  End of Story).  

 

 

[metcalph]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

However, going back a bit reveals that "It happened that in Seshnela after the Dawning, Duke Froalar married the Goddess of that land and became king. Through new laws from Malkion, who they called Engr, they had destroyed the castes and formed a single one called Engroni (knights)." So there we have that. Before Malkion in Seshnela they called him ENGR, which may well be the name they knew in the north. Maybe they were all ENGRovalini in those days, except the ones who weren't.

However the Seshnegi were a mixture of native Kachasti and the Brithini settlers (Froalar etc) settled during the Great Darkness).  So it seems to me while Froalar and other Brithini knew Malkion as Malkion (they were personally related to him within a few generations) , the others knew him as Engr.   

[metcalph]

33 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

I looked up in Revealed Mythologies, and it has a frankly bizarre version of events where Engr is mentioned. Specifically, it pg. 25. that deals specifically with the history of Brithos. For one, it explicitly states that the Vadeli were the native population of Brithela, descended from a goddess named Vadela (which at that point was a peninsula connected to Seshnela, prior to the Darkness). These Vadeli are then driven away by a group of newcomers:

I think the Vadeli were resettled there from Pamaltela after the Kachasti War (Revealed Mythologies p15).  They then revolted (in an alliance with Nida).  Then settlers from Zerendel came and chased them away.

 

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

There's a lot of weirdness here

Last bit from me tonight because I am literally all out of reacts, but postulations like these are liable to get us both roasted sooner or later. I love it.

Bracketing potential typographical errors in Revealed Mythologies, the Waertagites are perplexing for many reasons, of which their relationships to other triolini nations and the wareran race are not the smallest. "Each of the Major Tribes has their own Origin of Malkion the Founder story, of which the Aerlit/Warera myth is one. This one even sounds like it could be the Waertagi story." 

Page 25 is a swipe from the Book of Foreigners so is very old. 

Edited July 21, 2019 by scott-martin

[Tindalos]

54 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Although it does make me think about the oddness surrounding both Malkion and Waertag having so much in common.

Heretical thought: Do the Waertagi hold Waertag and Malkion (the Founder or whoever) to be the same person? Wonder how Zzabur thinks about that, if indeed he does.

The Waertagi point of view would be an interesting one, as in the Gloranthan Sourcebook (page 85) it's noted that Warera -- the mother of Malkion -- was a descendant of Waertag. And it's also mentioned in the same boxed text that Malkion was the father of Waertag, so there's that fun there.

[Joerg]

When I look at Old Norse, I think that Engr is not an acronym but a perfectly pronouncable name. Eng-ngr, the second syllable without a real vowel but the ersatz vowel written as a rotated e in  phonetic transcription. Yng or Yngr is one of the alternative names of Freyr (another two--syllable name with one consonant-only syllable),

Apart from Norse (which also has the aspirate Hr in names like Hrut or Hroar) and my native German, I have come across a similar accumulation of consonants only in Greek (with chr as in christos or pt as in ptolemaios). Most languages go out of their way to avoid such heaps of consonants, and languages using syllabaries rather than alphabets need to break these down into many small syllable to transcribe them.

(Which makes me wonder how Linear B managed to transcribe the pt in the word for bird... but then the Greek alphabet has consonants which are really combinations of consonant sounds, like xi or psi.)

 

Nearly impossible to pronounce Malkioni terms also includes "Srvuali".

 

Entities with multiple names may be ones with multiple natures - demigods or similar. As the son of Aerlit (a later generation Burta of Storm, and thereby Earth and Sky) and Warera (a Sea Srvuali) Malkion Aerlitsson bears all the elements of the surface world in his ancestry.

 

To address @scott-martin's original question, I wonder when the concept of the Invisible God entered Malkionism. The Brithini appear content to acknowledge a Creator or Prime Mover, but the concept of an Invisible God receiving gifts of surface world magic.

The passage in the Daka Fal cult in Cults of Prax suggests that elevating their ancestor to an aspect of the Creator is something that happened over time, and wasn't part of their original self-understanding. Even Zzabur might have integrated the Erasanchula into his immortal humanity over the experiences of his life. Convergence of the devolution of ideals and the ascension of the human intellect.

[Tindalos]

7 hours ago, Joerg said:

To address @scott-martin's original question, I wonder when the concept of the Invisible God entered Malkionism. The Brithini appear content to acknowledge a Creator or Prime Mover, but the concept of an Invisible God receiving gifts of surface world magic.

The passage in the Daka Fal cult in Cults of Prax suggests that elevating their ancestor to an aspect of the Creator is something that happened over time, and wasn't part of their original self-understanding. Even Zzabur might have integrated the Erasanchula into his immortal humanity over the experiences of his life. Convergence of the devolution of ideals and the ascension of the human intellect.

I've been assuming the mention of the Seshnegi in Daka Fal was a reference to the Ascended Masters, since it mentions it happening in the Dawn Age.

(Although the alternate approach mentioned of reducing gods to ancestors/superhumans does seem in line with the RQ3 depiction of the False Gods as powerful sorcerers)

[Joerg]

2 hours ago, Tindalos said:

I've been assuming the mention of the Seshnegi in Daka Fal was a reference to the Ascended Masters, since it mentions it happening in the Dawn Age.

The Brithini didn't really worship their demised ancestors - after all they knew they were lost and could no longer be contacted. The new practices were established alongside Hrestolism, after the Dawn.

IMO all the information we have in Revealed Mythologies is from sources that deal with an altered Other Side. The early God Learners tinkered with Malkionism, and so did the anti-paganism Hrestoli movement after the Serpent King dynasty had died out in the late second century. It was Hrestol who had established tinkering with the Other Side for mundane world rewards among the Seshnegi (and again among the Malkioni of Fronela), after all.

The Zzaburite teachings and records may be presented as the objective truth in the memory of the Great Sorcerer, but IMO a good deal of memory editing went into those insights, and possibly a mystical union between the human immortal leader of the Zzabur caste and the Erasanchula, until the human forgot his origins as the son of Malkion and a Tilnta. Since new developments in Seshnela usually were actively imposed on Arolanit and then counteracted by the Sorcerer Supreme, I have come to think of Zzabur's tales as an avatar's memories of his divinity's past, and not the personal memories of the human avatar.

 

2 hours ago, Tindalos said:

(Although the alternate approach mentioned of reducing gods to ancestors/superhumans does seem in line with the RQ3 depiction of the False Gods as powerful sorcerers)

Depends on whether you give precedence to the Danmalastan story (which is fresher and longer than the Brithela story) where the human Sorcerer Supreme forgets his divine ancestry and claims the divinity of the runic entity he was born into as an avatar over the Brithela story which has the advantage of conforming to numerous established connections with Seshnegi deities, elves in Brithos, and those unpublished older stories which may be heavily edited memories rather than objective truths, too.

[scott-martin]

7 minutes ago, Joerg said:

those unpublished older stories which may be heavily edited memories rather than objective truths, too.

even the blue man has something like nightmares