I tell you that Reality Lies to Us! That is the first of the great truths that I have discovered, and it is the only truth with power. Reality as we know it is an illusion. It is a prison meant to keep humans and the other mortal races from taking their natural place as the rulers of everything.
Reality lies to us. Glorantha and Time and Space and Reality are illusions created by all the gods in order to obscure the true structure of the cosmos, to conceal our true inheritance, to keep us from remembering that the gods have lost us our place as the rightful rulers of the universe.
History and religion are lies meant to distract us from the true reality behind the reality we see. Wars and tribes and hatred are intended to stop us from seeing that we are fighting our own brothers and sisters, who were once as we were, gods over the universe. Religions are lies that tell us that we are slaves of the gods, when in truth the gods were once our slaves.
The Primeval World was a beautiful place on the boundary between the infinite forest and the endless ocean. For those who dwelt on the beach or within the forest the Primeval World must have been a Paradise. On one side the sea offered up its bounty. On the other side the forest was a cornucopia of riches. When monsters came from the sea men could run into the forest. When monsters came from the forest men could run and swim into the sea. The forest gave shelter from rain and storm.
The Primeval World was man's original home. Men grew from animals playing in the surf and hunting in the trees into thinking beings, and man awakened in Primeval and realized its place in the universe, as a creator. Mankind achieved its potential in that place and became like gods, able to create and destroy with a thought, to mold reality to their desires through an instantaneous effort of will. Man wandered the universe, making and unmaking worlds. In that place man created the gods which brought about our downfall. We now know Primeval as the Godworld, for the gods have stolen it for their own. But it is ours by right.
Once upon a time men lived in the true reality and were as gods. They were shape changers. They could become either sex. They were powerful physically and in magic. They had met and mastered dreams and death. Their words could become realities. Their thoughts could create or destroy civilizations. They passed through the universe, creating and destroying infinite numbers of realities. They created slaves that became demons and gods alike. Men created the runes and then broke them. They knew of the raw creative stuff of Chaos, alternately corrosive and renewing, poisonous and healing, and could use its power to extend the frontiers of true reality.
The gods, whom some say were once men themselves, became jealous of man, and conspired to steal our power for theirs, and to become the rulers and inhabitants of the Primeval World which was our home. They beseeched help from all the realities created by man, and found a spider which wove a web of reality that could not be unwoven by gods or by men. They conducted a long ceremony which would cement their power and their superiority over man.
The spider, whom we know as Arachne Solara, imprisoned both gods and man in her web, trapped us all in illusions which we could not escape nor alter. We are caught in our illusory reality of time and place, our world. The gods are caught in their illusory reality of story and meaning, the myth world. Neither men nor gods inhabit the true world now, only the Spider. The Spider was far wilier than the gods had believed.
It was too late for the gods, who were caught in a trap of
their own devising. And it was too late for men, who had been
trapped in the illusion and were altered and lessened, who lost
their ability to change shape and became stuck in their form.
>From men we got trolls and elves and dwarves, and we got the
mermen and humans, and we got the races of angels and devils.
The true world and the other haunts of men were warded by guardians who were ordered to keep men out, and to kill them if they were unable to bar them.
Hells were created to imprison men in their own delusions, even after death made them forget. A Hell is a place of punishment and imprisonment. It is the place where unborn man souls await incarceration in mortal bodies, and where the gods imprison the shades of their mortal followers. There are a vast number of Perditions in Hell, those created by cults, gods, demons, strong-willed shades, and by others. Perditions are enormous, and some lead into others. Most consist of vast numbers of tunnels and caverns coiling endlessly upon themselves, with echoing torture chambers, blood-soaked abattoirs, deadly battlefields, and stinking charnel houses appearing suddenly when the walker goes around a bend in a corner.
The spirit world and the Godworld are not the same thing. The spirit world is a place of half-formed thoughts and dreams, where the castaway powers of humanity wander, those powers that have not been appropriated by the gods and other beings of might. It is a world of ghosts of men, and other strange things, of dreams and desires and hopes and the echoes of things long past.
The gods now inhabit what is left of the Primeval World. They call it the Godworld, and do not remember how it was before we were trapped in the illusion by the Spider. They think it has always been as it is now in their stories. Men may not go into the Godworld without encountering great danger. The gods do not want us to go there. There are guards meant to keep us out. They are angelic servants of the gods and of the Spider.
There are guards in the Illusion meant to keep mortals in. They include animals. Animals hate us in secret, and they conspire to keep us within the Illusion. They spy on man and report free thinkers, those who begin to see the truth behind the Illusion, to their superiors. We are unable to see them as they really are, and see only pale reflections of their real form. We see the most powerful guards as rats and ravens, though their true forms are far more terrible. Of all the animals only dogs truly love man and would release us from the Illusion if it could.
Other guards include the dehori, incubi, spirits of disease, and other spirits which haunt our prison.
The final audacity was that the gods blamed Chaos for everything that had gone wrong. They lied. Chaos is the raw, unbridled stuff of creation, the source of all, man's only hope for freedom from the Spider's net, our only hope for redemption from the illusion.
Powered by hypermail