> Heort's Laws euphemistically call Chaos "the Predark" without in any way being in favour of it.
The Predark is a source of forces of counter-Creation, of undoing, that are present in Orlanthi myths of the Golden Age evolving from the Green Age. It was successfully suppressed and kept out of Creation, until invited back in.
> So if orthodox Orlanth/Ernalda cosmology identifies Darkness is the first element to come into being and Chaos predates Darkness, it is not heretical to describe Chaos as the Source of All Things.
Chaos is not the Source of All Things, it is the annihilation of all things. It is Anti-Creation. Not just Death. And definitely not part of a cycle, but a one-way road to perdition.
> Celebrating Creation is not a surprising thing for an Earth/Life cult to do. If Chaos was essential to this, maybe celebrating Chaos's role in Creation (though not its later role in Destruction) would be okay?
That's the point: "if chaos was essential to Creation" - it wasn't. Chaos is not about Destruction (which is the province of Disorder), it is about Un-Creation.
> I don't have the passage to hand, but I believe there is something (probably in the passage which explains about the dark side of Illumination, and how falling to the dark side is more a matter of personal hubris than alignment with Chaos) in the Nysalor write-up in Cults Compendium (reproduced from Cults of Terror), which explains that the Illuminate should not see Chaos and its opposite (Order? Law? The cosmos itself) as interchangeable because they create in different ways. Not sure whast it means or even if I have remembered it correctly though
Yes, that's the fallacy of Illumination, nowadays called Occlusion by the Lunars.
Even among the Lunars, Chaos is mostly a bad thing inflicted on bad enemies. The Temples of the Reaching Moon started out as such, too.
Eyzaal Alchemy is a twisted attempt to apply Chaos to processes which aren't necessarily concerned with complete annihilation. I tend to regard this as extremely fine-tuned annihilation of unwanted effects, which nonetheless weakens Creation as a whole.
Now, a mystic learns to transcend Creation, and the Lunar trend to take the populace along on this mystical path may make this appear as a minor issue. To those who have experienced what lies beyond Creation. Which is not necessarily Chaos, but rather the unlimited potential of pre-Creation.
Exposing Creation to this unlimited potential will cause Creation to be undone. Chaos is the destruction of Creation in this way.
Leaving Creation behind, a mystic can enter pre-Creation, and shape it. That's what makes mysticism (and especially "failed mystics") so powerful - it is unleashing the primal forces of Creation.
Even before the cataclysm of the Great Darkness, Creation already was overcrowded. Whether this stemmed from the collision of the worlds or simply was more change of reality than reality could manage, I cannot say. WIthin Time, a barely patched reality from isolated shards that somehow escaped complete annihilation during the Great Darkness, a release of primal forces of Creation is bound to weaken the patchwork holding reality together. That's how the lesser cataclysms come about.
> A degree of entropy is necessary for life itself,
Nope. A degree of Death is necessary to balance an overabundance of Life. Life from Death is possible in the cycles of existance. Life from Annihilation is not what fertility cults consider. Unless you consider Vivamort as a fertility cult...
> and Earth cults (which are big on birth, death and rebirth, even if an indivdual cult's role is more specialist) would know this better than anyone.
Death is different from Annihilation. The walking Dead of Esrolia are part of Reality. Things lost to Chaos aren't.
> Kajabor (Entropy personified) had to be contained by the Ritual of the Net (and devouered by Arachne Solara) so it did not devour everything, but the advent of Time meant that entropy was very much written back into Glorantha afterwards, in a more controlled way.
Time is mainly a delayed decay of what could be salvaged. The world of Life still contributes to the Otherworlds, but as Time progresses, the contributions are diminishing. The cataclysmic changes of ages mark significant losses.
> Does the corruption of Chaos date from the Unholy Trio's ritual to create Wakboth, who was a force for Corruption rather than Entropy? Or is there another point at which Chaos went horribly wrong, or was Chaos always wrong but also somehow always necessary?
Chaos is things not meant for Reality. It is taking the unlimited potential of pre-Creation into Creation in an incompatible way that will cause not only destruction but annihilation.
Elimination of bad choices may have been necessary in the earliest stages of Creation. Once Creation was established, it had no place there any more, and the incursions of it were wrong.
> There is also something about the Earth rune which hints at associations with Life and Balance (and in the Third Age Balance is very closely associated with the Red Moon and its inclusive approach to Chaos), just as there is something about Fire (formerly Fire/Sky, and it is more true of the Sky bit than the Fire bit), which echoes Stasis (and maybe Truth), and something about the Air rune which echoes Mobility and maybe even a bit of Disorder. Is it this possibility of Balance which alowsz some Ernaldans ot praise Chaos for its role in Creation, or was this prayer simply the work of an Illuminated Ernaldan writing something subversive?
Chaos played no role in process of Creation. Chaos sprang from what played a role in the process of Creation, but when encountering Creation it is its undoing.
As a mystic progresses, he experiences all manner of Creation (like the three Otherworlds of Theism, Materialism and Animism) and overcomes their limits. This is accompanied with a certain loss of Reality, but the point of the mystic journey is not to lose all of one's self on the way to the Absolute. Simply stepping into a Chaos Void certainly exposes your self to the Absolute, but is pointless because you don't get there. A sufficiently advanced mystic will be able to pass through without being annihilated. Your basic wild illuminate (due to limited understanding of Nysalorean riddles) probably won't.
> Finally is there any objective truth in the 'heresy' from Lunar Tarsh that Ernalda is somehow synonymous with the Seven Mother called She Who Waits (even as she is also the loyal husband of Orlanth), even if it is mostly false but with an element of truth in it somewhere?
She Who Waits, Ginna Jar and Ernalda share some very deep truth, some core being. However, there also are deep truths not shared, making each of these entities different. HonEel's intrusion into the Ernalda myths on Kordros Island probably was along these shared deep truths.
> Obviously the Lunars can convince themselves (and some people in Tarsh), but equally the rebels in Eastern Tarsh, Sartar and most of Esrolia thinks otherwise-- for good reasons of their own. Would it be too simple for the Lunars to be just plain wrong?
The Lunars share deep truths with the Theyalans. The entire bunch of the Seven Mothers is about sharing Deep Truths with the established cults, but arriving somewhere completely different throught the rites they underwent.
There might be some Lunars who are convinced that Danfive Xaron is identical to Orlanth. Personally, I think that Danfive and Orlanth share certain deep truths. However, I doubt that pointing this out to Orlanthi would be a selling point for proselytizers, while pointing out similarities between Humakt and Yanafal Tarnils is very much a selling point.
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