> Myths by their very definition are timeless.
> "The study of myth must not and cannot be separated from the study of religion, religious beliefs, or religious rituals. No mythologist has been more eloquent than Marcea Eliade in his appreciation of the sacredness of myth and the holy and timeless world that it embodies."
> Classical Mythology, Seventh Edition OUP.
I'd like to counterpropose that any attempt do define myths does distract from their nature. While I accept the requirement that time and causality in myth as well as in fantastic fiction can be vastly different from our experience in the real world, this does not forbid certain portions of myth to have an experience of time as we know it.
Since myth is malleable, there is nothing wrong with a group of people sharing a set of myths that obey at least some laws of cause and effect, and that have something similar to measurable time as a shared experience.
Starting with the Theist Golden Age or the Malkioni 4th movement, there is an intrusion of mundane world behavior into the myths of Glorantha. The Storm Age still has a lot of instances where ideas trump reality, but the Dark Age continually introduces the failure of such ideas. Things that later (after the timeless experience of the End of All Things, the culmination of the Greater Darkness) get confirmed as reality survive better than many of the wilder ideas, and are more likely to be resurrected or otherwise return from total annihilation. Those are the shards that get collected in the Web of Arachne Solara in Theyalan mythography (I didn't want to use the word myth in this context).
> I suggest reading Campbell's Hero with a 1000 Faces and his Masks of God series. They also look at the timeless world in which myth operates (as do many other books).
I read the Hero with a 1000 Faces. For a while, I tried to use it straight, but I found it too much a of a generalisation, suppressing some of the sense of wonder that I want in my dealings with myth.
I am aware that some of my use of a science-like approach to some facets of story and background may be a distraction to others, but for me some carry-over from science and cause-and-effect helps enhance my experience of the strange and wonderful.
> On 23 Apr 2013, at 08:43, jorganos <joe_at_...> wrote:
>> I think that the very act (or ritual) of measuring time within the mythic eras created a measurable series of events. The meticulous choreography of the Yelmic court created its own rhythm and subcycle that could be counted.
> Although within mythology, these definitions of time become fluid in themselves. A single day can last a 1000 years, or a million years pass in the blink of an eye.
Sure. There is no constant flow of time, it doesn't even resemble a river or sea current with eddies and whirlpools. Time and place provide a topology at best, not a repeatable metric.
For what it's worth, I know of one explicit Elric/Corum/Erekose-like paradoxon in Gloranthan myth, where two meetings of two or more mythical characters occur in different sequence to the participants - Arkat meeting himself as opposition, receiving the unhealable wound, and that's from two or more separate immersions into preexisting myths, not inherent in the myths' structure.
>> Mythical time is also called cyclical time - I read this as you can insert yourself from the realm of linear time (the mundane world) into the chains of mythic events and experience them in a loose sequence, too.
> Some mythologies have cyclic time, but not all -
True. I was referring the old Cults of Prax article on Time, which surely made it into the GtG in some form and which differentiates the linear time of the mundane Glorantha with that of the worlds of myth that can be visited by Gloranthans.
> There's an interesting comparative article here:
> Contrastive Study of "Time" in Iranian-Indian Mythology: http://www.antrocom.net/upload/sub/antrocom/070111/14-Antrocom.pdf
I'll put that on my e-reader.
>> There is some form of cause and effect - meaning that some >> actions are prerequisites of others. You cannot perform the >> Westfaring after Orlanth's atonement without leaving that >> mythical cycle.
> I disagree. The story of the LBQ is rationalised as a story
> for real world telling, it would make for a poor jumbled story
> otherwise.
I wouldn't go that far. The LBQ as we have seen hints of spread over a series of publications on Glorantha is a tangle of story strands, with knots in certain positions forming a topological structure that is used by questers. IMO Harmast and his companions did a similar culling and choosing as did the synode of Nicea when they set about to create a definite story they would follow as truth. Harmast did so in order to finde a manageable path into the magic, in order to take magic out of it.
There are certain nodes that most (though far from all) experiences of the Lightbringers' Quest are going to touch (assuming they make it through the story, and don't just take a short section of it as an imprinting pattern to get a lesser magic, much like e.g. the iron song in Kalevala that is both an integral part to the greater story but also a source for magic to enhance iron or to repair the wounds it created). Passage through the Gates of Dusk and Dawn are fairly universal nodes, as are the stations of capture in Hell, entering the Court of Ashes, the Compromise, and the Ritual of the Net.
A Chalana Arroy resurrection quest will touch as lightly as possible and as deeply as necessary on certain of these nodes.
An experienced quester will follow certain strands of the story that he expects to be workable or survivable. Maneuvering the myth, the tenet "you win some, you lose some" is essential - win all the encounters, and the quest is going seriously wrong. Win all the expected encounters, and there still is something going wrong with the quest.
> Actually being in the LBQ may be very different from the order of the story presented, and rationalised afterwards.
I view the participation in the LBQ as representing one tiny little fibre in the multitude of fibres that form the strands of the myth. This fibre will likely follow some current of story, but may as well leave a current to do something most other participants would regard as completely unrelated, maybe to return to the same strand of the story or to a different strand. If that fibre isn't cut off from the story or thrown out, it _will_ go through certain nodes where almost all strands meet.
There is another form of participation in the LBQ - embodying encounters, opposition, or just narrative background. I think it would be a most interesting experience if a group of rivals went through a LBQ, and the heroes get involved in all kinds of stages of the quest as the quest opposition. Much of the time, the heroes might not be aware that their actions determine the course of their rivals' LBQ because their own interface to the myth may be some totally different mythical tangle they interface.
> This non-linarity of heroquests is covered in Sartar p190: "The Myth and the Heroquest Surprise. The myth is the starting point for the heroquest and is the players' guide to understanding the obstacles that will likely be faced on the quest. However, as stated previously, the myth is not a complete or even necessarily accurate guide for the players. Even if the players slavishly adhere to the stories they have assembled, they will be confronted with an obstacle (and maybe several) the story does not prepare them for. It is perhaps better to think of the stories as providing the clues to solving the heroquest and not the solution itself." and p197: "Heroquesting is not a science, and even the same myth re-enacted by the same hero will be different each time. The nature of heroquesting in the Gods War is that things change."
Neither of these quotes addresses the linearity of the immersion in the myth, which IMO is a given. If you go on an LBQ and the Gates of Dusk transport you directly to the Gates of Dawn, you and your group will emerge comparatively unharmed, but woe to your mundane community for all the things you did not achieve in Hell. If you are lucky, you and yours will experience a pocket existence like Fronela under the Ban.
Should this happen, the responsible quester would take a look at the Gates of Dawn and then stride off into uncharted myth rather than inflict this on his folks, in the hope to become Lost in Hell somehow. If the questers manage to avoid the encounter with the Gates of Dawn as an integral stage of their quest, they might succeed going deeper.
It is an interesting question whether they will be able to get to the Gates of Dawn again even if they manage to make it through the Ritual of the Net. I suppose that the famous Argrath Quest did not touch that stage of the LBQ. Argrath's very diminished party emerged from a different, even darker myth, probably treading into Dragon and Lunar territory.
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