> I realise that those are your tools to working with
> Gloranthan mythology,
That for the framework, and a character-driven story-writing.
> mine stem from another source even though my background was
> originally science. I see two strands when working with the
> mythology of Glorantha. First, our own world:
> I believe that all of the mythology of our world derives at
> some point from the experiences of individuals interacting with
> the other world.
Interesting. I'll grant you that experiencing the other will make people look for ways to communicate the experience. Maybe I'm too Lutheran, but my personal experience with the Other does not come as a story and does not involve myth, rather a direct exposure to the Ultimate.
To me, real world myths and meaningful story are more or less the same. Myth conveys the knowledge about the worlds one interacts with, usually indirectly, and often retelling a leading character's experience and development in a way that the audience can identify with, and place themselves rather than the leading character in the situation. Whether the implied moral lesson is driven home depends strongly on the cultural context. (There is nothing worse you can do to a story than the moralizing bit at the end so many childrens' programs from the USA and Japan add obsessively.)
Myth doesn't require the Unknowable to work, as far as I am concerned - you can experience myth much nearer to the Knowable, and especially much closer to story format. This shadowy realm where impressions of the Real World combine with wild inspirations and unexpected twists is the source for the telling of original stories, or at least original story elements. I regard myth as the almost Knowable - there will always be twists that defy knowledge and (previous) experience, seeming paradoxes that may be solved or remain unsolved or leading on to new paradoxes.
> Ignore the argument as to whether this is just fantasy or not,
> that's not what I'm talking about here. Don't just dismiss that
> these things haven't or don't happen - people write them down and
> we can read them.
I wouldn't dismiss that. Imagination (literally: making pictures out of wild ideas) is the interface to creativity. This may just capture a moment of clarity and/or confusion, or it may evolve as a story.
Humans like to attach stories to facts, it makes them memorable. Just learning facts by rote doesn't create knowledge, connecting these facts through stories makes the stark information useful. Pure metrics or numeric values have no meaning. Myths come into this from the other direction, there are no measurable facts, but there is meaning. That meaning also is threaded into stories.
> Writing them down is an imperfect way of recording something
> that is a personal other worldly experience, truly not of our
> world.
Writing them down, or better keeping them as a live narrative that adapts to the audience, is an attempt to communicate experiences that cannot really be communicated. I find music and smells/tastes a better vehicle for those transcendent experience than words or pictures, but I guess that is due to personal preferences.
> Some have used other media, such as poetry or painting, but
> ultimately these are just as limiting as writing them down.
> The experiences that people have had may make no sense at the
> time, it may take a while to make up a big picture.
Basically, the communicator of the experience tries to re-package it in a structure that wasn't inherent in the experience. The communicator tries to package non-conscious content in a more or less conscious medium, in order to bypass the audience's consciousness.
This is the sense of wonder or awe that deeply mythical stories inspire in their audience, as well as intense forms of art expressions.
But that's only one half of what myth does. Myth also is the packaging for knowledge in a (hopefully awe-inspiring) story thread that the audience can follow. Circumstantial impressions like ritual, stimulation of other senses or consciousness-suppressing techniques or chemicals may be used to instruct an audience with utterly mundane codes of law and socially acceptable behavior. Unusual language ("Though shalt not kill") and miraculous circumstances emphasize the rather mundane and factual payload, and turn it from dull and uninteresting into memorable and possibly exciting (at least within the framework of that culture). If you can create a sense of enthusiasm in the recipients of your message, you are using and creating myth.
> When telling of these experiences, we need to hear things in a
> coherent form - a story. By fitting the words into a story, the
> original experience is further removed from its source.
That's where I disagree. Unless you want to bypass the "almost real" for the deep Unknowable, a lot of myth happens much closer to our mundane home side. Fable or improvisational theatre (Commedia Del Arte, Judy and Punch) use familiar characters faced with a real world issue and make a myth out of it. I'm fairly certain that our northern European pre-christian religious activity wasn't too far from what we experienced as children in the puppet theatre, only with much more meaningful archetypes.
These stories (and more importantly, these stories adapted to the audience) carry several layers of meaning. The nonsensical story in the foreground, which is sufficiently amusing while at the same time disturbing to catch our attention. Then a layer with the moral package delivered. Finally a much deeper unease and uncertainty, possibly resolved during dramatic moments in the story. And a different question than the one you started with at the end of the story, encouraging you to follow a different narrative.
While I am typing this, one of our TV channels broadcasts a repeat of Blade Runner. That story (and the short story by Philip K. Dick the richly embroidered movie stems from) is entirely fictional on the surface, and just an action movie. There are several other layers of message, too, some of which can be analyzed, some that can be hinted at, and some that can described only in the kind of reaction the audience experiences. That's myth.
There are plenty of rather two-dimensional stories that are also told on the screen. Maybe they started out as a meaningful story to their creator, but maybe the creator lacked the narrative toolset to make them memorable, or to convey other layers of meaning. Nowadays, it is just as likely that the creator didn't bother to add meaning to the framework for advertising time sold on the media.
> Time passes, stories get edited...
I hope so. A static story runs the danger of losing implied layers of meaning. In many cases, other layers get defined into these stories by convention, and sometimes a totally different myth comes out of the very same text that gave a totally unrelated message in the original context.
> It is possible to revisit the myth in the otherworld, through
> dreams, visions, numinous moments, mystical experience,
> meditation, trance, etc.
For stories I encounter in the real world, this is somewhere between narrative immersion (which may become the equivalent to a near trance event if I as audience am prepared to go there) and elusive moments "outside of time" (or space, body, whatever). Narrative immersion is much easier to achieve, and is the objective of our hobby of role-playing or myth-making.
It may be my personal quirk of getting into narrative immersion, but creating an "almost real" background with strong semblance to what I experience as reality enables my immersion. Once I reach this immersion, I can deal with paradoxes and I can look past surface inconsistencies. Without that mental preparation, I fall out of the quest.
This is similar to following a series of ritual actions during religious activities. Entering a religious service unprepared, out of the everyday activities won't be a very satisfying experience. By gradually building up the context to access other layers of meaning, the stories may transport the audience (i.e. me) to that otherworldly experience.
Still, just as often a myth will mainly serve as a mnenonic tool to ram down social conventions or a knowledge base. Those require a lot less immersion. Excellent myths will combine these layers with deeper layers, but there is a vast amount of very flat myths that serves as packaging for some dull information, and that's all.
> Secondly, Glorantha: Glorantha is a fictional world with a
> fictional mythology. We build Glorantha by using the real
> world as an example. The geography looks like real geography,
> but we've been told everything comes from mythological time.
It may look like real geography, but there's always something extremely not like real geography in the background - whether the cloudy pillars of Kero Fin, Skyfall and the Eternal Battle, a hazy impression of the Block a vast distance away (once you get higher mountains out of the way), or simply the fact that the sun passes overhead throughout the year, regardless of season.
> The histories mimic the way real world empires and peoples
> have come and gone.
Where there are (human) people involved, human interactions and human requirements for narrative structure have to be met.
> The only difference we are told, is that magic exists - it
> crossed the barrier from mythological times into the now.
The only difference to the real world as example is that magic creates measurable effects (within the context). However, we are talking about a fictional setting which isn't much different from say heroic Ireland or heroic Finnland, or other entirely fictional creations.
> The obvious way to explore these times of myth is to look at
> real world mythological experiences. Just as in our world, those
> in Glorantha can revisit these Gloranthan otherworld experiences,
> using what ever system they prefer - dreams, visions, numinous
> moments, mystical experience, meditation, trance, etc. There will
> be similar issues resolving those experiences into real world
> communications. Fortunate for us, it's easy for others to have
> these experiences and experience them themselves. The shared
> experience of Gloranthan mythology is not as fleshed out as it
> seems. We have the stories, but they are lacking in details - is
> the face of Orlanth the same to all of those who go and see him.
> Is the time experienced in the god time the same for all? Is the
> shared experienced of myth in Glorantha the same for all - just as
> in this world, I don't think it is. I think most of it is "storied"
> to make sense, and when you get there it's your experience.
I guess the problem may arise from the "myth inside a myth" effect.
I still say that myth and story are interchangeable terms, while transcendent experience depends on immersion into the story and its context. Far from every myth reaches all through to the unknowable and unthinkable. This makes these myths no less real in their role as vessels for meaning, only limited. This very limitation may be useful to derive related magic out of these myths, but like the object of the myth this magic will be limited.
Taking frex. wizardry, a spell is the rather shallow (yet potentially very effective) result of an applied story. Mastering a rune goes way beyond that, may be less useful to create a desired effect (or at least reliably create the effect the wizard intended to call forth), but opens many new possibilities. By recording the story of this use of the rune, a new or different spell can be made. Material components, a choreography of gestures etc. may be part of the story-telling context.
Glorantha is a very complex context, explored through stories. Everything about Glorantha is stories. Those which are recognizably meaningful on multiple layers we call myth.
Projecting much of our knowable reality onto the story context of Glorantha (or any other fictional setting) allows us to experience an immersion a story without too much relation to our reality like e.g. the new Tron franchise or the Matrix sequels didn't manage to convey. When the audience drops out of immersion, layers of the story get lost. Describing the world in terms that allow an audience to gain the level of immersion necessary to access other levels of the story is what our efforts discussing and developing this world is about. Maybe there are different paths to achieve this immersion, much like there are different ways to do magic in Glorantha.
For me, the sense of wonder only comes from almost, but not quite breaking my frame of reference. That's where I am often unsatisfied with "fiat" and where I keep creating a frame of reference allowing me the immersion, possibly past the point other Gloranthaphiles go.
Transcendence is something that "works" for me only first hand. Once it is "me" in the story, I can follow that. As long it is not about "me", the attempt to describe transcendence is indeed a weak storytelling that doesn't really matter and can be brushed away.
I can work with second hand immersion of a story character in a story within that story. That's how I handle the heroquesting experiences, except unusually deep ones like I Fought We Won.
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