Re: Dara Happans and Time

From: Jeff <richaje_at_...>
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2013 06:23:07 -0000

Seriously, it is pretty easy. The God Time is simultaneous, eternal, and ever-recurring. In ceremonies, heroquests, and mystical exploration we can experience it - we can witness Orlanth forge the Great Compromise with the gods, witness the resulting Dawn, and return to our mundane world with that experience. Later during that same year, we might witness Ernalda display the mysteries of death, rebirth, and bounteous fertility, and return to our mundane world with that experience. And then still later, we might witness the ordering of the directions, the naming of first things, and return to our mundane world with that experience.

What order did these experiences have? Certainly we understand the Dawn to have occurred at the threshold of Time. But we experienced Ernalda's promise of the harvest AFTER experiencing the Dawn. And the Naming of Things surely occurred before anything else - otherwise how would things have names? But we experienced it last.

And that's key to getting the God Time - we can still experience it. We can't experience the First Age. It happened. It is in the past. But the God Time is still there. Endless. Eternal. Always reoccurring. We can witness it, experience it, with powerful magic even interact with it, but as creatures of Time, we are not of it.

Now the God Learners tried to bring order and reason to the God Time, in order to better manipulate the universe. However, as stated in the Guide:

The God Learners were not entirely successful in synthesizing Gloranthan mythology consistently or logically. Some myths have gods traveling from places consistent with a later Age to places appearing in an earlier Age. For example, the Orlanthi Middle Storm Age myth of Mastakos' Journey West has the god traveling from Halikiv (which first appears in the Middle Storm Age) to the Black Island (which disappears at the end of the Early Storm Age). Such contradictions infuriated the God Learners, especially the Reconstructionalist Movement, and were the impetus behind the Zistor Experiment, which sought to transmute Creation itself and impose logical structure upon the Cosmos. Nonetheless, these efforts all failed and in 1010, the great sorcerer Halwal proclaimed that, "the God Learners were doomed from the start as the Great Mystery cannot be reduced to logical parts. Mystery predates Law and Reason."

Jeff

>
> El Jeffe:
> > As far as canonical Glorantha is concerned,
> > it is pretty straightforward.
>
> What? Are you kidding? Have you been drinking?
>
> > Before the Dawn, Time as we understand it did not exist.
>
> Right, but we humans have no experience of what that would mean. So, what would you subtract from your daily life if you were to describe that? Would you subtract causality, such that events would appear to occur without having a cause at all? I would not, because I can't tell a story that way. instead, I would disassociate them from irrelevant context, because that is the way we seem to encounter them in the hero plane. And that, to me, means eliminating any commonality to unrelated events.
>
> > Not linear time, not cyclical time, not causal time.
>
> I don't think causation and time are the same thing. Time is a way of arranging events that are otherwise unrelated.
>
> You could also say that the arrow of time points in the direction from cause to effect, but I don't find that interesting in the game.
>
> > It was the logic of poetry and the rationale of myth, not science.
>
> Dirty limericks?
> There once was a Storm God from the Spike ...
>
> If not, then it's pretty much over my head. This is why I'll stick with my non-canon version. It makes sense for me and adds to MGF -- which are my only criteria for Gloranthan Truth.
>
> Chris
>