Myth ain't Truth

From: Joerg Baumgartner <joe_at_sartar.toppoint.de>
Date: Thu Mar 20 10:05:56 1997


Carl Fink delurked with the
> Subject: Myth and Truth

> Several people posting here are guilty of a great error: the
> assumption that Glorantha is our Earth. It isn't.

True.

> The extrapolation seems to run: since religious beliefs on Earth are
> mutable, and do in fact change dramatically over time, and since the
> associated myths here also change to match the cultures that tell the
> stories, the same must be true in Glorantha.

> Nope.

Well, in Glorantha the cultures change to match the stories told (or rather quested), but there is strong evidence that religious beliefs on Glorantha did in fact change dramatically. I forward the unpopular example of the God Learners, the very ones who found the Monomyth necessary to deal with all the changed myths they found to produce the ur-myth.

> Certainly the stories change on Glorantha -- they're being told by
> human beings (among others) after all. However there are clear
> reasons to think that the God Time and its events "really happened",
> and that there are limits to how far from this pattern the myths are
> permitted to get.

I agree that the Godtime events really happened - over and over again, too. So whenever some dragon/other great monster shows up, some halfwit swordbearing Stormson arms himself with a bag, drinks some intoxicant and eats some sweet bread before having his other arms given to him and going off. The monster does its special trick, halfwit spoils it, and rips the beast asunder.

This myth comes in all local variations and sizes. (Note that the acting god starts with a worship ceremony... whom does he worship? Who they in turn?)

> For one piece of evidence, the God Learners eventually failed. They
> could distort things only so far before being obliterated.

IMO they failed because they acted like grave-robbers rather than decent archaeologists when digging up and interpreting myths. The Raccoon exchange is a clear example for thoughtless and unthorough meddling.

> There
> seems to be a "tension" created when myth is too divergent from "what
> the gods remember", and too much tension causes things to snap.

Nah. IMO they failed to see the consequences of changing one bit. Actio equals Reactio, and God Learner Actio was immense.

However, myths etc did not revert to what was before. The God Learners may have been the only party not to have learned a lesson out of the Sunstop consequences, and they repeated that error. In the Third Age, yet another culture meddles out of sheer goodwill with forces it doesn't understand, even though it seems to control them for the time being.

> For another, perhaps the most famous reality-changing heroquest in
> Gloranthan history, the destruction of troll fertility by Nysalor.
> When he clawed the womb from (forgot her name, Kyger Litor's
> hypostasis of fertility), the trolls didn't *forget* that they had
> ever been able to have normal children. The myth didn't change at
> all.

Actually, a new myth around Korasting (Mother of Many... today that title sounds almost like a taunt, considering the trollkin multiple birth) was made. Not too different from Tanien or Zistor, both of which left their consequences in myth and reality (the Firebergs and the Machine Ruin).

> I hate Berkeleyism or anything that smacks of it.

Well, I'm not from Berkeley, so what exactly is that -ism?

End of Glorantha Digest V2 #96


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