Kingdom of War
They refer to themselves simply as War, don't they? 'War Incarnate'
refers needlessly to 'War Discarnate'.
Tarot
The existing Tarot is a description of how humans think. Its images
correspond to processes and entities of the collective unconscious.
(It doesn't matter if you don't believe there is a collective
unconscious, because it functions as if there is.) Different cultural
interpretations of these symbols are required (because you can't
depict reality completely directly), but they are the same symbols.
The monomyth, God Learner construct or not, is true (= we can
understand much better with it than without it). It's also, lest we
forget, what led Greg Stafford to Glorantha in the first place.
So a Gloranthan tarot can't deviate fundamentally from the existing
one. (I'm not saying real world because it's a misleading distinction
here: the RW tarot and the Gloranthan tarot are both about things
that exist in the imagination, i.e. imaginary things.) This is,
assuming Gloranthan humans aren't different in some fundamental way
from Earth humans. I think it's reasonable to assume they're not,
given some of the stated intentions about Gloranthan cultures
exploring aspects of Earth-human culture and development. (If they
are, we would have to invent a tarot which did for Glorantha what has
taken tens of thousands of years to develop on earth.)
...
These are my first suggestions for correpondences between cards and
runes:
0. The Fool luck rune 1. The Magician mastery rune 2. The High Priestess magic rune 3. The Empress fertility rune 4. The Emperor law rune 5. The Hierophant truth tune 6. The Lovers harmony rune 7. The Chariot 8. Strength spirit rune 9. The Hermit 10. The Wheel of Fortune fate rune 11. Justice 12. The Hanged Man man rune 13. Death death rune 14. Temperance stasis rune 15. The Devil illusion rune 16. The Tower 17. The Star infinity rune 18. The Moon moon rune 19. The Sun light rune 20. Judgment 21. The World earth, air, fire, water runes swords/spades air wands/sticks/clubs fire pentacles/coins/diamonds earth cups/hearts water
The correspondence is good but certainly not perfect. Since we know there are lots more runes than have been published, the runeless Major Arcana might need some of them.
The Major Arcana are, amongst other things, a representation of the hero's journey. The best example of the hero's journey in Gloranthan myth is the Lightbringer's Quest, which suggests a few correspondences between cards and gods. We should probably be talking about an Orlanthi tarot or a Yelm tarot rather than a Gloranthan tarot, in any case. And how much do we know about styles of pictorial art in Glorantha?
...
The Trickster archetype, by the way, originated like this: as soon as
proto-hominids evolved language and started to speak, they realised
they could lie. They could make a desciption of reality which did not
correspond to reality at all! By doing this they could influence
people's behaviour, make their own position stronger, start quarrels,
start wars. This power was so huge and new that it seemed partly
outside the liers, and it became myth. The power to lie also more or
less created art. But it remained so destructive, tolerable only in
very restricted ways, that the contrary imperative of Control became
myth too, in forms such as Zeus, Odin and of course the God of the
Hebrews. An extraordinary treatment of Trickster and Control is
Robert Holdstock's novel The Hollowing.
In the hunter-gatherer societies that existed at that point, one
lapse in discipline, or in coordination among the tribe, would result
in death. The world was chaos, subject to man's will in only the
smallest and most temporary ways. The stage at which most people
could conceive of a balance of law and chaos began with widespread
permanent settlement, in which small parts of the world were tamed
and behaviour within them became less life-critical. This is part of
what's interesting about the Lunar Empire: by setting up 'civilised'
infrastructure, widespread individual chaotic behaviour becomes
possible, so the Empire looks from the outside like a thing of chaos.
(Not my summary of the Lunar Empire, just a possible aspect of it.)
M.
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