Glorantha and Paradise Lost

From: ANDOVER_at_delphi.com
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 1996 19:04:09 -0500 (EST)

In Book II of Paradise Lost, Satan meets Sin and Death. Sin says:
"my womb Pregnant by thee, and now excessive grown
Prodigious motion felt and rueful throes. At last this odious offspring whom thou seest Thine own begotten, breaking violent way Tore through my entrails, that with fear and pain Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew Transform'd; but he my inbred enemie
Forth issu'd . . .
I fled, but he pursu'd . . .
Me overtook, his mother all dismaid,
and in embraces forcible and foule
Ingendring with me, of that rape begot
These yelling monsters that with ceasless cry Surround me . . .

Satan was more lucky than Ragnaglar, since Sin (Thed) persuades Death (Wakboth) not to kill him!

So they open the gate into . . .

"The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark

Illimitable ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth, and time and place are lost; where eldest Night and Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal anarchie, amidst the noise
Of endless warrs, and by confusion stand. . . . Into this wilde Abyss,
The womb of nature and perhaps her grave, Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire, But all these in this pregnant causes mixt Confus'dly, and which must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds."

And so it goes!
Jim Chapin

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