Frustrated by Peter, Simon wrote:
>Ok, so we'll never agree on how the gods arose or what they mean.
Gee Simon, if you thought Peter has a culturally subjective mythos, you should game with the Farmer-Quest crowd up in Seattle. Seriously, why should we agree on how the gods arose or what they mean? They don't "mean" anything to us happy post-industrial types - what matters for MGF is what they mean to the residents of our Glorantha.
For my part, I am uninterested in a Glorantha that claims to have an objective (as in extra-Gloranthan) "truth" - too much like those annoying White Wolf games with their underlying uber-conspiracies. For me, Glorantha is represents an opportunity to explore how a member of early iron age agrarian culture(s) understands and interacts with the magicial world around him. That this interaction and interpretation is further interpreted by a cultural panoply of myths and rituals furthers the enjoyment of Glorantha IMO.
>Foolishly, I thought that Glorantha was a magical place where the gods
>existed before Time and did many deeds there, only to be bound into relative
>inactivity by the Compromise. One of the reasons I liked the place was that
>it was different to Earth, that the gods were well-explained and crossed
>cultural divides.
And there are many Gloranthans that would agree with that mythic interpretation of the world. Certainly the Heortling Orlanthi and the Esrolians agree with that. The GodLearners even tried to pull a Joseph Campbell on Glorantha, creating a "universal monomyth" that tried to reconcile all of the Gloranthan myths they encountered. And in a sense, what they did was correct - most earth fertillity goddesses certainly seem to share a lot of common myths, most cultures have a "why we die myth", most cultures seem to have a storm diety, a sun diety, and a trickster-type. On the other hand, this interpretation was ultimately overly-simplistic and didn't work. It is like telling a good Catholic that she worships a modified Dionysius or Taruz - the myths are similar, the common themes are there, but ultimately a Catholic isn't a Hellene. Same thing is true to with Elmal and Yelm, with Orlanth and Shargash, and with a host of other dieties.
>However, it becomes obvious to me that in Glorantha, the gods are nothing
>more than glorified people or extensions of cultural conciousness. Clearly
>the Brithini were right after all and every god is a mad sorcerer who broke
>the rules and did terrible things to other people.
Yes, the Brithini interpretation is correct - given the Brithini's assumptions about the world. Of course, the Heortlings are also correct - given the Heortling's assumptions about the world. As long as a myth-language functions in its task - as a necessary tool for interpreting the world - it is correct to its users.
>Why don't I play AD&D instead where I can play in many worlds without any
>clear mythology, where I can be a cleric of Set and a fighter worshipping
>Odin in the same party with no thought as to why they are there?
Ultimately your last sentance explains the confusion that has set in amongst many Glorantha-philes, in recent years there has been much thought as to what gods are worshipped by people and why. In my opinion, the monomythed culture of Glorantha prevalent in RQ2 had a very artificial structure - why do the Orlanthi (a self-sufficient and rather sophisticated culture) believe that the chief god of a far-away foreign culture is the sun? When Greg Stafford asked "who is the Orlanthi sun god?", Glorantha took a giant leap towards truly achieving its potential as the most sophisticated game-world ever.
>Because Glorantha is not like that! I am sorry, but I can't accept such
>earth-dominated arguments as I have heard here. You can argue that the gods
>are all manifestations of one or two principles until you are blue in the
>face and I can argue otherwise until I collapse and we will never agree.
Yep - but why should you be searching for an extra-Gloranthan truth that no player character, no NPC hero, no mythic figure, that no one in Glorantha will ever be able to find? I think it is much easier, much more useful and a hell of a lot more fun to ask - what does Boltho of the Ogorvaltes think about this? What does the clan godi believe? What does Elmharsnik believe? And of course - what should I tell the players? Maybe I'm just to much of a philosophical pragmatist, but what point is there in trying to determine the ONE GREAT TRUTH of Glorantha, when none of the Gloranthans ever will.
>However, once you begin to argue that the Spike did not appear in Dara Happan
>myths or that the Great Compromise was not known, then things get a little
>silly.
It probably didn't and the compromise of Orlanth certainly isn't known by that name. On the other hand, the Dara Happans do have the Throne and Pillar of Yelm and when Rebellus Terminus begs forgiveness from Yelm and the patron of Raibanth grants it, we certainly have something that a cunning GodLearner might say is the same myth. At some level, that cunning weasel would be right. On another level, most certainly wrong.
>(Throws his hands up in disgust and gives up)
Simon, don't give up on exploring Glorantha - maybe on trying to fit Glorantha into a seemless monomyth. I mean the God Learners had an edge on all of us and look what happened to them.
Yours truly,
Jeff Richard
End of Glorantha Digest V2 #649
WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html
Powered by hypermail