>they don't
>believe that time had any true meaning and that linear relations such as
>cause/effect don't apply, other cultures have a different view.
IMO Orlanthi certainly do have a strong sense of cause and effect in the God Time. They just don't think much about it before they do something. The Storm Gods act on passion (and whim) - this is their contribution to the world's structure. They only think about the consequences if something bad has happened. But one of Orlanth's main virtues was that he recognised that his own actions caused certain results and he acted to rectify them if they were bad.
For humans and other Elder Race 'mortals' (ie not deities), an alternative idea for thinking about pre-Dawn Time might be to ask how does time manifest? In actual experience, time really seems to be manifest only in the turning of Yelm across the sky and therefore of the day/night cycle. The seasons might also be a result of some ordering of the universe following the Great Compromise/ Submission of the Rebel Storm. Beyond this what do we have? _Measurements_ for the period it takes for certain things to be done, and for people to mature, grow old and die. Why could these not have happened without the rotations of the Sun, or the turning of the Seasons for that matter?
Certainly it seems from TrollPak and from accounts of the Yelmies (and even my impression from snippets of Orlanthi mythology) that there were generations of people before the Dawn. We don't know how 'long' these might have been in putative years, or even really if anyone died of old age. There was learning (and maybe forgetting) and traditions (amongst the 'weaker mortals') suggesting a cause and effect presence. Perhaps the God Time dealing with Elder Races and humans was a series of events involving the steadily increasing population of the world, then trouble caused by conflicting pressures of culture/myth and population resulting in massive wars which certainly did cause death, and the influx of chaos. In many views I would imagine, chaos rather than time, is the cause of everything bad in the world - ranging from old age to disease and bad weather. Time, in effect (in the Orlanthi view), was a means of instituting some order to combat chaos.
To pursue further, maybe in the God Time everyone was long lived, happy and prosperous until the coming of bad things to the world. Gradually people became less heroic as they became alienated from their gods, until that was 'arrested' (or not) at the Dawn. Even then, there seems to have been changes in the relations of people to their gods and mythology. Kind of like Homer's heroic classics where everyone was especially big, wise, strong 'in the old days'.
All this postulates that life after the Dawn was more or less similar to life before the Dawn. We don't know this to be 'true', since all our documents are written by post-Dawn people (I think) and they could have no conception of existence without time or at least cause and effect. Hence the incomprehensible nature of many accounts of God Time. "We don't know why it was that way, but it was". Poor ingnorant people trying to categorise something completely beyond their (and our) experience. Try thinking about a world without any cause and effect: bollocks - it just doesn't make any sense. However, the fabric of the universe (including experience) may be malleable (like Pam's 'plastic time'). Of course third ages people _do_ have access to the God Time - through the Hero Plane... (I'll stop...)
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