some more timely musings

From: Peter Metcalfe <P.Metcalfe_at_student.canterbury.ac.nz>
Date: Tue, 05 Nov 1996 20:12:35 +1200


Chris Lemens:

> Likewise, in
>pre-Time, one could measure causality (not Time, which did not exist) per
>Peter Metcalfe's examples--turning the Red Sands of Time and the Plentonian
>Year Count (which surely got their names after the fact)....

They didn't. Why should they? The idea of Time being released upon the world at the Dawn is a God Learner idea. Plentonius, Zzabur and and the Kralori all independantly believe that time was measurable before the Dawn.

>...could eac

h lead to
>an estimate of the number of years that had passed during pre-Time. The way
>to think about it would be that the sands running out of an hourglass causes
>its owner to turn it over, which causes the sands to run from top to bottom,
>etc.

And what would they call these periods? Years perhaps? What would they call the passing of the periods? Time perhaps? Why should they call them anything else?

>Similarly, a few people talked about years, days, and seasons in pre-Time.
> E.g. P

eter Metcalfe: "[T]he Malkioni, Dara Happans and Kralori all have
>year counts that go back to before the Great Compromise.") This is clearly
>incorrect. In pre-Time the sun was either stuck in the center of the sky or
>stuck in hell (at least from a non-Malkioni perspective).

It is?

We have the prosopaedia entry for Yelm which states that he 'was not always bound to his path in the sky, but once travelled freely'.

The Entekosiad (which details Pelandan Myth) mentions Night and Day as o
ccuring during the Good Old Days. The God Age Pelandans also believed that the Sun was 'first created by Idovanus as a ersoon, a _temporary_ holy structure or model'. The emphasis is mine and the Sun is being thought of as the glowing tip of the creator's firestick.

The GRAY mentions that the Sky was found to be rotating regularly during the Grey Age (after the Darkness and before the Dawn). It also quotes a poet from that period who states that the Great Darkness (or Dara Happan equivalent) l
asted 1000 years. (The GRAY
does not mention days and nights in the Golden Age, but given that it is a solar culture why should it think otherwise?).

We have the Kralori Calender on page 30 of the Glorantha Book from the Genertela boxed set in which it is said that 'The six moths of the Kralori calender have rather peculiar names. The common Theyalan calender's seasons corrsepond to the seasons of Western Genertela, where that calender originated. Most Philosophers believe that the Kralori cal ender's odd
month-names correspond to those seasons which existed in the Godtime when this calender was first created'.

Yes, you can say all this is wrong in favour of God Learner Fundamentalism (Invoking Power is not a Cause and all that metaphysical gobbledigook) but I prefer to invoke parsimony and stick with the Devil I know.

>After all, much of
>the mystic significance of seasons is related to the death-rebirth cycle
>associated with the Light Bringers Quest and the Dawn.

So? We can
 easily say that the Lightbringers cycle takes its mystic significance from the attempts to recreate the seasons of old (ie those seasons that existed in the Godtime but were destroyed in the Godswar).

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