Eliade and the GodTime from Jeff Richard on 1997-04-20 (Glorantha Digest Vol 04)

From: Jeff Richard <jrichard_at_cnw.com>
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 10:42:29 -0700

Just a quick bit of approval for Frederic Ferro's comment:
>The Golden Age is the Gloranthan version of the
>"Illo Tempore" in Mircea Eliade's anthropology books about rituals (e.g.
>his Mythe de l'eternel retour) : the Sacred Time must be "reenacted"
>in the mortal (linear, mundane) time. The Godtime can contain in
>its simultaneity all the "seeds" of the Post-Dawn era, which "unfolds"
>the myths in History (even the Red Moon).

Frederic you have hit it on the nail. Although most of Eliade's work suffers from that same curse that afflicts most Continental works - mediocre translations, I can recommend "The Sacred and the Profane", for its lengthy section on the Sacred Time and Myth. Worth reading for anyone who wants to play around with Gloranthan religions.

>The Chronology of Golden Age at the end of the
>(Orlanthi-biased ?) Cults of Prax was only a logical order, not
>a real series of discrete events. In Dave Cake's version, the
>Godtime would be only a kind of archetype of the real Prehistoric
>time, the ghost of the past in the Heroplane.

I agree with Frederic - the Chronologies of the God-Time are a logical ordering of myths, not a secular series of events. There are advantages to logically ordering and categorizing myths (witness the God Learners), but IMO, the Cults of Prax or GoG order is little more than the traditional categorization preserved by the Lhankhor Mhy cult in Nochet. Traditional and useful, but hardly sacred (except to that rare species of surviving GLer).

Jeff