Of the seven current planets, Lightfore, the Twinstars, and Mastakos/Uleria have a Cycle of 1 year -- on the same day each year, they are in the same place at the same hour.
Shargash/Tolat and Lokarnos/Wagon have Cycles of 2 years.
Entekos/Moskalf has a period of 31 years.
Artia has a period of 8 years. Note that she is invisible during Theyalan Sacred Time, but she is still moving across the sky normally.
When the Boat Planet was in the sky, it also had a Cycle of 2 years.
The lowest common denominator of all these is 8 x 31 = 248.
Now, the Southpath has a complicated pattern which actually increases this, though Greg and I have not worked out the exact pattern. I currently favor some multiple of 3 years, though something weirder, like 17 or 29, is certainly possible. The point is to make the path predictable if you study the stars for long enough. As only thre Buseri of Yuthuppa have (and possible some of the Kralorelans), no one else in Glorantha has figured it out yet.
BTW, I was unclear in my last post -- I propose that Shargash have a High Holy Day only once every two years.
As for Tolat, if a pregnancy lasts a full Gloranthan year it would make sense for the sexual event to take place only once every two years, at least as far as an individual woman is concerned. Since outsiders presumably know of this event, it would make sense for half the women to _not_ participate each year. They would spend that night taking care of children and old people, and guarding the other women involved in The Rapture.
Alternately, is it possible that Tolat is actually recognized by them to be a dual entity, a Man one year and a Woman the next? Tolat's being a woman half the time would give a believable connection for them to associate their menstruation with the planet (though just Tolat alone is association enough, I think), and would give the women a break from being pregnant nearly 100% of the time. Some of them at least.
As for other markers of the Grand Cycle, the Southpath is only one possible source of a variable. A Pole Star wiggle of some kind would be acceptable to me, or something to do with the tilting of the Dome. For example, some people might believe that the tilting of the Dome is slowly changing, and has been for millenia. They might believe the Great Winter was caused simply be the fact that the Winter tilt was greater then (they would then need a myth to explain why the Sun was gone, and why that was unrelated to the Great Winter). Such a people might well believe that a Great Summer would eventually follow, a time when the Summer tilt was greater than the northern tilt is now. They might think that the Golden Age was a time when the northern and southern tilts were exactly equal, and hope for such a time to come again in the future.
Such a people should ideally be Genertelan. In fact, given that I think the Kralorelans recognize the last Emperor before the Dawn as the current Sun God, this seems like a belief some of the Kralorelans might hold. But I could be wrong, as I don't really know a whole lot about them.
Still responding to Alex
>Another possibility is that such cycles _used_ to occur, and are still
>preserved by custom, though no longer Celestially True. For example, if
>the God Time Moon (TM) had a period of which which the (then) length of
>the year wasn't a multiple, a non-trivial "Great Year" would arise which
>might be associated with the length of term of Sacral Kingship, and the
>like.
This is actually an excellent point, and I think it is one which the Lunars claim as fact. They would likely tell that Rufelza's original "period" in the Godtime was in fact seven days, which is why the Red Moon has that period today. However, seven days does thus have a Cycle of 1 year, so that is no help. However, the Lunars might also claim that the 54 year Wane is also a prehistoric time marker.
54 is 2 x 3 x 3 x 3. This would give a Great Cycle of 27 x 248 = 6696 years. I had hoped for something closer to 5000, but I could accept this as the Buseri-accepted length of a Great Year. What we would need would be some belief of the Buseri as to why the number 27 or 54 is part of the pattern, since they would have come up with it in the Darkness.
Hm, given that the Southpath is sometimes called the Red Path, and I also believe that some Gloranthans call it the Moonpath, perhaps the variation of the Southpath should be in a 27 year cycle? This would be a source of power for the Lunars for mastery of those planets. Note that there are links between the Lunars and Artia (it is believed by some to be the place from which the Red Goddess retrieved the Crimson Bat), and between the Lunars and Twin Stars. And there are links between the Lunars and the Shargash/Tolat planet -- see Enclosure and The Book of Drastic Resolutions, volume Prax for details of these links.
Yeah, I am beginning to really like this -- I will have to suggest it to Greg. As the Southpath variations are the only major factor of Celestiology which have not been worked out, this would be a really useful idea.
It would, of course, be a secret known only to the Buseri of Yuthuppa and a few others. And it could explain why the modern day Shargashi claim the Red Goddess as the sister of Shargash -- since Shargash has a period of 2 years, a 27 year Southpath cycle would give him an actual Cycle of 54 years, identical to that of the Goddess.
And, since Artia's cycle is 8 years, this would give a Cycle of the Southpath planets of 8 x 27 = 216 years, certainly long enough for most Gloranthan peoples to not have figured it out.
Cool. Thanks, Alex.
Stephen Martin
ilium_at_juno.com
- -----------------------------------------------The Book of Drastic Resolutions
End of The Glorantha Digest V5 #120
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