Catching Up I

From: John Hughes <nysalor_at_primus.com.au>
Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2000 14:24:16 -0600


Heys folks,

CONAN Catching up. Whats all this revisionist rubbish about Conan being a great fantasy movie? :)

The greatest fantasy movie of them all is of course Howling III: The Marsupials, and its Glorantha potential should be obvious even to the poetically-challenged positivists and cruel, cultural imperialist anti-wisdomists that populate the list. A timeless story of mans inhumanity to hsunchen. A heart wrenching tragedy of duck-like proportions. See it and weep.

I sure did.

KUDOS DUE Mike Mittmann, thank you for those great Chaos features. They are now firmly stuck to the cover of my GM folder, awaiting the next excursion into the gors. Any gors. I wonder how many Digesters remember the original cccccccherry bomb!

SEVEN MUMS / SEPTA MATRAKA A few weeks ago, the lurker in shadows Jeff Freymueller (too many damned Uz round here for my liking) noted:

>There are even a collection of goddesses called the Seven Mothers in
>ancient India. If you go to the Asian Art Museum at the Smithsonian
>you can see an example of the Sapti Matriki (I may have forgotten the
>spelling).

Matrakas (Mothers), or Septa Matraka (Seven Mothers), or Mahamatrakas (Great Mothers). While drawing parallels between Gregs thinking and real world mythic inspirations is fraught with dangers at the best of times, there are a few structural similarities that made me think it worth a Sunday morning post. So with thanks to my wife Pip...

The earliest *concrete* mention of the Mothers is in the Mahabarata. They're fierce goddesses who prey on children. They're involved with both of the weird birth narratives associated with Karttikeya / Scanda / Murugan (the blonde, YT-ish, homosexual married to the army God of War who seems to reflect at least some of the attributes of Alexander the Great. It his Tamil form of Murugan he is the War Dancer).

The early sources disagree on how many Mothers there were but by early medieval times it had standardised to seven. One list names them as Kali, Halima, Malini, Brhali, Arya, Palala and Vaimitra. Though divided into siva (auspicious, good) and asiva (inauspicious, bad) spirits, they are collectively characterised as stealing children. They all like flesh, drink strong liqueur and hang around birthing chambers. They are dangerous, and consistently violent. One is described as born of anger and carrying a spike in her hand.

There are at least two main stories concerning their origins...

  1. They were believed to be the wives of the seven sages and were each thought to have committed adultery with either Agni or Siva, and so was the actual mother of Scanda. The accusation was unjust and proven to be so, but the sages divorced their wives anyway. Divorced and thus barren they came to hate children out of jealousy and would kill or torment them when they found them. They came upon Scanda when he was washed up on the banks of the Ganges and because of his divinity their nature was reversed (to some extent) and they mothered and raised him. They took him to Siva and Parvati to educate. In this version Scanda is Agni's son. As a reward for raising the god, the Mothers requested that they be worshipped as goddesses forever and that they be allowed to freely torment children.

In a very Hindu twist, Scanda asks them to protect children as well. And an alternative version of the myth tells how the Mothers were originally sent by the barbarian thunder-wielding King of the Gods Indra to kill Scanda, who was prophesied to replace him.

b) The Mothers are fierce aspects of the Goddess Parvati that she sent to raise Scanda when he was washed up on the banks of the Ganges. They were fierce because Parvati was (characteristically) pissed off at the gods for disturbing her century-long sex bout with Siva. She really wanted a kid and she was VERY annoyed at Vishnu for rattling their windows and distracting Siva at the errr, crucial moment. So when Scanda appeared she sent Kali and company to look after him and bring him home so she could raise him. It's kind of appropriate that Scanda, god of war, be nurtured by Kali...

An interesting mix, and as I said, some *suggestive* similarities. Dont get too literal though...

LOZENGE BUILDING Thanks for the encouragement folks, and special thanks to Nick for webbing the essay and Crim Marten for his additional commentary that really opened some of the issues up.

ESCHEWING LINGUISTICS The ever-anonymous Killfeather Deathdrake:

>Didn't a certain Professor ignore the advice to "eschew linguistics"? So
>none of us are professionals in the field, but I've found that actually
>playing with the nuts and bolts of Praxian has helped me design a working
>model of a "Praxian mindset" that helps me run them as NPCs on the fly.

I thought that my closing comments made it pretty clear what I *really* believed about eschewing linguistics. The piece was after all subtitled what the *Arkati Trickster* taught me. Having *zero* linguistic skills myself, have a lot of admiration for folk like Bryan and Loren Miller who can invest the time and effort to make a game language live.

>Do Sartarites speak their own language or merely Old English? I would go
>for the former rather than a simplistic semi-OE. What is Sartarite
>"REALLY" like? For the purposes of most game play, it's IRRELEVANT!
>Mind you, I'm the guy who is designing Praxian as a full-fledged language
>cluster, not only with a phonology and some names derived therefrom, but
>also with syntax, idiom, etc.

I dont believe the Sartarites speak OE, but I do believe that the various Sartarite dialects are close enough to OE or Old Norse to make the use of a few more root nouns profitable. My reasons?

http://www.spiritone.com/~mcrobins/mark/oldenglish/wendere.htm

has a 12,000 word OE-English dictionary downloadable as a spreadsheet, allowing you to do sorts, searches etc. Its a wonderful resource!

>Of course, the first thing I decided was to NOT willy-nilly adopt any
>real-world set of roots for the language, since that would just cheapen
>Praxian.

I dont see how real-world roots cheapen anything, any more than cultural or religious analogues cheapen Glorantha. If anything, it makes the learning curve much more attainable. Given that the joy and the bane of Glorantha is that we are all expected to be in some degree historians, economists, comparative-religionists, anthropologists, biologists, zoologists, ecologists, game designers, dramatists and (non-positivist) poets, I for one dont mind some aspects of the load being lightened.

Just my three clacks worth...

Nuff for now. Still ways behind though.... Darvalls hunters. Far Point Yelmalio. Other stuff... all (hopefully) to come.

Cheers

John 

nysalor_at_primus.com.au                           John Hughes
nysalor_at_yahoo.com
johnp.hughes_at_dva.gov.au 
                                           Havamal 86.

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End of The Glorantha Digest V7 #357

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