Or more to the point, I'd suggest, a greater self-knowledge that negates such an understanding of them.
> Let's see. We have Thed, the goddess of rape; Malia, the goddess of
> disease;
Not a chaos goddess, btw.
> [numerous examples]
The matter is largely one of: do you recognise chaos as a distinct 'class' of Bad Thing (the Dara Happans for example seem at least as bother about Darkness as Chaos; in the east there seems to be little recognition of chaos per se at all); whether you recognise chaos as a creative force (as the Lunars do, and as seems to be implicit in assorted creation myths); whether you recognise any moral ambiguity about the presense of chaos (for example, if you find an apparently normal human child which your Uroxi assures you has a chaos 'taint'). Your examples don't do justice to the subtlety of (for example) the Lunar position on chaos, which is not at all simply a question of asserting what a great guy Thanatar is.
> If there are myths in which chaos is positive, I'd like to hear about
> them.
Nysalor; Red Goddess; and at least by Orlanthi standards, anything delving too deeply into mysticism. (That is, it'd be chaotic by Orlanthi definition, but positive according to its adherents.)
The problem with this discussion is that it persistently confuses Glorantha POVs, with POVs about Glorantha. It's not necessary to tie oneself in knots to understand the Orlanthi, say, or the Doraddi POV, or the Kralori POV. It only happens when one attempts to rationalise the whole kit and kaboodle in one fell swoop from an external POV (or a GLish one) that one ends up having to adopt an anachronistic or inappropriate seeming view, so criticising such rationales on those sort of grounds seems to me to be off the mark.
End of The Glorantha Digest V8 #32
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