> > Basically it's from our knowledge that the Underworld has a link to
> > Ultimate Reality.
>
> Greg was very vague about that, I thought. I can't remember what he
> said, though I do recall him being asked, and I do recall thinking
> "hrm, that was a not entirely certain-sounding response".
I've similar impressions, but I remember that the vagueness seemed to indicate that he was uncertain about the nature of the link, not that it existed about which fact he seemed quite definite.
> > The Black Age is pure in itself : a remnant of pure pre-Blue Age
> > Glorantha, lnked to Ultimate Being, uncorrupted by subsequent
> > upheavals (but not previous ones) ;
>
> This sounds to me to be _in effect_ an analogue of the Green Age, then.
Well, yes and no. The Black Age and the Blue Age are fundamentally different to the subsequent Ages, although the Green Age togetherness of all things also existed in the previous Ages, but in different ways. Discrete entities exist in the Green Age, which is how and why that togetherness can be destroyed. Blue Age "essences" flow into and out of each other, so that there's no precise boundary or exact difference between them (but there is movement and separation). Black Age creature(s) simply exist as an undistinguishable, yet ordered, mass of protoplasm(s). So, the Green Age upheavals that led to the creation of the Golden Age are impossible in Black Age and Blue Age Glorantha : people simply weren't distinct enough from each other to be so disrupted.
> In any event, it sounds far from "pure", since by your construction,
> it's a Hero Plane ("Mythic Age" type...), and thus mixed; and as (one
> of) the very earliest one(s), it "predates" the 4-fold separation,
> and is thus by that logic also "mixed"...
No, because the Black Age predates the 4-folded brokenness, which from this POV was the event that created the Blue Age, but in its deepest innermost reaches the Black Age was unaffected by the split (from another POV, these reaches remained as a source of Primal Creation, & therefore a direct link to Ultimate Reality. IMO).
(The Darkness Knows. Uz Know. Uz Waits.)
> > in its deepest place, this is Glorantha
> > at the exact moment that it came into existance, and is thus
> > "transcendental" Reality, in all senses of the t-word.
>
> I can see why you'd say this, because there's nothing "before" the Black
> Age (let's dodge the issue of there being things "before" the Green
> Age as such...). But things like the Wonderhome myth are obviously
> very "late" after First Creation,
The Wonderhome myth is set in the Golden Age (Lead Age ?) and early Storm Age.
> by that measure; the actual 'moment'
> of Creation is something only the mystics would dwell on over-much,
> and them not in the least lucidly to any non-mystic.
Yes.
But of course, there are some Uz magicians who do precisely this ...
The important thing is that the Black Age contains a link to the Infinite and Eternal Well of Creation, similarly to many RW mythic cosmologies. As such, it has many of the characteristics of a bona fide Otherworld, but not all of them, because the energies that flow from the Well are "broken" and "mixed" by the Black > Blue > Green > Gold > Storm > Chaos devolution, which is also why the Underworld is a mixed and broken place.
Julian Lord
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