Don't the Buddhists have examples of people who have achieved enlightnment but have chosen to return to help people here? Similarly, Mystics in Glorantha could experience a state of Unconsciousness and then return to share knowledge with others, or even to help others achieve the state.
> Whether this state of Cosmic Unconsciousness can be identified with an
> age, as a GL (or someone else) would conceptualise it is the trickier
> part, though, for me. (I imagine that few cosmogenies out-and-out
> contradict the GL elemental progression, but some seem to pay little
> attention to it, some seem to "skip" elements, as far as any overt
> creation of them is concerned.) Certainly darkness being the "first
> element" doesn't necessarily entail it being the first concept/entity/
> state of being.
But we are not identifying the State of Consciousness with the Age. Merely that during the Age, that State of Consciousness can be achieved. Maybe a particular Age has more than one such State or maybe such a State can be found in more than one Age.
Cosmologies only detail those parts that are of interest. So, troll cosmology could include a "appearing from Chaos" age, a "creation of Wonderhome" age, a "creating gods" age, an "Uz" age, a "Hurtplace" age and a "back to now" age. They would not care that there was a Blue/Green/Golden/Storm Age elsewhere. Parts of their ages would be able to be mapped onto the GL schema, so HurtPlace would clearly be when Yelm entered Hell and defeated the trolls, driving them to the surface, but they would not know or care about how Orlanth killed Yelm. It is outside their cosmology.
As far as I can tell, the GLs took as many cosmologies as they could get their sticky fingers on and combined them into one. Along the way, if there was a conflict between cosmologies, they took the version that was most common or was included in most cosmologies. This does not mean they are wrong or they are right, they are just more complete. Thise areas that the GLs did not reach have their own cosmologies that have some common threads but some new ones.
> I'm not saying the GL conception is necessarily "wrong", certainly.
> But rather, my predisposition would be to believe that the terminology
> used by mystics themselves is the more accurate and useful for describing
> such experiences, rather than external understandings.
Since the GodLearners were not normally mystics, they would describe this as being some formless state where nothing was really defined. Presumably there are ways to identify grades of formlessness, which is what they would want to do - impose form on this Age.
> > Similar meditation and "deep" HeroQuesting
> > practises are a core "mystic" element of many Gloranthan religions :
> > although only those that accepted the GL/Theyalan pre-Ages model
> > could believe that the practises can take you to the pre-Ages.
>
> Or to be more precise, only in such circumstances would they use those
> concepts to describe them. I can certainly imagine a Vithelan ascetic
> performing practices a GList would say must be a such-and-such-Age HQ.
Most, if not all, of the HQs written up are Theistic ones. There would be Mystical HQs but they would be different types of HQ. They are more along the lines of performing certain acts to gain access to certain states and increase enlightenment. Bear in mind also that the people of Glorantha will have different ideas of what is mysticism. Quite often it is achieving the state of bliss that once existed and now is lost. This would be exactly returning to, or visiting, the early Ages.
Troll Mysticism would concern becoming One with the Darkness, Merman Mysticism would involve merging with the Waters. Both of which could have an element of returning to the Black and Blue Ages respectively. Obviously, there would be more to it than this.
Simon
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