Re: Help. Don't get it. Never really got it...

From: simon_hibbs2 <simon.hibbs_at_marconi.com>
Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2003 12:21:19 -0000


Michi Kossowsky :

>So. now for my question - the religions of Glorantha,
>the interaction between men and gods, HeroQuesting,
>God Learners, etc. I don't get it, someone please help.
>
>Ok, that isn't so much a question as a statement. The
>question is "How = does it all work?". If that has been
>written up sometime in the last 20 = years, just tell me
>where to go look.

Since you're here and we can have a dialogue about this, I don't think refering you to an essay somewhere will realy substitute for direct discussion. After all, it's what the Digest is for.

Before addressing your points though, missunderstandings about the nature of myth and therefore of heroquesting are (in my experience) usualy a result of starting from the wrong assumptions. If we start with inapropriate assumptions about what gods are, for example, there's no way we can understand myth and heroquesting.

One complicating factor is that different people in Glorantha make different assumptions about what gods are, and therefore they too view myth in different ways. Monotheists such as the Malkioni have very different ideas about the nature of theist gods from theists such as the Orlanthi, for example.

It seems to me you are asking about theist myth and heroquesting, which most of us are familiar with from Orlanthi and Lunar myth. Therefore I will discuss it from the point of view of theism in Glorantha, discussing theism assuming that it is basicaly true.

>Problem 1:
>Let's start off with the oft repeated comment in many
>Glorantha articles that the various myths we have don't
>necessarily fall into a = chronological order, nor do
>they describe what actually happened, and that they are
>= all subjective to the worshipper/cult/culture/whatever.
......
>So, problem one is - there is somewhere a single, true
>accounting of = what happened. Mortals may not know it.
>The gods themselves may not know all = of
>it, but it exists. What is it? Where can I find it?

First of all, there is no such single objectively true, historical myth, in the sense you mean. Myth is _not_ history, it is much more like alegory. Imagine you are a new human being, with no history or significant culture, looking at the world with new eyes. You see that the sun is high in the sky, and it's light warms and iluminates the world. It's very powerfull, and important, like an emperor who's power radiates out across the kingdom. You breathe air, and it is vital to life. There are also violent and dangerous storms that can kill, yet they also bring the life-sustaining rains. You observe all these things and you understyand that the natural processes of the world make your life possible, and so you make stories about these important things. The sun setting every night is like death, the sun rising in the mornign is like corn growing in the spring. You see connections and meaning in the world.

To an atheist in our world these things may be accidental similarities with no actual meaning, but to a theist these are not coincidental, they are real correspondences that tell us things about the world. In Glorantha, the things these correspondences tell Gloranthans about the world are true. The sun setting at night realy is connected to death, and the sun rising in the morning realy is somehow related to the new life of golden corn rising in the spring. But the real fundamental nature of these correspondences - the magical links that make magic work - are beyond full mortal comprehension. To understand the true secret nature of the gods is to be a god. Myth is a simplified, symbolic model of these magical connections that is comprehensible to mortals, and which they have discovered. It is not literal, material truth, but it is representative of the truth in a symbolic, magical way and so has magical power. Perhaps the world of myth is a reflection of the real world, or perhaps the real world is a shadow of myth, but they know that the connections are real.

Of course this means that different myths, that still both correspond to the way the world works, can vary from each other and yet still give magical power. The Dara Happans don't need rain because their crops are watered by the floods of the river Oslir, so to them storm is a dangerous terror that is only destructive. To the Orlanthi, storm is the motivating essence of the winds that bring rain and life. Both beliefs are perfectly objectively true in context, and therefore are magicaly true as well, in context.

>Problem 2:
>What is HeroQuesting? How does it work?=20

Myth isn't something that happened long ago in history, it's something that is happening all around you all the time in Glorantha. Every day the sun sets, that's Yelm dying right there in front of your eyes. That's why heroquesting isn't time travel, it doesn't need to be. You want to go see Orlanth? - There he is in that storm, right over there.

Heroquesting is an extension of ritual. Ritual is an attempt to augment and stimulate processes in the natural world that are beneficial. We want the sun to rise in the morning, and we want the corn to grow in the spring, so we do magical rituals that re-enact the myths we have learned to make them happen, and make them hapopen in the best possible way. These rituals work because in Glorantha there realy is a connection between Rulership and the Sun, between the deaths of kings and the setting of the sun, between the rising of the sun and new life bursting forth from the ground every spring.

Heroquesting is an extreme form of ritual, where the heroquester makes it his personal responsibility to perform the myth, and will suffer the personal consequences of failiure. He's betting all his magic, in fact his soul, on the truth of the myth and his ability to make it work, and keep working.

Experimental heroquesting is somethign a little different. An experimental heroquester isn't satisfied with known myth, and by extension isn't satisfied with the way the world appears to work, or is currently understood. Either they try to discover a better myth that more powerfully corresponds to the way they understand the world, or they try to actualy change the world by changing myth. Both are incredibly dangerous.

>Problem #3:
>
>Assuming #2 is valid, I guess that is what the God Learners
>were doing, right? They were basically codifying their own
>version of celestial = history and embarking on HeroQuests
>to rearrange the universe in a manner = pleasing to them.
>Clearly, they managed to seriously piss off enough gods that
>= the gods decided it was time to get rid of them.

I think the god learners discovered a new way to look at myth, that allowed them to interact with it in a different way. Remember they were not theists, they were monotheist/materialist Malkioni that didn't realy believe in the moral authority of the theist gods. They used theist cults and engineered them to suit their political and magical purposes.

I don't think the gods 'decided it was time to get rid of them' because I don't think the gods can realy decide anything in the way that mortals can. The god learners forgot, or never realised, that in interfering with myth, they were interfering with the natural processes of the world. Eventualy the interfered so much that the nature of the world changed in such a way that it destroyed them.

My own way of looking at it. I hope it helps.

Simon Hibbs

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