The Only Old One rises briefly from one of his interminable slumbers. Attention span of a newt, our Immoderator ...
>FWIW, that's an oversimplification -- in fact, gender is simply FAR
>less important in the Heler cult than elsewhere in Orlanthi culture,
>despite some write-up appearances to the contrary.
>
>
>Vinga is a Storm cult not a Death cult --- In Orlanthi culture the
>Storm is one of the prime sources of fertility, and I can see nothing
>wrong with the concept of aggressive and stormy female fertility ; I
>mean just look around, it's all over the place in RW ...
>
Stray thoughts ...
Storm actually seems infertile. Sons and nephews and nieces are all mixed up, and there is little clear sense of generations as in, frr instance, the Earth tribe. Maybe they all split off from Umath. Also, the Storm realm is overwhelmingly 'male'.
(What gender means to a deity who might be a person or a wind or an animal depending on what day of the week it is is of course a clue to the whole essentialist confusion: Greg's prognostications (http://www.glorantha.com/new/q-and-a/male_female.html) seem obtuse at best. Interestingly, he describes Vinga here as "masculine version of Ernalda", not a female version of Orlanth. Jeff R, please take note).
The only female pure storm deity has received significant attention is Brastolos, and she, significantly is 'No-Wind'. (Some have been pretending Vinga is pure Storm, but she is the child of Earth and Storm). The Brastalos writeup and Greg's Q&A mentioned above are the only places that I know of where a yin/yang model of gender is posited for the Storm Tribe. But that model is ignored elsewhere, and if folk are to be made aware of it it needs more explicit mythic elaboration. And its still essentialist of course.
So Storm is a male realm. The myths posit exogamy for Storm deities (yes?), usually to the Earth tribe, so Storm fertility seems very low. It's water/rain/Heler that supplies the non-earth fertility.
What the Heortlings think is another matter: many strongly patriarchal cultures insist that the male alone produces offspring: woman is merely the 'soil' for the male seed. There's a real tension here between Storm patriarchy and Earth mastery.
I could go further and say that Storm is an *adolescent* male realm: impulsive, rebellious, destructive and violent. You do what you like, as long as you fix it afterward. (Raid, war, destroy the universe ...) The burden falls heavily on Heartling women to control, tame and fix the wrong-doings of their men. If you want to do a cheap pyschoanalysis on Glorantha's basic structures, Storm/Orlanth is the rebellious, adolescent male, Fire/Yelm is the patriarchal father, and Earth/Ernalda seems more motherly than wife: a mixture of wisdom, forgiveness/tolerance, good sense and fear. Uz/KL is even more explicit: the realm of the monstrous female and mishapen offspring. Women deities get a hard time in early Glorantha: there's a lot of male fear in Gorgorma and BB and KL especially, and you get early pop-ups (pin ups?) like Jar Eel the bikini girl and the now almost forgotten Gunda the Guilty.
That Glorantha encodes so much male adolescent energy and fear is hardly surprising: Greg was an imaginative adolescent as his creative enterprise began. And we all know that when Greg has to decide between Glorantha as self-myth and Glorantha as gaming realm, self-myth usually wins, no matter what the prospects for popularity or play. Add the explicit masculinist construction of the Campbellian heroquest, lingering bits of shared, American post-civil war cultural psychosis, a highly individual, eclectic personal mythology that will develop over time into full-blown white shamanism/neopaganism, various bits of gaming and comic culture, a few jokes and insights and shake till it all falls together in glorious bricolage.
And ongoing problems with essentialism.
What it all comes down to is a need to look more closely at Heortling constructions of gendered self. There's a lot of material in Gloranthan myth and world ethnography to help us build a model that can escape some of the more blatant essentialisms we've been seeing surface of late.
But I'll save that for part 2 ...
Jimbo
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