> As a rule of the thumb, any myth in which an Orlanthi cannot be
> conceivably be take part strikes me as one of their just so myths. In
> the birth of the devil, who are the participants? Thed, Malia,
> Ragnaglar and Wakboth. So if an Orlanthi clan was going to re-enact the
> myth, the only option to have a looksee IMO is to be chaotic. Likewise
> for the broos, who are the participants? Thed's alive. Malia's "left
> the conspiracy". Wakboth and Ragnaglar are dead. The only possibility
> that I can see is going to the late storm age, looking at the sky to see
> the unholy trio planets do their evil conjunction and note the
> appearance of the devil. But that's hardly a mythical re-enactment on
> the scale of the short lightbringers quest.
Nice stuff. I miss the participation stuff, myth remaking the world and so on. Can't help but notice Eliade is out of the suggested reading list.
Just to throw a few small apples (kallisti!):
"MALIA was a death goddess captured or enslaved by Chaos (or who freely joined, depending on the version being reviewed). She was part of the spell made by Ragnaglar, Thed and some others." (Wyrms Footnotes 7)
And some others! Who others? A bat, a dead fish...?
2. Thed's dead, baby. Or more to the point, dead but lingering in some perpetually aberrant and awkward "skinless" state. Between this and Mal(l)ia's "is she or isn't she" conspirator status, it looks like at least half the "trio" breaks the rules (living OR dead, chaotic OR objectively not).
Which is fine with me since they're ur-blasphemous liminal figures and all, but it drives the Storm Bulls nuts.
> Agreed but it does tell against the actual Wakboth (ie the one who
> pranced around glorantha in the chaos age) being the product of such a
> ritual. I think he regularly appeared earlier ("every 600 years you
> have come" KoS p269) as a result of a bad planetary conjunction and had
> to be ritually defeated. Throughout the storm age, the Orlanthi
> performed their tasks diligently (Vingkot's death at the hands of the
> Chaos Man is the result of one such conflict) but the battle of
> Stormfall was the one occasion in which the Orlanthi failed completely,
> allowing the devil to run riot throughout Glorantha.
I love this but the trend lately has been that we can't have pre-Time archaeology, it's all "illo tempore."
> Being a scheming plotter implies intelligence and personality, naturally
> spreading disease does not. It's also a big leap from spreading
> diseases to a) listening to Rashoran b) murdering Rashoran with two
> other groupies to keep his teachings to yourself c) plotting with the
> conspirators to reintroduce chaos into the world etc. If Malia were a
> deity with a record of independent action (like say Thanatar), then the
> myth becomes more credible. But Malia, as practiced today, has the sole
> motivation of disease - her worshippers have little inclination to delve
> into forbidden lore and plot to summon chaos into the world.
This is what interests me about those weird inconsistencies in the Malia cult lore that has come down to us. For cackling extra-dirty highland hags, they seem to have preserved a lot of fairly arcane lore that's been erased everywhere else: pre-Lunar Rashoran mysticism, medicine in the Bright Empire, death "by natural causes" in an intrinsically mythic world, maybe some weird troll or dark earth echoes. Sweep out the hag with the game artifacts and I can almost glimpse these lost details.
OTOH it's not really clean lore, but I caught the Glorantha plague long ago...
> *My pet theory about Wakboth's origins is that in a Saga, he was
> described as "madness was his father, rape his mother/and disease the
> midwife at his birth" to indicate that this was the one scary dude and
> that some witless scholar took the poetry literally.
Love it. At that moment, three placeholder figures were born to haunt the world, much like King Undine and the dreaded *name in the old days.
Slightly more seriously, I don't know if they have metaphor in Glorantha. Maybe in the Lunar Empire, where it's as advanced and weird as their dreaded double-entry accounting and other mind-twisting revelations.
But my favorite thing right now in Glorantha is the age-old dispute over whether the Devil's real name is Wakboth OR Kajabor. At some point early on Since Time, two cultures met and couldn't quite reconcile their mythic bad men. I want to know how those cultures and their stories changed.
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