[Glorantha] Arkat, Nysalor, and Gbaji

>And his ... enemy, who came from the far west...

That's a pretty reasonable description of Arkat, who is sometimes referred to as Gbaji. I don't think this tells you much - other than that Greg likes to further confuse mysteries.

Personally, I think to understand this you need to look at the idea of "others". Nysalor and Arkat are enemies, but both had an other, confusingly referred to in both cases as Gbaji. There's a difference between your other and your enemy, but there's also no reason that they can't be the same being. Eventually the pair meet in Dorastor and fight. This is a heroquest moment, so each would be investing their adversary with the appropriate archetype. In other words, even if Nysalor wasn't Arkat's other (and vice versa) all along, at the moment of the heroquest challenge they would be identified with the other sufficiently that the other's fate and their own would be the same.

So we have from two to four entities here - Arkat and his other, and Nysalor and his other. And both Arkat and Nysalor are trying to identify their enemy with their other, so that defeating one means defeating both. (There's also the nice "become what you hate to defeat it" motif, at least on Arkat's side. I've always assumed there's symmetry here, but I don't know of any firm evidence for Nysalor "becoming" Arkat to defeat him.)

Only one of Arkat and Nysalor leaves Dorastor, but no one knows which. (He claimed to be Arkat, but both were well known liars...) It doesn't matter. By this point both were essentially the same being - your other is part of yourself, the bit you don't like to admit to in public. You can't defeat the other. At best you can hope to control and accomodate it. In a sense that's what the final confrontation is about - Arkat/Nysalor/Gbaji (hereafter ANG) confronts his other and reaches a point (illumination? why not...) where he can live with it. ANG walks away and lives on in the mundane world, founding the Stygian empire. ANG's other no longer needs to be personified (the heroquest is over) and so reverts to the other side (aka subconscious). This feeds nicely into the Lunars claim to have found Nysalor (either ANG or more likely ANG's other), but for that you do need to believe a word the Lunars say.

Cheers,
Graham

-- 
Graham Robinson
graham_at_albionsoft.com

Albion Software Engineering Ltd.