From: Saravan Peacock (saravan@perth.DIALix.oz.au)
Date: Fri 01 Nov 1996 - 07:54:47 EET
Nick E. writes of pre-Dawn Orlanthi:
>they don't
>believe that time had any true meaning and that linear relations such as
>cause/effect don't apply, other cultures have a different view.
IMO Orlanthi certainly do have a strong sense of cause and effect in the
God Time. They just don't think much about it before they do something. The
Storm Gods act on passion (and whim) - this is their contribution to the
world's structure. They only think about the consequences if something bad
has happened. But one of Orlanth's main virtues was that he recognised that
his own actions caused certain results and he acted to rectify them if they
were bad.
For humans and other Elder Race 'mortals' (ie not deities), an alternative
idea for thinking about pre-Dawn Time might be to ask how does time
manifest? In actual experience, time really seems to be manifest only in
the turning of Yelm across the sky and therefore of the day/night cycle.
The seasons might also be a result of some ordering of the universe
following the Great Compromise/ Submission of the Rebel Storm. Beyond this
what do we have? _Measurements_ for the period it takes for certain things
to be done, and for people to mature, grow old and die. Why could these not
have happened without the rotations of the Sun, or the turning of the
Seasons for that matter?
Certainly it seems from TrollPak and from accounts of the Yelmies (and even
my impression from snippets of Orlanthi mythology) that there were
generations of people before the Dawn. We don't know how 'long' these might
have been in putative years, or even really if anyone died of old age.
There was learning (and maybe forgetting) and traditions (amongst the
'weaker mortals') suggesting a cause and effect presence. Perhaps the God
Time dealing with Elder Races and humans was a series of events involving
the steadily increasing population of the world, then trouble caused by
conflicting pressures of culture/myth and population resulting in massive
wars which certainly did cause death, and the influx of chaos. In many
views I would imagine, chaos rather than time, is the cause of everything
bad in the world - ranging from old age to disease and bad weather. Time,
in effect (in the Orlanthi view), was a means of instituting some order to
combat chaos.
To pursue further, maybe in the God Time everyone was long lived, happy and
All this postulates that life after the Dawn was more or less similar to
prosperous until the coming of bad things to the world. Gradually people
became less heroic as they became alienated from their gods, until that was
'arrested' (or not) at the Dawn. Even then, there seems to have been
changes in the relations of people to their gods and mythology. Kind of
like Homer's heroic classics where everyone was especially big, wise,
strong 'in the old days'.
life before the Dawn. We don't know this to be 'true', since all our
documents are written by post-Dawn people (I think) and they could have no
conception of existence without time or at least cause and effect. Hence
the incomprehensible nature of many accounts of God Time. "We don't know
why it was that way, but it was". Poor ingnorant people trying to
categorise something completely beyond their (and our) experience. Try
thinking about a world without any cause and effect: bollocks - it just
doesn't make any sense. However, the fabric of the universe (including
experience) may be malleable (like Pam's 'plastic time'). Of course third
ages people _do_ have access to the God Time - through the Hero Plane...
(I'll stop...)
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