From: Lemens, Chris (CNU!AUSTIN3!lemens@cnucorp.attmail.com)
Date: Mon 04 Nov 1996 - 13:52:00 EET
Oliver Bernuetz asks what the distinction is between the pre and post
Compromise eras. (Philip Hibbs quibbles that there cannot be an "era" prior
to the advent of Time. I agree, but cannot supply a better word because,
like most non-physicist humans, I think in terms of time. See more below.)
Jonas replies that "Events didn't follow each other in a temporal but in a
contextual
way." I think this is right. The way to think about pre-Time is simply to
eliminate references to time in your normal thought processes. Easy, huh?
;-)
Looking at what is left may help though, and here is where I disagree with
most everything else said on the subject.
Nick Thed-Shaman:
"I imagine that the original conception was that Before Time ran underneath
different rules of reality -- such as fatigue and hunger didn't exist, you
could only die if someone used magic in the form of a copy of death to kill
you etc. [snip] Whereas [Orlanthi] 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. The Dara Happans believe that everything
from after the point of creation can be measured in years, and neither do
the Malkioni believe in Time."
Similarly, Lewis Jardin:
This seems wrong because it confuses temporal order with logical order. The
"People do not age (normally) and linear sequences do not occur. [snip]
[T]hings are location based and sequences are determined by the order of
visiting locations."
older (RQ2) materials say that the God Learners came up with a "logical
sequence of events" pre-Time. This clearly implies that logical
relationships such as causation still apply. So, as I said before
"eliminate references to time in your normal thought processes", but leave
causation intact. (Phillip Hibbs' idea that there are no causes pre-Time,
but only Powers is an interesting twist that the God Learner in me loves.)
Hence, you can still be hungry, fatigued, or dead because all of those
conditions are effects of causes. In fact, we know that people did die in
pre-Time, or Larnste and Daka Fal would not have needed to separate the
spirits of the dead from this living.
Because people could die (at least after the advent of Death), it makes
sense _retrospectively_ to measure events in terms of generations. Hence we
have reference in TrollPak (or so I hear) that generations passed between I
Fought We Won and the Dawn and in other sources for Dara Happa and Kralorea
that the imperial lineages are traced directly back to Yelm. Likewise, we
have the source that Nick Thed-Shaman pointed out: "From the conclusion in
KoS it appears that Fourth Age Orlanthi also measure Before Time in years as
they talk about the LBQ having taken place at -150 ST." Likewise, in
pre-Time, one could measure causality (not Time, which did not exist) per
Peter Metcalfe's examples--turning the Red Sands of Time and the Plentonian
Year Count (which surely got their names after the fact) could each lead to
an estimate of the number of years that had passed during pre-Time. The way
to think about it would be that the sands running out of an hourglass causes
its owner to turn it over, which causes the sands to run from top to bottom,
etc. Note that there is not necessity to ascribe a quantity of time to such
causal chains. However, after the advent of Time, it would be natural for
people to go back and measure pre-Time as if Time had existed by multiplying
the number of turns of the hourglass by the amount of Time it takes
post-Time for the hourglass to run out. I would take this as a post-Time
attempt at imposing temporal concepts on non-temporal events based probably
on the number of generations that passed (probably drawn from accounts of
who was on various thrones). Since the God Learners ordered things
logically and not temporally, I'd say that imposing Time on pre-Time sounds
like a misperception of a God Learner project. I rather like Oliver's
second post about the advent of Time being a transition from three to four
dimensions and challenging us to measure our existence in five.
A tangent:
Similarly, a few people talked about years, days, and seasons in pre-Time.
E.g. Peter Metcalfe: "[T]he Malkioni, Dara Happans and Kralori all have
year counts that go back to before the Great Compromise.") This is clearly
incorrect. In pre-Time the sun was either stuck in the center of the sky or
stuck in hell (at least from a non-Malkioni perspective). Neither would
require years or days. Seasons might still be viable as a mystic
progression of dominance of the various elements, but might be distinctly
different from post-Time seasons. IMG, there would be no seasons pre-Time
apart from the "Eras" that Pam Carlson et alia propose. After all, much of
the mystic significance of seasons is related to the death-rebirth cycle
associated with the Light Bringers Quest and the Dawn. However, there is an
interesting questions about when Time began. Did it begin with the Dawn or
sometime before the Dawn, with the Compromise (or some other event in other
mythic structures)? Was there a delay after Time began before the Dawn? If
so, how is Time measured during that period? Was the gap substantial?
Pam Carlson talks about pre-Time Time being "plastic". I disagree. There
was no time pre-Time. That said, I would not quarrel with her
categorization of the logical sequencing of events in pre-Time.
Consequently, I pretty much agree with Saravan Peacock's comments about
causality still existing and with David Weihe's comment: "[B]efore the
Sunrise Event, one could perceive the Future directly, with the appropriate
effort, rather than just predicting on the basis of the current pattern."
(My one quibble is that it is not the "Future" because there was no Time
pre-Time.) This leads David to his other thesis: if pre-Time everyone
could perceive the consequence of their actions because they occurred
without reference to time, why would the Gods do the things that caused the
Darknesses? David's answer is that the advent of Chaos clouded their
perceptions. Since everything happened "all at once", as it were, their
perceptions were clouded from the "beginning". In terms of pure causation,
because their actions led to the advent of Chaos, they were not able to
determine that their actions caused the advent of Chaos. Because they never
had the benefit of clear "foresight" (i.e. understanding of the consequences
of their actions), they did not know to take actions which would eliminate
the advent of Chaos as one of the effects of their actions, and thus gain a
perfect understanding of the consequences of their actions. What lovely
circularity. This seems right logically, but does not feel satisfactory; I
don't know why.
Saravan Peacock offers that thoughtless, passionate action is the storm
David also offers an interesting comment: "I have always assumed that the
gods' contribution to the world and that their thoughtlessness was the cause
of the Darknesses. This has some symmetry to it, since Orlanth then
rectifies his mistake. It still sounds rather Yelmie/Lunie.
Compromise was the straw that broke the GodTime's back, forcing a symmetry
breaking in the Time dimension." I'd like to know what cosmological
symmetry he means.
Finally, on an unrelated thread, we got comments on the subjective nature of
Chris Lemens, God Learner.
myth from Greg. I think they say that Glorantha is the only post-modern
RPG. In most RPGs, there is Truth; in Glorantha, there is only truth. This
makes me think that everything I've written above is wrong and that Richard
Fenner is right when he says that the Compromise (or presumably some other
event depending upon your mythos) caused observers to perceive Time
(although I do not think it had to do with the perception of mortality
because post-Time, the gods also perceive the existence of time on the
mortal plane). Only the perception of Time causes Time. The logical
consequence would be that Brithini, Kralori, and (amazingly) Trolls really
were measuring time while us Jrustelans were sitting around unaware of its
existence.
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