From: Andrew Bean (ABEAN@GEEL.DWT.CSIRO.AU)
Date: Fri 03 Dec 1993 - 12:12:36 EET
Geoff Gunner said:
> re: Colin Watson's model of God-time as perpendicular planes - Not So !
> If your model was true, then you could only enter god-time at one point.
> But you can enter it on any point. So the model only holds if there is 'time'
> in god-time. Which there ain't. So god-time is more like the page that you've
> drawn your vector of time on. No matter how long the vector, still only one
> page. Anyway, you can't compare the two as they aren't of similar qualities.
I liked Colin's idea. I understood the situation as being that the actual ritual performed at each heroquest determines at which point you enter God-time. The ritual sets the mythic framework and delivers you into the God-time situation you wish to influence. You then complete the Heroquest and exit back to your current time. Unless a major accident happens, that doesn't just kill you (or even worse destroy you forever), and instead in a very few cases hurls you through time forwards or backwards out of control. Probably never to be heard of again.
People can be trained to Heroquest systematically as did the Godlearners or just learn it by accident (Arkat, Harmast and the dude with the white bear skin who leads the wolf pirates <I can't believe I've forgotten his name!>)
I don't understand the model that Geoff proposes up above.
I think of Godtime as being similar to the Australian Aboriginal dreamtime. It occurred for a long time (Kralori records suggest 10s of thousands of years) and had a couple of major events occurred that can be used to delineate it into sections (the Green age, ..., the Yelmic Empire which was followed by the death of Yelm which brought on the Lesser Darkness which ended with the birth of the Devil and thus began the Greater Darkness, this timeline is not complete but you get the picture). However I feel that within each section the events are fluid and exist in a dreamtime situation so that they can be experienced in different orders by different heroquesters trying to achieve different things and thus coming from different mythic frameworks.
Everybody is right when they see it differently because they will only see what they expect to see. You will never get them all in the same room for a whole heroquest so paradox never occurs. Their paths might cross but they never actually coexist except when sharing the same "reality". If they see a situation differently then the other person will not be present to contradict it. They might recount different outcomes to each other, but didn't Arkat meet himself whilst heroquesting once and look what happened to the Godlearners when they started straining reality too hard. It rebelled and they ceased to exist <maybe?>.
May the red moon's light illuminate your quest for truth always. Andrew
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