From: alex@dcs.gla.ac.uk
Date: Tue 31 May 1994 - 22:55:52 EEST
Sandy:
> There has been a general assumption on the daily that "God
> Learner Construction" = "abominable falsehood". This, combined with
> the many other attacks and jabs at the God Learners, means that many
> folks writing here on the Daily are as hostile to the poor dead
> Second-Age bastards as are the superstitious and barbaric
> Gloranthans!
Why, thank you!
> When something is a "God Learner Construct", that doesn't
> necessarily mean it's wrong! Quite the reverse.
Well, depends on what we mean by "wrong", doesn't it? One could argue that the Jrusteli monomyth isn't an "invention", it's a "discovery". After all, the events of the Godtime are obviously historical facts, preserved and embodied outside of normal Time by the compromise as the Godplane, and only intervening time and muddle-headedness has obscured the details so that they appear to the untrained observer, to be different, or even conflicting "myths".
On the other hand, it could be _pure_ invention. The Myths are just that, based loosely on some historical figure, perhaps, but mostly fiction. These myths give rise to what we now think of as the Godplane, which as it originally came into being, had entirely separate strands for each local group of deities. The fact that many different peoples now agree that the same entities appear in their myths is merely a reflection of the lies and propaganda spread by the GLers, and the irrevocable damage done to the Godplane by their munging together of orginally distinct myths.
> The GLs "discovered" Kolat's importance, but it's probably a
> result of their realization that Umath must have somehow spawned all
> the sylphs and storms of the world. The GLs then discovered that
> Umath did so by spawning one giant sylph-thing, which broke up into
> sylphs and storms. The GLs called this briefly-existing entity Kolat.
They called him Umbrol, by the looks of it, in that capacity. This seems the most obvious GLism. One wonders why they didn't go the whole hog and only have one name for Kolat/Umbrol: this suggests to me that both names were pre-existing, though possibly applied to different entities.
> It doesn't mean there's a personality-possessing entity called Kolat
> alive today, or ever alive (except for that brief moment during
> Godtime before he fragmented). But the GLs feat in discovering this
> fact doesn't mean that there was never any Kolat. Just that they
> found out about him.
If there were no myths about Kolat before the 2nd age, then this is as near invention as makes no difference. I suspect that the GLers may have done no more with Kolat than "tidying up and tying together" his (existing) myths, and identifying him with Umbrol.
> The GL effort to make sense out of the varied mythology of
> Glorantha, and their subsequent creation of the Monomyth should be
> highly appreciated by all Gloranthan scholars. Though the Monomyth
> teems with minor flaws, I submit that the various warts and lesions
> on it are trivial compared to the great advantage in having it to
> work with. The Monomyth is a _useful_ construction.
There are two sides to this, though: certainly they made it easier to understand (if only in the sense that an omelet is easier to understand than three eggs), but they also actually munged the very thing they were documenting, losing some of its variety, its local colour, its immediacy.
> On occasion the GLs have been attacked because of their
> "unscientific" nature. I submit that they were highly scientific.
> They created hypotheses, tested them using the scientific method,
> discarded theories based upon their tests, and so forth.
You must have missed my "favourable" comparison of the GLers to earthly taxonomers on those grounds. On the other hand, is science an appropriate tool for discussing mythology? This isn't an idea which is in vogue on earth, at the moment. (Though some of those ol' Senate books on Mythology harp on about "the modern science of".)
> But the crimes of the Middle Sea Empire I feel were
> outweighed by their triumphs.
Pro: neat cult writeups.
Con: destroyed a continent or so.
I see your point. ;-)
Alex.
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