From: Joerg Baumgartner (joe@sartar.toppoint.de)
Date: Fri 03 Jun 1994 - 18:53:42 EEST
Sandy Petersen in X-RQ-ID: 4325
>> If the God Learners had not done their thing, I suspect that the >>Third Age (whatever that would have been) would have been the last. > Despite my occasional defense of the God Learners, I don't
Hmm. Maybe the Lunars are right about death and rebirth? Each Age has seen an effort for rebirth of some Godtime entity or reality, so there must be some compulsion to do so. _Maybe_ these efforts which regularly turn out to threaten the whole universe are as important to the continued existance of the universe as are the Sacred Time rites.
Nick, does this catch the Lunar Way? Am I illuminated now, ripe for the White Moon to come?
> Though the GL did not intend to destroy the world, their
> activities unwittingly undercut the world's basis. Glorantha reacted
> by sending antibodies to eliminate the threat.
But before the GLs did start a lot of projects to improve the lot of all Gloranthans. Most important were the Genert projects, I think.
I liked your theory about the Goddess Switch as a preparatory experiment for the Land God Switch. If the God Learners could prove that Genert wasn't slain, but took refuge in kind of a necklace, then this necklace could have been retrieved and Genert could be freed.
On a similar line there is the marriage vow of the unlucky Garzeen. That his bride, daughter of King Froalar and presumably the Goddess Seshna Likita, gave him an impossible groom quest seems to be a common folk- and fairy tale event. Read the verses of Scarborough Fair for good examles of impossible groom quests.
I like to think that these impossible quests are a justification to criticize the husband/wife later in marriage, or even a jursidictional means to nullify the marriage should things go really wrong - after all, the other party did not fulfil their wedding vow. Anthropologists?
The God Learners might have included the Genert quest into this set of impossible quests. It would be reasonable that the daughter of a land goddess would want to rescue her grandfather (according to the monomyth), wouldn't it? No big deal to include it into Garzeen's cult, which had been merged into the Lightbringer Issaries cult by some other project.
So now every Issaries priest turned Desert Tracker still works for the goal to reconstruct Genert from the parts Hyena (a Trickster of the Wastes) first had Dismembered and then Swallowed. Look at the Trickster spell list for details.
This might be a (constructed?) parallel myth to both the necklace myth of Pamalt and the incident where the trickster saved the Artmali empire by posing as the emperor and being carried off instead.
For fantasy purposes, I am a firm believer in parallel evolution of both species and myths.
> "The rot" was, of course, Power. The GL discovered that their
> knowledge of the heroplane, and their understanding of god, myth, and
> mankind enabled them to do new things that nobody had ever done
> before. The classic example is their use of the Forbidden God.
This rot seems to be part of the cycles of rebirth and death. The God Learners weren't the only ones to stumble over this - the EWF did so simultaneously, the Lunar empire does so ever since the conquest of Tarsh, Loskalm with all its virtues all but created the Kingdom of War, the First Council broke, the Arkati Crusade for freedom turned into a rampage of wanton destruction.
Illumination might be the secret that to ensure the continued existence of this bubble in the void, you have to try and destroy it, and yourself.
Ragnaglar might have been the first to realize this. ? ?? ?????
May all of ye bask in the Glow of the Goddess!
--
-- Joerg Baumgartner joe@sartar.toppoint.de
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