More God Learning

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From: David Gadbois (gadbois@cs.utexas.edu)
Date: Fri 03 Jun 1994 - 19:35:00 EEST

    From: sandyp@idcube.idsoftware.com (Sandy Petersen)     Date: 2 Jun 94 03:37:34 GMT
    X-RQ-ID: 4325

    The Jrusteli could not easily beat [the Waertagi] at sea. So some     researchers looked through the myths, and discovered the god Tanian,     the child of both Fire and Water. They sent a team of heroquesters     to contact this deity, and to create a cult for him. [...] At the     height of the battle, they invoked the powers of Tanian -- The God     of Burning Water. [...] The Waertagi and their ships were     destroyed in the holocaust. A classic success story for both     intelligent heroquesting and careful book-learning.

I'm glad you brought Tanian up. It seems to be the most clear example of what the GLs were up to.

I have a notion of the RuneQuest Sight attributed the the GLs as viewing the Godtime events as the areas formed by the intersection of strands in Arachne Solara's web. The ends are held down by the runes (not necessary by some particular god), and the portions of strands between the events are the heroquest paths. Heroquesting consists of moving the strands and so reshaping the events. (Explaining away some of the combinations we know of pretty much requires making the strands be n-planes in some high-dimensional space, but, hey, we know the GLs were big on simplifying assumptions and the 3D model works OK for most things.)

Under this model, we see that the industrious and ecologically minded God Learners were busy pulling frayed strands back together and tightening up the intersections in order to avoid a complete unravelling of the whole ball of yarn. For as the web becomes undone, the gods, mythology, magic, all the things that make life in Glorantha worth living, become unconnected and disappear completely.

Back to Tanian: it is clear that something should be there right where Fire and Water meet, assuming there is such an intersection. The problem I have is that the is no other mention of Tanian except at the Battle of the Burning Sea, and one would expect him to appear in some other myths purely on the basis of his position (the Dara Happans and Oslira, frex.) The conclusion I draw from this is that Fire and Water did not meet before the GLs did their thing; they somehow managed to "reach outside" the web [*] and bring the strands together. I.e., the GLs created rather than discovered Tanian. If so, it would qualify for the Bad Thing that the GLs were doing, in that the web could some stability conventions that such activites could violate.

[*] This fits in nicely with Paul's intriguing ideas about the God Learners who avoided the Gift Carriers by escaping into pocket universes outside the web.

--David Gadbois

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