Sedenya, Yahweh, Inanna, and the Gautama Buddha; A Comparison, Part I: Yahweh

This blog has, up until now, had a fairly standard format- diegetic documents with varying degrees of editorial commentary that exists in a liminal state between the diegesis and external reality. But while this is fun, enjoyable, and playful, it’s also a bit limiting. As such, going forward I plan to mix in essays and other such non-diegetic documents, where I put forward ideas without wrapping them in various imagined containers and using complicated webs of references. This first one is about comparing Glorantha’s Red Goddess with three religious entities from the real world. In the process of writing, it has grown enough to demand being split into multiple parts, which should follow shortly after one another in sequence. 

 

So. Before I begin, I’m going to put some reminders and indications of content for the benefit of the reader. First of all, none of this is an attempt to arrive at the “truth of Sedenya” or proselytize the previously determined truth to you, the audience, because there is no such thing. There’s only any kind of true understanding of the Red Goddess for a specific game that a specific group of people are playing, which is informed by the texts I’m going to be looking at here but requires that specific group of people and that specific game to form it. For example, in a game that I ran, the players ran into Sedenya on the Red Moon, disguised as a (mildly anachronistic but not egregiously so) receptionist. That was a true thing about the Red Goddess… for that game. But that doesn’t mean you’re required to incorporate this theophany of Sedenya into your games, (duh) or that I think this manifestation is an undeniable, intrinsic component of the sources that game used- it comes from the context of the game and the players. 

With that in mind, there is also one text I am going to be relying on which is somewhat obscure- “The LIfe of Sedenya”, written by Greg Stafford at some point in the 2000s and published in the fanzine Rule One between its August 2010 and Spring 2012 issues. This is not especially obscure as far as Gloranthan sources go- it’s no Greya’s Tale- but the website for Rule One is defunct, so I’m going to link the Wayback Machine version: (find it here). Additionally, there will be some rough language used, in that I can’t seem to stop fucking swearing, and I’ll also be discussing a few heavy topics. For this portion of the essay, there should be none, but the Inanna portion will end up discussing sex work and child abuse at a minimum, and we’ll be going a little bit into some stuff adjacent to identity death and child abuse again for the Gautama Buddha part. And for all of these, please bear in mind that I will be speaking from the perspective a historian, archaeologist or religious studies scholar would use when discussing figures of real-world religious veneration or worship. 

 

 

I. Sedenya & Yahweh 

 

Possible candid shot of Yahweh.

  

The genesis of this essay was seeing someone make some real-world analogies where they compared Orlanth to Yahweh, and so we will begin with Yahweh. The original poster described Yahweh as a storm god, and unfortunately, the assumptions that go into the statement “Yahweh is a storm god” or “Yahweh was a storm god (before the later developments of Judaism)” are wrong in several different ways that need to be unpacked. 

The first and kind of smallest area to discuss is that “storm god” is not really a term you would find in contemporary academic literature from specialists, and what you would instead find is a slightly different term- “weather god” or “weather goddess” or “weather deity”. Why does this difference in terminology matter? That’s the next area to discuss. 

Before the first really serious attempts at studying both contemporary and historical religions in a sense that wasn’t conditioned on comparing them to one’s own religion, the most common belief in Europe and its colonies, based on several passages from the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, was that the old “pagan” religions had believed that the representational statues called “idols” were the actual physical incarnation of the gods, and were alive. This in turn has survived down to the modern day, in that every time a statue turns out to be alive and stands up to fight the party or the player in a video game or the protagonist in a shlocky adventure story, this specific concept is returned to life. 

Without going too far into the weeds on that, what then replaced it in the 19th century was a sense that “pagan” gods were personifications or incarnations of natural forces in the world. The term “storm god” thus emerged from this understanding that Zeus, Thor, or Indra were understood by the ancient Greeks, ancient Norse, and contemporary Hindus to be actual storms given human form. This is also wrong and largely abandoned in academia, but it too has its own survival in fantasy fiction- it is the dominant way that gods are described. It’s all over Glorantha, too, though not universally so. 

However, when I say that it’s wrong, I don’t mean that nobody has ever told a religious story in which there was a figure who was a personification of a natural force. Going back to Indra for a second, there’s a story of a sage forcing Indra (who was becoming a bit of a drunkard) to confront a monster named Mada, whose name refers to drunkenness, and who’s beyond Indra’s ability to defeat with his strength alone- and, a-ha, the hearers of that story have thought through the ages, Mada is Indra’s weakness of character, or his alcoholism, or his own flaws! There may well even be gods given cultic devotion who were understood as personifications of natural forces. 

But what is far more common is for a god to be a different type of person, one who has a longer life, if not an immortal one, who may be physically larger than a typical human, who has various incredible powers, but a person who oversees some aspect of the universe. A weather deity oversees the weather, they may even have parts of their body reflected in the weather, the thunder being their voice or some other sound from them, the lighting being a weapon they carry, but they are more than just the weather given form. 

Okay. So there are no, or very very few “storm gods”. But wouldn’t Yahweh be a weather god, then? 

No.

So in the Hebrew Bible, there are a couple of places, in particular in various psalms, in some of the bits of poetry that are scattered through the Torah/Pentateuch and the Nevi’im/Former Prophets, and in the long poem Job, where Yahweh is described with images of the storm. There are a couple of subtler ones in the prose sections of the Torah as well. Yahweh manifests as a towering cloud for the Israelites as they wander the desert of the Sinai, Yahweh is praised as the “Rider of the Clouds” in Psalm 68:5… (or “him that rideth upon the heavens” in the King James Version, the translation I use is based on a 20th-century correction of the Masoretic Text), and you can find other such places for yourself in the Bible. 

Yahweh even pronounces his mastery over the weather in Job. But in the early 20th century, a discovery was made at an archaeological dig in Syria. A whole library of clay tablets written in a language that came to be called “Ugaritic”, after the name of the city where the library had existed, which included a number of mythological texts. 

There is a god you may be familiar with from the Hebrew Bible as well. The sections of Kings and Chronicles dealing with Elijah and Elisha, Ahab and Jezebel, put him into prominence. His name is Ba’al. 

 

Having a real ba'al even without his thunderbolt.

Ba’al isn’t really a name, it’s a title- it can be easily translated as “Prince”. Where a proper name was used for this god in Ugarit, it was “Haddu” or “Hadad”, clearly etymologically related to a weather god from further east, in Mesopotamia proper, named Adad. The Ba’al of Ugarit was also a weather god, and one of the titles he is frequently referred to in the mythological cycle of stories discovered there is- “Rider of the Clouds”.

And if you read those sections of the Hebrew Bible where Ba’al is referenced, it becomes clear that there is, shall we say, a position being taken- that Yahweh is greater than Ba’al, and really does what Ba’al claims to do. (Or Ba’al’s priests, depending on how monotheistic the specific source is understood to be.) Yahweh is also identified with a bull, at least by the kings of the northern kingdom, Israel, in the text of 2 Kings, who erect golden bullcalf statues to commemorate the Exodus (which the authors of these texts understand as an improper way to worship Yahweh, being particularists for iconoclasm when it comes to Yahweh and centralization of worship at the Temple in Jerusalem.) In the Ugaritic texts, we learn of a god named El. El is frequently referred to as “El the Bull” or “Bull El”. 

El’s name is also used in the Hebrew Bible. In the original Hebrew, is is in fact fairly common for descriptive prose before Moses learns Yahweh’s name from the burning bush to refer to Yahweh as Elohim, which is the plural form of El’s name, and is also found in Ugaritic to refer to “the gods” generically, both gender-inclusively and specifically for male gods (with “Asherim”, the plural form of the goddess Asherah or Athirat’s name specifying goddesses). “El Shaddai” or “El Shadday” is another name Yahweh uses for himself in his meeting with Moses. In fact, the “el” in “Israel” is “El”, as a generic term for “God”, as is also found in the names of angels in both the Bible and extrabiblical texts. Meanwhile, “Judah” contains a part of Yahweh’s name. 

There are further borrowings. The Biblical scholar John Day’s book Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan goes into an exhaustive list of various gods whose symbology Yahweh may have borrowed from or appropriated in the course of the history of Israel and Judah, but it is only part of a broader discourse- see also Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities in Ancient Israel. 

One of the key components in this discourse is that Yahweh evolved and changed and accumulated and assimilated components of various different gods- the general consensus is that there was a common understanding in early Iron Age Canaan, continuing on from what we know about Bronze Age Syria in Ugarit, where cosmological power was divided between the elderly El, the head of the council of gods, perhaps even their king, and his executor, younger and in his prime and capable of beating down divine rebels. In Ugarit, this was Ba’al, and the Ba’al cycle of myths is about how Ba’al moves from being one of those divine rebels to triumphing over death itself and cementing his place in El’s court. And in Canaan, there seem to have been dueling traditions where Ba’al had this position and Yahweh had this position, and eventually, within the Jewish context, Yahweh assimilated parts of El and Ba’al into himself and became the head of the divine council, which eventually became non-divine, populated only with the lesser angels, who in time would become only dubiously independent from Yahweh. 

The original Yahweh, before all of this, remains of mysterious and uncertain origins and character. It is generally agreed that Yahweh probably came from the south- most notably, his holy mountains are located to the south of Israel and Judah, Moses has his encounter with Yahweh directly when he is dwelling in Midian, in various bits of poetry Yahweh is described as coming from the south- and there is a further elaboration of this into the “Kenite hypothesis”. This hypothesis posits that Yahweh was originally worshiped by people in the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula, which biblically is referred to as divided into Edom, Moab, and Midian (populated by the Edomites, Moabites, and Midianites). Additionally, the small group of nomadic metalworkers called “Kenites” in the Bible, who are depicted as strongly pro-Yahweh even when the rest of the Israelites have fallen away from Yahweh’s worship, in turn are thus posited as the source of Yahweh worship’s introduction into Canaan. This has become a respectable but not undisputed position. In that formulation, Yahweh may well have been a god of smithing, ruling over metalworking. Mark Smith concludes, separately, that Yahweh was originally a pure warrior, something like the Ugaritic goddess Anat (and the refugees from Judah who formed a colony in Egypt known as Elephantine worshiped a deity they called Anat-Yahu). 

Or to put it another way, Yahweh is a god with a prolonged and deep rivalry with a weather god, who seeks to usurp the weather god’s position. Yahweh is a god made of many disparate parts, assembled together into a single fabric. Yahweh’s origins are hazy and mysterious. Yahweh has many epithets, including ones that would normally be plural renditions of multiple deities. 

 

 

Sedenya, She-Who-Can-So-Dress-Herself-Shut-Up-Valare (rare epithet)

Sedenya is a goddess with a prolonged and deep rivalry with a weather god, and she seeks to usurp the weather god’s position. She’s made of many disparate parts, at least seven ancient “moon goddesses” (at least four of which have no obvious moon to be a goddess of), assembled together into a single fabric. The origins of “Sedenya” are hazy and mysterious- "Life of Sedenya" puts together a mythological narrative for how certain of the ancient moon goddesses are connected, but there are obvious holes in that narrative as well, and none of it says just where “Sedenya” comes from, beyond a mystical insight- but there “Sedenya” is, in a few passages in the Glorious Reascent of Yelm, written a thousand years before this insight. Sedenya has many epithets: Red Goddess, Sedenya, Rufelza, Taraltara, Teelo Estara, Teelo Imara, the insulting Shepelkirt- even before getting to the ancient moon goddesses and their potential epithets. "Life of Sedenya" says that "Sedenya" is a singular form of a plural term. 

Those are in some ways superficial connections. Let’s dig a little deeper. 

One distinguishing characteristic of Yahweh by the time Biblical sources begin to be written down (still disputed, but the consensus puts them well after the formation of monarchies in both Israel and Judah) is that the key defining characteristic of Yahweh had become historical deeds. Yahweh ruled over all the natural forces, oversaw each and every one, so the central importance of Yahweh, the thing which made him stick out, was that he was a historical entity. For the writers of the source texts that make up the Torah/Pentateuch, Yahweh had intervened in their history, and the various mythological and legendary stories they knew could be assembled into a history which stretched from the creation of the world to the present day, and that Yahweh had, at a certain point in history, destroyed the cities of the plain where the Dead Sea now sits, and at an earlier point had flooded the world and then made a deal, and agreement, with humanity that he would never do so again. 

Yahweh’s historical actions faded as the mythological and legendary stories became more directly historical. God “disappears”, as the Biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman put it. This is not truly unique, of course. First of all, there are other religions where this kind of synthesis of mythological time and historical time can be done, and perhaps is done, and second of all, the precise historical ordering as written down textually in the Torah has perhaps never been taken fully seriously. “Where did Cain get his wife?”, and so on. Indeed, Sumerian king lists moved from mythological to legendary to historical figures, and they appear to have been a direct inspiration for at least some of the Bible, though the writers of the Bible didn’t assign any lifespans of tens or hundreds of thousands of years to apparently normal humans. 

However, this characteristic is not a common one. It is generally significantly more common to have mythological time and historical time be somewhat dissociated. One common method can perhaps best be described as John Lindow put it in his Norse Mythology: mythological time is divided into distinct eras or periods, and these periods have a loose order of events that happen within them, but there is no specific order that can be assembled from the known events. And these can of course be correlated to historical time, perhaps with Lindow’s “mythological present” incorporating all or most of well-defined history and legendry, and then a more faint history and legendry being the realm of the “mythological past”. You could make use of other periodizations, other correlations. 

But putting all of that aside, one way of rephrasing all of this is that Yahweh has a special relationship with time. Yahweh inhabits historical time, linear time, the time of dates and years, much more readily than many other gods can. Sedenya, too, has a special relationship with time. Indeed, the only deeds of Sedenya’s that are articulated in Gloranthan source texts, the things that are specifically hers (or Hers, as Stafford might reverently have put it) are her actions within capital-T Time, which, I will assert, is historical time as opposed to mythological or “Godtime” in the Gloranthan context. 

Sedenya, as Friedman said about Yahweh, is defined by her acts in history. This leads me into two further areas of comparison: chaos monsters and demythologization. 

There’s a myth, or a motif, or a mytheme, which involves a god (or a hero) fighting a monster who has many heads (or an unspecified number but probably just one), a long serpentine body (or a humanoid figure with a tail and an udder), who is associated with water (I actually have no parenthetical here except to note that this explicitly excludes the story of Apollo and Python and similar “hero fights a snake that isn’t watery” stories). This is sometimes called the Kaoskampf, or “struggle with Chaos”. This is unfortunately somewhat confused as a term, because it comes from the Greek term Kaos for the primordial void or depths, which does not apply to most of the monsters, except for the Babylonian Tiamat… who is not particularly representative. 

But from this confused terminology, “chaos” has become a way to classify certain types of mythological figure- monsters who seem to be outside the order of existence in some fashion. The Norse Jormungandr or Midgard Serpent, who encircles the “middle world” where humans and gods live, may be characteristic- even the jotunn or giant Hymir fears Jormungandr enough to cut him loose when Thor fishes him up. Other such figures from Norse mythology include the anthropomorphic personifications (and Jormungandr again) who show up at Utgarda-Loki’s enchanted castle in the poem Gylfaginning, or Surtr and the fire-giants, who only show themselves for Ragnarok, or even the Fenrisulf/Fenrir, who grows so vast by the time of Ragnarok as to stretch his jaw from earth to heaven.

But sometimes the chaos monsters aren’t all that chaotic- they’re associated with a well-defined if ill-tempered god. Ba’al’s first challenge is to overcome El’s current favorite, Yam, the god who rules over the seas and rivers. One of Yam’s strongest servants is a many-headed snake named Lotan. Somewhat later, when Ba’al’s companion, the goddess Anat, is recounting a list of the monsters and divine pets she has killed, she also talks about how she nailed Lotan to the side of a mountain. By the time of the writing of the book of Job, very similar passages are used to describe a serpent called Leviathan. (Or LTN becomes LVYTN, when transliterated more directly.) However, Leviathan, like Behemoth in the same book, like Ziz and the Tannin elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, and like Rahab in extrabiblical sources (though Rahab is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, the specifics that matter here are extrabiblical) has been overcome by Yahweh and set into place and been made part of the fabric of the universe.

One of the central components of the “Lunar Way”, the religion that centers around Sedenya, is the belief that Sedenya’s power can take Glorantha’s Chaos and make it a working, healed part of reality. Of course, Sedenya also has powers over Chaos and especially the chaos monster the Crimson Bat, and Yahweh, too, could loose the malevolent Leviathan, Behemoth, Ziz, Tannin, or Rahab at any time as instruments of his wrath. 

And on the specifically watery end of things, there is a somewhat more minor motif where other parts of the Lunar religion come into contact or conflict with the watery powers and successfully subdue them, but in a distinctly different way from how other entities, like Murharzarm, Orlanth, or Vadrus defeat the servants of the watery powers- while the former two dismember the water serpent to reveal a sexual partner, and the latter dismembers the water serpent but may not understand what sex is, the Lunar interaction with the water serpents keeps them serpentine and “monstrous”, but incorporates the snake into the system.

 

There are of course some interesting parallels here to Yahweh and the lack of sexuality this god typically has had, but there are also ones to Inanna, so I will defer further discussion until then. 

“Demythologization” means, quite simply, the process of removing or minimizing mythological elements of something. In contemporary theology, it typically refers to hermeneutical approaches that attempt to separate the cosmological claims of a religious text from its ethical and philosophical claims, but in the context of the history of religions, in particular that of Biblical textual criticism, it means something different. 

It has been accepted by the overwhelming majority of serious scholars since the 19th century that the Torah- the first five books of the Hebrew Bible- was composed from multiple textual sources. For most of the 20th century, Julius Weilhausen’s documentary hypothesis, which divided the Torah into four complete narrative sources, distinguished primarily on stylistic and linguistic grounds, dominated, and while it is no longer seriously accepted, especially in its particulars, the basics of it remain. 

The simplest explanation of Weilhausen’s version and neo-documentary hypotheses involves the book of Genesis. In Genesis, sometimes Yahweh is referred to by the name Yahweh and sometimes by the name Elohim. (In contemporary English translations, the former is translated as “the LORD” in small capitals and the latter typically as “God”). In turn, there are certain stories that are duplicated, and the duplicates are distinguished by this difference. Weilhausen was German, so he referred to the “Yahwist” as the “Jahwist” and this is known as the J source, while the “Elohist” would be the E source. In turn, there are lengthy sections of the Torah which are distinct in their concern with priestly rituals (and with certain other narrative elements), and going beyond Genesis, the book of Deuteronomy is mostly stylistically distinct, contradicts the previous four books in key ways, and has apparent continuity with the following Former Prophets of Joshua, Judges, Samuel 1 and 2, and Kings 1 and 2. These became the Priestly source, P, and the Deuteronomist, D. 

Neo-documentary hypotheses also typically lay out several small sources- the “book of generations” and the “list of stations”, and all variations on this hypothesis assume at least one editor or redactor, R, who added text as well to resolve certain conflicts between these sources. 

With that explanation, it is worth noting that although supplementary and fragmentary hypotheses tend to reject E as a distinct source and disagree strongly with Weilhausen’s dating, the basic multilayered nature of the text is accepted. 

It is also worth noting that the J and E or JE texts have a characteristic worldview where Yahweh is anthropomorphic in form and in mind and where he interacts physically with the world- there is an E/JE Flood story, and a P Flood story, and in the E/JE story, Yahweh physically closes up the ark for Noah. That is, they are highly mythological. In P, Yahweh is probably not anthropomorphic in form, is less anthropomorphic in mind, and does not interact physically with the world. In J and E, Yahweh gets angry and then his temper cools, but in P, Yahweh is always dispassionately just. In P, only priests can interact with Yahweh, and they do it through ritual, but in J and E, human beings can meet Yahweh, talk to Yahweh, and wrestle with Yahweh in an unconstructed fashion. 

D, and the “Deuteronomistic” sources that follow the Torah, is in an intermediate position- there is less mythological material, but there is still direct connection between humans and Yahweh, through judges, prophets, and the covenant with King David. So Weilhausen determined that these sources had been written in the order J, E, D, P, and assigned them to his assumptions about the evolution of Judaism historically, with the mythological context consistently decreasing. Weilhausen’s chronology and assumptions are now discarded. But there is still a trend of demythologization that you can notice, of moving from a mythical world to a more naturalistic one. 

Concerning Glorantha, there is a formal assumption, laid out in the game texts, derived from Mircea Eliade, or so the fandom consensus agrees, that the world is split between the material and the spiritual, that there is Time and Godtime, and the spiritual world is eternal and unchangeable. The gods do not alter, they do not change, and this is the steadfastness on which Glorantha’s societies sit- they know that what they do has divine approval and that will never go away. Even such figures as Arkat and the God Learners, who attempted to change the spiritual world, weren’t really able to do so. The eternal nature of Godtime was sealed by the creation of Time and the first dawning of the Sun and so on and so forth. This is called the Compromise or Great Compromise. 

Except that it can be changed. There are of course little inconsistencies or details that suggest this all over the source texts, but in addition to those, there’s the very large, glowing red problem of the Red Moon and of Sedenya. The Red Moon and Sedenya were not within the Compromise initially, did not exist, and by looking at the sources closely, there never was a Red Moon to reassemble. The Red Goddess of time was made from parts of the shattered Blue Moon and other lost planetary bodies, but the Red Moon itself is totally new, and the Red Goddess is new as well. But simultaneously, she is part of the Compromise now. 

Eliade understood myth as requiring an absolute distinction between the sacred world and the profane world. Sedenya thus demythologizes, or threatens to demythologize Glorantha because her existence makes the two run together and become contiguous, both in the abstract sense and in the concrete sense that the Red Moon is a place between material and spiritual worlds, with physical connections to the material that anyone can walk with their feet. So, too, did the evolution of Yahweh seem to demand the demythologization of Israelite beliefs. 

But there are texts in the Bible like Jonah, Job, Daniel, sections of the Hebrew Apocrypha, and extrabiblical texts of similar age to these which are expressly mythological, as much so as J and E are. There’s a strand of remythologization there as well, and while the Red Goddess demythologizes Glorantha away from Eliade’s vision, she also carries the power to create new myths and remythologize the world in a very literal way. 

 

There is a sense in which Yahweh, especially in neopagan or semi-neopagan circles, is understood, through Christianity, as having inaugurated the death of the magical world, the disenchantment of reality with the Enlightenment, and thus the strangling of mythology and the rise of, as they see it, heartlessly technocratic, totalizing modern society. But the remythologization is just as real and meaningful. To quote Moses ben Maimon (better known as Maimonides) in The Guide for the Perplexed, “All forces are angels. How great is the blindness of ignorance and how harmful! If you told a person who is one of those who deem themselves one of Israel’s sages that the Deity sends an angel, who enters the womb of a woman and forms the fetus there, he would be pleased with this assertion and would accept it and would regard it as a manifestation of greatness and power on the part of the Deity… But if you tell him that God has placed in the sperm a formative force shaping the limbs … and that this force is a “Mal’akh” … the man would shrink from this opinion…”

It is and has been common to understand Yahweh, in the sense of being the god that the Hebrew Bible focuses on, as a cruel, indifferent, or even malevolent figure. Indeed, early branches of Christianity formed over this assumption, which is also often sadly conjoined at the hip with antisemitism. In more modern times, it is often atheists, agnostics, and neopagans who have this understanding (along with a fair number of Christians, of course). It is a limited understanding- one simply has to read Jonah or Job or Moses arguing with God in the J and E sources to understand that there is much more to Yahweh than that invented figure, even before stepping into the realm of Biblical criticism and studies of historical religion. 

However, it is also common to understand Sedenya as a malevolent figure, a “Scarlet Harlot” (as one poster put it memorably) who’s working to erase all boundaries in a postmodernist fog, the “Poison Blood Moon”, whose Red Moon is actually a dripping gash or wound in reality (let’s hold off on the psychoanalysis), someone whose promises of liberation are at best literal-genie “you can’t be held prisoner if you’re dead” pettiness and at worst are a seductive lie. Some would even say that Sedenya is the incarnation of deception and deceit. Again, these are limited understandings. But they, too, are an important connection and point of comparison, and they are one which offers a valuable insight. 

Both Yahweh and Sedenya can be argued with, and neither are truly unchangeable and immobile. As Exodus 32:14 puts it, (and here the King James Version is surprisingly direct in its wording,) “And the LORD [Yahweh] repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.” As the Glorious Reascent of Yelm calls her, she is Sedenya the Turner or Sedenya the Changer. Neither are truly absolutely different from other gods and goddesses in their origins, but they offer a bridge between the mortal and the divine, a god that can be intensely and uncomfortably personal, a goddess who will abide by the covenants you make with her.