Eight Arms and the Mask

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 audienc...

This is the face of the waters which the interpretatio ugaritica hath presented to us. Prince Yamm, Judge Nahar, the sea, the rivers, the god of the waters of the earth, is a beast and a tyrant, who would slay Prince Hadad, the rider upon the clouds, who directs the rain and the dew. Among those who he sent forth from the depths of the seas to torment Hadad, Hadad’s sworn sister Anat, and their friend Athtartu was a great serpent with many heads, Lotan, the river and its delta made horribly manifest. Aarne-Thompson-Uther index type 934K speaks of a folktale that has spread across certain parts of Europe, mostly in the broad Germanic-speaking areas of diffusion and their immediate contact. It tells us of the waters, a lake or a stream, which are hungry for human life. Once per year, perhaps, or perhaps less consistently. They set forth a hue and cry, “The hour cometh but not the man!” until their chosen victim runs into the water to be taken and devoured. Or perhaps they simply strike ...

 "To the best of my recollection, it said, 'The great sin of the goddess was that she did not hate, and took that seriously. Even Erissa the merciful has her Natyrsa side, who if not an eager slayer of the vomitus of unreality, at the least would not lift a finger to aid any creature of the outer void or their corrupted servants. When she was confronted with the squalling hideous thing, the overt abomination, the oozing, gushing impurity of her flayed wings, she did not stamp on it and crush it and finish the unfinished task of Arkat, she did not take the damned thing and annihilate it, she looked the chiropteran vileness in two of her eyes and said, "You're hurt and bleeding, like me. What do you say we stick together?"'  'Nor was this even the prelude to an absorption of the shredded, ragged wings of her youth! Nay, she was honest and kept her word and the Bat remained herself, a thing apart from her origin point, given an appalling further leash on lif...

I have often thought that the greatest weakness of our Goddess Sedenya is that She is marked by magnanimity and kindness in equal proportion to her selfishness and cruelty. When she defeated the older gods at Castle Blue, what she extracted from them was an expansion of the universe to create a place for her and for those of her kind. She did not displace anything, she did not demand the forcible incorporation of the remnant Blue Moon, she did not remake the Air, she did not demand submission, only acceptance of her existence.  Oh, tyrants can never prosper for long, in the grand scheme of things. Her reign would have been foreshortened as those of Orlanth and Yelm the Second were. But if, as now seems increasingly likely, all that we have been, all that we have made over the past four hundred years and change, shall be obliterated from the world, made as if it never were, and its remnants perverted and despoiled, would not it have been better if She had ruled in justice that trans...

Leika "Betty" Ballista Taraling, Queen Regnant of the Colymar alliance, looked out over the remains of the day, at the red banners and vexillae haggard in the light breeze as the enemy retreated, and thought of her glorious deeds. Lo! The Quivini stood querulous, absent administration- no. Lacking leadership, when the foe pressed upon them, they routed and broke, beleaguered and brittle-made by the Prince, but then the Colymar arose, the Black Spear flew free, and the blood-clothed- the blood-garbed- the blood-cloaked- "Fuck me, where's my bard?" she said aloud. "Here," Donanarth said from behind her. He had at first tried to insist that he wasn't a bard, that his teacher and master had died so suddenly in the violence of the liberation that he had never been certified past poetry of the second order and humorous anecdotes of a historical character, that true bardship, of rattling off entire genealogies on command, of making remarks so cutting they...