[Glorantha] Re: Glorantha Digest, Vol 12, Issue 10

[Nic Hughes]

Simon Hibbs <simon.hibbs at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>I suspect that the Great Darkness wasn't an external event that
>changed the world around them, and to which they responded. It was a
>change in the nature of the whole world, and since people were a part
>of that world, it was a change in people too. The example of the laws
>of physics changing so that electricity stops working was on the right
>track, but didn't go far enough. If the laws of physics change, then
>they change for the workings of our own bodies and minds just as much
>as they change for the world outside them. If we consider living
>Gloranthans to be complex systems that work according to the 'laws of
>Gloranthan reality', when those laws change in the way they did during
>the Great Darkness even the very identities and innermost natures of
>every being in the cosmos will experience that change in the most
>personal and subtle of ways. Recovering from that isn't going to be a
>trivial excercise.
>
>  
>

One possible view on this is to look at all the correspondences to 
Sun/Fire and assume that they were mythically weakened during the great 
darkness. The organ associated with fire is the brain so perhaps anyone 
without specific means to counter the effect were mythically brain 
damaged, or the functioning of their brain was inhibited. Fires would 
not have spontaneously lit after the dawn and higher intellect may not 
have spontaneously returned even though obstacles to its returning no 
longer existed. This of course become a trap in a way that the inability 
to light a fire does not, if your brain is inhibited you would lack the 
insight to see a way to remove the problem yourself even when the 
external cause of the problem is removed.  I can certainly see some of 
the more philosophically inclined Gloranthans believing something along 
these lines.

More practical Gloranthans probably give it little thought, its just a 
fact of history.

--
Nic