[Glorantha] Lunar Mysticism

[Simon Hibbs]

It's been a few weeks since tentacles, and I've had a chance to read
through the Tentacles preview edition of ILH2. There's a lot of realy
excellent stuff in there, and the material on Luinar philosophy is
just a part of it. I also had a chance to flick through Revealed
Mythologies at long last (thanks Trotsky), and in particular the
eastern mysticism material which was also a great help.

The recent disucssion on mysticism was killed stone dead by
anticipation of the upcoming Lunar material. What's the point of
speculating in the dark when you'll have hard facts to work with so
soon? What I'll try to do is illuminate the previous discussion based
on my reading of the material in ILH2.

In Revealed Mythologies the Unknowable All is called the Atrilith. For
the Lunars this is Taraltara, which is beyond all comprehension or
description (but watch me try). From Taraltara down the chain the
other entities are comprehensible at a 'basic' level, where Taraltara
is not.

ILH2 confirms that Sedenya is the Great Self of the goddess in her
various incarnations and is, I suppose, the closes that the Lunars
have to the Great Buddha. Realising Sedenya is I suppose comparable to
realising Buddha Conciousness. ILH2 also comes closer than any other
Gloranthan publication to defining exactly what Chaos is, at a
metaphysical level. Here's my understanding of it.

It seems to me that where the Atrilith/Taraltara is the unknowable
All, in order for it to be All it must encompass all concievable
things including it's own opposite - the denial of it, the nothingness
'before' or 'after' it. All these things must be a part of it, while
according to logic being apart and seperate from it. The All is the
union and reconciliation of these things, yet because it is everything
it must also be the irreconcilable division of all things too. Gibber!
The Lunars call this paradox Agataraltara, or Good Chaos. The chaos
intruding into the material world is the material and psychic
manifestation of this impossible, unsolvable, insidious paradox. Yet
chaos is also the source of all creation, for the All must both be
eternal and yet to be all things it must also be the opposite of
eternal, which is to say it must be created, and so the world of
Glorantha  (the world of creation) is made possible by the paradox of
Chaos.

Greg has said that the Lunar Goddes is the goddess of Time. I didn't
understand that then, but now I do. I only realy 'got it' a few days
ago. It comes back to something I realised about Gloranthan myth a
long time ago - that the god time isn't in the past. It's timeless
because it doesn't live in history, it lives in the moment. The God
Time is outside time because it is in the Now.

If Chaos is both the birth and death of the cosmos, and yet the cosmos
is eternal and extends infinitely into the past and present (to be All
things it must be so), then we can't talk about the cosmos being
created at some point in the past, or destroyed at some point in the
future. The only way to resolve this paradox is if that creation and
destruction is universal and omnipresent. It is the perpetual,
immediate process of Time itself in which each moment is born anew,
and also instantly destroyed forever. Time is the engine that
processes the cosmos, manufacturing the future from the past, and
Chaos is what makes that possible. Imagine what it must be like to
command an engine that powerful.

In ILH2 the writeup of Agataraltara says that she offers enormous
power, yet those who make use of them inevitably find that their
powers betray them and cause enormous harm. I think the problem is
that this power of creation and destruction is just too powerful.
There is a saying that every creative act is also an act of
destruction, because in creating something new you inevitably destroy
what was there before. Creating a statue destroys the block of marble
from which it is cut. Painters grind up plants and minerals to make
their paints. IMHO Agataraltara is the creative and destructive powers
of Taraltara. To use her powers to creat is also to use them to
destroy. The powers available are so far out of scale with any
concievable problem that a mortal could deploy them against that
unimagined consequences and unintended side effects run riot
throughout creation.

So it sems that Taraltara is the All, and Agataraltara is the opposite
of the All, yet also part of it. It's a more sophisticated scheme that
the one I was using previously (That Chaos is the destruction or
absence of the Great Self), and yet I think recognsably the same
thing. I still think that chaotic beings have no Great Self but also
recognise that this is perhaps a crude way to think about them. I
think the 'passionate denial of the moral value of the cosmos' that
Peter Metcalfe talked bout is actualy the same thing, because all you
have to do is substitute 'Great Self' or 'All' for 'Cosmos' and you're
there. They have denied their connection to the All, you might say
they have sacrificed it, yet the All encompasses even Chaos. It is
impossible to concisely define or categorise Chaos because it is so
destructive, it even destroys it's own definition.

On Sheng Seleris it seemshe is not Chaotic, but only because he has
not sacrificed or lost his Great Self after all. What he did was
refuse Transcendence, but apparently even for him there is the
possibility of redemption. Under different circumstances, I suppose he
might change his mind.

Thinking about creation from destruction got me thinking about the
nature of the moon as a created world. That got me thinking about what
the Lunars (by which I mean the mysticaly enlightened, transcended
Lunar beings) are realy up to. More later.


Simon Hibbs