False Machine: Memory

Showing posts with label Memory. Show all posts

Thursday, 23 June 2022

We need to be churning more oceans!

We need to be churning more oceans! We need to be fisting more demons! We need to be killing more sons! We need to be hurling more weapons!

Part three of a short series about the elements of Proto Indo-European Mythology that haven't made it into the fantasy noosphere, or haven't made it as much as one would think, or have made it quite a lot but still a look at the reconstructed "originals" can be illuminating.

WE NEED TO BE CHURNING MORE OCEANS

"Although the concept of elevation through intoxicating drink is a nearly universal motif, a Proto-Indo-European myth of the "cycle of the mead", originally proposed by Georges Dumézil and further developed by Jarich G. Oosten (1985), is based on the comparison of Indic and Norse mythologies. In both traditions, gods and demons must cooperate to find a sacred drink providing immortal life. The magical beverage is prepared from the sea, and a serpent (Vāsuki or Jörmungandr) is involved in the quest. The gods and demons eventually fight over the magical potion and the former, ultimately victorious, deprive their enemy of the elixir of life."

Already something of a failure because this concerns not an element of PIE Myth that hasn't been covered by the Genres but one that fits almost too-well into D&D specifically.

Elixirs and potions are happily set within the D&D cosmology so the idea of a super, super super divine level potion fits right in. After all if you can make a potion of this or that of various strength and effectiveness then why not have there be a potion of immortality which made the deathless gods what they are? And a highly interpretable boundary between powerful mortals and gods is something D&D handles pretty well.

I can imagine a 'potion of ageless immortality' being a super-high-level item, combine it with a potion of eternal regeneration and boom, you've got yourself a god.

BUT, one element that’s missing is the potions cosmological nature; it’s not just some potion that came from wherever - it was made through the combined efforts of a super-serpent, plus the beings we now call gods, plus the beings we now call demons - they made it together through some incredible process that neither group could have done alone.

And then the gods stole it, or tricked the Demons into not drinking it, and that’s where 'Gods' and 'Demons' come from, the trickers and the tricked.

Gods as original adventurers indeed.

Of course if we view this from inside the resulting mythos then the Demons were very bad and the Gods HAD to do what they did - BUT THEY WOULD SAY THAT WOULND'T THEY??? Reading back the difference between what would be gods and what would be demons looks more like the difference between two street gangs

What does it mean, or what would it mean in an imagined world, this war between the deathless trickers and the, not-quite-mortal, but definitely not deathless or ageless, tricked?

While the sacrifice myth gave the roots of reality as a kind of annihilation of self/twin, the churning elixir myth gives the roots of divine order as a kind of scam, in which we applaud the scammers because they were more clever and because they were/are sort-of on our side, or at least more on our side than whatever 'Demons' are.

The benefits of this crime being an escape into deathlessness, into eternity.

I suppose the requirement of the unified action of Gods and Demons explains why they are no longer making the 'good' version of the immortality potion - that lot will never work together again. yet at the same time it suggests a way of making more; by some third party, (the adventurers or main character of the story) tricking both groups into once again churning the cosmic ocean.

WE NEED TO BE ACCIDENTALLY KILLING OUR SONS (AND POSSIBLY BURNING OUR FORTS)

"In the Ulster Cycle, Connla, son of the Irish hero Cú Chulainn, who was raised abroad in Scotland, unknowingly confronts his father and is killed in the combat; Ilya Muromets must kill his own son, who was also raised apart, in Russian epic poems; the Germanic hero Hildebrant inadvertently kills his son Hadubrant in the Hildebrandslied; and the Iranian Rostam unknowingly confronts his son Sohrab in the eponymous epic of the Shāhnāmeh. King Arthur is forced to kill his son Mordred in battle who was raised far away on the Orkney Islands; and in greek mythology an intrigue leads the hero Theseus to kill his son Hippolytus; when the lie is finally exposed, Hippolytus is already dead.

....

According to Mallory and Adams, the legend "places limitations on the achievement of warrior prowess, isolates the hero from time by cutting off his generational extension, and also re-establishes the hero's typical adolescence by depriving him of a role (as father) in an adult world"."

It might be bad to be a PIE hero but if you are the son of a PIE hero.. run! Run for the hills! Except don’t because you will fall over and lose your memory, be raised by hill people and become their hero, try to free them from the tyranny of the river-valley lord and fight him in single combat only to die and fall over again, mooning him, revealing the birth mark on your arse that confirm that yes, he just killed another son, sky-father damn it!

A key point for us is that killing the son, in Indo-European terms, is like 'killing the parents' in children’s fiction; it enables the adventure.

Sane parents stop their children going on adventures so for the story, or game, to happen, and for the Hero to happen, they need to be missing, powerless, incompetent or dead. (Like most Disney parents).

Likewise the D&D adventurer will ultimately 'age out', (though in practice they remain near-psychotic self-driven loners in otherwise communal societies), but if they were real they would probably gain families and embed themselves in a socio-political milieux, as people tend to do as they age.

How then may they adventure? You can do socio-political court dramas, but how can they meat-and-potatoes, risk-and-exploration adventure?

Clearly by accidently killing their son and/or heir in tragic and fated circumstances, this then ending their 'family line' (assuming a patriarchal society) this disconnects them from the world of line-building, politics and embedded power structures - a good time then to go on a grief-stricken old guy adventure.

How to do this with an entire adventuring party? Simply have them ALL accidentally kill each others children in the same fated event and/or situation. It’s an utterly batshit idea but not that much more batshit than the sheer number of accidental son-murders in the Eurasian mythos.

Alternate versions could be the accidental but fated self-destruction of whatever it was the adventurers invested in that bound them to society - a fort, wizards college, thieves guild or whatever.

WE NEED TO BE FISTING MORE DEMONS WE NEED TO BE BINDING THINGS MORE IMPOSSIBLY!

I am sorry I could not find any examples of Jamshid fisting Ahriman, I feel as if I have let you down

"In both accounts, an authority figure forces the evil entity into submission by inserting his hand into the being's orifice (in Fenrir's case the mouth, in Ahriman's the anus) and losing it"

Firstly people aren't being swallowed by monsters enough, instead of just killed.

Secondly the idea of immobilising a way too high level being by SHOVING your hand UP INSIDE IT (an ex-friend once told me if I was bitten by a Pitbull, "just shove your finger up its arse and it will let go", I never had a chance to try it out), allowing the creature to be bound or the victim extracted.

Then - disastrously but perhaps predictably, it goes (slightly) wrong, resulting in the loss of only one hand. This feels like a good and appropriate mythic level beginning for a low level hero, a level-one adventure even. You get a major win over a too-high-level foe but at the cost of a major sacrifice and a big name-imbuing mythic incident to start of your career.

"leprosy hand guy who bound that monster that time"

"stank hand who fisted a demon and trapped it"

Combine this with the arrival of a fated weapon, with some truly exciting powers but probably also a doom (almost certainly involving killing your own son by mistake), and you have a very nice set up for a P.I.E hero - one hand, magic mace or sword, binder of monsters, fated doom.

Furthermore, investigation of the binding of Fenris myth (where Tyr got his hand bitten off), lead me to another mythic fragment;

"The Gods had attempted to bind Fenrir twice before with huge chains of metal, but Fenrir was able to break free both times. Therefore, they commissioned the dwarves to forge a chain that was impossible to break. To create a chain to achieve the impossible, the dwarves fashioned the chain out of six supposedly impossible things:

The sound of a cat's footfall
The beard of a woman
The roots of a mountain
The sinews of a bear
The breath of a fish
The spittle of a bird

Therefore, even though Gleipnir is as thin as a silken ribbon, it is stronger than any iron chain. It was forged by the dwarves in their underground realm of Niðavellir."

And this reminded me of a half-memory of something from Hinduism which I remembered as being a hero binding a demon with sea-foam. I searched for this for literally minutes and found that actually it was Indra, and not binding but a weapon;

"In the epic, there is a very brief description about the story of Namuchi and Indra. According to the story, once Namuchi hid himself in the rays of Surya due to fear of Indra.

Indra then promised him that he will not kill him in day or night, or with any weapon which is wet or dry. However on a foggy day, Indra chopped off Namuchi's head using foam of water.

From that day onwards, Namuchi's head followed Indra reminding him that he was killer of a friend. Indra then went to Brahma to find solution for this problem.

Brahma told him to bathe in the holy water of Aruna river which was purified due to confluence of river Saraswati. Indra then did the same and got rid of this sin."

The concept and gameability of the impossible binding is not something I remember seeing much in fiction or games. (It feels familiar, but, like with early wizards towers, when I look in my memory for specific examples I can't find much).

This also seems like it would be a good fit for D&D, for the 'paradox binding/assembly' the collect-these-impossible-things is essentially a fetch quest which could range from very high magic to cunning folk trickery depending on how you approached it. For the sea-foam equivalent impossible natural binding, you need to find a wonder-worker, or super-smith (who probably stole their powers from a devil or demon, that’s another possible PIE myth), who can bash together the wind and rain or whatever it is you need to make your thing.

I am interested if anyone in the comments has any other versions of the impossible binding motif or ideas about how it could be used.

WE NEED TO BE HURLING OUR WEAPONS INTO THE SEA

"In the Ossetic Nart saga, the sword of Batradz is dragged into the sea after his death, and the British King Arthur throws his legendary sword Excalibur back into the lake from which it initially came. The Indic Arjuna is also instructed to throw his bow Gandiva into the sea at the end of his career, and weapons were frequently thrown into lakes, rivers or bogs as a form of prestige offering in Bronze and Iron Age Europe."

More magical weapons should be loaners imho, you get access to them by completing a quest, or by fulfilling some other strange circumstance, and get to keep them till thy work is done - this also means you can have more hot babes levitating and emerging from water. Probably the clear reflective water is a gate to the Otherworld and as somewhat god-imbued things, many weapons both come from and return to that place.

In-game the fact that it’s a 'loaner' limits the PCs freedom, but hopefully in a specific and self-selected way so that it’s still interesting.

The question of when to 'throw back' the sword, in game, is interesting. In legend it seems to happen around the point of death; the heroes whole life was the mission and it wasn't just one thing, like "kill this dragon/monster" but a more-grand 'restoration of order' deal, like with Arthur, or Arjunas taking part in the Kurukshettra.

The quest of disposing or returning the magic weapon of a hero, (without using it), is an interesting one, and the idea of the heroes super-weapon turning into an adhesive cursed weapon if it is kept too long or mis-used.

And of a PC being given a way too powerful weapon at the start of their career, which they have to 'grow into' and which they can only keep so long as they fulfil its purpose, which will also lead them to some sort of doom

really every magical weapon above a certain level should have a specific end that it has to have once it has fulfilled its purpose

"Reflexes of an ancestral cult of the magical sword have been proposed in the legends of Excalibur and Durandal (the weapon of Roland, said to have been forged by the mythical Wayland the Smith). Among North Iranians, Herodotus described the Scythian practice of worshiping swords as manifestations of "Ares" in the 5th century BC, and Ammianus Marcellinus depicted the Alanic custom of thrusting swords into the earth and worshiping them as "Mars" in the 4th century AD."

Should our heroes be worshipping their swords? If they all have a bit of the war-god, or death, the Twin, inside them, and if they are related to the Otherworld and made by the power of the Smith who tricked the Devil, then are they not themselves sacred things? And is shoving one into the Earth-Mother then not essentially making a kind of shrine? A sword is after all a kind of boundary between this world and the Otherworld, opening the gate between here and there, it surface shining just like the lake you will one day throw it into.

Tuesday, 14 June 2022

Murder at the Dawn of Time

The stories start to vary right from the start but one thing that links them all together is the killing of a brother and their butchering, the spilling out of bones and organs, as an act of creation with which reality was made.

"as the result of the original dismemberment of Yemo: his flesh usually becomes the earth, his hair grass, his bone yields stone, his blood water, his eyes the sun, his mind the moon, his brain the clouds, his breath the wind, and his head the heavens."

Probably you are so familiar with this concept from mythology that you haven't stopped to think about how utterly strange it is. But to go a bit deeper;

You are moving though a void, a placeless place

"neither non-being was nor being was at that time; there was not the air, nor the heaven beyond it... Neither death was nor the immortal then, nor was there the mark of night and day...".

You are not alive for nothing has ever lived nor are you dead, for nothing yet has ever l died. Neither are you immortal, like the gods, for there are none.

You simply are. Yet you are not alone for beside you is another. They are blood of your blood. A brother. Often they are the only other thing. (Sometimes there is a third and also a cow, but we will get to that later). Sometimes they are a giant, sometimes an hermaphrodite or multi-gendered being, but the one they they always are is your twin. Their name in fact is 'twin'. Yours is 'Man'.

Amidst this absolute nullity you turn on your twin, your other self, the only other thing there is, and you kill them. Then you cut them open, or since there is nothing to cut with perhaps you tear them open, and you reach into their body, steaming with blood, which is creation, and you butcher them, pulling out organs, bones, blood, tendons, hair, eyes, brain. And you cast or place these things into the nothingness and now instead of nothing there is reality. Earth, sky, sea, air, sun, moon, stars, grass and animals, all of this is built or formed from the flesh of your slain twin. And amongst all this you walk, the first man, who is also the first priest, for you made the first sacrifice and that is the nature of a priest, amidst a reality made from the corpse-flesh of you dead twin.

Of all the world creation myths, this one might be the most insanely fucked up, its also a common root or tributary concept for a bunch of cultures across the Indo-European range. For the Norse the twin was Ymir, father of giants. The Romans likely historicised their own version into Romulus and Remus, and the first romans considered themselves Remans, children of Remus, not of Romulus. In the Vedic and Persian versions the twin is Yemno, another derivative of 'Twin', and becomes the lord of the underworld, first to die and god of the dead. The killer is Manu and yes it does look like we named the species after this one guy.

"The association of Mánu with the ritual of sacrifice is so strong that those who do not sacrifice are named amanuṣāḥ, which means 'not belonging to Mánu', 'unlike Mánu', or 'inhuman'."

I think about how terrible it must be to kill your brother, the only other person who exists, the only person who can truly recognise you, and then to walk through a cosmos made of their sacrificed flesh.

It makes sense if you imagine a herding people where cattle are wealth and the most valuable and immediate source of survival. Cutting open an animal on the empty steppe, its blood steaming in the air while the butcher spreads out the parts on the hide and hands this part and that to this or that kin. Truly life through sacrifice.

Variations;

There is a third guy there, and possibly also a cow. At some point the cow gets stolen and the third guy goes and steals it back. Honestly it sounds better in the original versions.

The ritual cow stealing seems to be a restoration of order motif and the third guy is the first Warrior, with the Cow sometimes symbolising the peasant or 'grower'.

So now we have a traditional proto Indo-Euopean tripartite division of Priests/Warriors/Peasants, or if we are feeling funky, Kings (Yemno was the first king)/Priests/ Warriors/Peasants.

Sometimes 'Twin' is multi-gendered or you both are, or you are somehow the same being;

"Some scholars have proposed that the primeval being Yemo was depicted as a two-fold hermaphrodite rather than a twin brother of Manu, both forming indeed a pair of complementary beings entwined together. The Germanic names Ymir and Tuisto were understood as twin, bisexual or hermaphrodite, and some myths give a sister to the Vedic Yama, also called Twin and with whom incest is discussed. In this interpretation, the primordial being may have self-sacrificed, or have been divided in two, a male half and a female half, embodying a prototypal separation of the sexes."

WHAT CAN WE DRAW FROM ALL THIS?

Its all quite familiar from mythology, or from the mythology of fantasy. There are probably hundreds of fantasy paracosms which begin with some binary separation between different opposites.

Quite a lot of deep viscerality has been lost and we never get to see this from the first person perspective.

Viscerailty;

its quite different if you think deeply about what it would actually be like to physically destroy your own twin, your own blood, the only thing that is like you and that can know you as totally as you know them.

And to think about the blood and the guts of the matter. The butchered body cooling on the steppe, everything around you being made of the body of the sacrificed twin. Imagine what it would be like to fully believe that as your cosmic mythology - every time you look at any material thing, you are looking at the flesh of some unknowable corpse, to which you are distantly related. An uncle long removed.

Man is the first Killer and Killing is creation.

and what does it say about a culture that this primal violence lies close to its root, or what does it say about this primal self-destroying, bloody violence and butchery that it can help to form a culture that goes on to influence so much

its a pretty powerful and irresolvable moral maelstrom

The only part of current culture which I'm familiar with which deals with butchery, and especially the sacrifice and butchery of humans, is serial killer fiction

specifically one of the first things that came to mind was From Hell, the very upsetting scene where we watch Jack the Ripper take the body of his victim apart and lay out the pieces in ritual formation while mumbling and going mad/embarking on an act of ritual magic which allows him to walk though the walls of reality

of course, if all creation is made of sacrifice, then any such sacrifice is an act of sub-creation, and it makes sense that it would act as a kind of spell or prayer - altering or sustaining reality depending on perception

Manu as a Character;

We have a shitload, really an epically insane shitload of Storm Gods, Sky Gods, Sky Fathers and their derivatives, and even more, truly a cornucopia of 'Strikers', the thunderbolt wielding hero who goes around killing monsters, releasing the waters etc.

I don't think I've ever seen a story where the Manu figure, the first Priest and the first Sacrificer, who made the world from the body of 'Twin', is even in the story, let alone the main character.

What would that story even be like? Or that game?

Being the first Priest in a reality which you essentially part-created with the flesh of your Twin and teaching all these.. descendants? The children of Manu? Made up partly of your seed and partly of the flesh of Yemno, all about the Truth of Sacrifice and how Lord Yama, who takes the souls of the Dead in his place beyond the Canine Guardian and the River, is actually kind of the spirit(?) of your Twin, whose body made Reality and you also small man.

(I'm still kind of tripping that we didn't change the name of the species in all that time. Must be one of those Querty-Keyboard situations where its just too much bother once you start.)

"Oh yeah say hello to the spirit of my twin on his throne below. You know he's the only reason you can die? He was the first one to do it, which allowed time and stuff to start. I killed him. We are walking on his guts atm actually. Anyway say Hi when you see him."

More Cattle Raids;

Seems like there should be a lot more cattle raiding in both fantasy and gaming. Its absolute bedrock for the Indo-European tradition and has carried over all the way from the steppe to a few centuries ago.

But when have I seen a D&D module or adventure or a computer game, or even a scene in a fantasy novel where "Hey we have to do a cattle raid. Partly to re-enact the core of our ancient creation myth but also just to steal cows." - NEVER. Not once.

More Sacrificing;

Neither have I seen (much) sacrifice in either games or fantasy. I will grant you there is the pretty-common evil-human sacrifice which the Heroes need to stop. That one is a classic. And bits and pieces of soothsaying from the Roman/Euro tradition, but its not common to see sacrifice as a thing which the protagonists are doing, or have to do, really want to do and consider not only normal but even sacred/magical.

As the children of Manu we really should be sacrificing more. A LOT more. Gotta get those numbers up.

If all of reality is the result of sacrificing some essential meta-being, then surely lesser sacrifices can create, or change, lesser aspects of reality? After all, butchery is genesis.

Tuesday, 31 May 2022

Gilding the Shadow

- yanking the less-used parts of the Indo-European Mythos for our Frankenstein version of the same.

We seem to have accidentally/on purpose reconstructed elements of the proto Indo-European mythos in our current fantasy worlds.

It happened strangely. The tides of history rolled over cultures, avoiding some until late, preserving others. We have the Norse myths, largely textualised by Christians, the Roman myths left behind after the Empire receded. We have fragments of pseudo-celtic myth through the Arthurian stories and we have very late additions, fragments of the old pagan religion of Lithuania wiped out close to the renaissance.

And we have the 'key to all mythologies' the Indian Vedic religion, which the west largely has access to due to European empires bumping into India. And we have the Iranian stuff and a bunch of other smaller things I forgot.

But in the anglo-influenced 'western' worlds of fiction the big ones are Greece, Rome and 'Vikings'. Plust maybe a dab of King Arthur. The Greek and Roman mythos are the safe spaces to play in fiction during the Renaissance, I think the Norse comes in later and well, to cut a long story short; Mallory > Sir Walter Scott > a jewish depression baby in New York making comics about King Arthur because he saw him in movies growing up and that means he's American Culture.

Add in another major point of fissure and reconstruction in the 60s probably and bobs your uncle. Or to be more precise; Sky Father sees all, Earth Mother nourishes, the hammer/lightning wielding hero fights the serpent and releases the waters (thanks), elves or whatever come from the otherworld which might also be the land of the dead, guarded by a river and a big dog (don't forget your ferryman coins), and that land is ruled by a grim dude who might be the Sky Fathers brother, who he may have also killed to start the world, and that sacrifice was witnessed by the first priest who might kind of be the first man? His name was Manu anyway. Regardless, the world will end in a giant super-fight between an Archdemon and a another hero of some kind but before that happens remember to praise the dawn, be careful around snakes as they are immortal, respect the spirits in trees and throw your sword, or bronze axe or whatever, into a pool of water because those are also gateways to the Otherworld. Also rivers have sexy spirits in them.

All of the above paragraph are from the reconstructed Indo-European mythos (accuracy levels = unknown without time travel but fuck it), and all were essentially divided up by the inheriting and influenced cultures, who respectively went super fucking hard on different aspects, a well as altering, swapping back and forth etc.

Basically imagine that the Indo Europeans cooked a bunch of cultures a meal (probably a nightmare banquet), and then every subsequent culture started adding to and changing parts. Some cultures grew, or their own cultural influence was vast, affecting many people, though they changed a lot, others were small but relatively unchanged. Most were lost.

Then from about 1500 to 1900 a Euro-oriented culture says "Fuck this", takes every remaining fragment they can find, puts it all in a blender, mixes it and starts telling stories based on the resulting taste.

And oddly enough, a lot of fictional properties.. end up producing bizarre ghost-echo facsimiles of the original myths.

Lot of mixed metaphors there and a long explanation for what's a simple essential concept; since we are in some way vibing with the shadow of the Indo-European mythos, I would like to reach back to find a few of the less-popular fragments of the assumed original and to bring them back to gild the shadow of our stately dreams.

HORNY DAWN

What if Apollo was a hot babe who was also kinda sexually predatory? Well! By frankensteining various derivations of the Dʰuǵh₂tḗr Diwós, "Sky Daughter", child of the Sky, and merging them into one horrific glorious post-indo-european whole, we can do just that!

From the Vedas we can take the positive light-bringer elements that later got appended to Apollo in the west;

"Ushas (Vedic Sanskrit: उषस् / uṣás) is a Vedic goddess of dawn in Hinduism.[1][2] She repeatedly appears in the Rigvedic hymns, states David Kinsley, where she is "consistently identified with dawn, revealing herself with the daily coming of light to the world, driving away oppressive darkness, chasing away evil demons, rousing all life, setting all things in motion, sending everyone off to do their duties". She is the life of all living creatures, the impeller of action and breath, the foe of chaos and confusion, the auspicious arouser of cosmic and moral order called the Ṛta in Hinduism."

From KuRaPro

"She dispels darkness, reveals treasures and truths that have been hidden, illuminates the world as it is. .... She symbolizes reality, is a marker of time and a reminder to all that "life is limited on earth". She sees everything as it is, and she is the eye of the gods, according to hymns 7.75–77."

Not only that but we can add that classic Indo-European element - COW POWER.

"Ushas is described in Vedic texts as riding in a shining chariot drawn by golden-red horses or cows, a beautiful maiden bedecked with jewels, smiling and irresistibly attractive, who brings cheer to all those who gaze upon her.

"Hymn 6.64 associates her with wealth and light, while hymn 1.92 calls her the "mother of cows" and one, who like a cow, gives to the benefit of all people."

Good so far, but there to this we can add the Greek elements of beauty;

"The dawn goddess Eos was almost always described with rosy fingers or rosy forearms as she opened the gates of heaven for the Sun to rise. In Homer,[27] her saffron-colored robe is embroidered or woven with flowers; while the singer in the Homeric Hymn to Helios calls her ῥοδόπηχυν (ACC), "rosy-armed" as does Sappho; rosy-fingered and with golden arms"

....

"The delicate and fragile beauty of her appearance seems to be in total contrast with the carnal nature that was often attributed to her in myth and literature."

Because the Greek Dawn Goddess is horny on main;

"Eos fell in love with mortal men several times, and would abduct them in similar manner to how male gods did mortal women. Her most notable mortal lover is the Trojan prince Tithonus, for whom she ensured the gift of immortality, but not eternal youth, leading to him aging without dying for an eternity. In another story, she carried off the Athenian Cephalus against his will, but eventually let him go for he ardently wished to be returned to his wife, though not before she denigrated her to him, leading to the couple parting ways."

The same energy seems to have been refracted in different cultures. Especially in the Greek/Roman mythos the original was split, order reason and hope ending up with Apollo, while irresistable beauty leads to Aphrodite, together they consume most of the original god elements leaving only a vague Dawn Goddsee behind.

But what if we had ALL OF THESE TOGETHER? We could have a super-hot golden rosy-fingered, saffron veiled Dawn riding her chariot pulled by red-gold cows across the firmament, upholding reason and order, defeating chaos, but also SUPER HOT and horny as fuck, and jealous, just abducting hot guys and not letting them go until they admit she is hotter than their wives.

THE FIRE IN WATER MYTH - THE WELL OF ETERNITY

"Another reconstructed myth is the story of the fire in the waters. It depicts a fiery divine being named *H₂epom Nepōts ('Descendant of the Waters') who dwells in waters, and whose powers must be ritually gained or controlled by a hero who is the only one able to approach it"

This one doesn't have the same "condesive" power as Sexy Dawn but it does have a particular poetic beauty which I have not seen replicated in fiction.

Fire in general is interesting in the reconstructed Indo-European mythos. 'Eternal flames' are common. The Zoroastrian seem to have inherited one part of that and in middle ages Lithuanian culture warriors for the church said it was easier to shut down the sacred eternal flames than to cut down the sacred groves as the fires gave themselves away by their brightness. Fire is also associated with sacrifice, which is a heavy, heavy strand in the mythos. Reality began with a sacrifice and the sacrifice of animals and animal flesh remains important, usually they are shared with or sent to the gods by fire, the Fire-God forming a kind of link between the mortal and divine realms.

"In one Vedic hymn Apām Napāt is described as emerging from the water, golden, and "clothed in lightning", which has been conjectured to be a reference to fire."

Nechtan of Irish Myth guarded a sacred well;

"Nechtain son of bold Labraid

whose wife was Boand, I aver;

a secret well there was in his stead,

from which gushed forth every kind of mysterious evil.

There was none that would look to its bottom

but his two bright eyes would burst:

if he should move to left or right,

he would not come from it without blemish."

By TomTC

Another well from the same mythos;

"Connla's well, loud was its sound,

was beneath the blue-skirted ocean:

six streams, unequal in fame,

rise from it, the seventh was Sinann.

The nine hazels of Crimall the sage

drop their fruits yonder under the well:

they stand by the power of magic spells

under a darksome mist of wizardry."

And from there to the numerous wells in Norse mythology. The Urðarbrunnr, the Well of Fate where the Norns go to weave the Skien of men;

Two sections of the book Skáldskaparmál reference Urðarbrunnr. The first reference is in section 49, where a fragment of a work by the 10th century skald Kormákr Ögmundarson is recited in explaining how "Odin's fire" is a kenning for a sword. The passage reads "A sword is Odin's fire, as Kormak said: Battle raged when the feeder of Grid's steed [wolf], he who waged war, advanced with ringing Gaut [Odin's] fire." and that Urðr "rose from the well."

and "Mímisbrunnr", the Well of Wisdom which seems to have a similar nature

"High explains that, beneath this root" [of Yggdrasil] "is Mímisbrunnr and that the well contains "wisdom and intelligence" and "the master of the well is called Mimir. He is full of learning because he drinks of the well from the horn Giallarhorn. All-father went there and asked for a single drink from the well, but he did not get one until he placed his eye as a pledge.""

What do we get if we condense all of these? A primal fire, perhaps that of the first sacrifice, hidden beneath water. A deep water it seems, and dark.

In many versions the three Fates (very common across the Mythos) guard or dwell nearby. In some particular animals live there, the original swans from which all others descend, or the Salmon of Wisdom, who eat the magical Hazel Nuts which drop into the water.

There is always fire or brightness under the water, a God, the flashing of Salmon, or the knowledge of Fate. Probably you are going to lose at least one eye, likely both. Odin sacrifices one to drink from the water, those who look into the well of Nechtain have their eyes melt out.

A God arises "golden, and clothed in lightning". Apām Napāt in the Vedas and also in early Zoroastrianism. Deep water, bright eternal fire, knowledge of Fate, a connection to the Divine and divine sacrifice, and the sacrifice of eyes for those who look.

Of course both Warhammer and Warcraft have their own 'Well of Eternity'. In Warhammer Tzeetch throws his chief Demon in to discover eternal knowledge and ends up with a mutated Kairos Fateweaver, who can see past and future at the same time, lies and tells the truth at once and who is curiously blind to the present.

(I am out of time for this post but may return to the subject in future).

Wednesday, 2 August 2017

There's Probably No Pre-History?

I think the term 'Pre-History' should be changed to 'Pre-Record History' or maybe 'Inaccessible History'.

Why?

PART ONE - WHAT IS 'THE RECORD'?

Ok, so what can we agree is history? Let's go through it one-by-one.

Writing - if someone wrote something down and we can get it, especially they themselves were deliberately trying to record their own past, then everyone can agree that yes, this is definitely history.

This is kind of a shit definition since even people who would strongly defend it can probably think of things that are definitely history but that don't involve writing. But it’s also the clearest and most inarguable one that has the most consensus. Like, most people would agree that things other than a painting can be art, but everyone agrees that paintings are art.

Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was a bit of a dick, asked the question "Does Africa have a history?*", which is a typically dickish way of putting it since most people will immediately say "Yes of course Africa has a history, even the non-literate bits that didn't write anything down."

So there is something to examine here in the way we think about the validity of the record. If the subject we are talking about is near-modern people who were non-literate, or mainly non-literate, and who we interacted with in a creepy and colonialist way, pretty much everyone will be willing to say that group has a history, even if it’s unclear to us. We are assuming and accepting the existence of a history which is present but which we cannot directly perceive.

Whereas if we are talking about actual deep-history non-literate stone-age cultures, well we didn't colonise those people and we have no perceivable relationship with them so we are happier dumping them into 'pre-history', which is a slightly different mental category.

(And just to be clear, I don’t think it’s bad to have a ‘hard’ definition that might be unfair or limited in some way. The world needs hard definitions, without them things become a bit of a blur and people don’t even know what they are arguing over any more.)

Oral Stories - still the baseline of intra-person communication for most people on earth. Much more low-fidelity than writing but capable of doing some crazy stuff (Polynesian oceanic navigation, aboriginal Australian stories that seem to record deep-historical geological events). You can run a pretty damn complex society on oral transmission alone. Insanely and utterly near-impossible to ever get an accurate date out of them.

Big Stone Things - If someone spent a lot of time building something FUCKING MASSIVE like a pyramid or a coliseum, then even if it doesn’t have any writing on it, or if it does but we can't really understand what it says. Or if we have sweet fuck all about the exact and specific reasons that it exists (i.e. Stonehenge or anything Neolithic), we still never claim that it is anything except history. Because look at it; its huge and made of stone.

Pictures and Art - Ok but to what extent. So a European oil painting or a Mughal Miniature is history. Are those French cave-paintings history? Probably? How about a piece of bone with cross-hatch scratches and ochre marks? Mmaybe?

That brings us to;

Small Made Things that Probably Aren't Art - An Assyrian clay tablet with a bit of Gilgamesh on it must be history because that’s a thing, and writing, and the writing is itself about past events, making it double-history. History Plus. What about a Greek Cup with some gods and centaurs on it? Ok that's in. What about an unmarked clay cup but the tag on it says it was excavated from so-and-so level on such-a-date in the ruins of Mojinder-Daro? What about an unmarked clay cup? What about part of an unmarked clay cup? What about a single shard of worked clay, but you know where it came from?

Bodies - So a bunch of Iron Age bodies in a bog, with particular weapon wounds and forensically-identifiable damage so we can see that they have been in a battle and estimate the kinds of combat and weapons used; that's almost certainly history. I mean the wounds are a record of a precise series of events. Like words. So they must be history.

That guy that got frozen in ice with his hair and tattoos and whatever. That should be history probably? We can read the wear on his teeth, see the fractures in his bones that healed and puzzle over his tattoos.

Here's a question for you - at what point, from what origins, in what context and of what subject do a bunch of bones move from being a record of history to something other than that? When they are from an indeterminate person? When from a non-human hominid? A near-human hominid that could probably speak a bit?

Genetic History - So this is a very weird one. I suppose we can break it into two parts.

Analysing the Genetics of Old Bodies - This is almost certainly history. We can slot it in as an expansion of or improvement of forensic and cultural Archaeology. If we can look at tooth wear patterns and shards of iron in a wound then adding genetic knowledge to that seems reasonable.

Reading Our Genetic Book - The archaeology of our own bodies. So the ways in which this is like history is that its literally a code - information. An abstract piece of knowledge you can print out on a sheet and which says *only what it says*. Once recorded and understood, the information is the information.

The way in which it is unlike written history is that in using it to build an image of the past, we are creating this imaginary supposition, a winding webwork of descent and change which we try to overlay on, and adapt to, what we know from other sources. The way we interpret this is unlike other forms of historical analysis.

Part 2 -"PREHISTORY WAS JUST A BIG WASH OF PEOPLE BEING HUNTER-GATHERERS."

NO IT WAS NOT AND COULD NOT HAVE BEEN.

First-

Look at the enormous cognitive, cultural and behavioural differences between people living at a stone-age level of technology in our formally-recorded history. By the standards of 'Pre-History', all these people are simply 'Hunter-Gatherers'.

Hugh Trevor-Roper said another interesting thing, which I've mainly forgotten; "It is not in how they get but how they spend that men show their nature*". Hunter-Gatherers might have done relatively similar things to get their living surplus but they spent that surplus in becoming radically culturally and maybe even cognitively different to each other.

I'm just going to assert at this point that the world had a greater diversity of culture and cognitive styles before the advent of civilisation, with a lower total population, than it did after, and that the growth of civilisation, which has raised the population level, has also reduced diversity of thought and experience.

And I'm not doing evidence because this has taken too long already, because I'm not smart or well-read enough to do it and because it would take years to really do it properly.

So, having blindly accepted that, we now know that 'pre-history' had a great diversity of particular and specific cultures, more than we have now. The societies and groups of that time had specific structures of authority and specific cultural desires. They wanted different things and saw the world in different ways. They had cause to co-operate and cause to compete, and did so in specific ways.

Second -

There are no non-specific actions in the human past. 'Humanity' never left Africa, particular groups of humans did, and of those groups one particular group must have been the first, and that particular group must have had an authority structure; a way of making decisions. And that means there is a particular range of times and places you could go and see, directly, the decision structures that lead to humans leaving Africa.

You could tell a story about it about a particular group of people, and it would be a true story. We will never know what it was, but the information did exist at one point.

The same is true for every human migration in 'pre-history', humanity didn't cross the land-bridge to the Americas, specific people did, and moved to Australia, and, crucially, arrived in New Zeeland.

And its here that 'pre-history' which I think might not really exist, meets 'history', because no-one reading this is going to tell the Maori that they don't have a history, yet if we go purely by the technological and material record, the colonisation of New Zeeland by the Maori was 'pre-history' even though it happened in near-modern times.

The same with every technological development. 'Humanity' never discovered fire. Specific people did, and then many probably re-discovered it in many places, but these too were particular people. Same with flint knapping or building a particular kind of canoe. Nothing happens to Humanity, humans do things.

And our current global configuration, the way societies work and are laid out, is utterly dependant on these particular actions and decisions made by these particular people.

Part 3 - IS HISTORY THE RECORD?

(or is History What Happened, regardless of whether we know it or not?)

If History is the record then, logically, we know all history at any particular time. Because we know what we know. We know everything in the record; that’s what history is. Therefore we know all history.

No-one accepts this as reasonable or true.

History cannot be defined simply as what has been recorded.

It might be more interesting and accurate to define it as a process. As the act of remembering, of contextualising and questioning and of searching for memory.

And, if we go back to the beginning, if Africa has a history (but we don't know what a lot of it was), then Pre-History also has a history.

The mistake we have made in thinking about the world is like having a photograph of something really important, and the photo being really blurry and out of focus, and then confidently stating that the events depicted in the photo are 'The Blurred Times'.

"Ah yes, the Blurred Age, things were terribly out of focus then you know. All a big wash of shapeless forms."

Except we know that for the people in those circumstances, things were not blurred. They were particular, individual, highly distinct and mutually consequential. It is accepting our own lack of knowledge about the time as a reasonable label about that time.

That is an insane thing to do.

If I have one central element to my argument its that we should stop accepting the idea of a 'Blurred Age' and instead think about the existence of a specific, unique and consequential series of events which we will never be able to fully access.

The difference between these two modes of thought might seem minor but it changes our moral and intellectual relationship to our own past and our own selves from something comfortable, superior, thoughtless and wrong to one inquiring, curious, humble, ignorant and right.

So there is no 'Pre-History', only 'Inaccessible History'.

Rambling

(What follows is just me rambling about movement and time. There is no grand revelation at the end. If it was a joke, it would be one without a punchline. And it's long. With no pictures. you have been warned.)

There are pages in Japanese comics that do nothing but show time passing in a place. Scott McCloud has a name for them, which I have forgotten, and several examples in his book, which I have forgotten.

But I must have remembered the idea of them somehow because I realised suddenly on the bus to work how one of these pages functioned. And I can’t find a scan or picture of it so I may have actually created it in my head. I will describe it to you.

It’s night and it just stopped raining. Suburban, but somewhere near the city. A road, near houses, but not to a house. One of the weird little street s that go behind and around things and that lead to nowhere places people never go. The ones you notice as a child when walking around and then stop noticing as you grow older. A hedge on one side, houses in the darkness, white light in squares and empty domesticity inside. A cat slinks under the bush. There is traffic, somewhere, just in a corner where a road passes. The cars are irregular.

So I was thinking about this image that I thought I remembered, but maybe invented it took up one page of a Japanese comic, which I believe is about A5. I was trying to work out how I understood about the passage of time from just the information on the page.

I started thinking it was the things that are observed that showed me how time worked on that page. The things held in the panels showed the pattern of attention. That pattern, along with the physical objects, put me in the scene. It’s not just the things you see, it’s the state of mind you have to be in to notice them. To take them one-by-one.

Water beading on a leaf, the leaf bending as the droplet slowly separates as it falls to the ground. It’s slow and can’t be disturbed or the phenomena ends. It’s small. Precise. It happens only after rain or dew. So you have to be there, standing or moving slowly, to see it. If you are moving through the scene quickly you don’t notice the fucking water bead. You have to be observing and to be contemplative to see it. If you have a busy mind it doesn’t pop.

The Cat. The cat would run away if you were moving. Or loud. You have to be still and quiet to notice it in the darkness. If the cat is there and you are there to see it then you are someone still and quiet.

The cars passing. (I can’t remember how this was indicated on the comic page which suggests that this may be something I invented. Sequential movement of this kind can be hard to represent in comics.) You generally only notice the slow passing of cars in the night, in the damp, if you are moving slower than they are. You see the brightness of the reflected headlamps as they emerge, changing the colours of everything, then they pass hissing on the road. The shadows flow back behind them. Each car is an event that changes the environment like a tiny electric day, and moves rapidly and inevitably out of sight.

The bright, white slice of someone’s kitchen or living room, seen through curtains or blinds. Empty, anonymous and familiar. You’re not looking through, it’s just there, in you field of vision. And nothing’s happening inside. No noises, no events

The key idea here is that a piece of media that describes or creates a pattern of attention can, by a kind of reverse experience, instil a shadow or mild re-creation of that pattern in you when you experience it. That’s what much of cinema is about. That’s what much of comics is about. You can’t sit someone down for hours and make them wait. But if you arrange your images correctly, I the right rhythm or relationship to each other, you can make them feel like time has passed. Or hasn’t.

So obviously this lead me to the issue of travel in RPG’s.

RPG’s, especially D&D, are paratactic. I like that word. It means like a string of pearls. A bunch of things in a row, but they don’t necessarily have to have a relationship to each other. The games like parts. Things broken up into parts. Want to travel somewhere? How far? Roll a dice. Encounter! Where does the encounter take place? Probably half way between here or there. Beat the encounter and you are where you wanted to go. A journey mad of three things. Start point, end point and interruption.

And of course no journey in the history of human experience is like this. In fiction maybe. In records. In memory, perhaps. But journeys as you live them are not made of parts they are made of flow. Especially when walking and especially when walking in nature. The more technology you use to travel, the more paratactic it becomes. Airports are a great example. But if you walk outdoors, even in a city, there is only the slow endless changing of one thing into another.

I have never seen a game that captures this. Or tries to. (lack of experience perhaps, let me know in the comments.) Well why would you? The point isn’t the journey after all, it’s the destination. The places in-between are just in-between. Until a fucking monster jumps you, or you meet a hermit in the forest or something. Then it becomes another destination. A point on the map.

Computer games can do this really well. You can run through the space. Films a bit. Comics a but. Text can fake it, but text can fake everything but music and dance.

Tabletop games have trouble with it. The DM can describe it, but that’s not quite what I’m looking for. It think I’m searching for something else. Something you can play. That has brought me back to the that page of Japanese comics. We are trying to do something with the cognitive machinery of the game that it doesn’t really like doing.

(Or at least it is not easy. Mediums have things they find easy and things they find hard. Name a happy poem that’s really really good. Now name a sad one. Poetry has trouble with happy, happy is for dance and for music. But still, it’s hard to name a happy song with words that’s really really good. Happy is movement. Complex word structures don’t deal well with happiness. They do sad really fucking well)

SO.

If showing people something in a comic that would only be noticed in a particular cognitive state helps mimic that state inside their minds. What things could you put in a game. What gameable things, could put people in the same mental state you would be in as you slowly ride a horse through empty scrubland, or walk through a forest in the morning. What inter-actable, observable elements can embody people in that state of mind?

Logistics isn’t enough. That’s something you plan before, this has to be the sensation of during.

I was thinking of linking two things and having the travel be a gameable moment where you have to manage the transition between the things as one turns into the other. Maybe that is stupid. Perhaps this whole series of thoughts is stupid.

What do you notice as you are walking that you rarely notice when you are not?

The nature of the ground perhaps? Incline definitely. How the earth holds your tread.

Things getting in your way. Nothing gets in your way when you are still, only when you have intend. Buddha (or indeed psyduck) has no obstacles.

The sensation of an unexpected heavy wind that presses against your body enough to shift your weight and your stance. It kind of awakens your nerve endings, enlivens you. You lean slightly into it. If you were daydreaming you are suddenly plunged back into the sensual experience of your flesh. Thoughtless but awakened and alive you feel the wind flatten your clothes against you and push you off your feet. This only seems to happen to me when I am walking.

What else?

Wednesday, 23 January 2013

Animal Crackers

This is in my head and I think I need to get it out before I can continue doing monsters.

Sub-scientific rambling and nothing to do with RPG's below

Complex Theory, meet Mundane Reality

"What defines the depth, background and consistency of your invented world?"

The weight of things I can carry in my bag. About three to five kilos back and forth to the Nerd Cafe is the most I can move without it becoming a stress.

(A factor in moving away from 4^th is that the books just physically weigh too much.)

So, two LOTFP rulebooks, Realms of Crawling Chaos, Vornheim, Isle of the Unknown, a folder of one page dungeons and info to tie it all together. Dice, many many pencils and a bottle of water. If it doesn’t fit in there then it probably wont be forming a firm part of the game background.

"So if you dropped the water bottle and took something else then the world could become more dense by a measurable extent?"

Yes, but that leads to another problem. Energy levels.

"Explain"

The extent to which I can connect different parts of these sources as meaningful aspects of the living game depends on my state of mind as the game is being played. This is affected by the amount of food I have eaten and how recently, how thirsty I am, how much caffeine I've consumed and where I am on my depressed/maniacal cycle.

Caffeine makes me more aggressive and intent, for about half an hour, then leaves me more isolated and lethargic. Then I need to go to the toilet. I'm pretty sure Mountain Dew got more than one character killed when I was playing Cyberpunk. So when I was MC'ing Apocalypse World games would peak in violence and danger as I got caffeinated, then undergo a period of distance and ennui, then break for 5 mins while I went for a piss. Like a Michael Bay film turning into a Werner Herzog film, then just stopping for no reason.

I try to moderate my caffeine intake to ride this wave.

Being hungry makes me monomaniacal and emotional. Emotional in a bad way, like a 13 year old girl who had a birthday party and no-one came. Never DM hungry. Gives you decision fatigue. (Though sometimes the impaired self-regulation can lead you interesting places.

“What about the weird shit that comes out when you run out of stuff to say and just start free-styling?”

Some of that comes from stuff I daydream about at work. So if the flow of calls at Argos is low then the game should have more colour and original incident. If its high then the game gets more derivative. Other stuff is fragments of books I'm reading. Like Werner Herzog is the grand Duke of the Isle of the Unknown because I was reading an autobiography when I was putting together the tables. Other stuff is just from dreams or the silent moments between events.

“When does the Quantum Ogre come out?”

Good question. When does stuff get moved around behind the scenes? Only if it can happen so quickly that even I can't think about it. Two or possibly three seconds from conception to statement. Something else I noticed MC'ing Apocalypse World is that if you invent something very quickly and as part of a rapid interaction with one or more players then it doesn’t feel* like railroading.

The same thing goes for reincorporating stuff that’s already in the game, or that came up in tables but that the players don't know about. So one of the random NPC relationship tables is Scrodd, a place the PC's are visiting, came up that one NPC wanted to consume another one. This made no sense to me. But then one of the players used the word 'vampire' and I remembered a dungeon I have with a vampire in it. So it became part of the game. It happened very quickly. It didn't feel like making something happen, it felt like discovering something or allowing something. Iain Mcgilchrist has a lot to say about that sort of thing.

But if you think for longer than about 3 seconds, the nature of the choice seems to change. Almost as if different parts of the mind were coming online and trying to assume control of the situation. Forcing it to make sense in a different way.

The nice thing about dice is that they are a kind of gateway between the parts of you that hunger for control and want everything to be logically consistent and the parts of you that love to abandon control and experience new and inconsistent things. So the whole thing becomes a kind of continuous tennis match between the different parts of yourself, and more than the parts that make it up.

A DM gets to make more of those kind of choices than players which might be why a good game leaves me with a vaguely ecstatic feeling.

“How do you know if you are fucking the players out of a meaningful choice?”

I actually don't know. I believe that I'm not. But I wouldn't win a public debate with myself on the issue. I trust to the silent parts of my mind to arrange the patterns so that they remain true to themselves

*Cue Nerdstorm. Man obeys feelings. Betrays REALITY.