The Technique of Mughal Miniature Painting

Curiously, just before reading this I had finished a Clark Ashton Smith collection into which the enormous and specific work and attention paid to every aspect of a pure luxury good, as well as the almost magical-alchemical assembly of these wonderous, varied and specific materials - the fur of a young kitten, Lapuz Lazuli ground with rough salt and separated by grain, soft repetitive polishing with crystal or malachite, would seem to slot almost perfectly. 

While transformed-orientalism western idea of Luxurious Otherness has a pedigree which seems to flow all the way from 'Othello' to Jabbas Palace, the particulars of the creation and social milieu seem to cry out for some boutique D&D adventure - the Emperor calls for a painting and his artist, the 'Wonder of the Age', needs *this* specific kind of malachite, grains of gold and Lapis Lazuli and the tail fur of this specific kind of kitten, and you only have 50 days to finish the painting, and the artist has enemies who wish to sabotage him, and the Emperor might be about to be assassinated.. "Vorsprung durch Luxus"..

"The Technique of Mughal Miniature Painting

Miniature painters sat on the ground while working with one leg flexed to support a drawing board. (Plate 19). Their technique was deceptively simple: opaque watercolour on paper or occasionally on cotton cloth. Artists learned the trade secrets of their ateliers as apprentices, often from fathers or uncles, as this craft was frequently a family occupation. As children, they were taught how to make balanced, finger-fitting paintbrushes of bird quills set with fine hairs plucked from kittens or baby squirrels. They also learned how to grind mineral pigments, such as malachite (green) and lapis lazuli (blue), in a mortar; how to sort them grain by grain according to purity and brilliance; and how to prepare the aqueous binding medium of gum arabic or glue. Other pigments were made from earths, insect and animal matters, and metals.

(Plate 19)

To make metallic pigments, gold, silver and copper were pounded into foil between sheets of leather, after which the foil was ground with rough salt in a mortar. The salt was then washed out with water, leaving behind the pure metal powder. For a cool yellow cold, silver was mixed with it; for a warmer hue, copper was added. Because such pigments as copper oxide were corrosive, the paper was protected from them by a special coating. Some artists, such as Basawan (Plates 6, 8, 12, 13) were particularly admired for their manipulation of gold  which they pricked with a stylus to make it glitter - burnished or modelled by tinted washes.

Although artists did not make paper, they were connoisseurs of its qualities. Composed of cloth fibres, it varied greatly in thickness, smoothness and fineness. Akbar' painters of the late sixteenth century preferred highly polished, hard and creamy papers, while Shah Jahan's artists employed thin, extremely luxurious sorts, possibly made from silk fibres.

A complex, very costly series of steps involving many people was required to make a Mughal painting. Pictorial ideas usually began with the patron, who summoned the appropriate artist (or artists) to carry them out. Several of the most renowned Mughal aritsts were specialists, such as Govardhan, who was noted for portraits of saints, musicians, and holy men (Plate 24), or Mansur, famed for birds and animals (Plates 26-27). 

(Plate 26)

After the painter and patron had conferred, sketches, such as Figure V, were prepared. In this instance, the artist drew from life, which lent his sketch disturbing immediacy. Like others of the sort, it was intended not for the patron but for the workshop, as a model from which to paint, and it did not have to be formal and tidy. Mistakes were scumbled over in white pigment and redrawn.

(Figure V)

Later, in the artists studio, the drawing would either be copied or pounced (traced) onto the thicker paper or cardboard of the finished work (Figure V, Plate 23). 

(Plate 23)

Tracing was done with a piece of transparent gazelle skin, placed on top of the drawing, the contours of which were then pricked. It was then placed on fresh paper, and black pigment was forced through the pinholes, leaving soft, dark outlines to be reinforced by brush drawing. Sometimes the original drawing included notations of colours, in words or washes of pigment.

Unfinished paintings reveal the progress from bare paper to thin outlining in black or reddish brown ink and to the many stages of colouring, which were built up layer by layer to enamel-like thickness. Usually, gold highlights were the last step before burnishing. Burnishing was done by laying the miniature upside down on a hard smooth surface and gently but firmly stroking it with polished agate or crystal, a process comparable to varnishing an oil painting, which provided protective hardening and gave an overall unity of texture.

The length of time it took to accomplish all this varied according to the painting and period when it was done. Robert Skelton and Ellen Smart discovered a small marginal inscription on an illustration to the Babur-Nameh stating that Ram Das worked on it for fifty days (see Figure II). Other paintings published here must have taken considerably longer. After the artist had finished his picture and shown it to the patron, who had probably overseen its progress step by step, it was turned over to other specialists to be trimmed, mounted on splendidly illuminated borders, and bound into a book or album, according to imperial wishes. Occasionally, pictures were mounted on walls (Plate 17).

(Plate 17)

The social position of artists varied greatly. Akbar himself learned to paint as a child; and some of the artists were aristocratic courtiers who also served in diplomatic or other governmental capacities. Most court painters, however, were revered but humble craftsmen, whose talents had earned them privileged positions near the throne. A  few, such as Jahangir's favourite artist, Abu'l Hasan, who was honoured with the title "Wonder of the Age," grew up in the royal household.

Paradoxically, the lot of artists was often more secure, and probably happier, than that of princes. Arists painted on and on, from one reign to the next, while royalty rose to dizzy pinnacles of wealth and power, too often only to be imprisoned or murdered. Since all but a few Mughal rulers were keenly interested in painting, artists were generously rewarded. Salaries must have been ample, and when a patron was especially pleased, presents were lavish. Bichir painted himself in the foreground of a picture (Plate 22) holding a miniature of an elephant and a horse, gifts no doubt from Jahangir."

(Plate 22)

("Prithee allow me in thine painting sirrah".

Closeup of Bichir getting photobombed by some European dude..)

From "Imperial Mughal Painting" by Stuart Cary Welch

Thoughts on this Gundam

First time putting one of these together. Apparently this one is an MSN-065 SINANJU NOE ZEON MOBILE SUIT CUSTOMISED FOR NEWTYPE (TITANIUM FINISH).

The whole thing is push-fit and largely stays together, (the arms still want to go on holiday a little) which means some really high grade plastic engineering. The whole process of assembly felt super-detailed and like something a huge number of people have put a crazy amount of time and energy into, and also had the slight secretive gnostic-text feeling of interacting with a deep and highly interwoven subculture.

FEMME HYPERMASCULINITY

Are Gundam femme?

I was looking at the high heels and skirts and wondering but then this person on twitter reminded me that looking kinda femme is actually ULTRA MASCULINE. 

My boi Louis, enemy of Churchills, baldies and heretics to the most Catholic church everywhere

High heels to illustrate firm calves and strong smooth legs, clenched waist to show others your dominant upper body combined with dangerous flexibility, armoured skirt so as not to impede movement,  tall headpiece to indicate magnificence and project extreme confidence. 

Very masculine yes.

EDIT;

I WAS RIGHT!

THIS IS THE PILOT

His name is 'Full Frontal' too.

(Thanks to Alex in the comments.)

WINGS

Of course the Gundam also has WINGS.

Probably is Boccioni had gone into the jet age he would have given his dynamism-angels jet wings as well, they are the most Futurist thing possible.

These can look pretty good from the front, raising up over each shoulder for a head-on rocket angel thing.

The wings are important because they create this whole new interpenetration with and interaction with space at the rear of the model, and as we all know, one of the most important ways to look at a sculpture is to turn it round and look at the back.

What do they do to the back?

Well they make it a bitch to pick up

I guess the wings are brought out to best effect if you have a stand and you can pose this guy. That way they would essentially create an entirely new and different axis of motion for the figure, making it perhaps, more truly three-dimensional, more of a pure sculpture.

And of course changing its time signature from stepping time or bearing time into fragment time, so in that case, making it more of an image? Which I suppose contradicts my original statement there.

You may need to look elsewhere for a synthesis on Gundam wings.

PSEUDOSENSE

An aspect of this that was interesting was being introduced to an unknown (to me) form of pseudosense. 

Mainly i'm contrasting this with 40k, where I know a supremely insane amount about how the machines of the dark future are meant to work. Here I know absolutely nothing about the imaginative world making up the background of the figure, but I know that it *has one*, so these energy weapons and super rifle (comes in the box) and long white things (at the back) all have specific uses and meanings in the imaginative reality of the Gundams. 

These white thingies in particular are fascinating.

(I'm assuming they are fuel tanks or something like that, & they eject at crucial moments in battle for combat-theatre.)

So it has a particular mystery for me where rather than the pleasure of seeing how the form and pseudotech fits into a known paracosm of mechanics and culture ("ah, here is the power generator at the back with the admech skull on it"), for me at least, it is a prompt to imagining more what things *could* be. Interpretation more than recognition.

(I'm not sure anyone has written in a positive way about the artistic pleasures of recognition and ordering, though they must be significant pleasures and a meaningful part of many works).

ORIGINS OF THE FORMS, A NEST OF MEANING

It really is very beautiful.

Where does it come from?

So one part of this is clearly hyper-evolved samurai armour.

Another is this interlacing of the visual signifiers of rocketry. A weaving of cables and implied sources of power with implied transmission of energy we draw from, in this case, late 2th century aerospace tech.

The flow of shapes across this particular Gundam is quite remarkable, for any particular element, it might be said to be;

- Pseudo-Biology. (those forearms are swole with masculine growth, one old standard of manhood was that when the veins popped out on the top of your hands then that meant you ware an adult male, here power cables provide the simulation of those popping veins and tendons).

- Shaped armour carrying the shape of assumed musculature. (See above).

- Rocket Ejection stuff.

- Heat ejection stuff.

- Mechanical Energy Transmission; pipes, cables, suggested fuel reserves.

- Energy Projection. There are these plastic flanges of what I assume to be pure projected energy.

- Pseudo Aerodynamics. arts of this are very like the curves of a sports car, but if you look into it deeply, its not as if the curves are oriented in a particular direction, (& don't Gundam fight in space anyway?) they are more the symbolic curves of speed, high performance and expensive high status engineering, reproduced (it basically looks like a Ferrari robot).

Probably the most interesting thing is where I compare it to this reproduction of Boccionis "Unique Forms of Continuity in Space" (1913)

(which I happen to have on me)

where its, wow

they could almost be related

I'm not sure which is more interesting, the idea that the Gundam designer(s?) deliberately looked at Boccioni first, or that they are a form of parallel evolution.

Masculinity, the machine, speed, forward movement, dynamism, all trying to capture those elements in a still three-dimensional figure.

(They even both have a projecting horn thing).

THE PACE AND FLOW OF FORM AND SIGNIFICATION

The 'pace' or flow of detail and clear space across the surface of the miniature; I read somewhere (Ruskin or Rawson I think), about the use of markings on a curved surface emphasising its wholeness and flow precisely by dividing up the space (like a woman’s stockings) and that might be part of the heraldry here.

Another might be because the whole model is so shiny  so the curve and space occupied by the form is given to the eye is shown simultaneously by reflection of light wrapping the metallic limbs and by shadow in its curves (as opposed to a more matte version where the shadow would dominate more over the shine).

But the spots of black and gold heraldry break up that pattern of mass-sensing and (though they are actually a bit shiny themselves) compared to the rest of the model they are a bit like empty black spaces, with the shape of the form emphasised through direct shiny gold marking, in essence, creating the symbol of the shape and projecting that instead of just showing you what the shape is.

A little more towards the 'word' than the 'form' more signified (relatively) than shown.

Flash Gordon and the Bat Sandwich

 Who could have guessed that the greatest enemy of cinema would be;

1 BAT SANDWICH 

In an attempt to lure people back iin, local cinemas have been putting on old favourites at rescued prices. I went to see Flash Gordon, and then bought the first volume of the collected newspaper strips by Alex Raymond.

I enjoyed every minute of the film, the insane pace is accurate to comic, as is a whole lot of everything else; Hawkmen diving, cities riding on ray-beams, baroque rocketships.

In the comic, the whole start with Mongo somehow threatening earth, Flash and Dale in a plane which crashes right next to Zarkovs lab, who then forces them into his counter-attack rocket with a gun for.. reasons? Then a crash-landing on Mongo, all takes place over one page. 

(Flash was a famous *Polo Player* in the original...)

Princess Aura is the best character in the film just as she is in the comic. 

There are loads of mildly-honky effects in the film but no bad shots, lots of very broad performances but no actual bad performances. Maybe the guy playing flash maybe, but he plays a good-natured monodirectional athletic lunkhead pretty well.

The designs in the film, especially the costume designs for Mings Court, are fucking insanely good,  decadence, lushness and questionable transformed Orientalism (the exotic Other!) seen through a lens probably slathered with whatever they used to use in softcore porn shoots.

Check out the costumes

Not really a surprise that this film did poorly in the U.S. as it’s an extremely, relentlessly, unamerican film in its aesthetic.

In the comic collection the art is lovely, the invention wonderful and the development of Raymonds comic-booking skills charming but even for someone who likes all of that the story is brutally, even oppressively, repetitive.

Flash has gladiatorial duels, fights strange animals, escapes from castles, sneaks into castles, someone has abducted Dale, someone has abducted Flash, friends must battle, enemies learn a new respect for each other, Ming sends out his feudal-tech fleet of ships, a new biome is discovered ruled by a new people with origins in a questionable early 20th century ethnic stereotype.....

Just keep reloading that page basically.

WTF IS MONGO

Presumably this has been explained at some point in the long-running comics, or some fan has build a web.. nope I looked it up and apparently it’s just a planet, which I find quite dull, so will be ignoring that I think.

There seem to be a whole lot of moons and planet-fragments bounding and rolling around each other in some kind of aetheric atmosphere. Is it all happening within the envelope of some attenuated gas giant? Or in some solar bubble, maybe a fractured dyson sphere binding the energies of a dying star?
That would probably make more sense for me, it explains the feudal toybox technology in a way familiar to anyone into D&D. A dying red sun at the centre of a fractured sphere the size of a solar system, with wounds and rents the size of worlds, red light leaking out as if from a hooded lantern.
But still holding enough energy that within its both liveable but also fucking HUGE; why it can reasonably call itself the ruler of the Galaxy.

Also explains where all the post-singularity tech and different quasi-human subspecies came from. Remnants of the fall. Also explains Mings super-intelligence.

THE FEUDAL FUTURE FAMILY TREE

Flash Gordon also feels like a kind of missing link between the 19th Century Theatre-inspired Walter-Scott Expanded Universe and the post-60's pseudo-feudal Deep Future paracosms.

My timeline would be something like this;

17th to 19th Centuries

Printing and mass literacy begin to create the market and mind-state.

Sir Walter Scott (and others) "pulls a Shakespeare" and jams together historical sources and popular storytelling in a manner exciting to the Audience but also informing and reinforcing their cultural identity.

At the same time the orientalist craze ebbs and flows as the industrialising western empires come into deeper contact with a wide variety of non-Western polities.

Many are, or were, richer than the West. The Other who has more money than you is a *decadent empire*. If they have less money than you they are either *savages*, or possibly *noble savages*, indicating that *you* might be the Decadent Empire. (Tacitus there writing a proto TNG episode).
All of this combines with the "hey we discovered ANOTHER strange island" culture, which dates back to the Tempest and Moores Utopia. Utopia being a combination of proto speculative fiction and the recently discovered island culture being a real-life "what if" story.

So the Wests/Anglospheres imaginative landscape of *The Other* is made up of these fancy decadent eastern potentates and mysterious islands with monocultures.

19th Century

That sets the scene for Walter Scott and the Victorian popular novel.

That feeds into Victorian theatre, music hall etc.

Cinema eats the theatre.

1930s

Here comes Alex Raymond with a world based on theatre costumes, circus wear, multicoloured fireworks, rockets, rays, sword fights from theatre and cinema, endless castle escapes and infiltrations from gothic novels and Walter Scott, an evil version of the Chinese Emperor being vaguely but generally ethnically evil, decadence and wealth from a blizzard or orientalist fantasies, single-biome 'worlds' or stage sets like islands in the sea, "primitive" tribes and peoples with Witch-Queens like something from 1000 colonial fantasies and dream versions of real encounters, and, less interesting to Raymond, but more to us, a Feudal social structure combined with super sci-fi Future tech.

Late 1950s/60s

Here comes "proper" Sci Fi, including Asimovs "Foundation", basically "The Fall of the Roman Empire.. in spaaaace". Includes Tech-Priests, predictions of the future, a golden path, and lots of Feudal Empires in space.


1965

Frank Herberts "Dune"

"Dune" is basically a darker-n-edgier Flash Gordon, or an "Alan Moore Does Flash Gordon"
Hey guys guys guys, what if we had an orientalist  19thC lost-desert-prince-returns-to-the-tribes plot _but the tribes were actually the goodies_.

What if we did Asimovs "Evil Psychic Mohammed" plot from the Foundation books, but psychic Mohammed was actually the good guy?

God Emperors, more future visions and crucially, Feudal Space Empires.

And a more clear confabulation of *why* exactly technology and culture produces human-centred Feudal Space Empires and *why* being really good with a knife or sword is more important than having a tank.

Deeper world creation but Walter Scott could have told you why; modern war tech is distant, impersonal, reduces individuality, either annihilates or fails, and broadly, is a fucking nightmare to tell a human-centred story about. Really you need heroes in big families and comprehensible hierarchies fighting with swords over dead fathers and threatened lovers and marriages and crowns and shit, THATS a story buddy!


1977

Star Wars. Lucas does his own Flash Gordon inspired thing. Has some success. Shamefully he takes out the feudal identity structures and swaps 1930s luxury futurism for decayed-new-york worn technology. He does manage to keep the sword fights and the stripe down Hans trouser leg though.

1987

Warhammer. Dune plus Foundation plus Medieval Europe.

JOY

Joy is a valid production of art and very few works of art produce joy. pleasure is an emotion as complex as any, though its engines may be atavistic. A pure response, without much alienation or inner "turning about" is more difficult to consider than a dissonant or multi-tone response, but is just as difficult to produce, (seeing that it is produced well so rarely), and has the same 'depth' as a more-apparently complex response.

Imagine emotion as a light, or as a kind of sonar signal pinging out and echoing back from the hidden trenches of the psyche. A piece of art that produces a complex interplay of signals; a deep corrugated terrain of emotion, memory, experience and intuition, that can be thought of as a deeply textured signal, or a jangly dissonant one, but there is also a response, simple and almost surprising in its lightness, like the sense of locating an unexpected object, finding a whale on your sonar perhaps. 

A chime that comes back, largely unaltered, but not without illuminating the depths of memory and experience and emotion first, only that what it illuminates is harmony, oneness, cohesion, "rightness", maybe even playfulness.

Maybe a metaphor I’m looking for is, that while some art is a sonar ping that echoes back as an image of a murky dark, invisible terrain, other art is like a chime or a bell, that echoes back from a house, or a home or a hidden cavern previously unsuspected or ignored, or forgotten and put aside, but returns as a polyphony, its echoes and responses combining into a return signal more complex than the one put out, but coherent, whole within itself, harmonious , and which could not have produced those effects without being, in some sense, emotionally simple to begin with.

The Vortex of Agnes Miller-Parker

The title was a trick, this is actually a review of the book 'The Wood Engravings of Agnes Miller-Parker' but I knew if I said the words 'wood-engravings' and 'review' then you probably wouldn't click. 

But now there is art to look at so you don't need to think. Just scan onwards.

Some of you may remember her from one of my 'Artists of the Faerie Queene' posts, as that is where I encountered her. She was an artist working mainly in wood engraving book illustration and largely in the inter-war years for private presses in the UK.

This is my review of a rather fancy and quite large book of her work.

This was published in 2005, written by Ian Rogerson.

Its a brave effort and a good book. Rogerson has discretion and sensitivity but sadly lacks vividness and imagination, which leads his assessment of quality to be totally utterly wrong. 

Nevertheless, these are only the faults of his class and neurotype and can be easily amended by me, now, so we should award him at least the silver for effort and intention.

And I did find his brief view into the history of Private Press publishing in inter-war Britain fascinating. Thank Christ for the internet, the old ways seem specifically designed to annihilate artists and creators in order to fatten a managerial class. What a terrible waste.

The only thing Rogerson and I can agree on is that AMP's Aesops Fables pictures are really good.

Scan quality is imperfect but look at that frog!

Beyond that, her best images are for The Forest Giant and the Faerie Queene. These are also the images where AMP's vorticist leanings collide most energetically with nature and form.

Rogerson likes the boring images, made with skill and a medium emotional range but fundamentally AMP was a genre illustrator, the more intense and gothic the situation the better she generally does.

Rogerson John Clare is a fair shout. I am not super-familiar with his poetry but AMP being more obsessed with the hyperreality of objects than their symbolic meanings makes perfect sense. More precisely - shes really really interested in focusing on the object in particular, in the beauty of that precise form, and because everything is black and white, light and shadow and shape are all there is.

Vortex Mole

Beasts Rotating

AMP really likes animals. Aven a poor AMP animal is usually pretty good.

From Welsh Folk tales

These animals often appear in pairs or groups, usually crossing each other in the image, facing slightly different directions, with different sides and dimensions and aspects showing. I get the sense that these are in a way, all the same animal, (though there are a few cases where they are clearly not), but, in the way that animals in heraldry are flattened and invisibly twisted so more of the animal 'presents' to the viewer than would ever naturally be seen from one point of view and in the same way that cubism fractures the view of something so that, in a different way, you see it from multiple directions and multiple fragments of it at once.

So these are post-vortcist animals maybe? Done in a naturalistic way. Not that she was trying to save time or cheating but that she was so totally absorbed by the animal as a living breathing object-form-being, that she was looking for some way to hyper-represent the creature but without going into modernist techniques. So we get these pairs and crowds of animals moving around each other showing different sides, different aspects of movement and in-sense.

Shadowed Faces

I do know know why AMP was so much into shadowed faces. Faces turned away. It is as if she was uncomfortable with faces somehow. She can do them, and pulls them off a handful of times, but in almost every case if there is some possibility that she can occlude a face, she does.

Storms, Water, Light, Forest, Hills

What is a storm but a dangerous series of sky-things

about to fall upon you like the toys from a shelftop box?

The wonderful thing about light, weather, forests and anything in the background of a good AMP image is that it is a field of forms.

I think Scot McCloud said US superhero comics were like a cornucopia of objects, and AMP makes a world, not necessarily of mere objects, because her objects live powerfully,life is central to her work, but or forms.

I feel as if I could reach into the image and run my hands across the hills, pick up clusters of buildings like lego blocks, smooth my fingertips across billows of wind like fine clay and grasp crystal shards of light.

Our old friend MVTABILITY

Tubular Clothes

Apparently there were some complaints that her clothes for poverty stricken characters weren't ragged enough? Thats because her clothes were tubes, shapes before they were textures or material.

Floral Explosions

These are pretty great.

The really great thing about AMP is how she smashed together the world of forms and that of living breathing emotion to produce an intense hyperreality.

From 'The Forest Giant'

That is not best shown in her later works which are merely literary.

She should have been given more weird shit to do, and should have been paid a lot more.

Thoughts on the Glorantha Sourcebook

LAYOUT AND ART

My favourite thing about this book and most powerful sensory experience is the quality, variety and integration of the art throughout the whole of the book.

There are some minor quibbles with the dietetic elements. I fantasise about an epistolary world and
this attempt is imperfect, but still noble and good.

Firstly, this book is BRIGHT, which I very much appreciate and which fits the tone and feel of the world it describes.

As someone who has been quietly disappointed in Games Workshops slowly dulling aesthetic and not really happy with its art or the way it integrates image, world-building, infographics and DIFFERING STYLES of art within the same world window;

THIS IS HOW YOU FUCKING DO THAT.

THE DIVINE INFOGRAPHICS

My favourite part of the book is these repeated family trees of the divine hierarchies for the different cultures and celestial courts. Since the superstructure of Glorantha is all about divine powers, these are essentially cosmic maps of the setting.

They are tremendous fun, and very well made. They also feel 'real' or sub-real, they have a pleasing harmony of pseudosense

THE INTEGRATION OF STYLES

There are many different artists throughout the whole of the book but the sense of them as a whole, as representing the same reality, though seen through different eyes, is sustained throughout.

This feels more like the kind of book where the artists have been allowed to draw the bits they find most interesting and then space has been found for it, rather than the other way round.

The fact that there is no absolute, crushing 'Gloranthan House-Style' means it feels like the art as a whole, across the book, can breathe. There is a pleasing range of variety of methods and approaches within a loose but cohesive whole.

This fudges the diegesis somewhat. Some elements, like the bas-reliefs at the start of the book,

 or this vase on page 160,

 seem highly diegetic, as if they are literal artefacts which have been transcribed directly onto the page from the imagined world.

Other pieces have an un-specific diegesis, pictures from inside the world, but with no particular named artist or exact in-world point of view.

We could regard this as imperfect in the abstract but in function, as the book is read, it works fine. The human mind can deal quite easily with this mixture of levels of diegetic and less-diegetic elements, as we do when we are children, and the concept of the book never leans on that structure  so heavily that the differences become a problem.

Simply - these images speak in different voices, but they all feel like they are talking about the same thing.

THE TEXT - THE AMERICANNESS OF GLORANTHA

In both its world-concept and in its writing style, Glorantha feels to me, really intensely American.

This might not make sense initially as, in its subject and its openness to influence, I think it draws hugely from a staggering range of real-world religions and cultures. There is a shitload of Hinduism in there for a start, but there is a lot of Everything in there.



I'll begin with the language

This is really hard to define, and none of it is intended as a criticism. There is a quality here I think of as 'plains English', which, by imagination or not I tend to associate with the middle bits of America. Friendly bearded protestant men with Hawaiian t-shirts and Tiki collections who go to church every Sunday. People who's grandfathers probably spoke German or Dutch.


"Then a great dark spot rose into the sky upon the net. This huge bloated shadow flickered with a smoky glow. The shadow crept across the face of the sun, blotting it out and making all the world cold for a moment. A snapping moment of terror pierced the world, then the dark sky-web vanished, and the edge of the sun crept past the shadow. The shadow disappeared and the sun brightened, but everyone thought it looked paler than it had before. Some said it moved differently, too.

In Pamaltela, the heat strengthened the many spirits of that realm. They entered the jungles, plants, and elves, and combated the rot in their fibers."


There is certainly nothing wrong with this and it does its work. There is something in it that reminds me of American ticker-tape just-the-facts prose. Americans, I believe, do not like compressions of meaning, or elisions. They like a word to be a word and a phrase to be clear, to be linked directly to the next phase and for its meaning to be what it plainly signifies itself to be. They also seem to dislike strong euphony and intensification of rhythm. There is a Germanic tendency there that its better to extend a sentence than to potentially leave any element of it open to inconstant interpretation. Brandon Sanderson is a bit like this in some of his things I've read. It is very clear, democratic, rather Methodist-bible language.



Theogony Gumbo

The simple fact that Glorantha takes from so many different world religions and the combination of its very open-hearted and very open-handed attitude to them, along with the simultaneous access of knowledge and systemisation of that knowledge, speaks itself, in the nature of the intellectual work done, of a particular time and place.

This kind of mingling together of influences would not have happened in this way at many other times.

A little earlier in Anglo-diaspora history the 'foreign' bits would probably be more foreign, more orientalised. A lot earlier and the knowledge either wouldn't exist or the originating religion/cultures that make it up either wouldn't be in conversation with each other or wouldn't get on.

Post 2000's, I think most millennials would probably feel bad about taking aspects of IRL cultures and religions from different real-world ethnicities and just jamming them together anyhow. It seems like the kind of thing someone would get upset about.

So this reads to me as very much a product of the 1960-1990-s era of relative liberalism. And the willingness to systematise the whole thing (though the diegetic elements of the world itself do remark that there is no absolute systemisation of divine order from within the world, only differing interpretations arranged around a wide but fuzzy 'general knowledge).

This is from what I think of a "Cultural Lego Times". Innocent times when a bunch of nerds could just reach out to grab elements of different cultures and fantasy elements and just jam them together like a child making something, without a great deal of angst or drama.

I do not think we live in Cultural Lego Times any more.



The Fantasy Elements

Glorantha has humanoid Ducks in it. Literally they are only in a few pages BUT THEY ARE ON THE COVER AND THEY ARE CANON. So, this is the kind of highly developed fantasy world where it has its own divine hierarchies but clearly at some point Sandy Petersens best friend or someone really wanted to play a humanoid duck, and while they haven't really gone deep on the duck thing since then, they are still in there.

My broad point here is that the genesis of the integration of fantasy elements, with trolls (but different), elves, dwarfs etc (but different) and not hobbits (but we have ducks), again seems to me to come from a particular time and place. The post-Tolkien 60's-70's boom. (Much of Glorantha feels very 70s to me). It has that slightly gauche summery tactile 70's vibe.

On the mid-20thC Paracosm-boom scale, it’s very clearly cooler and edgier than Greyhawk or Blackmoor, and more coherent than Coventry, but not quite as cool as Tekumel, which is like Gloranthas edgy brother who plays in a band and won't let Glorantha into their room.


So all of this makes me intuit that, though Glorantha is, very nobly, a combination of a vast range of influences and has many highly original elements and aspects, the range and origins of those sources, and the manner of their integration and expression, make it feel very American to me.

GODS IN GLORANTHA

If this is about anything it’s about the integration of a coherent Theogony as a magical, moral, cosmic, historic and philosophical superstructure for a fantasy world. If you want to play a game where there are lots of religions and where religion matters then this is for you.

Gods in Glorantha play a dozen roles.


Gods as Aircraft Carriers.

Their simplest is as tanks or artillery divisions in battles. Every culture has a god or godsquad and when they come into military conflict whoever has the strongest god(s) and can get them to intervene more effectually will win battles by having them lend power or simply turn up on the field.

So Gloranthan military engagements are actually 5th dimensional affairs in which ritual and spiritual elements can transform into simple military materiel and visa-versa (a little like 40k).



Gods as Culture-Leaders

Gods incarnate, visitate and reincarnate a whole bunch and this can lead the centre of any culture an effectively-immortal warrior/teacher/prophet/lawgiver who acts not only as a private superman but also as a kind of cultural and moral library and judge.

It’s a little like the British Sovereign is almost meant to be in law, a magical source of power, and a little like if George Washington could reincarnate on each death, but with all knowledge intact, and if all George Washingtons children might be born with a few grammes of divine Washington power. And if you want to invade America successfully, you need to find and permanently kill the reincarnating George Washingon, but once you do that, the rest of the place goes down pretty easy.

Or simply as if all that Eurasian stuff about bronze-age God-Kings was pretty much accurate and literally true.



Gods as Magical and Philosophical Superstrucure Soap-Opera

Since the gods are definitely real, though mainly outside time, and since there is a big library of gods and their exact relations and histories, learning magic, philosophy and history is really learning about this big divine Soap-Opera and trying to get close to, and understand, one or more of the characters.

Magical and divine power in Glorantha is so integrated, and so total, trying to understand it is one of the few useful things you can do. Societies and cultures that gain technological or philosophical dominance, don't do it necessarily by prioritising technology and science, but by getting close to a highly rationalist god or god-philosophy that releases these capacities in them.


God as Atom Bombs

You can basically smash any problem if you can get a big enough god on it.

There seems to be a theme in Glorantaha of Godwars and gods punching each other to pieces leaving holes or damaging reality so that the grainy sinister 90's CGI of Chaos can come through. Since its a D&D world where becoming a demigod is the last rung of promotion and since its quite and agonistic world where adventure needs to happen, this adds an element of tragedy; your super-adventure might end up punching a hole in the Real and bringing Glorantha closer to DOOM.

QUESTIONS
FOR PEOPLE WHO PLAY IN GLORANTHA

How the fuck do you play in Glorantha?

I'm waaaay into Warhammer 40k, to the extent that I have opinions on the different _voice actors_ for the Audiobook Readers in the Horus Heresy series.

Reading this Glorantha sourcebook is probably as close as I can get to what it must be like to be introduced to 40k for the first time. Holy crap this is a fucktonne of stuff to be slammed over the head with.

Even as someone who is generally into pseudohistories, and this being, essentially, part of my job, bit parts of Glorantha were a real slog to get through. There is just a huge, HUGE amount of highly specific history here. Staggering levels of detail, highly specific and, due to Gloranthas close integration of divine order, magical power and temporal culture, highly consequential information.

I know there are a huge amount of playstyles and cognitive/world-engine preferences out there very different to mine and this is probably exactly what a bunch of you are specifically looking for.

People who play in Glorantha, specifically, people who are introducing new players into Glorantha. How do you do it? Is it a loremaster thing where the DM is just deeply read in the pseudohistory and drops it on the unknowing as things go on? Do you need a bunch of experts on Glortantha to play?

From my personal biases, Glorantha is so dense that its virtually unplayable as a game setting, but I know most are not like me, so what are you doing?


Where did Glorantha Come From?

I know there must be a forum somewhere purely about this, and with its own scandals and schisms, are we at the point yet where anyone can summarise 40+ years of paracosm development in a blog comment or medium article? Probably not.

How much of the legendary background is stuff that happened in some game back in the 70's? Or in some wargame? Very large amounts of this read like legendarification of someones play reports, specifically the oddness of the pseudohistories which come off very much like some player-character stuff.

Or am I wrong and its all designed-in? Or did it evolve over multiple books over different eras? Has anyone written the historiography of the creation of Glorantha? And then helpfully done the condensed version because I probably don't have time to read the whole thing.


THE COMMENTS ON THIS ARE REALLY INTERESTING IF YOU WANT TO SEE TRENT DO A DEEP-DIVE ON GLORANTHA AND A BUNCH OF OTHER STUFF

What do you think of art in games?

AND WHY?

I'm thinking here specifically at noisms over at Monsters and Manuals, whom I would consider the head of the Puritan Iconoclasts, those who think the need for art if games is overblown.

- It costs a bomb (which keeps the prices of development high and arguably keeps poorer creators out of the market).

- It stops people imagining stuff for themselves. Why do you need it in a game communicated almost entirely through words?

- It seals the 'vision' of what a thing is in one particular way, the 'approved' idea of a thing.

- Other arguments I forgot.

Personally I find myself, by intuition and desire, almost entirely on the Cavalier Idolater side - I fucking love art in games and prioritise it when I can.

HOWEVER

My arguments for doing so are less coherent than the Puritans against.

SO -

What do you think, and why do you think it?

A Theory of Filmed Violence

I started thinking about a theory of filmed violence and, in brief, its this -

The symbols of violence that tell the story well on film are almost always bad things to do in real violent situations.

Maybe its simpler to say 'accurate violence is a boring story'.

Lets go through it one by one:


Sword fights. Fighting with swords for real would be like boxing with knives. Fast, brutal, ugly and difficult to discern what’s happening from the outside.

In any real physical fight both sides will work very hard not to signal what they are doing or about to do. The movement between any two positions or actions will be as short and fast as possible. There will be no unnecessarily wide arm movements, no unnecessary body movements. Short, clipped controlled movements that return quickly to their originating position and rarely 'follow through' or carry the weight of a contestant far from their centre of mass. Blades will rarely clash.

This looks dull and crucially, *doesn't tell the story* of the fight visually on film. On film all the movements will need to be extended, emphasised, made particular. Always over-extend your arm, always follow through with your body weight. The audience *wants* to see your body move. The shifting of your body tells the story of the act, the more it moves and the more visibly it moves, generally the better the story.



Boxing. I don't know much about this but I think its pretty true that in boxing attritional damage is a bad thing and you would almost never let an opponent 'wear themselves out' on you before you come back in force before the end of the fight*.

In real life, damage is bad. In boxing films, damage is excellent. You *want* both fighters to be visibly damaged. specifically you want the hero to be the more damaged fighter because every visible example of pain makes them more heroic for resisting it.

The boxing hero has to be beat-up towards the end. if they were just very good and won intelligently without being visibly physically hurt then it would have no visual or emotional impact. It would be like throwing away the language of film.

What goes for boxing goes to some degree for all other forms of physical damage. Getting shot is very bad and probably effectively incapacitating for almost all normal people no matter where you get shot. On film the hero *has* to get shot. Or at least clipped. it has to be physical and it has to be *visible*, without the visible example of danger and pain the hero isn't heroic.

*EDIT - ok this is apparently actually a thing people sometimes do.



Gun fights. Any time after WW1 if you are facing machine guns or artillery then you have to be some distance from each other. You need to be far enough away from each other that if someone opens up on you with a machine gun and walks it down the line there is enough time from the person in front of you dying and falling down and you seeing this for you to get into cover.

The trusty grunts dive into the trench or foxhole. They are all there, lined up and *in the same shot*.

"We're pinned down, we gotta get out of this Kowalski!"

Sure you do, but the reason you are pinned down is not because of tactics, its because the director of the film needed their principal story-carrying characters near each other, in direct danger, *in the same shot* so they are interacting socially just by being there and the audience can *see* this happening.

The trusty grunts will *always* end up pinned down together in a foxhole, or behind a wall, or in a room. The only thing you can say for sure about the place that they are trapped in is that it will be somewhere where you can point a camera at the whole group and *see* them acting together, exchanging glances, being in each others social space. That shot tells the story of coming together under pressure to achieve something difficult. It tells it better than simply filming the real thing would.

If everyone has machine guns really you want to be behind someone, in cover, at long-medium range so you can shoot them in the back. This looks terrible on film. Film wants everyone in the shot.



Archery. In Game of Thrones they actually lampshade this.

"Never hold your bow drawn, it loosens the string for no reason." - Also it tires you the fuck out because bows are heavy to draw and you are wasting energy. Just draw and loose in one movement.

Then later in the series during a siege *they do the same fucking shot*, a row of archers, arrows pointed up for a ballistic shot, even though the enemy are below, all holding their bows drawn for a really fucking long time.

I think the arrows are also flaming too.

Why? Because it tells the story of the violence better than the real violence would. The bow held at the draw gives the human body a powerful and tense visual signature. The muscles are literally held in tension, all they can do is release and you are just waiting for that to happen.

Having a bunch of archers in a row? Fucking cool, gives the image depth and perspective. Plus the sight of a bunch of people holding themselves in a uniform tension multiplies the signal of the single archer.

Adding flaming tips? Of course. Always do it. A more powerful visual signature. As well as that, always chase escapees and light your castle with flaming torches and never with candles or lanterns. The naked active fire on the torch is almost a character in itself and the fact that the person holding it must hold it like a weapon, upright, away from themselves, body in tesnsion, makes it better dramaturgy. A lantern hangs, a bare candle must be moved with slowly (always have candles in the scholars study *and if it’s a ghost story*, candles slow physical action down, torches speed it up.)



Weapons. Always too big. Real weapons have to be light enough to wield continuously for a long period of time. Warhammers and picks are small. The head has to be small to concentrate mass and force. A big wide head is dumb, a big wide sword is dumb.

Fantasy weapons have to be oversized so they can tell the story of the weapon better. Conans sword was so big and heavy only Arnold could actually wield it. The sword of Goderick Gryffendor was designed originally to be held by children and looked big in their hands. In the final films, in the hands of adults, it looked too small.

Guns don't always need to be super-big but they should have all kinds of extra crap bolted onto them like laser sights and extra magazines and little pointless clips.

Guns and swords both need to make much more sound than they do in real life. Guns in films clatter like dice bags every time an actor even touches them.



Helmets. Helmets are the most important piece of armour that anyone will ever put on. Except maybe a mail shirt or kevlar. But in general, if you are wearing armour and not wearing an helmet then you are fucking insane because you keep your brain in there and you need that.

Yet in film people are continually losing their helmets. Often they get shot off or lost in battle some other way. Sometimes the main hero becomes such a super-soldier that "helmets just slow me down maaan". Generally if a film can find any way to get the helmet off, they will.

Why? I think because it fucks up the transmission of story energy from the face. Helmets (and hats) surround the face, change the profile of the skull. They look dorky in real life. They look even more dorky on film because a huge amount of information about the way someone’s body and personality and presence impacts the world is simply missing from a film image. What you have is the visual in a box and helmets fuck badly with the proportioning of informational space within this box. Heroes don't have wide faces. Heroes don't have small features. They have large expressive features that fill their often-narrow faces. They are full of information.

Some hats do and some hats don't. Top hats do, Sherlock Holmes rarely wears one on film. Even in old films he's usually taking it off. Cowboy hats don't. probably cowboy hats are ok because they are a *lateral line*, they go *across the screen* and make the screen feel wider, not more dense. A top hat goes up and down and on a film screen thats awkward as fuck.

Neither surround the face and make it look bigger, Sherlock will NEVER wear his deerstalker with the flaps down. Even on the moors when it’s probably cold as fuck and he is literally stalking something he will keep his flaps tied. Marge from Fargo can have her face-surrounding hat, it makes her look plumper and more heavy and that *tells the story* of Marge and is accounted for in that stories structure.



- Over Signalling.
- Taking damage.
- Grouping up when in area-danger.
- Being highly visible.
- Partial armour use.
- Holding a position of dynamic tension.
- Oversized weapons.

Maybe this is another thing like dungeon traps, a signal inverted or somehow turned inside out to make is useful in a fiction about a thing, to make it a useful piece of mental architecture, a transmissible idea, rather than a piece of the real world.

Beauty and Imagination

Long ramble that goes nowhere, prompted in part by recent events, partly by this. It felt like I was going to get close to a point, but the dammn thing slipped away somewhere and I'm tired of searching for it. Read at your own risk

Pictures of Titans and a link to a better post.

A picture of a Space Viking riding a tugboat pulled by wolves has sparked a deep intorspection in to the heart of culture.


Firstly, if you want to read some interesing analysis of Mini's, go here and read both the post and the comments (not mine, mine was terrible), then if you want to follow up, go here and read the comments.

Now here are some pictures of Titans I jammed together. Some are very old titans in the 6mm range. that means they are about the size of  your thumb, or smaller. The others are modern Titans in the 28mm range. That makes them the size of your hand, or forearm maybe.

 

The Cathedral at Night

From ‘Cathedrals of France’ by Auguste Rodin, Chapter Ten

Distant gleams turn brown and blacken before certain columns. They clarify others obliquely, feebly yet regularly.

But the depth of the chancel and the whole left part of the nave are plunged into a thick gloom. The effect is horrible because of the indecision of things in the lighted distance. A whole square space is struck by stark illumination; lights flame between columns that take on colossal proportions. And I am made to doubt this epoch and this country by the interruptions, these conflicts of light and shadow, these four opaque columns before me and these six others lighted further off in the same oblique line, and then by the night in which I am bathed and which submerges everything. There is no softness. I have the impression of being in an immense cavern from which Apollo will arise.

For a very long while I cannot define the horrible vision. I no longer recognise my religion, my Cathedral. This is the horror of the ancient mysteries. At least so I should suppose if I no longer felt the architectural symmetry. The vaulted ceilings are barely perceptible, braced by shadows, the ribs of the arches.

I must escape the oppression of this effect of closing in. A guide takes me by the hand, and I move through darkness that soars as far as the vault.

From the light beyond them, these five columns have their oblique illumination. The ribs, the arched ceiling beams, the ogives resemble crossed flags like those at the Invalides.

I advance. It is an enchanted forest. The tops of the five columns are no longer visible. The pale lights that cross the balustrades horizontally create infernal roundelays.¹ Here one is in heaven by day and in hell by night. Like Dante we have descended into hell.

Violent contrasts are like those from torchlight. Ardent fire at the mouth of a tunnel spreads out in layers. Only the columns against this flaming background are indistinctly black. At moments a drapery appears with a red cross; the light seems to be extinguished, but no, it persists in a mortal immobility.

The chancel is laid bare to horror. But the horror controls itself, imposes order, and this order reassures us. And then, our memory of day, our connections with the day come at this moment to our rescue, giving us the necessary confidence.

There is a reflection on one ogive; the perspective is masked and the clarity, imperfectly developed on the edge, shows only the stationary construction in the dim gleam. But this gleam, although terrible, nevertheless reveals the masterpiece.

The Cathedral assumes an Assyrian character. Egypt is vanquished, for this Cathedral is more poignant than a Pyramid, father from us than the grottos where the great creation of rules appeared. The unknown is the mystery of this spectacle. One thinks of a forest, of a grotto, but this is nothing of that sort: this is something absolutely new, which it is impossible to define at once.

The frightful bulk of night, feebly pushed aside for a moment, as quickly, and with an irresistible violence, regains empire.

This is like Rembrandt, but as a spectre of taste and order. Rembrandt himself brings us not more than an echo of this prodigious world.

I am in terror and in rapture.

Dante, did you enter this circle of horror?

The chapels are transformed by the struggle between darkness and light.

This one is a sombre grotto where there seem to be only shells set out along the ribs of the arches. And yet, the terrible shadow allows itself to be seen, appreciated, and modelled.

Another chapel is divided in two by a cast shadow. One whole side is abolished. The columns seen from three-quarters, black and formidable, disturb the whole architectural arrangement. My dissipated mind apprehends only frightful things; it sees horrible supporting legs repeated in this forest that man has created for his God. Is this forest less beautiful than the real one?  Is it animated by fewer thoughts, less populated by atrocious larvi and by fewer spirits?

And you, gargoyles, did you not issue from the brain of sculptors who returned to the Cathedral after sunset to take counsel there from the night and to seek there the memory of some horrible dream?

I aspire to a new confirmation of the grandeurs of the Gothic soul.

One would have an impression of a Tower of Babel if, in this apparent confusion, all at once architectures did not surge out of the night, if the shadow itself were not organised. The moment is present without words and without voice.

Completely black columns are around the chancel; this is stone in prayer, a waterspout that rises to God.

Oh Night, you are greater here than anywhere else. It is because of the half illumination that terror comes over me. Incomplete illuminations cut the monument into trunks, and these gleams tell me the thrilling pride of the Titans who built this Cathedral. Did they pray? Or did they create?

Oh genius of man, I implore you, remain with us, god of all reflections!

We have seen what the human eye had not seen, what is perhaps forbidden it to see. Orpheus and Eurydice feared being unable to escape, since the boatmen did not come to fetch them in the terrible gloom. We walked alone amid the Night. We were in the straits of Tarn. We went alone into a great forest. A whole world was in this Night that the Titans had prepared for us.

A candle buns: a tiny point of light. To reach it I must stride over heavy masses of shadow where I rub against dead gleams, unicorns, monsters, visions.

The Thinker² would have been well adapted to this crypt; this immense shadow would have fortified that work.

By lighting a candle, the sacristan has displaced the shadows. There is a treasure here, the treasure of shadow accumulated by the night. It hides the treasure of the Cathedral.³

As we reached the door, this gigantic scene advanced toward us: the immense room seemed prepared for a banquet to the infernal gods.

Then the small door of the Cathedral was closed. The vision disappeared. All is entrusted now to our memory

1. Translators note: dances in the round. See Albert E. Elsen, Rodin, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1963, pp 155-156.

2. Translator’s note: This refers to Rodin’s enlarged figure of the Thinker.

3. Translator’s note: The French word here is église (Church), but obviously it refers to the Cathedral of Reims.