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Redeeming
Thed, Goddess of Rape
A powerful account of one group's profound
heroquest
By Ron Edwards
"Hello, my name is Ron Edwards, and I'm a rabid
advocate for playing HeroQuest." Everyone else: "Hi,
Ron!" This article is intended to illustrate just what
you can get from playing the game, and it's pretty deep-end.
HeroQuest isn't about swinging swords and improving your
character's abilities, although that does happen. Playing
this game is about stuff, and the good news is that ultimately,
what the stuff really means is up to you. What do you need
to know, to read this article? Not much. The name of the setting
is Glorantha, and there are lots of cultures involved. Gods
and goddesses are a big deal, very much like what you'd
find in reading The Iliad. This essay is about one of them:
Thed, the Gloranthan goddess of rape.
In my role-playing group, during our very first discussion
of the setting's mythology and cultures, the other players'
initial reaction to this concept was probably similar to most
people's: "Whaaat? You must be kidding me."
I saw their point. It doesn't sound good, does it? Especially
the "of" part, which means what it sounds like--this
goddess represents, facilitates, promotes, and rewards the
act in question. To worship her is to perpetrate rape and
its associated agony of all kinds. I was looking at my players,
and they're giving me that No Freaking Way look back.
Now, years later, I'm writing this article to show that
the Gloranthan setting is built to prompt these kinds of responses
from people, and that HeroQuest has the guts, as a game, to
take even such a difficult ball and run with it for some outstanding,
uniquely powerful play. In many other games, such a response
means, "Avoid this issue from now on." In HeroQuest,
it can mean, "Go there, now."
So here we go, on a discourse about Thed. She isn't
a very powerful deity. Her primary worshippers are the broo,
or goatkin, a stock monster for the setting and arguably the
most debased kindred ever invented for a fantasy-world. They
propagate exclusively through rape, and they are cross-fertile
with just about anything. The offspring may have features
of the victim-parent, but it's a broo, usually male,
and usually riddled with "Chaos features" (i.e.
magical mutations) and diseases. They worship Thed in animistic
terms as an ancestor-spirit, and probably through misapplied
theistic worship as well, using all manner of sacrifice and
vicious evil-doing as currency.
The broo are found in all published versions of Gloranthan
role-playing. They're always the same: humanoids with
nearly-random animal features, although with a tendency toward
goat-part; festering and stinking with diseases; displaying
all sorts of deformities and wild magical features; and running
around intent on rape and pain. On occasion, united by a shaman
or the occasional debased human, they may be involved in more
subtle plots, on the scale of "poison the village well"
or "steal ten babes for sacrifice." They'll
hire out as mercenaries, although their employer would certainly
be ostracized by his or her other potential allies. Broo vileness
shows up everywhere. Check out any edition of RuneQuest (The
Chaosium 1977, 1978), and the supplements Snakepipe Hollow,
River of Cradles, The Big Rubble, Dorastor: Land of Doom,
and Shadows on the Borderland.
The role-playing source material on the mythos can be found
in Cults of Terror (The Chaosium, 1981). Its text was recapitulated
in the Avalon Hill publication Lords of Terror (1994) and
also in the first three chapters of Glorantha: Introduction
to the Hero Wars (Issaries, Inc., 2001). From the Thed section
in Cults of Terror:
Before Time
Since Time began
From the general section in Cults of Terror and repeated
in the later texts listed above:
From Lords of Terror (in addition to the above text):
Wakboth's first act in the world was to slay his father,
so that none could be born to rival him. He then forced Thed
and the broos to aid him as he destroyed the world. Thed's
willing submission to rape [I'll have more to say about
this later -RE] provided him with other, more powerful, brothers
and sisters, and these monsters served him as lieutenants
or champions during the Darkness.
And from Anaxial's Roster (Issaries Inc, 2000):
All right, that's not too out of line for a villain
deity, albeit a vile one. But, what's all this about
"she"? How can a female figure play this kind of
theistic role? On the face of it, the concept sounds frankly
awful --mean-spirited, at the least, or insensitive to
the issue, or all manner of similar things. Why not have the
broo god be Ragnaglar, the rapist perpetrator? No, it's
Thed--the goddess who was violated, including the birthing
of the rapist's child, who itself proceeds on to further
abuse. Not only the plain physical violation, but the trauma.
A goddess who claims ownership of rape. Is Gloranthan myth
assigning the responsibility for rape to its victim?
Even worse, you can't ignore it. Thed is a major element
of Glorantha, mythically speaking and also in terms of potential
foes for role-playing; if you house-rule this stuff out of
the setting, you leave behind gaping holes. Thed's actions
gave a face and intent to Chaos (previously fairly neutral,
if disturbing), and that intent necessitated the Great Compromise
and the birth of Time. It set up the relationships between
gods and mortals that define the theistic rules of Gloranthan
role-playing, most especially those of HeroQuest.
Close examination
Clearly there are some fuzzy areas in the texts quoted so
far. For example, just to pick a detail, the origin of the
broos' goat-ness is ascribed to both parent gods in Anaxial's
Roster. When getting hip-deep into philosophical and cultural
issues in Glorantha, the place to go is Greg Stafford's
novel King of Sartar: How one man became a god, which is sort
of a deconstructionist collection of after-the-fact documents
about the events of the Hero Wars. My copy is from The Chaosium
(1994); here's what it says. Bear in mind that every
"document" in the collection is intended to reflect
the writer's bias to an extreme degree.
It doesn't sound to me like she was Ragnaglar's
wife. Furthermore, Ragnaglar is kin not only to Storm Bull,
but directly to Orlanth himself. A previous section in the
book describes how he fails an initiation in "the sex
pit" and is driven mad, but his brothers rescue him and
put up with him thereafter. I'll discuss this fellow
later.
I should also explain the fictional writer's bias as
well. All this occurs during the Storm Age, in the Lesser
Darkness. Orlanth has usurped the rulership of the gods by
killing Yelm the Emperor. That's significant: there is
no rule of established, community-supported law. Orlanth's
justice is all about a "king" being a chief of chiefs,
and to such a chief, justice is a matter of case-by-case judgment
and assigned compensation (e.g. weregild). And bear in mind
that all this is before the advent of Andrin the Lawgiver,
who provided a better structure for negotiating justice and
establishing precedent. Therefore Orlanth presents judgment
by saying to Thed, "Here's the culprit. Name your
punishment."
What does Thed do? She ignores Ragnaglar and turns her attention
to the world itself. She chooses to become a full goddess
of what happened to her. She inflicts the crime that was perpetrated
upon her onto all of reality--i.e., she brings rape into
the world as a potential subject of worship, which includes
transforming her goat-people into their current form. Through
her decision, and through the broo's atrocious activities,
all women and indeed all beings must now fear this act to
a vastly greater degree. The net total of suffering and torment
in the world jumps up a notch. And as stated above, her story
continues with her alliance and coupling with Ragnaglar and
Mallia, to create Wakboth.
So the whole Unholy Trio story is really Thed's. Ragnaglar
and Mallia are secondary; they make no particular decisions
and do nothing she's not involved with. Unlike the Cults
of Terror text, which introduces these three as already-malevolent
conspirators, this material tells us who did what before that,
and how Thed came to be the center of the Trio. Her whole
Godtime saga proceeds as follows: (1) she is raped by Ragnaglar,
(2) she seeks justice from Orlanth, (3) she chooses to deify
rape, (4) she allies with the other two deities of the Unholy
Trio and they are first exiled and then killed by Humakt,
(5), they kill Rashoran, (5) "they did what they could
do to each other" (King of Sartar) and Thed births Wakboth,
(6) she fights with Chaos during the Greater Darkness, and
(7) she is defeated and skinned by Kyger Litor.
Keeping in mind the central question (why a goddess of rape?),
what does all this imply in moral, mythic terms? Some possible
initial reactions include: "Bullshit--what kind of
woman would do such a thing?" And, "It's all
Thed's fault, eh? Sounds like the same-old 'Blame
Eve' story." And, "The men are being let off
scot-free in the whole issue." One might even peg Stafford
as an outright sexist pig, to use the terminology of my upbringing.
However, our game-play, my thoughts on the issue in question,
some careful reading of the texts involved, and much input
from the men and women in our group has yielded a more complex
reaction. In play, it turned out to be the entire thematic
motor (Premise) underlying our game, and indeed, our Glorantha.
As I see it, the crime of rape is Ragnaglar's and the
crime of injustice is Orlanth's. He does not enlist the
community/society in passing judgment on the rapist. He says,
"Oh, you were raped? OK, here, justice is your problem,
you take care of it." Orlanth does not acknowledge the
responsibility of the community to pass judgment on the rapist,
as a representative of the injured party. By hard-line Orlanthi
mores, established community values play no role in justice.
Everything is taken case-by-case as an individual revenge
issue. This is one of two issues (the other is kinstrife)
where Orlanthi culture falls flat on its face. For these issues,
such "justice" only yields further harm.
Orlanth does not acknowledge that the act was itself wrong,
in a generalized sense, and that it needs a standing penalty
that will be enforced even in the absence of the victim's
power to enforce it. Even worse, the King of Sartar text strongly
implies that if Orlanth had known his brother was the perpetrator,
he would not have offered justice at all. Thed's response
suddenly takes on power and meaning--she rightly pegs
the existing society as insensitive to, even dismissive of,
the crime of rape that exists within it. Thed did not invent
rape. It already existed, and she suffered it. Nor did she
invent its atrocious, explosive properties (as expressed in
the broo); they are the result of society's inability
to admit to the rape within it. Instead, despite her appeal,
she was isolated by that community. She invents neither rape
nor its societal denial. Nor does she invent Chaos. She reveals
them. "You think this is judgment? I'll show you
judgment. You think this is Chaos? I'll show you Chaos."
I then reviewed all the literature again to make sure that
I was not sugar-coating or rewriting--this was not out
of a sense of purism, but rather to see whether some inkling
of the conclusion was there. And you know what? The King of
Sartar writeup never assigns Thed guilt (unlike the Lords
of Terror text which mentions her later willingness to be
raped by Wakboth). Although it's not articulated in the
terms I outline above, I'm convinced that Stafford knew
exactly what he was doing.
Now for Ragnaglar, for a moment. His brothers knew he was
an uncontrollable rapist, and they knew he was crazy. But
Orlanth perceived justice against his acts as "shame"?
And to project some of my reading onto the text, I think Ragnaglar's
own view toward Thed is, "She must have liked it."
Nowhere is any commitment of Thed to Ragnaglar mentioned,
and the phrase "said to have been wife to Ragnaglar at
one time" becomes especially interesting.
It also strikes me that the the ritual of the Unholy Trio,
which refers very directly to a sexual threesome in my reading,
is still rape; it had to have been, to produce the Devil.
Given that Thed entered into the ritual (and quite likely
organized it), the act signifies, to me, an internalization
of the abuse on her part--gaining "power" through
trying to own the suffering she experiences, rather than empowerment
per se. It's sex whose power is generated through hate.
Is Thed a heroine, then? Emphatically not--a vengeful
victim is not automatically a hero. But neither is she a Disney
villainess who mucks up reality just because her ego is wounded
or a bitch who does it just because she can. Nor is she lacking
in insight. She effectively tears the veil off the notion
that rape is an individualized, isolated indiscretion. The
crime she suffered always existed, and now, it never stops.
Her spawn, Wakboth, prompted the end of Godtime; he will also
prompt the climax of the Hero Wars and provide the transition
to the world to come, as hinted in King of Sartar. Thed is
literally Glorantha's "open wound."
Gloranthan mythology is not wholly original. It is syncretic,
incorporating elements of many, many real mythologies: Celtic,
Persian, Native American, Scandinavian, Greek and more. Whether
this is good or bad is up to the individual, although I know
some folks who find it aggravating. However, this issue stands
out. I am unaware of any real mythos that deals with the issue
of rape in the sense I've described here. The only parallel
I find is in literature, in John Milton's Paradise Lost,
which similarly brings up rape and the origin of moral evil
in the character of Sin. From Paradise Lost (Book Two):
[The other "shape" is Death, who gets snippy with
Satan and almost prompts a fight, except the "Snakie
Sorceress" intervenes; Satan asks who she is. She describes
her birth from his Satan's forehead long ago. - RE]
[emphasis mine - RE]
[Then Satan tells her:]
[Sin responds:]
That's powerful stuff, and Gloranthan mythology probably
borrowed a thing or two from it. But in that mythology, Thed
takes the issue much further, specifically to those of the
community, justice, and denial. Since it's a solid, sobering,
and narratively-inspiring treatment even in comparison with
Milton, I stand in awe. In this instance, the fictional mythos
of Glorantha rears up on its own hind feet and says, "I
am myth, derived from none other." It speaks uniquely
to our reality, to our problems, and to our self-image.
Our game
The player-characters were some back-woods Heortlings whose
community history includes inadvertent incest. After a few
sessions, their loyalties centered on Aething, a modified
Antigone character, as the clan leader, and that decision
became the core of everything to follow. They discovered their
clan myth included a Thed-Daimon named Eech'ya, specialized
to issues of incest-abuse. Eech'ya, a stalking figure
with long clawed hands but beautiful features, cloaked in
pale, soft leather, became a station in their heroquest to
establish themselves as a Hero Band. This quest "crossed"
other heroquests, including those by exceptional broos. Later
play saw more servitors or aspects of Thed-worship, such as
Sheth the anti-Lunar, hard-line-Thed broo shaman, and his
rebel son Tenslayer, a broo who struggled to contain his own
defiled nature through the help of the Seven Mothers and who
suspected that Thed had received a raw deal in the core myths.
The original plan had been to play out a story over perhaps
five or six sessions. But when the players established the
Graming Hero Band and determined upon their political goals,
there was no stopping. As I prepped for our tenth, then our
eighteenth, and eventually our twenty-seventh session and
beyond, with yet more to work with each time, I considered
the myths more and more. My watchword for myths, whether taken
whole cloth from the Gloranthan source material or made up
by me or a player, is always to look for the gaps, because
those become unexpected stations during heroquesting. Eventually,
I came upon these questions which I could not answer based
on the texts and myths: Why did the women goddesses not speak
for Thed? Especially, why didn't Vinga? And regarding
Thed, where were her kin?
These questions powered the final story of our game. I introduced
a historical character, Kistralde, based partly on the real-life
legend of Boudicea, but bringing in spousal rape as well,
as the fellow on the other side who rapes her, although not
her daughters, is her husband. I further included the splintering
of the three daughters' loyalty to their mother over
the fate of the resulting child. This scenario was set in
Far Point, and I decided that both Vingan and Yelornan heroquesters
were attempting to co-opt the history of the event into a
myth. Both cults (one pro-Lunar, the other anti-Lunar) rely
on denying sexuality as a basis for power, and they wanted
to "own" the story for that purpose.
Our heroes learned that Kistralde's chaos-tainted child
was the problem at the center of the history, and that's
why two of her daughters, one a Vingan, wouldn't help
her, and that's where Manslime comes from. This is a
bit of canonical fun on my part, as in Dorastor: Land of Doom,
Manslime is a significant character in Ralzakark's broo
army. (As a side note, that's why Sheth was such a powerful
shaman, as he knew this as a subcult Secret.)
Our heroes' interaction with this conflict provided
the climactic sequence and heroquest for the whole game. They
invented the myth of Kistralde themselves, defying the other
two cults' attempts to do so. Unlike the others, they
acknowledged the child instead of suppressing his existence.
Here's where things got hinky. Acknowledging a chaos
child of this sort crossed this heroquest into another one,
which was a big deal in our story as well. Women and women-cults
all over Far Point were conducting a very deep, shared heroquest
to determine who Ernalda's husband is, Yelm or Orlanth.
Basically, our heroes crashed this heroquest and said, "Listen
up, this 'husband' business masks a serious problem."
This permitted them to crack open a still "deeper"
heroquest into the Storm Age itself, forcing the participators
in the women-ritual to enter into the judgment of Thed.
It was time for me to consider what Thed might be like in
visual terms, especially early in the myths. Thed is not described
physically in the primary RuneQuest material (few gods are),
so I checked out the secondary RuneQuest literature that arose
through intensive game-play during the 1970s and 1980s. A
lot of it is in fanzines and fortunately a lot of that has
made it onto the internet, so a search for "Thed Glorantha"
or anything similar yields a lot of stuff. Some of the scenarios
and stories troubled me greatly, as they relied on Thed being
all about manipulative, uncontrollable lust, a kind of evil
Venus or Ishtar. The similarity of this viewpoint on the part
of role-players to my interpretation of Ragnaglar is frankly
appalling. As far as descriptions/imagery goes, what I mainly
found was fairly predictable: a goat-headed female broo, with
a distended belly, and with an oversized, toothed vagina from
which tentacles issue, and similar. I think it's mainly
derived from Lovecraftian pastiche images of Shub-Niggurath
("the goat with a thousand young").
The same kind of thing can be found in the additional text
in Lords of Terror (1994):
I'm relatively certain that this published text, as
well as the reference to her willing submission to rape (!)
are derived mainly from these fan-based sources. As such,
I decided that all of these implications could be jettisoned
with little loss. Significantly, in Glorantha: Introduction
to the Hero Wars, the Cults of Terror text is repeated but
the Lords of Terror text is not.
I interpreted Thed as a maiden with goat horns, as I figured
the goat-affinity didn't have to be all negative at this
point in the myth, but otherwise quite human. We figured her
twisted and misshapen qualities originated in the later ritual
and the birth of Wakboth. As this portion of the heroquest
began, it was a terrrifically unsettling experience to play
the raped goat-maiden, occasionally slipping in her own blood
as she climbed the harsh path alone to Orlanth's Hall.
When she displayed her wound, it was of course her vagina,
and I played the scene full of shame, yet with desperation
for justice just barely strong enough to overcome it.
Orlanth's hall is a scary place, full of Storm Warriors'
roistering and Orlanth's justice handed out left and
right. When Thed presents herself, Ragnaglar cackles and leers,
hiding behind his brothers. Orlanth is sincerely shocked by
the evidence of rape, but also uncomfortable with allowing
judgment, and he makes excuses for Ragnaglar. Vinga turns
away but will not speak up. For the characters, in game-mechanics
terms, this was an ugly situation. They were losing affinities
and suffering greatly in acquired penalties to be defying
their King this way. Their only hope was to shame the goddesses
with the lesson of the new Kistralde myth.
Because the heroes had included women priestesses and followers
from all around Dragon Pass into witnessing these events,
they could then, in the myth itself, enlist the women of the
pantheon as Orlanth struggles with his decision. They told
them: marriage will not save you from rape (here we brought
in the "husband" issue of Ragnaglar, as one of the
goddesses suggests that Ragnaglar and Thed be married to solve
the problem), and motherhood will not provide you with automatic
morality (strong words to Ernaldans!). The climax of the story,
then, arrived when Tenslayer and Aething spoke up: "We
are the children of the damned, and we have come home."
I won't say what happened then in detail. I will ask,
instead, if you and other people you know were playing in
this scenario, "What do you think?" What abilties
would you roll, and what Action Points would be bid, about
what? The answer is crucial for your Glorantha.
Conclusion
I submit that the issue of rape in Glorantha cannot be ignored
in the long term. In play, if you meet and fight broos, rape
enters the story. If rape enters the story among non-broos,
Thed is there as well. Certainly one might avoid both of these
entirely, but to do so is to avoid a primary monster-race
of Dragon Pass and Dorastor, and to gut the mythological setting
of one of its central back-story elements. And to remove rape
and sexual abuse of any kind from a desperate wartime setting
seems disingenuous or worse.
The mythology in question is especially key to Dragon Pass
play. Broos are all over the place. A Lunar worshipper must
be confronted with the expectation to "include"
broos in We Are All Us, and a Heortling must be confronted
with the ethical and judicial limitations of his or her culture,
which are responsible for the broos' existence. Yes,
Thed is a minor, grubby goddess, but as I played her in our
game, I heard her crone-cackling, poisoned laughter at the
Lunar conceit that Chaos can be included and controlled, and
also at the Orlanthi conceit to fight Chaos using cultural
mores which themselves perpetuate the wrongs that Thed represents.
Unlike the more powerful gods, she knows that the Devil (moral
evil) can be neither embraced nor beaten. That's why
the Old World must end. I don't think I can role-play
in Glorantha again without knowing that abused, vicious laughter
is in the background.
I submit that Thed represents one of the primary Mysteries
of Glorantha, which is to say, an issue for which a Hero Band
must literally invent the New World's morality, as past
myth and cultures failed to do. In our game, we did that,
and we spoke for Thed for a brief moment of glory, and assigned
the injustice where it belonged. We couldn't save her
entirely, nor stop the Great Darkness, which was "set"
in the story too deeply. But the characters were heroes who
would not let Thed face her fate alone. That's why my
deluxe copy of HeroQuest bears the rune of Thed, which on
the face of it seems obscene. But for our group, it's
a badge of pride. ½ •
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