The Rigveda, the oldest extant Indo-European scripture, begins with a hymn to Agni.
Agnimīḷe purohitam yajñasya devamṛtvijam, hotāram ratnadhātamam.
(Agni I worship, the first before the Lord, he who illuminates Truth, the warrior who defeats darkness, and is the giver of Light.)
Why Agni? Why is he given pre-eminence? Agni is the god of fire, but more importantly, he is the sacrificial fire, the central element of ancient Vedic worship. The ancient priests offered their prayers before Agni, and cast their sacrifices into his flames, and Agni carried these up to the other gods. Without Agni there could be neither worship nor sacrifice. he is the bridge between Earth and Heaven.
This is on my mind for two reasons. The next book being released in the Cults of RuneQuest series is devoted to the Fire/Sky deities of Glorantha, and I look forward to it immensely. The second, I attended a fire sacrifice ritual last week at a Buddhist temple here in Japan, a ritual that can be traced directly back to the Vedic sacrifices of three millennia ago. This was at Enoshima Daishi, a temple devoted to an esoteric Buddhist sect, the central figure of which is Fudō Myō-ō, a terrifying red-skinned demonic looking figure armed with a noose and a sword. The interior of the temple is blackened and always smells of wood smoke. On nights when they perform the fire ritual, a massive bonfire blazes in the center of the temple, surrounded by chanting monks. To participate, you write your prayer or a situation or sin you would like to be rid of, on a piece of wood. The monks cast these into the fire as the grim visage of the towering Fudō Myō-ō statue is illuminated by the firelight. It is a powerful experience.
So lets circle back to Agni, and then Glorantha.
Fudō Myō-ō is essentially the Japanese incarnation of the Hindu Acala. Without going too far into the weeds here, the Vedic religion and modern Hinduism are not the same, and don’t focus on the same deities, but the vedas remain central to Hinduism. At the risk of oversimplifying, a very rough analogy would be the connection between Christianity and the ancient Hebrew scriptures. Acala is a fiery warrior god who first appears around 700 CE, but he clearly embodies one of the aspects of the Vedic Agni, “the warrior who defeats darkness.” This “darkness” is both physical (the night) and spiritual (sin, evil). Once again we get a glimpse of Agni’s deeper significance, the bridge between Earth and Heaven. The physical darkness he banishes is earthly, the spiritual darkness is celestial.
One of the things that makes RuneQuest and its setting Glorantha extraordinary is the way they reflect the themes of mythology without (in most cases) simply copying real world myths. Greg Stafford’s decision to name the Rune Fire/Sky is a perfect example of this. Once again, we see the duality. Fire is down here, on Earth. Heaven is in the Sky.
Imagine, for just a moment, you are one of the nomadic Indo-Aryans of four thousand years ago, when the Vedic hymns were being chanted and passed down orally. Imagine being on a wide plain at night. There were likely dozens, if not hundreds, of camps clustered together, each around a fire. These fires flicker and twinkle, just like the stars above you. They are earthly campfires, could not the stars be the campfires of the gods?
Fire rises, while the Sky descends. The heat they felt beating down on their backs from the sun was the same as the heat they felt on their faces around the fire. So clearly the fire and the sky are one. Fire, then, becomes the link to heaven. It rises back up to it.
“The Lord” mentioned in the hymn I quoted above is Yajna, the Master of the Universe. Agni is an emanation of him. In Glorantha, the most direct analogy is Enverinus, god of fire and sacrifices (Prosopaedia, pp. 34-35), who is himself a portion of Yelm, the Master of the Universe. Like Agni Enverinus is present at all sacrifices, and has to be. This remains true in the Lunar religion, which itself is a development of the religion of Yelm in a similar manner as Hinduism and the Vedic religion. Enverinus’ priests oversee all sacrifices performed by other Lunar cults.
When I wrote the “The Elements of Heortling Ritual” section of Six Seasons in Sartar, I leaned into this as well. The Heortlings burn their sacrifices, or at least portions of them, to offer them to the gods. This time the sacrificial fire is Oakfed (Prosopaedia, p. 90), who “was tamed in Prax by Waha, and in other regions by their ruling deities. Oakfed now sleeps, but he can be awakened by priests who need his help.” Oakfed is one of the Lowfires, along with Mahome (the hearth fire), and Gustbran (the forge and kiln fire). The Prosopaedia describes Oakfed as the wildfire, but notice the difference between that description and the one given in The Lighbringers (pp. 10-11):
The Lowfires—Mahome the Hearthfire, Gustbran the Workfire, and Oakfed Wildfire—serve men. They are the fires that cook our food, work metal, bake clay, and send our offerings to the gods.
This is not a change so much as The Lightbringers being more explicit about Oakfed’s function. It is already implied in The Prosopaedia when Oakfed is associated with Enverinus. This means that in the Orlanth and Prax pantheons, the sacrificial fire is as central as in the religions of Yelm and the Red Goddess. Of course, this was true in our world as well. The ancient Vedic peoples were not the only ones make fire sacrifices. The ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans all did as well. Note however that for the cultures following Orlanth and Waha, the fire was essentially tamed and stolen from Yelm. There is a bit of Prometheus to this twist, which only makes sense given the Orlanthi and Praxians are raiding cultures. Yet fire remains as the bridge which carries sacrifices to the gods (though I strongly suspect the Earth Goddesses received buried offerings rather than burnt).
We’ve talked a great deal about sacrifice, and the role of fire as a bridge between worlds, but the attributes given to Agni in the hymn are relevant to other Fire/Sky deities as well.
As the “warrior who defeats darkness” we see a number of deities. Let’s pick out four.
Preeminent I think is Polaris (Prosopaedia, p. 100), who commanded the armies of the Upper World during the Gods War. When the Spike was shattered, Polaris built a fortress around the hole keeping back the dark. A point to consider here. We are talking here about the “spiritual” darkness we mentioned above. This would be the entropy and moral evil of Chaos. Gloranthan mythology speaks of the time of Chaos as the Lesser and Greater Darkness, but this is not physical darkness, which is the Darkness Rune. There is a relationship between the two—notably the Chaos Rune looks like the Darkness Rune but with the addition of horns—but I think that deserves its own discussion. Still, the Fire/Sky pantheon is also at odds with the Darkness gods, again showing that duality between fire’s physical and spiritual aspects.
Shargash—the most Acala/Fudō Myō-ō of these Glorantha deities—is another prime example. His entry in the Prosopaedia (p. 110) talks about his creation by Yelm to keep order (disorder being another type of moral or social darkness). Yet it also talks about his “purification” of the world by fire. This occurs after Orlanth has killed Yelm, making the world “impure” by cutting it off from heaven.
This is a major theme of the Fire/Sky mythology of Glorantha. Heaven is “pure.” Earth is “impure.” As the Sky deities descend into the world they gradually become less pure. Dayzatar, who sits in the highest heaven and is furthest from the Earth, is the “Master of Purity.” Lodril, who dwells in the Earth, is the most indulgent, sensual, and impure. This has to do of course with “light.” The light of the stars and sun is a pure light, a clean light. A wood fire produces smoke and burns. It blackens things around it and leaves ash. Yet conversely, dual-natured fire is also light. Purification is a vital function of it, and this is why it is central to sacrifice. Whatever offering you make to the fire, it is purified and made fit for the gods. The smoke rises towards heaven. Flames leap up.
Shargash then might conceivably be seen as burning the world to return it to the gods. It is what my old mentor Alf Hiltebeitel called “the ritual of battle,” comparing the war in the Mahabharata to a Vedic sacrifice to restore the befouled world.
The god who best embodies the concept of light keeping away physical darkness is Yelmalio (Prosopaedia p. 139). Polaris is defending the heavens against spiritual darkness, Shargash is redeeming the world by fire, but Yelmalio is the pure light of heaven down here, at least in the mythologies of the Orlanthi. With Yelmalio, things get complicated.
Yelmalio is one of the deities associated with the planet Lightfore, which is the same color as the sun and follows the same path as the sun, rising as the sun sets and setting as the sun rises. The key difference is that Lightfore is smaller than the sun, and thus does not give as much light. We see this in the name, I think. “Yelmalio” clearly evokes “Little Yelm.” During the Gods War, when Yelm was absent from the sky, Lightfore continued to illuminate the world, though dimly. In Glorantha, before the ascension of the Red Moon, we can imagine the soft golden light of this planet illuminating the night almost like a full moon.
We see this association with Lightfore reflected in two of Yelmalio’s titles, the “Cold Sun” and the “Preserver of Light,” and his counterpart in the Yelm pantheon is Antirius. Their respective mythologies depict both as “carrying on” for Yelm after he was killed, but in notably different ways. Yelmalio preserves physical light in the world, making him beloved by the Elves and accepted by the Orlanthi, while Antirius rules in Yelm’s place. Both suffer a successive series of setbacks (try saying THAT three times fast) that robs them of their fire powers and leaves them only with light. Both suffer a loss at the Hill of Gold (Antirius is killed, Yelmalio struggles on). BOTH of these mythologies parallel that of yet another version of Yelmalio, the Orlanthi Dawn Age deity Elmal. Elmal—whose name is so clearly a mistranslation or mishearing of Yelmalio—is a son of Yelm who becomes steward to Orlanth. Orlanth puts him in charge of the world when he descended into Hell for the Lightbringers’ Quest (as Yelm leaves Antirius in charge). He too suffers a series of injuries and losses that weaken him, but like Yelmalio he endures, keeping a last spark of light alive in the dark.
If we went looking for Earth mythological parallels to Yelmalio, the one that jumps out to me is the Indo-Iranian deity Mitra, and his eventual Roman incarnation Mithras. Both the Vedic Mitra and the Iranian Mitra were gods of light. They were both associated with the sun but not worshipped as the sun. This was also true of the Roman Mithras. One of the deity’s most common epithets was “sol invictus,” the unconquered sun, but his worship was distinct and separate from the Roman Sol Invictus, the actual sun god. Regardless, both Mithras and Sol Invictus were associated with the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, but also the turning point when nights start to get shorter, the very Yelmalio notion of “the last light before the return of the Sun.” All three of these deities were associated with honor, promises, endurance and duty. In both Avestan and Sanskrit, mitra meant “promise,” “covenant,” and “brother” (as in band of brothers and not blood relation). The Iranian Mitra was associated with soldiers. Interestingly, the Roman Mithras was a secret fraternal order, a brotherhood, and called themselves syndexioi, those "united by the handshake.” This is very evocative of the name’s Avestan and Sanskrit meanings, though it is very unlikely the Romans were aware of that. The worship of Mithras was very popular among the Roman legions, to the point he was called “the soldier’s god.” All of these qualities remind us of the cult of Yelmalio and the Sun Domes.
The last “warrior who defeats the darkness” has to be, of course, Yelm himself.
Yelm (Prosopaedia, p. 138-139) is the middle brother between aloof Dayzatar and worldly Lodril, and as such embodies the quality of duality we have talked about several times. He is the bridge between Heaven and Earth. As the brightest object in the sky, he is also “the giver of light.” As the Celestial Emperor he “illuminates the truth” by revealing what is good and naming all things. Also as Emperor he defeats spiritual darkness by giving order and purpose to the cosmos. As the god who died and returned from Hell, resurrected, he defeated that ultimate of physical darknesses…death. He so perfectly embodies all the aspects we started with in the hymn to Agni that it only makes sense to finish our discussion with him.
And yet clearly Yelm is not a parallel of Agni, but instead of “the Lord” mentioned in the hymn. That Lord, Yajna, is like Yelm “Master of the Universe.” While Yelm embodies so many of the traits possessed by other gods in his pantheon, the one no one else possesses is his centrality, authority, or rule. He is the Emperor, a title not even Orlanth usurped and that the Red Goddess—who is not afraid to challenge Orlanth for the Middle Air—does not contest. In this he is the ultimate embodiment of a Rune that depicts a single center to the sky.
In the end, all of Gloranthan mythology is about him. His death triggers the Gods War. He is the Light the Lightbringers quest to bring back. Time begins with his return, etc.
It is hard to find quite anything like Yelm in terrestrial mythologies. There are no solar deities that are, really. The Indo-Europeans preferred their tribal/chieftain storm gods. The Egyptians had several successive solar deities, but none of them with emperor of heaven status. The late Roman Sol Invictus became strongly linked with Empire, but this was a case more of monotheism than imperialism. The closest we come, I think, is China. Here we find the Emperor of Heaven, or Jade Emperor, who is the center of a celestial order mirrored by the one on Earth. The imagery here however equates authority more with heaven than the actual sun…heaven is “above” us all.