From: Loren Miller (loren@marketing.wharton.upenn.edu)
Date: Thu 28 Apr 1994 - 14:14:43 EEST
Loren here, responding to Alex Ferguson
>> Now who is going to say "this initiation is to your culture, but that
>> one is to your religion"? They're both sacred. They're both the product
>> of the gods. Any differentiation is artificial.
>Woah. Only if cult and clan (tribe, skin, etc) are unitary, indivisable,
>etc. Now, I don't for a nanosecond deny there's a religious aspect to
>"cultural" initiation, or a cultural aspect to "religious" initiation.
Why do you think that "cult" is in "culture"? Religion is the basis for society, the glue that holds society together in any pre-industrial setting.
IMO, cult and clan *are* unitary. Or if not then why is there a different Orlanth cult in Prax from the cult in Sartar? I believe that the Orlanth cult is different from each clan to the next, and that the only reason the rulesbooks don't mention it is that it would be unplayably complex to have all those different long-form cult writeups, one for the Colymar, one for the Lismelder, etc, etc, etc. This goes back to the idea that every worship service is a heroquest that has the possibility to change the cult, if only a little, and that over time every congregation diverges from the cult as it is perceived elsewhere, even over the hill in the next village. Gradually the cult is infused with local accretions. Eventually, given enough divergence, the local cult may become totally incompatible with the cult as worshipped elsewhere. It might not even worship the same god. Naturally, this proves that everyone else suffers from rectal-cranial inversion, not that *we* might be wrong.
>But: what I'm quibbling about, is to the general effect that I'm
>not convinced that for all Gloranthans, Initiation into their society
>is _necessarily_ coincident with Initiation into the full, active religious
>life of the community. And if it does, I'm not much impressed by the
>existing, or proposed rules for it.
I disagree. Adults are *all* capable of participating in religious ceremonies in adult roles, because they have become adults and that's the purpose of adulthood initiations. However, there are mysteries that require additional initiations. Frinstance, the village chief goes through an additional initiation that ties his prospects to those of his village. I suppose in Sartar this would be represented as allying the wyter or initiating to its cult or being adopted/acknowledged by it or some such thing. Members of the Praxian men's secret lodges must go through additional initiations. So must the women into their mysteries.
Everyone joins the same cult. That's the social glue for their community. By joining the local cult the adult should get all the benefits required to live successfully. The most important god in the local form of the religion has to be the one with the most associated cults. If the other important cults don't start as associates then over time through the heroquesting implicit in worship they will become so. In a clan in which Barntar is the pre-eminent deity the land goddess (Ernalda, etc) would give her spells to him, not to Orlanth. So, each locale and/or clan version of a cult would have different associated cults. If we had separate long-form cult writeups for every single clan's version of each cult they worship then it would handle my concerns. It would be compatible with what Greg and Sandy have said about cults. It would make Alex's and other folks' objections to pantheon-style worship unnecessary. However, nobody has the time to write all that stuff.
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