From: Joerg Baumgartner (joe@sartar.toppoint.de)
Date: Thu 02 Jun 1994 - 17:34:16 EEST
Harald Smith in X-RQ-ID: 4294
Nice piece on Imther!
A request: could you let your texts begin at the left edge? By the time your message comes to me, half of it consists of spaces. I promise to try and cut my quotings shorter in return!
> - Assorted discussions on the Trinity
> My feeling is that a son, father, spirit representation of
> the Invisible God is not correct. [...] I think
> one thing to keep in mind is that to some extent the
> development of the 3-in-1 Christianity was a mythical
> inversion of the earlier pagan 3-in-1 goddess, used
> particularly by early Christians to convert the pagans.
I hear this for the first time. I would have thought that the father-son relation would have been a too nice parallel to Mithraism (the real contender with Christianity in Constantine's era) not to be exploited in conversions. Noone was interested in converting the heathens, it was inside the empire the church had to establish itself in this expansive period. I don't know whether Isis or Ishtar were organised along this 3-in-1 scheme at that time, being another quite popular sect of this era.
> I can certainly see the Malkionis attempting to find ways to
> convert the followers of the Serpent Kings or Orlanth
> (creating saints, aiding Seshna, etc.), but a trinity of
> aspects does not seem important mythologically.
I had the impression that the Seshnegi were Malkioni before they settled (conquered) Seshnela. From the Daka Fal write-up in Cults of Prax I take it that the "pagan" elements among the Seshnegi practised ancestor worship to an extent where King Froalar was of the same stature as his wife, the goddess Seshna Likita, and both surpassing the major deities of the elements etc.
I found the trinity fine as a concept for "Stygian" or "Henotheist" sects, and apparently I'm not the only one who feels so. The "Creator incarnate" concept at least helps to explain why this deity or that has a rightful claim to dominance.
--
-- Joerg Baumgartner joe@sartar.toppoint.de
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