From: Sandy Petersen (sandyp@idcube.idsoftware.com)
Date: Thu 02 Jun 1994 - 06:37:34 EEST
Dave Dunham asks:
>how do you associate "their great god, the huge iron Ram whose horns
>could break anything," with Heler?
Heler is the god of sheep, or at least sheep are his special animal. I don't know if this has been published or not. Greg told me it was because sheep fleece reminded him of fluffy clouds.
David Gadbois sez:
> If the God Learners had not done their thing, I suspect that the
>Third Age (whatever that would have been) would have been the last.
Despite my occasional defense of the God Learners, I don't agree with David G. on this point. It is my belief that the world very nearly ended with the Second Age BECAUSE of the God Learners' activities. The Sending Gods barely came in time.
Each Age of Glorantha has ended with cosmic catastrophes of immense portent, and each Age of Glorantha had the potential of destroying the entire cosmos. Each Age, the destruction gets closer and closer to success. The First Age destruction was comparatively mild -- the only real result was the death of millions of Genertelans and a near-complete change of Pamaltelan ecology. The Second Age destruction was much much worse -- entire lands vanished from the face of the earth, gods died, and the face of myth was altered. The destruction at the end of the Third Age, it seems to me, is even more catastrophic, especially mythically. Certainly the Hero Wars are viewed as an immense threat to all of Glorantha.
Devin wonders:
>I know well and good what the God Learners did, but less clear is
>WHY they did such things. In other words, why create a monomyth? Why
>try to combine or switch gods?
The GL were an entire nation/society of folk, so there is no one reason why they did anything. Some of them were scholars/philosophers/scientists who were trying to study the way the world worked. (After all, why do WE have paleontologists and astronomers? Neither field would appear to offer immediate benefits to society.) In other words, they were curious. I like to think that at the start, they were JUST curious, and it was later on that the rot started in.
The Waertagi had been preventing anyone else from constructing trans-oceanic sailing vessels. The Jrusteli could not easily beat them at sea. So some researchers looked through the myths, and discovered the god Tanian, the child of both Fire and Water. They sent a team of heroquesters to contact this deity, and to create a cult for him. Once they had the cult in place, they built a fleet and went toe-to-toe with the Waertagi. At the height of the battle, they invoked the powers of Tanian -- The God of Burning Water. Fire literally rained out of the sky and set the sea aflame. The Waertagi and their ships were destroyed in the holocaust. A classic success story for both intelligent heroquesting and careful book-learning.
So what you have in the case of the God Learners is a combination of exploitative, manipulative, power-hungry merchants and ivory-tower scholars. Occasionally, some group of carpet-baggers would spin off from the main God Learner group and found new political groupings such as the False Dragon Ring or the Six-Legged Empire.
So, "why create a monomyth"? 'Tis a useful tool in understanding other people's mythologies. When you meet someone knew, you can try to fit them in, which both sheds light on your own beliefs, and also helps you know where to fit them in heroquesting. Once you decide that Ehilm and Yelm are the same guy, you can assassinate the Ehilm king by portraying Orlanth on a heroquest, even if the Ehilm folk have never heard of that particular part of the legend.
"Why try to combine or switch gods?" These activities were pure experiments in an honest attempt to discover new truths about the Heroplane and the nature of Glorantha. The GL responsible may have had some plan behind it -- for instance, if the Goddess Switch had been a success, perhaps they'd have tried something bigger next time, like switching Pamalt and Genert in an attempt to restore life to the northern continent(!). I'm not saying they were planning this, but it's a possibility.
In the end, their vast knowledge and skills caused them to think of the gods as just collections of spells, MPs, and characteristics. Basically, the God Learners were minimaxers of the worst possible ilk. And in the end, the universe retorted upon them, asserting itself before it was destroyed, and destroying them instead.
Paul Reilly mentions:
>the nature of the world is determined by these 'primal gods'. They
>lack cult structure not because they are hard to reach but because
>they are free with their aid. For example, Flamal makes your plants
>grow whether or not you worship him. You can get a little extra
>"oomph" through his cult structure, but it's not really necessary.
This is basically what I believe as well, except that I also believe that some of the more primal gods ARE hard to reach. Probably because they have little personality available for a human to latch on to and worship. There's few or no human worshipers of Gata, for instance, but I know that there are a number of elf temples. Elves, being closer to the earth, no doubt find it easier to worship the Six Earths.
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