From: yfcw29@castle.edinburgh.ac.uk
Date: Thu 08 Sep 1994 - 18:28:39 EEST
(Peter Metcalfe, CAPE Canty) Writes :
>So if I believe that Yelmalio didn't really loses his fire powers at the hills
>of Gold, I can use Fireblade? To me this is simplistic. What also matters is
>what the enemy believes about the god and what actually happened to the God
>himself.
>I must come out into the open and state my belief that at 0 ST, the gods were
>frozen by the web.
But the 'godtime' exists outside of time, not merely 'before' it. It exists in the Gloranthan 'here and now' just as much as in the gloranthan past. It exists beyond a veil that can be pierced through heroquesting. To a great extent, such heroquesting has created the godtime we all know about. Remember also that cult rituals are also heroquests, so these can alter the godtime in the same way. Thus the worshiper's beliefs, manifested in their rituals of worship, can make their mark on the godtime.
>In extremely rare cases the myth can be extended
>into time by concious heroquesting of a colossal magnitude ..
I don't think that the difference in magnitude need be that great. In a sense some heroquest is all heroquest. Treu, to make a great change which alters a myth important to millions of people is a great heroquest, but even minor heroquests are temporaly ambivalent. After all, every quester on a given path is arguably performing the same deeds at the same time and place.
>Either the heroquester finds an event of what the god did that was previously
>unknown and adds the spell to the cults lexicon or he borrows a tool from a
>similar diety or invents a power in which case he becomes the focus of a
>subcult.
Or rather, he performs some heroic deed in the name of the god and thus adds that acomplishment to the god's achievements. This is the difference between personal and cultural quests. In the personal quest, the questor performs and benefits from the deed. In cultural questing, the hero acts for/as the god, indeed the whole culture, and adds to the cult that way - but with lesser personal benefits. Founding a subcult is a hafway step between the two, where others follow a hero's personal quest path and expand it's influence on the culture as a whole.
>And if Elmal was not Yelmalio, would some bad side effects have happened? The
>God Learners switched two earth goddesses around and no fruit grew in one place>and no marriage survived in the other.
I think these are quite different. The god learners did not even tell the poor worshipers that they had made the switch. It was pure godplane engineering. The rituals the poor saps were using were mere pantomime, they nolonger corresponded to the godplane realities. I think the worsipers probably could have quested such a change themselves given time and judicious questing.
>I do not accept this. The Gods were, the gods are. They have made themselves
>a permanent part of glorantha.
Will the real Yelmalio please stand up! I have difficulty reconciling this with your next statement.
>This was the basis behind my suggestion that the Solar
>Orb was too powerful to be worshipped directly and all the sun cults we have
>are only crude approximations.
Spot on! Antirius, Yelmalio, Elmal, whatever, spring from the same source. I relay don't want to be drawn into the Yelmalio/Antirius debate. I just question some of your statements about heroquesting and god learnerism.
BTW. What the hell is the Hill of Gold anyway. Is it a place, or a metaphor?
>I'm sorry if this has been somewhat pedantic but I feel obliged to explain
>myself when people invoke my name. I am trying to wean myself of this habit.
Go right ahead, Pete. I think your ideas are interesting and reflect a differentview of heroquesting from mine. You seem to believe in an underlying mythological
truth, where I believe in a continuous mythological process. That's ok.
Simon Hibbs
yfcw29@castle.ed.ac.uk
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