Them pesky gods, 'gain.

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From: Alex Ferguson (alex@dcs.gla.ac.uk)
Date: Thu 15 Sep 1994 - 07:07:16 EEST

Peter Metcalfe:
> David Hall Writes
> >Whether this is true or not doesn't really
> >matter: what matters is what they believe.

> 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.

Yup, it sure is. Belief is not, in this context, just One Man's Opinion. What matters is the whole communities belief about their god, and how this reflected in their lives, and their worship. In order to re-jig the religion to "fix" his fire powers, you'd have to redo his whole mythology, and the whole society based upon it. Big heroquest.

> I must come out into the open and state my belief that at 0 ST, the gods were
> frozen by the web. All the myths that we have of a particular god are the
> totality of the god himself.

I don't think this is true, myself. Certainly mythology has changed since, and while some of these changes may be caused by "rediscovering" lost truths, I don't think that accoubts for all, or even most of them.

> Other types of cult changes can be either of two mechanisms.
> [...] the heroquester [...] invents a power in which case he becomes
> the focus of a subcult.

Right. Why isn't this "new" mythology, and effectively a new (mini-)god, then?

> >Glorantha isn't a world based on science where things can be proved right
> >or wrong - where there is one true way.

> I do not accept this. The Gods were, the gods are.

The gods form a confluent term reduction system?

> Transferring this example to Glorantha, An Orlanthi warlord encounters a
> malkioni land and conquers it. [...] He orders the wizards of
> that land to alter the spell of worship invisible god to worship orlanth and
> borrows other malkioni traditons. Do you think that this would be successful?
Maybe, maybe not. It would depend much more on whether the locals went for the idea, and whether a plausible mythic and ritualistic connection could be made, than whether Orlanth "was really" the Invisible God. I don't think this hinges on some plane of Platonic ideals somewhere, where there are gods which Simply Are something, regardless of what people believe and practice.

> (Yes, I know about the cult of the invisble orlanth, but that is a myth in
> carmania of how Orlanth defeated the creator and was enlightened, not the
> identification of Orlanth with the invisible god)

When I asked Greg about this, he said precisely the reverse. Mind you, he also said he didn't know much more about it, and could conceivably have been Nicked. Whichever way you slice it, they believe in a relationship between the two which would not be accepted elsewhere (like Loskalm, or Sartar). Which of them is wrong, and why does their magic still work?

> However if Elmal was not Yelmalio/Antirius/Paininthearseus, they
> were still trying to do was substitute a foreign god and the Sartarite could
> have easily made the charge of 'God Learnerism' which he doesn't.

Obviously no priest is going to stand up and boldfacedly tell his congregation that they'd been worshipping the wrong god, let's switch to a new one. That doesn't mean that either i) he's right, in some one true cosmological sense; or ii) that he won't later deny any identity, when others persist in worshipping the "wrong" god.

In any case, I don't think the typical Sartarite has a great working knowledge of God Learnerism, so it would hardly be the insult of choice. "Dirty Yelmic-fellow-travelling treacherous backstabbers" would do nicely.

Alex.

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