>there seem to be no clans,
>tribes, or cultures that rely (fairly) exclusively on Vinga. We know
>Ernalda, Orlanth, Heler, Yelm, Shargash, and the Red Goddess can
>provide that core for a society; others remain open to debate.
You can, with sufficient imagination, base any idea for a potential culture on any deity or set of deities, but some of them would be pretty damn weird and difficult to justify in relation to the rest of GAG. If you wanted to have a clan based on Vinga what you would have to do is work out how such a clan would come about in the first place - one potential founding history/myth would be that the men of the clan were all wiped out in one fell swoop leaving the women to fend for themselves with the aid of the goddess Vinga as their protector, and find a good excuse as to why they never got Orlanth back when they got men back in their clan (kidnapped Pelorian peasants as breeding stock?).
The term 'Great God' should really mean what the individuals in that culture think, and the rulesy bit in HW about GGs is just an attempt to make it impossible to get all the powers of all the aspects and myths of a GG if you become an initiate or devotee. Easily justified by the explanation that GGs have so many myths and powers no-one has the time to understand and learn about them all.
Patrick Anders says:
>My opinion is that gods gain strength simply from their prominence
in myth,
>even the myths of those who don't worship them. A good example is
Zorak
>Zoran [snip]
To which Simon replies:
>But why and how do gods become prominent in myth in the first
>place?...It's easy to get confused and think of gods as being 'people' >in
some
>sense. They aren't. Humakt is death works the other way around too,
>Death is Humakt. Whenever you read a myth from another culture >where
>Death is personified as a god, you have to remember that it's in >some
>way directly related to the Death the Heortlings know as Humakt.
So you imply that where a god is closely associated with a major law of the Gloranthan universe or a key archetype he gets into more myths. But the cultures have their own gods and twist on the cosmology. Death is Humakt, but Death is (to the Pelorians) Shargash too. Where the ideas are compatible enough the same name gets into the myths of both cultures when the two cultures meet and have priests arguing with each other and trying to explain to their own people what the strange folk up the road beleive and do. It would seem the GodLearners tried to amalgamate everything into one myth, get down to the nitty gritty of the essential laws of the universe and come up with the minimum set of archetypal gods needed to make it go (like our RW Jung). And failed, like Jung, because you can't do it without getting into broad hand waving abstractions that mean nothing to the people whose myths you are trying to appropriate, and probably say nothing about the true state of the universe.
The undenyable unifying thing about Death in Glorantha is that it is a dividing line between the material plane and another plane where things are different, and dead people have a certain look and smell about them and usually behave in particularly immobile way. All else is up for grabs. Heortlings, with an eye to social stability in a culture of hot blooded barbarians, concentrate on who gets killed and when it should be done and by whom and come up with Humakt, the trolls like the emotional angry bit and marmalise and kill people cos in certain states of mind it can be fun, and trolls hang out with their dead ancestors all the time so being killed is not that big a deal, and come up with Zorak Zoran.
Are myths where death is personified and dealt out by Zorak Zoran _really_ referring to Humakt too? This is a sort of explanation as to why the GL had to invent Humct, a more generalised version of death god with none of this awkward culturally determined baggage who could be slotted into any mythical role where death is involved. And then the game was up as far as the theists were concerned because Humct wasn't any kind of deity they could recognise, but a peice of sorcerous nonsense that had been foisted on them for who knows what reasons.
Robert Darvall:
>Which fair screams Lunar hells, esp that one containing Sheng >Seleris.
>Even if its not true it's good propaganda for pro Sartar Humakti to
>produce.
And what did the swine do with the Pharoah eh? Next purgatory over from Sheng I'll bet, with that sneering snob Yanafal Tarnils rattling his keys outside and sappy Teelo Norri driving them nuts as prison social worker. (So Mr Seleris, I feel your fondess for disembowelment and tearing people in two with charging horses indicates some unresolved anger issues... Ever thought of taking up bread making?)
Once Heroquesting was discovered just killing someone was not enough to get rid of them for good, any sufficiently powerful mate of theirs could cross the barrier of death and the myths told them exactly where to find them and how to get them out. Maybe I was a bit extreme when I said diverting souls after death was a chaos thing - it would be something they would do and why they are so feared, but wouldn't sufficiently powerful non-chaos types do it too if they had to? Or is the temptation to extend your rule beyond the material plane into the realms of the gods and spirits that hubris that leads to inevitable corruption and downfall? (Arkat, GodLearners, EWF)
And finally, a question. Just what magico-technological marvels did the Zistorites have? And how did a bunch of assorted barbarians stuff them if they did have such marvels? (Visions of Rorke's Drift, waves of screaming Orlanthi mown down by Zistorite riflemen, trollkin herded across minefields, Praxian encampments strafed by fiendish flying machines...)
Barry Blatt
PS: Apologies for making an arse of the formatting of the last post.
End of The Glorantha Digest V8 #502
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