>From: David Weihe <blerg2_at_...>
>
>Ask your "bods" if the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of
>Christ, in any sense.� Most practicing Catholics are told to believe
>that it does, in every sense (except that the wine doesn't taste
>salty).�
The non-practicing Catholics are told to do so as well. ;-)
In point of fact, and one should understand that I'm pretty philosophical about such things, I personally believe in transubstantiation as a real phenomenon.
To quote Pink Floyd:
"Far away across the fields
the tolling of the iron bell
calls the faithful to their knees
to hear the softly spoken magic spell."
Previously I didn't think of this sort of thing as magic as that term I took to mean either charlatanry or the magic that occurs in fantasy worlds (as if it was something different). That is, calling your own beliefs magic seems to belittle them somehow. I always thought that the lyric above was meant to be insulting, for instance. But as a term in Glorantha, as I currently understand it, where rituals like transubstantiation exist they are perfect examples of magic rituals. Consider the term Communion. It's the act of linking oneself to the being that they believe exists on the other side. This linking and changes coming from it are, as I understand it, the definition of magic in Glorantha.
What I'm trying to get at is that my current understanding of magic (and, of course, given my misunderstandings elsewhere it would be dangerous to consider this accurate) in Glorantha is that it's not really in any substantive way different from the perception of real world people from pre-rational societies. More flashy, perhaps, but that's a matter of POV, too. That is, I think people see Glorantha as "Fantasy" because magic exists in it. This being the fantastic element that makes it different than Earth. Wheras perhaps a more enlightening view is that Glorantha is just like Earth from a philosophical POV, and varies simply in the specific details.
Put yet another way, if you are like myself who believes that magic, defined as contact with the supernatural, does exist in the real world. Then the only real differences with Glorantha are the specific beliefs of the people in each world. In fact, from an epistemological viewpoint, I think I can prove that they're functionally identical. If, as Descarte tells us, we can doubt everything (even our own existence, though doing so leaves no room to advance philosophically), then every belief is merely a question of faith. That's true for every real world person as it is for the Gloranthan.
Of course, this is true in every fantasy world, as it happens. The difference is the approach that HQ takes toward this as a rule system. Most "Magic Systems" figure out one or two particular beliefs as "correct" for magic, even going so far as to give a canon description of how these things work. In HQ we have no such "proof" of the rules, all magic systems work given belief. This is, to me, what makes HQ magic so much more magical than other fantasy games' systems - it's about the beliefs that cause the magic to work. That is, you really can't escape the philosophical underpinnings of magic like you can in many other games where magic becomes just a tool of the player. In HQ eventually you have to consider the ramifications of the characters' beliefs.
This is why I'm less concerned with Glorantha than I am with the HQ system itself. It seems to me that any other "world" you play in is merely a farflung portion of Glorantha in that, if you apply the system to it, the important theme erupts, which is the question of the beliefs of the inhabitants of the places in question, and how one ought to live given that not everybody shares the same beliefs.
Mike
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