>My "aha" moment was when I was reading the sourcebook "Glorantha IttHW" (I
>think), and it mentioned that Lunar missionaries in Malkioni lands present
>the Seven Mothers (and other Lunar mortals-become-gods) as "saints", since
>"saint" is a Malkioni concept that would let them grasp
>the Lunar emphasis on apotheosis.
Well, it's not actually the Glorantha: Intro that says that, but rather Nick's Arrolian work which is online and will appear in Tales #20.
>I thought, Waitaminute--GIttHW says Lunars are theists who, in the West,
>present themselves as monotheists/socerers.
That's incorrect. They present themselves as Malkioni. Not all Malkioni are monotheists/sorcerers (c.f. the Carmanians or the Stygians) and the cults of the Arrolian Saints are mostly theistic.
>How do we know that it isn't
>the opposite? How do we know that they aren't monotheists who (in Dara
>Happa/Kerofinela/etc) present themselves as theists?
Look and feel. They cannot change their gods into spirits etc. even if they wanted to. All they can do is present arguments about how their religion is actually the fulfillment of your religion.
>In actuality, I assume the Lunar elite are God-learner type synthesists,
>who think you can play it all four ways whenever you like (and like the
>God-learners, I think they're cruising for a cosmic bruising).
They are not God-Learners and they do not play it all four ways whenever you like. Their message is the recognition of Cosmic Unity, not the destruction of diversity (which is why the Borg and God Learner parallels are inappropriate IMO).
>But I
>think the typical Lunar-on-the-street thinks the Lunar way is however
>the local priest spins it. Praxian Lunars think it's animistic, Dara
>Happans think it's solar-theistic, etc.--and when those unwashed masses
>find out that the faith is presented differently elsewhere in the
>empire, they'll begin to wonder (like my uzko) whether the elite really
>believe anything at all.
All of which assumes that the Lunar Priest *only* tells them that the Goddess is what they worship. I think the Lunars would say that the Goddess is what everybody worships and that different peoples have different ways of worshipping her. When they say "We are all Us", they do not mean "Only You are Us".
>...since the Lunars are so often compared to the Roman empire, we might
>want to recall Gibbon's words about Roman religion--to the common man,
>all religions were equally true; to the philosophers, all were equally
>false; to the magistrates, all were equally useful. And as it happened,
>this was not a stable state of affairs--when the people tired of being
>told that "Zeus" and "Jove" and "Amun" and "Wotan" were all equally
>valid perspectives on the Divine Principle, they ended up joining cults
>that actually believed something and knew what it was--cults of strange,
>anti-Roman Eastern gods, like Semiramis and Osiris and Christos.
And Gibbon's summary about the decline of Pagan religion was wrong. Read Robin Lane Fox's "Pagans and Christians" for a better idea of what was going on.
--Peter Metcalfe
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