> As explained to me by Peter Metcalf, he used the word "sophism" because it
> was free of the baggage one would get when using "sorcery world view" or
> "wizardry world view". It was meant to be a very broad category as Theism
> and Spiritualism are when discussing the overall categories of magic.
>
> What would you suggest instead?
A neutral but good set of descriptive terms is obviously going to be difficult to come up with...
I've no such problem with Peter's classifying Zzaburism and malkionism as philosophies, or philosophical schools, although I most point out that most Gloranthan Westerners would not be philosophers, which should not prevent them from knowing magic...
The trouble is that sorcery is based on knowledge, but the two most obvious words relating to this sort of knowledge are "science" and "gnosticism", both of which are heavily loaded words, but even a bit less loaded words like dialectics or sophism are not much better...
Vocabulary derived from RW Religious sources would be similarly loaded, and potentially even inaccurate for general usage in Glorantha, as providing false impressions.
I dunno, "erudition" in the classical sense would be nice, if that weren't so hopelessly antiquated ; though "education" could serve that purpose I suppose ? I do feel that the acquiring of knowledge is more important generally than logic as such, except for the true specialists of course.
My personal feeling is that the type of vocabulary that has been used the more successfully in the past is that of medieval education, not necessarily of just Western University origin by the way, but from the broad mediterranean basin.
Vocabulary such as apprentice, novice, journeyman, student, master, learner, scholar and such can be usefully combined with whichever Gloranthan or RW terms or adjectives for religious positions, without requiring that one big word be used to describe all of this on one go.
It's possible that the actual problem here is that the methods and organisation of magical education in Western Genertela are actually so alien to us that we have no adequate vocabulary available in English with which to describe it.
Julian Lord
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