> GS: That's right. There is no spirit or Godplane there. They manifest themselves without their spirit or god powers. They look like people, they look like animals, they look like plants. It's a good trap to get your enemy's god into the Dead Place. But nobody's foolish enough to do it."
Love it! Deader than dead and well beyond 1977! Looks like this is not so much crazy as old hat for you guys.
So I was trying to figure out how to better align the bizarre mechanics of the Place with its actual myth of origin and realized that it's not quite accurate to go on about how this is where the "Waha" religion breaks down.
This is where Eiritha stops, the place she sacrificed. Herds can't exist there (in Nomad Gods anyway) -- it's not so much that you can't drive them in or that they die there, they simply "are not allowed" -- and if you can't have herds, the Waha social compact is impossible and so the magic of Waha and friends unravels there.
Not because of Waha but because of Eiritha. And then I start thinking a little about how the cosmic social relationship that drives the Great Tribes isn't husband/wife like it is over in Orlanth country. It's mother/son.
When the chips are down, Waha depends on his mom just like a herdsman depends, not on his wife, but on the riding beast. That's anthropologically interesting in itself. We already have it, just not quite in this context.
And when things go really, really bad, it's because mom was paying too much attention to dad, who is Storm Bull.
In so far as pretend people living in pretend countries can be said to have "depth psychologies," that's a pregnant perspective. Naturally the Jrusteli found it infantile and barely worth mentioning.
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