--- In WorldofGlorantha_at_yahoogroups.com, <worldofglorantha@yahoogroups.com> [David Dunham] wrote:
>I figure it's actually a divergence from seven TO nine among those transplanted to Umathela, likely related to a Second Age heroquest that brought back the Aldryami. After all, with all the God Learner experimentation on them, it's quite possible the Umathelans got it wrong.
That works for me. I leaned into the Umathelan system as closer to the "original" for two reasons: (1) this conversation started with what was to me a startling hypothesis that the sevenness of the lightbringers might be grounded on a prior mythological tradition and I wanted to run with it and (2) as the people named after "Umath," they might preserve pre-Orlanth material now lost on the northern continent.
But as you note it's at least equally plausible that the Umathelans started out with a heptad and evolved their system into an ennead over time. Certainly Sandy's list is weird by any Genertelan standard!
>Not looking this up, but I suspect that most of the Lightbringers wouldn't qualify as Great Gods (surely Ernalda and Yelm, to name two known to the Heortlings, would be Great Gods).
Not implying a one-to-one correlation, only looking for "prior mythological traditions" that might have informed early lightbringer lists -- and leaping after what looked like a pre-heptadic survival down there. But Sandy's list is not really helping me out here.
The fact that at least six of them are female is intriguing though. Some may be "finger goddess" analogues and so we might pick up the prior tradition from that direction. You know these people better than just about anyone: do you recall exactly where the waertagi brought them from?
>Mostly though: there aren't all that many one digit numbers. So maybe there are coincidences.
Sure. But a God Learner jumping at sevens a couple centuries before the lunar conspiracy is still jumping at something, right? What were they jumping at? A complex of theyalan (or pre-theyalan?) numerology?
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