Martin, please submit your Old Pavis Squarebeard Hallway Duelling System in playable form, else I shall surely have to simulate it via Live Action Roleplay when my brother comes to visit for Thanksgiving. No, but seriously, I like the idea, and I'm just kicking myself for never having seen your Masks in Pavis material -- Codex #1, I take it?
As usual, Martin (cultural relativism) and John Hughes speak well for my clan, the anthropologist branch. One other anthro-oriented issue has arisen, the question of the function of seemingly ubiquitous incest taboos. For an exhaustingly thorough argument covering this ground, see Claude Levi-Strauss' THE ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES OF KINSHIP. The book isn't nearly as abstruse as his later treatments of 'structural' mythology in the Mythologiques series. Levi-Strauss' point, writ simply, are that women are one of the principal goods that any human group has to exchange, and that bonds of exchange are necessary for the survival of all human groups, and that incest's form of keeping sexual relations/women within the close family group is a dead-end approach when other humans are creating bonds between themselves and others via the exchange of marriage. Hmm, it's been 10 years since I read the book, and it was around 400 pages originally in French, so don't trust my translation. Levi-Strauss' usual point is that socio-biology takes second place to structures of human thought that underly apparently diverse social forms.
For what it's worth, a Levi-Straussian structuralist approach to Gloranthan myth would look VERY different than anything we've seen from Greg, the Davids, Sandy or the other Rune Lords. I dunno if it would shed any light on our topics, but it certainly would out God-Learn the God-Learners -- the title of Levi-Strauss' most recent book, The View from Afar, says it al, he doesn't much give a fig for the emic (inside) view of events, he's an etic analyst all the way.
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