This is all done. By "all," of course, I mean 85%. I'm still waiting on essays from Peter Metcalfe (the deepdisagreement topics) and John Hughes (the four ways of looking at Glorantha).
Joerg, pls send list/abbrevs., so I may compare it to mine.
Re: origins of Malkionism
Mike Dawson has been buying a house, and I have been helping my wife have a baby, so he and I haven't been keeping up with the email dialogue with Peter Metcalfe and Nick Brooke as we would like to have. So it's natural that, in response to others' posts, this thread has moved to the Digest.
The point Mike and I have been hammering is to avoid a Christian parallel to Hrestol. The reasons are many, but perhaps the most compelling is that the model doesn't fit with what we know of modern Malkionism. Making Hrestol a vile sinner and having his martyrdom as the end of a Malkioni trial are two points that move us away from that model. However, I would like to point out some necessary corrollaries to Nick's theory, and discuss if they are a) consistent with published sources, and b) fun to game. I think we'll have less problem with b), because Nick can always be counted on to keep the game in mind.
As Sandy has so ably pointed out, nobody can be sure they're going to Solace when they die, nor can anyone contact a person who is in Solace. Ergo, nobody can know for sure that Malkion and Hrestol are in Solace, tho' those are widespread beliefs. However, if Hrestol died amid miracles, and his followers said he had achieved Solace, they have to confront the fact that they really don't know what happened to him. Now, maybe the fact that Hrestolism "works" is considered proof enough. But a corrollary of his martyrdom and assumed redemption into Solace is that we would expect to see such things as people arguing whether Hrestol really did achieve Solace, people claiming to have seen Hrestol in the flesh after his martyrdom (denial being a universal human ego defense), and sects arguing over the meaning of his death and the precise nature of his redeeming sacrifice.
This is all new. I can see some fun things out of it: secret gnostic (reactionary) sects that say that Hrestol didn't really achieve Solace; mystics and other gullible people claiming that Hrestol isn't really dead (cf. Muhammed the Prophet); others claiming that Hrestol is coming back (cf. Arthur, or that Portuguese king who got hisself killed in Morocco--you know, what's-his-name).
I also like the bits from Sandy and Joerg, which have clarified my thinking about knighthood and castes 'n' stuff. It should be possible to craft something that includes several people's vision. Glorantha is a shared vision, and gets more "realistic" the more it expresses lots of views. No one person can be as wildly inventive as they need to be, to make a world seem as complex and real as ours. (Is the Creator a committee?)
Nick says:
>This [misspelling Frazer] is just as annoying as "shamen" for
>shamans, IMHO...
Quite agree about "shamen." Fingernails on the blackboard reaction. Ick.
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