Seven Generic Questors?

From: Alex Ferguson <alex_at_dcs.gla.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 8 Aug 95 19:43:59 BST


David Cake enthuses:
> I would like to mention a particularly fabulous theory at this point
> (probably due to Nick Brooke). Are people familiar with the theory that the
> awakening of the goddess was a form of Lightbringers Quest?

Nick's certainly a notorious advocate of this view -- to the point of being heckled by Greg for espousing it. ;-) It's clear to me that it's _partly_ true, but the LBQ isn't necessarily the biggest influence on the recreation. Firstly, there are all these Naverian Women's Mythology type things, which in the pre-Lunar Dara Happan Empire took the form of very bleak, depressing and seemingly pointless mystery cults. "Oh my god, everyone dies horribly again..." I think that the Lunars have cannibalized other mythologies, LBQ and others, in order to "fix" these myths so that they have a Happy Ending, or at the least an Apparent Point. (This is, I think, where the Lunar obsession with "healing" things comes from.) Then there's the adoption cum subversion of Dara Happan practice. And also seemingly extraneous influences, like Uz ones: in order to rebuild Nysalor (faster... stronger... better...) enough trollish rituals had to be known of to work out what had been done with his Bits.

I don't myself think the correspondence between the Mothers and the LBers on a one-for-one basis is at all strong. I think the similarities are much more "patchy" than that: they've abstracted out "useful" elements from the LBQ, which can be made to serve a purpose for whatever the task at hand is, rather than trying to fulfill a consistent "role" for the whole quest.

Alex.


End of Glorantha Digest V2 #53


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