Simon Hibbs wrote:
>This whole men (and women too) becoming gods thing is even
>further complicated by the fact that heroic deeds performed by
>Orlanthi chieftens (for example) will often later be attributed to
>Orlanth.
>
>E.g. Say a bunch of broo attack the stead and the chieftain blasts
>the broo leader with a mighty thunderbolt. Later generations might
>say that Thed sent her spawn to destroy the tribe, but Orlanth
>saved the day with his mighty thunderbolts. Who is to say they are
>wrong?
It seems to me that there needs to be a distinction between _myths_ and mythic events and _legends_, or, as another way of putting it, between GodTime events and historical or quasi-historical events. If, as in Simon's example, a "historical" (post-Compromise) event is given a divine sheen and its actors are confused with divine entities, then this strikes me as being a legend, and I would have no personal objection against attributing the phenomenon to wide-spread euhemerism. This strikes me as being particularly applicable to oral history cultures -- ancient events being "compressed" or "simplified" to make way for more recent, fresher ones in a tribe's history.
However, while euhemerism may have a theoretical place in explaining legends - -- and perhaps even in explaining specific forms of _cultic_ worship -- I'm not sure that euhemerism should have a place in the explanation of Glorathan Myth. In fact, to a certain extent, I'm not even sure if Gloranthan Myth is myth in the RW sense -- or at least, it didn't used to be. I had always been under the impression that one of the points of the Compromise had been to "freeze", as it were, the events and acts of the gods before the coming of Time,and hence, History; and that heroquesting was primarily a way of _participating_ in these events, as opposed to changing them. I have to admit that some of the recent emphasis on the ability of heroquesters to change mythic "truth" has struck me as odd -- it sometimes sounds as though dozens of campaigns are being run in which characters routinely jump into the God Time to alter some fact about their gods or their enemies that they don't like -- if you will, that proto-God Learners are running amok.
The mythic acts of Gloranthan deities strike me as being central to their existence -- well, that and their one-time, now-apparently-discredited relationships to the Runes. I had always liked the seeming impression that true Gloranthan Myth was meant to follow the -- I think it was Cassirer's -- formula that a myth doesn't _represent_ the "thing", it _is_ the thing. If myths are being reduced to cultural creations and explanatory structures -- even if you attempt to claim that belief in them necessitates their truthfulness, a mechanism I approach with wariness, at best -- this strikes me as being a fundamental shift in the nature of Glorantha, turning it into an exercise in myth-theory and myth-criticism (and a reductionist one, at that).
Just a thought.
Mark
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