Re: Underworld deities

From: Sandy Petersen <sandyp_at_idgecko.idsoftware.com>
Date: Wed, 22 Nov 95 10:47:01 -0600


Pam said
>Yelm and Ernalda are not dead - they are alive in the underworld.

Yelm is actually in the true Hell, down in the Dark. Ernalda is just in the Earth. But technically dead, just the same.

>I'd say Lodril lives in Upper Earth, not in Hell.

        I place him in Middle or Lower Earth. He was the second deity encountered by the trolls in the Underearth on their escape from the Underworld -- the first was Asrelia, whom they had to free from her captor/husband (Lodril). That puts Lodril pretty deep down.

>Genert was/is the king of Genertela. He is not an elemental power,
>but the sovereign of the land.

        No matter what Joerg and Peter M. say, I consider Genert an Earth deity, and so do most Genertelans. He is the Land God, was father to the Grain Goddesses who are plainly of the Earth, and his parentage is of the Earth. He's not a chthonic deity, true enough, but an enlightened benign earth god.

>BTW, wasn't Ernalda on of his daughters? If that is the case,
>shouldn't Ernalda be a manifestation of Genertan fertility?

        No, because she is considered universal in a way that Genert was not. Of course, in the rather vague relationships that most Earth gods have, Ernalda is Dendara is Faranar is Den Xi is Esrola.

        But just as Orlanth is worshiped all over the place, but his mother is usually considered to be Kero Fin, in Dragon Pass, he is not a local god, but she is. Of course primitive uncultured Orlanthi in distant parts of the world have sometimes not yet learned where Orlanth was really born.

Michael R.
>If [gnomes] are harder to summon, they'd also be rarer, and vice >versa.

        I only partly get your meaning. If a creature is hard to summon, that doesn't make it rare. And a rare creature might be easy to summon. Unless you mean "little-used by human magicians" as a synonym for "rare". As an example of what I mean, ghoul spirits are fairly hard to summon (you need a fresh corpse and other appurtenances). However, ghouls are fairly common critters -- probably the most common undead of them all in Glorantha.

        On the other hand ghosts are pretty rare beings. For one to exist in the spirit world, a human must have lived and died and not gone on to any afterlife or been reincarnated, and not be haunting somewhere on the material or have been transformed into some other type of being. There are surely many more spell spirits, magic spirit, power spirits, probably even passion and disease spirits outnumber ghosts. But ghosts are very commonly summoned (they're easy to call up, especially for humans), and are one of the most-used spirits for cults, shamans, and even sorcerers.

Michael
>So maybe gnomes aren't more difficult to summon in winter, but
>perhaps they are more cruel and generally malign than during the
>rest of the year.

        I like this idea a lot, and it's now going into my evolving Shaman rules. Thanks.

Sandy P.


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