> The Red Goddess has undergone several transforming events and
> as far as we know has no direct memory of her 'past incarnations'.
"As far as we know" also runs us into the distinctively indeterminate essence of the Lunar Way, which teems with masks and reflections and veils and smoke-screens and mirrors and illusions. The Goddess is deliberately obscure, when she wants to be.
> It's not really her purpose in life; she strives for the Trans-
> cendant Realm, not to get total recall.
AFAWK (see caveat).
> Any suitable figure in the remote past is _fair_ _game_ for her
> purposes. That is why I am highly sceptical of the truth value
> of your lunar theory of prehistoric Peloria.
Peter's terminology here strikes a false note for me. I'd prefer not to talk about the Lunars' (or others') discovery of Gloranthan mythical links in terms of "fair game", of deliberate misrepresentations of remote and irrelevant figures, of tricking or cheating people to make something false, true -- instead, I see it as discovering a web of previously unsuspected connections between previously obscure entities. Now, it may be that 'discovering' and 'inventing' are similar processes in Glorantha: but I don't think they are necessarily. (The God Learners *deliberately* changed things to "make them so"; we don't know that other people did).
You don't invent things from whole cloth when you HeroQuest, as a rule (the old "What if I said the Moon was a big Edam Cheese, and convinced a million trollkin that it was?" argument). Instead, you discover what's out there, and try to make use of the relationships between the people, places and things you encounter.
IMO, the trick is in how you (subjectively) interpret and arrange the (objectively) real entities of the Hero Plane. The greatest distortions between cultural viewpoints come from humans' distorted *perceptions* of what they encounter in the Otherworld. (Which Greek was it who pointed out that the gods of the Ethiopians are black, and the gods of the donkeys would look like donkeys?).
RW example: I feel sick when I think of Thatcher's "Rejoice! Rejoice!" triumphalism at the end of the Falklands War; other people think it was a national celebration marking our glorious victory over an evil enemy. Similarly, a Dara Happan's emotional and cultural response to an encounter with Orlanth [Outlaw, Assassin, Barbarian] will shape his perception of that encounter, just as an Orlanthi's own encounter would [My King, Warrior, Hero].
So before the Red Goddess, there were stories about Verithurusa the White Planet; about Gerra the Suffering Woman; about Cerullia the Queen of Mernita; about all of these other figures. Lunar HeroQuesters (including the Seven Mothers, the Red Goddess herself, and others before and since) found links between them: similarities between these disparate figures. It's *like* God Learning (proving that "all Storm Kings are Orlanth; all Sun Emperors are Yelm"), except that, crudely speaking, the Lunars work *inclusively* rather than *exclusively*: they are building up the story of their goddess, rather than whittling down an established figure to see what's at its core.
Having found the links, paths, connections between myths, by educating their students in the mythologies of the different peoples of the Empire and the Lunar Sphere so that they can navigate the Hero Plane on their own travels and journeys between these newly-defined markers, the untravelled paths become beaten tracks, and eventually highways on the Hero Plane. More and more interest and worship is lavished on the places, beings and things of importance (whether you measure this in Magic Points, POW, sacrifices or Passions). In parallel with this, the Lunar Powers become greater and greater, and the mortal heroquesters associated with them rise to become cult founders, demigods and deities.
Food Parallel: The Lunar Way discovers little country roadside inns and advertises to let people know they're all there. The ads take care to tell potential visitors what's historic and special about each place. More people come, and the inns make more money, enriching their local communities, and improving their facilities (but tastefully and harmoniously); more travellers know where to get good food and lodgings, and the whole world continues to become a better place. By way of comparison, the "fakers" would build a faux-Irish plastic pub and pretend it had been there all along. And the God Learners would have bought up the sites, demolished the buildings and turned them into burger franchises and motels.
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