elementals and monomyths

From: Peter Metcalfe <P.Metcalfe_at_student.canterbury.ac.nz>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 1997 15:11:32 +1300


V S Greene:

>It hits me that the
>RQII and RQIII stuff can be looked at written by a Lhankhor Mhy Sage who got
>ahold of some God Learner materials; the core mythos seems to be very
>Orlanthi.

That is how I view it. I've got no problems with this sort of writing because that is how the educated people of the region would have written given their history (ie migrated into Sartar from the Holy Country means they are aware of both the God Learner version and the Orlanthi version).

Frederic Moulin:


>Lune means moon in French, which sound OK for the elemental of the Red Moon
>Godess. Now I hear about "Selene", which also mean moon, or now "relative to
>the moon" from the latin root. Are these two different elementals ???

The Selene comes from the Blue Moon whereas the Lune comes from the Red. Selenes are invisible and inflict a combination of hp and mp loss (a la shades and lunes). Their stats can be found in Troll Gods. Considering that these are from different planets, one wonders what the elements of the other planets are like? Is Shargash's elemental a raging sylph?

>And how about the elemental of light for Yelm, the sun God: There must be
>elemental of light if there is elemental of shadows... I remember reading
>about them somewhere, sometime...

Yelm's element is Fire. Hence 'Salamanders' are appropiate to him. I've never heard of any official shadow elemental.

Kevin Rose:


VG>> So Glorantha is a Consensual Reality?

>This is not something that is established as "true". I'm sure some people
>here do accept it, but I remember seeing some significant dispute of the
>concept a while ago.

It's not something that I accept. I do think there is an objective history and that mere belief cannot shape the gods (ie if someone were to posit a religion where Yelm is black and manage to convert every sun worshipper in the world, then buggerall would happen).

What I don't believe is that these truths are known to the humans and thus the differing viewpoints in Glorantha reflect their imperfect understandings (to various degrees) as well as differing cultures.

Hasni Mubarak:


>Premise: What actually HAPPEND in the past (Objective History) is set, and
>can not change. That is the monomyth, and I wish I knew it better. But
>for major events in history, the players and their actions are pretty much
>set.

This premise is perfectly fine by me. But the God Learners had something else which wasn't objective history and they called it the monomyth. So I prefer it if it was referred as something else and not a monomyth.

As for the rest of the (fine) post in which you said that noone can heroquest without an agenda, I must point out that the Lunars can heroquest back into the distant past (or double thereof) and learn from the distant past. But this merely shows us what the people in the distant past believed rather than the truth.

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