Grey Age is a term sometimes used to refer to the time _after_ the Great Darkness, but before the Dawn. Orlanthi sometimes call it the Silver Age; thus, Heort is said in RuneQuest Companion to be a Silver Age Hero. Star Age, Weeping Time are also cognate terms.
My beliefs about the merged nature of the Orlanth cult stem from a number of discussions on the subject, mainly with Jeff Richardson and Dave Dunham (and others) a couple of years ago. IMO, the two Orlanth cults (as they were originally separate cults, in RQ2) have too many differences, in magic, outlook, and nature, to have originated as a single cult. But I don't want to go into great detail of this discussion, whcih involved the entire Orlanth Pantheon, beliefs about First Age nature of these dieties, geographical separations, etc. I'll accept your agreeing to disagree.
>The presence of such cults where either the presented
>structure, or the mythic history of the cult would have to be "fixed" to
>fit the theory (7M, Yelm and Yelmalio, conspicuously, leaving aside the
>fuzzy "ruling shamanic" question) seems to me rather stronger.
I can't see how Yelmalio or 7M would have to be "fixed" to account for my theory. Yelmalio is a god constructed from 1 1/2, 2, or 3 other deities, thus seeming to fit my theory quite nicely. Though I will remove 7M from my argument mostly because I don't think even what we have in GoG can be said to be accurate about it anymore, with all the changes the Lunars have undergone in the last year.
Finally, having different ranks of a Carmanian mystery cult is completelyy irrelevant to a discussion of "rune levels", which in itself is a bad term -- these are not terms of cult rank in a RQ3 cult sense; that format would not be one I would suggest to use when writing up such a society.
Cult of Ernalda was in RQ3 Glorantha Book. Pretty bare bones, and the Dendara stuff was very contradicted by GoG, for the better (though still not enough).
Ever the Reconstructionist and Rewriter,
Stephen Martin
ilium_at_juno.com
- -----------------------------------------------The Book of Drastic Resolutions
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