Well, after digging through some of the Digests (far from all) I've saved I didn't find some of the remembered stuff about Monomyth invalidity. I'm way too lazy to do extensive digging at the main archive just to prolong a silly argument, so I'll just assume that all those times folk got accused of "God Learnerism" or times when a Monomyth-based assertion was shot down with something along the lines of "But the Dara Happens say.." all happened in bad dreams. :)
Hmm, oh, I did find some excerp from around Digest #193 ; apparently there was some sort of "objective vs. subjective" argument that had something to do with Monomythic validity, but I probably wrote that in my sleep.
Oh wait, here's something...an exchange between Peter Metcalf and me.
> No. What we are talking about when we say 'Monomyth' is a map
> of mythic reality. The God Learner points at the Sun and says
> Ehilm. The Dara Happan points at the same thing and says Yelm.
> The Monomyth is merely a descripton of the Cosmos and not "the
> truth of the world to the extent that an objective observer can
> determine them as opposed to the what each group's myths say".
> It used the God Learner's *own* myths to describe the Cosmos.
> It was continually refined as new peoples and their myths were
> discovered so that the God Learners could be more powerful but
> it was still part of their philosophy (ie 'believe in the Monomyth
> and you will be a Good God Learner') and not the Cosmic Truth.
>
> >I don't buy any notion that every people's world concept can be
> >totally different and unrelated and yet everyone is still the Truth.
>
> You're conflating the concept of truth as in historical reality
> (ie what actually happened) and the potency of people's magic.
> In Glorantha, magic can perform observable effects in the eyes
> of an objective observer. But four different philosophies can
> be identified in casting effective magic in glorantha: the
> Humanists, the Theistics, the Mystics and the Naturalists? Which
> one of these is truth?
That's from GD 195; there seems to have been a whole lot of talk right around then. Yeah, now I remember; I was posting stuff about being The Last Defender of the Monomyth and ended up acknowledging that the subjective view was the most correct. Hmm, or more to my present view, sure, the Monomyth is not the ideal thing to use as the Encyclopedia Glorantha but I'd like to see some sort of universal lore collection published as I've been noting repeatedly.
Anyway, this has been pretty much beaten to death.
V.S. Greene : klyfix_at_aol.com : Boston, near Arkham...
End of The Glorantha Digest V5 #295
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