Re: Maran Gor

From: Loren Miller <loren_at_wharton.upenn.edu>
Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 15:01:12 -0500


Simon Bray <101635.32_at_compuserve.com> mentioned Maran Gor:

his little note lit a bulb over my head <pop> and prompted some very interesting thoughts about Maran Gor and the knights of Carmania. We know that Maran Gor is one of the most popular cults for the warrior caste, but it simply didn't make sense for men to worship a woman's revenge cult as is. I had always kind of gotten stuck there, but Simon seems to have greased me up and let me slip on through.

  1. Maran Gor is related to the earth shakers, the giant lizards (dinosaurs) that wander through Carmania during its temperate seasons. This cult was invaluable during the ancient wars against Dara Happa and their gazzimites. The Maran Gor cult is somehow associated with whatever group trains and rides these monsters, and often rides them into war.
  2. Maran Gor has some powers to create earthquakes and to deaden the fertility of the land. But how does this anti-fertility power manifest in its worshippers, especially if they are men? The answer is plain. There is an initiation ritual in the Carmanian Maran Gor cult, necessary for some level of the hierarchy, in which the candidate must castrate himself with a blade blessed by Humakt (another associate cult). The leaders of Maran Gor are not men, they are eunuchs, and by castrating themselves and causing themselves to bleed between the legs, symbolically they have become like women. Neither men nor women but partaking of both... they have passed outside the caste structure and the laws of Balance no longer apply to them. The bloody horrors inflicted upon enemies by victorious Maran Gor warriors were at the heart of the widespread fear of the old Carmanian Empire.

Another other Maran Gor ideas?

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