RE: Mortar and Pestle
whoops, I meant, of course *real* Mostali when I spoke of non-sexual reproduction, but it was rather silly of me to forget the mortar and pestle thingy ...
Male slaves in Prax
IMO the thing which differentiates Praxian men from Praxian women is that the women do Life work while the men do Death work.
This pattern must surely be repeated among the lower classes? So, male slaves of Praxians do Death work that the Praxians don't like, and which is unsuitable for Beasts.
There are a few candidates for this, like cleaning bones (also how they are fed?), pest and parasite removal, disposal of diseased corpses, and lots of other unclean stuff like that.
Apart from the usual shifting and carrying ...
Jane Williams:
:And if she (FQ) isn't an earth priestess, does she have sovereignty to :bestow? If not, why did her (Argrath) marry her?
This *might* be a little bit too cynical, even by Argrath standards. Who *would* this nobleman marry except another noble? Admittedly, ulterior motives seem to be TM and (c) Argrath, but to imply that Argrath would _marry_ with some other purpose in mind than to get a suitable wife? Pretty cynical ...
Subject: God-Making
Ivan Gatt:
> Thinking of this, an improbable and perhaps scandalous taught comes to my
> mind. What if the Gods are just God-Learner constructs?
One of my more paranoid ideas was that the God Learners had discovered
a method for _permanently_ entering HeroQuest reality as the gods.
Gloranthan Myth, in this theory, becomes the history of various struggles
which divided the God Learner movement. The winners of the struggle
then BECAME the gods of Glorantha, and KILLED anyone else who
knew what the secret was about, and then used their new powers to
alter documented history and the world itself, recreating it, and agreed
upon the truce in their wars, which we know as the Great Compromise.
They continue to KILL anyone who comes close to the Secret.
This indeed is the job of GodLearner Arkat and GodLearner Humakt.
Like any good conspiracy theory, it cannot be disproved.
(at least not totally ... )
The history of Glorantha, according to this, is a LIE, and indeed
the description of the history of GodLearning itself is also untrue.
Only this conspiracy theory contains some of the Truth, so why
aren't I dead, then? Because I don't know the Secret; the God
Learners KILL anyone who knows ... and so on.
Not The Truth, certainly, but it might be believed by some Gloranthans... Insane ones.
Gods and Free Will
One god who *must* have free will, surely, is Trickster!
To my mind, the fact that Yelm doesn't switch colour every now and then is probably imputable more to inertia than to absence of free will. Hero plane inertia, of course. If you don't shake the Hero plane, it won't suddenly start moving on it's own. The Sunpath is part of the Hero plane, as is the colour of the Moon.
Probably, this discussion should be about Gloranthan Time.
If the gods are _outside_ Time, then they might well appear to
be incapable of acting *within* Time simply because they perceive
Glorantha with radically different eyes, and exercise their will in
patterns understandable only by gods and Dragons. Their
(or His) actions would almost always be invisible to mortals.
Cyclical Time, like the movement and appearance of Yelm,
is in fact a kind of 4D stillness, only appearing as change to
3D observers. (This is actually untrue in RW, but it might be a useful
model for Glorantha.)
The action of a god would affect 4D Glorantha in a certain place,
at a certain time, not necessarily NOW.
Resurrection
Is their a sorcery spell Evoke Life?
If not, how do westerners do Resurrection?
(doing my best to complicate things here ... )
I always thought, BTW, that the *reason* Humakt doesn't let his initiates be resurrected is because he's building up a huge army of dead warriors to fight in the upcoming Hero Wars and other conflicts. The Humakti ghosts in his temples aren't blasphemous at all: they're just on guard duty! Resurrection is desertion!
Heler
My last post looked really messy, sorry about that, hope this one's better.
Has anyone had any bright ideas about Sea Heler, other than mine about him being the merman Horned God? Input would be *really* nice!
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