Action or reaction are not the only possibilities by which gods may influence the mundale plane. Until the RW modern age 'action' was not opposed to 'reaction' but to 'passion'. Ence Descartes' book The Passions of the Soul (BTW, an excellent inspiration for things like personnality traits). In this context 'passion' means something you are subject to unintentionaly. It may direct what you the some way that action (based on free will) does. I tend to see gods and magic as acting through passions, not through intentional action. Passions also have to do with their present meaning: emotions. So the link between the god and it's follower is something emotional. That's why some people become followers of a god and not of another god: they *pick* the god that's near their the person's own emotions and passions). Divine spells are the magical result of a strong passion where the person and the god's emotions become one, and the power of passion and emotion generate a (magical) change in the mundane plane. Another important aspect, that explains why there is something as divine magic, is that gods are not subject to linear time. They are not subject to the bonds of temporal cause and effect. The passion of a god is something that links past, present and future. Divine magic is something that occurs counter to mundane causality. It only needs someone or something to allow it to manifest in the mundane plane: the cult member. Some examples:
Orlanthi wind connected spells. Are they creating or affecting the mundane winds existing in the moment when the spell is cast? No. They are manifestations of the timeless winds of the Storm god. They happen to be the right manifestations among the infinite winds of Orlanth because the priest and the god are in the same *wavelength*.
Or, taking you Chalana Arroy example:
> Challana Arroy knows everything that her worshippers tell her and
> some stuff about all people who need healing, are being healed, etc...
> Based on that information, and according to the patterns that are
> Challana Arroy she can do something with this information. Her
> actions are limited because she can't change herself, but within that
> limit she can do whatever is allowed to her by the great compromise.
IMO CA is unable of action. What is brought about is not through action but
through passion.
Forex, think about Chalana Arroy's ressurection: it's not a mechanical
thing. It's not a technic. It's not "i'll do that and that, and the man
will come back, now give me my money". For the CA priestess to enable the
ressurection (notice that I didn't call it *perform* or something similar),
she must feel passionate for the dead person. She must be filled with the
sorrow of the person's departure; she must be emotionaly overwelmed by that
loss. This emotion, this passion, must be shared by everybody and
everything that was connected to the deceased person. This passion of a
void becomes a presence (I would say that in the mundane plane, like in
Lavoisier's law, nothing is lost and nothing is created. Loss and creation
are the fruits of passions). And since CA is timeless, she can fill the
negative presence of the void with the positive presence of the living
person.
Going back to your CA example:
> Just in game terms, for example, she can decide *exactly* how
> she answers the next divine intervention call in the area she is
> concerned with. The next divination may include some extra
> information.
IMO CA does not decide nothing. When CA's cultists become magicaly attuned
with the godess, they share the same passion. The result is that they share
something I accept to call "knowledge" since I don't have a better word for
it (maybe "intuition" is more correct than knowledge). Since the godess is
timeless, that passion is connected to the present, the past and the
future. Next the priestess will act in accordance with the causaly best
way. Not because she knows or can antecipate the outcome, but because her
godess-inspired passion leads her in that direction.
I think that this way of seing things falls neither in the trap of the
intentionality of the gods, nor in the trap of pure subjectivism you
described:
> Not to allow the Gods at least this much ability to act is to make
> them little more than pawns of heroquesters and reduce them to
> nothing more than cosmic principles manipulated by their
> worshippers.
In my description, gods don't act but neither are they manipulated by their
worshippers.
Sergio
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