>> If I remember correctly, local gods and some "dubious" candidates >> are included among the boddhisatvas.
> This is not unique to Mahayanna buddhism and can be found in
> Christainity, Islam and Hinduism among other religions.
A nice example: the popular British and Irish Saint Bridget. Formerly eponymous patron deity of the Celtic tribe of the Brigantes, who *suddenly*
turned out to have been a mortal Christian saint ("all along"). So all the
pagan shrines to Brigantia turned into Christian shrines to St. Bridget,
and -- I like to imagine -- kept the same adaptable curators...
But what's this got to do with Glorantha?
Simple, really. Some things are damnably hard to work out for sure. Malkioni, it would seem, have a hard time interpreting exactly what their scriptures are on about when they mention (obscurely) holiness and purity and unclean spirits and angelic messengers and saintliness and so on and so forth. So, to use a recent mention by Julian Lord as an example:
: One of my players has a Rokari Knight who's met Humakt and has : experienced the divine nature of this god.
But what precisely does he mean by "the divine nature" of Humakt? If he were a purist Rokari, he'd know that an unclean demonic pagan spirit had attempted to mislead him -- no Rokari denies that there are barbarians who worship odd things they've found, or cooked up, or been duped by. If the Knight in question were boggled by the size of Humakt, or the power, or the apparent omnipresence ("I am in every Death"), or whatever, that's no more a reason to consider the big H. a "deity" on the level of the Invisible God than if he were similarly impressed by an Elephant, or a Waterfall, or Sunlight.
Consider: are exorcists polytheists?
"This young Knight appears to have made an elementary mistake," Old Wizard Marlet tells us. "Because he has undergone a stressful and unusual experience as a result of pagan magical ceremonies, he is falling into the false belief that this barbarian mythical mumbo-jumbo somehow contradicts or disproves Holy Scripture. Of course it does not. Consider when Malkion cast out the Devil, or Hrestol faced the Lion Goddess of the Pendali, or Froalar married the pagan goddess Seshna Likita to bring true Malkionism to all of Seshnela? These encounters with spiritual entities are recorded in Holy Writ. Now, you may not be the equal of Malkion or Hrestol or Froalar -- but you can at least prove yourself stronger than Arkat, who fell to the blandishments of pagan spirits and was utterly lost to the True Faith."
So: is a spiritual entity you encounter worth worshipping, or listening to? The current mainstream Malkioni answer -- after the tragic downfall of the God Learners -- is a pretty universal "No!" The Rokari burn witches; the Hrestoli loot the hero plane and kill gods. Avoidance of doubt, eh? They're there all right, but it's safest to have nothing whatsoever to do with them: look what happened in the when we tried that in the Second Age!
But the fringe sects -- Henotheist, Stygian, Aeolian, Carmanian, Valkarian, etc. -- have all reached their own accommodation with various pagan spirits, claiming that they have some special relationship with the Creator that makes it OK to deal with them. Mainstream Malkioni say that at best they are foolish, at worst they are deliberately perverting their true religion with these pagan flummeries, and if we're lucky they'll all be wiped out by the Wrath of God, just like the God Learners were.
Purity is in the eye of the beholder. Look at the three Religions of the Book in the RW today, and all of their myriad variants, now and ever. They *all* think that they're right, you know.
So now tell me that a religion which admits that other powerful spiritual entities exist, some of which are naughty, and knows that man is a fallible thing and that heresies can be created by mortal error, will be thrown into crisis if someone says he's encountered a spirit who showed him that "I'm a God, too, and very very powerful, and your scriptures are wrong about us pagans."
The auto-da-fe beckons...
Nick
:::: web: <http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Nick_Brooke>
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