Re: The Glorantha Digest V6 #28

From: Julian Lord <julian.lord_at_hol.fr>
Date: Sat, 18 Jul 1998 23:08:40 +0200


Excellent post from Peter Metcalfe:

> SH>> Illuminates "find the divine within themselves". That's pantheism in
> >> Malkioni terms and is incompatible with the concept of Solace. IMHO.
>
> I must disagree here.

Well, me too, really.

> ME>For the illuminate, divinity is transcendant, as it ought to be (but
> >often isn't) in Malkionism. Finding the divine within is a goal of all
> >truly religious sentiment.
>
> I must protest against the conflation of divinity and transcendance
> here. In the Lunar Empire, the two concepts are regarded as seperate
> (cf the RQ-Con II compendium) and illumination is NOT regarded as
> 'finding the divine within yourself'.

But I'm not making any conflation at all, and I'm sorry if my post wasn't clear enough here.

That is, divinity is not always transcendant, illumination isn't the same as divinity, and the self isn't necessarily perceived as divine. But _illumination_ can almost be defined as a transcendance wherein some of these ideas can become true: almost, but not quite. If illumination were transcendance, purely and simply, the war of Arkat/Nysalor/Gbaji would be easy to explain. But it isn't.

But, IMO, illumination, that is the "light" side of it, does lead to the religious feeling I clumsily attempted to describe.

> >I don't think that illumination is incompatible with Solace, as Saint
> >Hrestol himself showed, surely.
>
> One would have to show first that Hrestol was illuminated.

This is of course impossible, even, I imagine, in Glorantha. (Well, not impossible per se; an Arkati HeroQuester might gain entrance into Solace by some kind of exceptional Divine providence, meet Hrestol, and check if he was illuminated or not, but this doesn't exactly sound like a likelihood, does it?)

But lots of Hrestol's actions while he was alive definitely *sound* like they were commited by an illuminate, don't you think? All that transcendance of caste boundaries ...

Of course, if one were to choose a *historical* definition of "illumination" one could quibble away to one's heart's content, anout the anachronism of using the word "illumination" before Nysalor, for example, or Dawn Ages Solar Illuminism, etc... None of which would constitute proof either one way or the other, IMO

> I myself
> do not believe that Hrestol was illuminated given that his relevations
> can be and are understood as part of materialistic Malkioni philosophy
> by everyone since his death.

Are they understood? I believe that this is matter for some contention among the Malkioni ...

Julian Lord


Powered by hypermail