>Shock-horror. People from different parts of glorantha, who follow
>completely different religions and philosophies have incompatible
>conceptions of god.
Glorantha is fiction and a game world. People within Glorantha may apply
the word 'god' to very different realities, nothing against it. But I'm
speaking as a RW person that whants to understand Glorantha. So I, Sergio
(not my PCs) need to know what is a god in Glorantha. And there are two
different conceceptions of god, inspired by similar conceptions fo godhood
in the RW: the 'ancient' conception that we find in the Greek and Roman
pantheons; the jewish conception that gave origin to cristianity and
islamism.
In game terms, this means two completely different sets of rules, and two
completely different understandings of what is a god in Glorantha.
If I'm going to play in Glorantha, I need to know which are those
differences and how they translate to different sets of game rules.
>>It seems are evolving in a sense where gods in the first
>>sense are seen as purely cultural representations of unpersonnal,
>>natural powers
>You may view them as unpersonal and natural, but many Gloranthans
>do not.
But I'm not looking at this question in-character. It's me, Sergio, that's raising the question, not one of my PCs. And what I want to know is wheter I should look at gods as unpersonal and natural or as personalities.
>I love this aspect of Glorantha - it's what gives it its life. At's not
>just another two dimensional fantasy world in which the author has
>decreed that one - and ONLY one - philosophy is allowed to be true.
I'm not saying that there must be a one true answer. I live happily with polysemic (does it exist as an English word?) words. We may apply the word god to two realities, nothing against it. But I want to know they're different, and how.
I (meaning Sergio, not my PC) want to know if Orlanth exists, or if it is only a social representation of a natural phenomenum. Whichever is the case, I want to know what are the manifestations of Orlanth and how they operate in game terms. The same aplies to the Invisible God.
>To me, they both [shamanism and mysticism] seem amazingly
>similar. The main difference being that, as you say, Mystics
>have a wider perception of the onness of everything.
It was not me that introduced mysticism into Glorantha. But it's part of it, like shamanism. They may look similar, but they are supposed to be different. They are supposed to lead to different beliefs and magical practices. I want to know those differences within Glorantha, and how they lead to different fictional and game representations. If they are not different, why bother making the distinction? Or is this the opposite of the situation above where we have two realities qualified by a single world (god), while here we have a single reality qualified by two words (shamanism and mysticism)?
>You come across a wizzened old man sitting in a clearing in a forest.
>His religious practices consist of chanting strange mantras, abstaining
>from the pleasures of the flesh. he jabbers on about the beauties and
>dangers of the otherworld and the awesome powers available to him.
>Tell me, is he a Shaman or a Mystic?
Or a theist, or a materialist? A first impression can be misleading (the first Portuguese that arrived in India thought that the hindus were christians, based on superficial similarities between the two religions). Since this is a fictional product and a game, it will depend on the operative forces he his puting into action, how they operate, and what they allow him to do. In other words, on how each of the four magical systems is conceived and described in terms of game rules.
>Of the four magical philosophies, shamanism and mysticism seem to me
>to be the closest by far.
Of course, it is possible to turn all magical systems into variants of a single meta-system. Say, pantheon gods (Orlanthi, Yelmic, etc.) are only super-spirits (or super-elementals); a mystic is a lesser spirit that can gain the powers of godhood; etc.
But my question is a little different from this. Let me give a different
example:
I suppose that men in Glorantha have a methabolism that's similar to RW
humans. Think about blood and blood vessels.
And I suppose that different cultures in Glorantha give very different
explanations to blood and what it is for. (The same happened in the RW
until European medicine reached a full understanding of it.)
Notwithstanding the different cultural explanations of blood, there is a
single basic blood mechanism. Most cultural explanations may be wrong, and
some may be close to the truth.
IMO, magic in Glorantha should be like this: we should have the basic mechanics of magic (meaning that there can be several types of magic - like there are several types of circulatory systems). Each culture would develop his own understanding of magic based on a given magic system (or combination of magic systems).
>>Maybe. But remember that we still don't have a clear picture of what
>>is a mystic in Glorantha. (At least, I don't.)
>What's a mystic in the real world?
I realy don't know. I'm not one. I know the stories of RW mystics, but fail to understand it. Which makes sense: otherwise I would be one of them.
>Why do you think they should be different?
I just wnat to know what is a mystic in Glorantha, and I don't care if he
his like or unlike a RW mystic.
I simply expect to be able to understand why should I choose a mystic as a
PLC. Why he is different from a shaman, a sorceror or a priest.
Sergio
End of The Glorantha Digest V6 #56
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