1st point: are sorcerors and shamans the same?
TTrotsky:
> However, the attitude and state of mind of the shaman and the
> materialist are very different.
Simon Hibbs:
>> In other words, your concept of materialist action applies to
>> sorcerors, shamans, and gods.
> It seems absurd to me to characterise these two philosophies
> as being in any usefull way identical. The two practicioners are
> using totaly different aspects of their personality to achieve their
> effects and their understanding of what they do is quite different.
> Sorcerers manipulate nature through the excercise of their
> intelect.
> Shamans persuade nature to aid them through the excercise
> of their emotions.
I never said that they are equal, be it sorcerors, shamans, polytheists or mystics. They do magic in different ways, according to different principles, ideologies, and wordviews. But to do magic they use the same basic ingredients: their own spiritual forces, or the spiritual forces of a third party. This is represented in RQ with POW and MPs (I don't know about HW).
You keep trying to separate materialism from spiritualism and theysm, but fail to explain why the materialist sorcerors need a spirit (POW) and spiritual resources (MPs) to do magic, the non-material factors they are suposed to disregard. How can sorcerors use their spiritual self in a rational and deliberate way, and fail to explain this behavior?
In fact, you all seem bo be confusing two things: how magicians perceive magical facts; how they value and understand those facts. IMO they all perceive the same magical facts (because they're all humans after all - if we disregard, for the moment, non-human inteligent beings). But they have very different and even incompatible understandings of those facts.
At least Peter seems to recognize we have two questions here. Yet, he tries to treat them as independent questions, and I don'r see how it can be done:
>> In other words, your concept of materialist action applies to
>> sorcerors, shamans, and gods.
>
> Materialist action is not the topic. You asked what is a materialist
> in glorantha and my answer was given in terms of *viewpoints*. That
> alone is the critical difference.
So, according to you we can can discuss value systems (*viewpoints*) without sound foundations regarding the facts on which those value systems are constructed. How can it be? How can we define what is a materialistic, or a spiritualistic, or an idealistic, etc., ideology in Glorantha without knowing where are the boundaries between matter, spirit, idea, etc.? I can only find an answer: this can be done if we assume that matter, spirit, idea, etc. are the same in Glorantha then in the RW. But IMO tis is wrong. Matter, spirit, god, idea, mystic have a sense in Glorantha that is not to be subsumed to the meanings we give these words in the RW. Because G is different from the RW.
Which leads us to...
2nd Point - the objective nature of magic (the facts of magic) in Glorantha:
(to continue soon)
Sergio
End of The Glorantha Digest V6 #72
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