>1st point: are sorcerors and shamans the same?
Short answer: No.
>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).
The key distinction is the philosophy by which the practitioners view the forces which they manipulate. The Materialist views them as Manifestations of Impersonal Forces, the Shaman views them as spirits and so forth.
>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?
I think you are saying that because the sorcerers have to use energy from the spirit world, they cannot be materialists. I think the sorcerers see the spirit world as being a different form of matter just as the modern physicist sees matter and energy as being the same thing in different forms.
>IMO [magicians] 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.
This is correct. What is the problem?
Me>> 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?
Because the foundations are understood differently by each value system. To give an example by Nick Brooke a while back.
Wizard: This is just a carrot. Priest: This is a fragment of the Carrot God. Shaman: This is the host body of a carrot spirit. Mystic: I am the carrot.
They all explain the world satisfactory using their _own_ definitions. The Shaman does not go E=MC^2 therefore it follows that this is a carrot. He sees the world primarily in terms of manifestations of spirits. The theist goes one step further and sees the spirits as being manifestations of Gods. The sorcerer can point out that the Shaman and the Theist have made huge leaps in logic but they are not bound by their viewpoints to pay any attention to the sorcerer for they *know* they are right and the sorcerer is wrong. In the philosophy of science, Kuhn described this as a paradigm.
>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 use materialistic defintions when determining the limits of such concepts but I always keep in mind that gloranthans with other viewpoints will see things differently. Other peoples tastes differ.
Powered by hypermail