>> Let me find a RW analogy: Suppose I said, 'Europeans tend to be >> monotheists'. I suppose you would say: 'False. Europeans are >> monotheists now, but they were not monotheists in the past. >> Romans were polytheists and Celts were pantheists'. 'They approach >> religion as it suits them at the time.'
Dave Pearton:
> The problem with this analogy is that you're looking at different
> religious traditions. I dispute that there is terribly much in common
> between the religious attitudes of the druidic Celts and modern or
> medieval monotheists.
Notice that I provided two examples, and you only focuzed on one of them. I concede that the Celtic example may not be the best. In a sense, we cannot say that the celts were Europeans. I mean, Europe is a cultural concept derived from the Greek and Roman cultures. The celts were never part of it. Yet, many Christian worship places in western Europe are located in more ancient worship places, some of celtic origin.
And the roman example that you avoided plainly prooves my point. The chatolic church incorporated many practices from previous religious traditions, practices that we can still perceive today. Yet, Christianism is a completely different religion from the religions it replaced.
My point was that the usage of a certain word to describe a culture can be misleading. The particular word that started the discussion is *Orlanthi*. This is a polissemic word. It can be aplied to the followers of a religion, those that share a given culture, those that belong to a certain people. In this sense, it is apropriate to make an analogy between the word *Orlanthi* and the word *European*.
> There is, however, much more in common between first age and
> third age Orlanthi. Just because an element of culture is
> less in evidence at a certain point in time does not mean that it no
> longer exists - Argrath is more than happy to use dragon magic for
> example, despite the Alakoring tradition.
That's exactly what happens with romanized Europeans. I think that there is even more things in common between peoples living under the roman empire and the peoples that live today in the lands that once belonged to the roman empire, then between third age and third age Orlanthi. I'm using here the words *European* and *Orlanthi* in the cultural sense, not in the religious sense. Yet, things changed a lot, both in Glorantha and in the RW, so we can only say that a certain culture has or has not certain traits if we define the time frame of our analysis of that given culture. That's all I was saying.
> Actually the Red Goddess and Orlanth cannot co-exist. The lunars (both
> religiously and politically) cannot accept the existence of the Orlanth
> cult. They are fundamentally incompatible.
Why not? I accept that the lunars cannot accept the political independence
of the Orlanthi. But I cannot see why they cannot accept the religious
existance of Orlanth, provided that this religion accepts to compromise
under lunar primacy. I simply fail to see why the lunars cannot accept a
tamed Orlanth.
So, please explain why not.
Sergio
End of The Glorantha Digest V6 #268
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