Re: Great Compromise

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_yeats.ucc.ie>
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1999 03:18:47 GMT


Nils ansswers Steve:
> > I have one other tangential question. The Great Compromise is commonly
> > framed in terms of the Lunar/Storm pantheons (at least as I've seen it).
> > Is the Invisible God also subject to it?

> The IG is a "High God", a transcendental entity, and
> as such beyond issues like the Compromise.

Hrm... That description makes me a _little_ nervous, as "High God" generally refers to the objects of mystical devotion, whereas the IG is not such (as a rule, though there are probably some at least semi-mystic cults among the Malkioni). Westerners would say that the IG was 'beyond' the High Gods as well as the Gods, and at least in a sense (reachability by modes of worship, apparent capacity for affecting the mundane world, place in the cosmological framework) they'd appear to be right.

But yes, the IG would be 'beyond' the Compromise, in which I don't think the Malkioni believe.

> > What about the Kralorelans? Are True Dragons "skew" to the
> > Compromise, and therefore not really subject to it?

> The concept of the Compromise does not exist in the
> east. The easterners don't recognize the Darkness,
> the Dawn etc. In Vithelan myth (which is one of the
> main influences on Kralorelan myth)

You mean vice versa, of course! "Kralori Myth -- the original, and still the best!" And what's more they have the meticulous paperwork to prove it...

The Kralori, as Nils says, don't have a Compromise, Dawn, or Darkness, either. This may have been some of the 'technical difficulties' the False Dragon's Ring had with their mythology, though the truly dedicated God Learner could identify some broad congruences with these concepts in the Monomyth.

What Dragons (and their 'newts) say about themselves is sufficiently inscrutable that it'd be pretty hard to make many inferences at all from it about their relationship to the Compromise.

What should be stressed, though, is that is from the (say) Orlanthi PoV, this is all complete guff. The Easterners and Malkioni are as magically subject to the compromise as everyone else, they just talk a lot of nonsense about their Inexistent God or their Ancestral Lizards that quite obviously makes no sense. They just ain't proper gods at all! It's a bug, not a feature!

Admittedly, we're a bit hazy on what the Dragons' role in the Compromise could have been. Evidently in the old world, their role was in essence to act really screwy, since that's exactly what they've done ever since... Basically, the important thing is that none of 'em do anything that outright breaks the Compromise, so Orlanth lets 'em live. Excepting the obvious exception...

Slainte,
Alex.


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