An idea related to Peters tantra idea (that the Stygians are deliberately doing the 'wrong' thing in Malkioni terms and deriving occult benefits from it) -
Malkioni consider the theist impulse to 'personalise' or anthropomorphise (or really deicise, to neologise) the spiritual universe as deities very wrong. Stygians, while fundamentally Malkioni, do not seem to abhor this practice. There is an issue to reconcile here.
My suggestion is inspired by a spiritual technique used by the late Aleister Crowley. He used to perform techniques designed to create religious visions, principally Raja Yoga and some techniques stolen from the Jesuits. These techniques involved devoting himself to a god to the point where he had a true religious vision - and then he would repeat the whole process again with a different god, preferably one from a wholly different belief system. Repeat it enough, and you can master the religious urge (after all, its hard to be bound by the dictates of a single god when you have met several) without simply rejecting and not understanding it.
Perhaps the Stygians do something similar - through carefully controlled experience of the process of interacting with the great powers as deities with personalities, you can learn to transcend the impulse, to master it and not let it master you. In this way, you can gain some of the more flexible understanding of the otherworld that the theists have (the human mind just finds deities easier to deal with than abstract runic powers, IMO), but without falling from the worship of the Invisible God. If you are Arkat, or know his most secret teachings (illumination), repeating the process with many cults (and thus gaining a greater understanding of the process quicker) is easy. If you are not, you may still walk the path, though much slower. The Stygians are supposed to consciously comparing their sorcerous and theist relationships to the otherworld, and learning that they are the same, and in this way becoming better able to understand their relationship to the Invisible God.
Anyone like this, or is everyone just looking at me funny? Cheers David ------------------------------
End of The Glorantha Digest V7 #265
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