Modern Malkioni do, but not the older styles. The Brithini (the oldest strain) have no problems with personalizing dieties --- some of the "dieties" used to be their neighbors up the way, before they decided to set themselves up as "gods" to con the pagans. The Carmanians (another strain relatively untouched by the God Learners) worship gods very much as "real" theists do, except for the magi who worship Idovanus (their IG name) alone, and who are alone in worshipping Him only.
> 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
I think that you have misidentified who uses this technique. This sounds more like what the later God Learners were doing. The Return To Rightness crusade ended the pagan practices of dealing with single gods as gods, but they do seem to deal with them as entities for the sorcerors' own purposes (eg, Tanien's Victory). Since they also dealt with them as specific gods that the GL master needed to know (hence the write-ups) before using, this trick of believing in two incompatible gods before breakfast sounds like a good way to handle the problem.
After the fall of the God Learner empires, the survivors decided that dieties in general are bad news, and better to deal with as being just forces or archetypes. The Rokari went to the extreme of shunning them even in the form of Malkioni saints.
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