Re: God Learners and magic analysis

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 17:14:04 GMT


Hello all, and a happy new year to you. It seems the season has played merry hell with my receipt of the Digest -- not so much Y2K as liberal use of Off buttons. But kicking off with what little has filtered through...

Peter Metcalfe speaking of me speaking of the four magic systems:

> >It's clear
> >that the GLers both helped create/reinforce this distinctions and
> >categories _in Glorantha_, by their actions, as well as employing
> >the well-know research tool of Ignore Countervailing Evidence, when they
> >found things that didn't fit their pattern.

> I think they found the distinctions rather than created them.

They would say that, wouldn't they... I'm not dismissing the real differences they found, but equally, it's clear that there was a degree of manipulation in many cases to make the data fit 'better'. Whether this was wholesale enough to be creating distinctions out of whole cloth, or whether it was no more than 'tidying up' pre-existing systems that had 'devolved' from from ideal state is much less clear. Getting well into the territory of 'YGMV', if not 'philosophically unknowable', if you ask me.

> Greg seems to think that this pattern was real and became
> complicated as the different worldviews meeting each other
> in the storm age.

I thought that Greg, who has indeed been expounding quite a bit on such lines of late, has presented it specifically as being a GL view.

BTW, on the earlier comments about the Kralori draconic religion being a 'mixed' tradition: Greg has lately started calling it a fifth tradition in its own right. However I think it's certainly the case the the God Learners did analyse them much as Peter suggests, as a mystic/animist synthesis, and that the FDR succeeded in manifesting considerable powers on that basis, so one can certainly still assert this is true 'on some level', I think.

Cheers,
Alex.


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