That's quite nicely put; but not 'Orlanthi males', in the round, but rather, only Orlanth Thunderous (and assorted fellow-travellers) devotees. A truly devout OTist, is, it's fair to say, a living manifestation of thunder and lightning.
(More especially thunder, to be picky; lightning is also characteristic of the Warrior/Four Magic Weapons aspect.)
> That is, some of the nuttier ones might strive to become a living
> incarnation of death, but most wouldn't.
Well, nutty is just a value-judgemental term for 'pious' here, I'm sad to report. ;-)
> One of the really good things about Glorantha (and RQ) was how
> 'believable' it is. The Orlanthi really seem like a viable society.
> The 'specialist' cults (Humakt, Issaries, Chalana Arroy) are not for
> weirdoes; they are for the fraction of a tribe who have specialized
> occupations.
It would be wrong to think that Humakt was simply 'the god of specialised warriors' in Orlanthi society. Firstly, warrior is hardly a specialisation, in any strong sense: 'all' of the clan's men, and not forgetting, 'none' of their women, are warriors when asked politely, and they don't have the crops to sow or the weans to put to bed. And Humakt is certainly not the only warrior god: Orlanth himself, Urox, Vinga, Babeester, Hedkoranth, Heler, and assorted others it's geting too late to successfully spell are (almost) equally, deities of premeditated mayhem. In most clans, not only are most of the warriors not Humakti, it's not even the case that most of the _weaponthanes_ are Humakti. (Some clans have a notable Tradition in such areas, of course, but you can find clans with Traditions for lots and lots of really strange things, come to that, but it's best not to dwell on such points.)
What distinguishes the Humakt devotee from those other warriors and weaponthanes? It's pretty much the death thang, isn't it? With a dose of 'truth and honour' on top, in the manner of a Portugese fried egg. Certainly people will become Humakti who are far from the stereotype of the cult: I come from a long and glorious (read as: short and bloody) line of Humakti, and dad said it was a great cult to join...; our clan has a tradition that the leader of the weaponthanes is a Humakti, and I liked the idea of all those Champion's Portions, and the beer isn't bad, either...; there are Lunars to be killed, and sacrifices have to be made, self-sacrifices not excepted. But being devout, being truly _devoted_ consists in large measure of accepting the twin principles of being prepared to kill, and being prepared to die. (Contra Gandhi.) In the gleam in the eye of the truly zealous, 'prepared' certainly starts to shade into 'eager'.
Nutty? Maybe not all nutty, but if one corrolates the most psychotic and borderline psychotic 1% of Orlanthi society, by the conventional metrics of the leather-couch squad, with the (let's say for argument's sake) 1% of Orlanthi initiated to Humakt, one would fine a 'statistically significant corrolation', to err on the side of predicting conservatively.
This analysis would work better if one took out the Uroxi first, of course. ;-)
Isn't the key magic of the cult all about manifesting death? I recall Greg once musing (caveat: given how flakey some of his outright statements can be, don't read _too_ much into his 'musings') that perhaps Sever Spirit wasn't so much a common or garden Feat (sack de POW, get de magic...), as a sort of mystical communion with the higher power of Death. That's gotta hurt.
(To quibble with other respondants: to say that Humakt _is_ death is a somewhat culturally relative term; an Orlanthi would nod vigorously to such a proposition, but Dara Happans and assorted other theistic cultures have rival claimants, while the more mystically-inclined would aver that such 'personifications' of the transcedent are typical of the misunderstandings inherent in the sacrifical method. But Humakt is about as close as you can get to 'Death' by theistic means, as a concept, and worshipping him is about as close as you can come to Death in practice, without either taking up meditating on the ultimate reality of mortality as a lifestyle, or perhaps more to the point, actually dying.)
Cheers,
Alex.
End of The Glorantha Digest V7 #295
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