He does also self-describes as an Arkati, which is a (sort of) mystical tradition, albeit a pretty weird one. Now, where the beer-drinking, Elvis Papery, and Dinosaurs fit in I'm less than clear on, but...
> And doesn't Greg's Trickster stance strike you as a mystical path
> leading away from knowledge and power and towards foolishness and
> freedom? It do me.
Sounds about right to me. As one of my players commented, in re: our clan's (semi-detached) Mad-as-Five-Separate-But-Equally-Insane- Hatters Kolating, that the line between shamanism and mysticism is a a fine one, and Greg seems to feel much the same, on some evidence at least. (The line (if any) between manifest mysticism and esoteric animism, specifically.)
> [...] if my guesses about the God-Learners actually being
> mystics is correct. The RuneQuest Sight (bet that name has to change)
> might be something that stops the Mystic from being an alien everywhere
> and makes him frighteningly native to all the Otherworld planes and lets
> him see them in a unified way.
That, however, seems largely backwards to me, I'm afraid. The God Learners 'created' the different Otherworlds (as categories, that is, not out of whole cloth, obviously) in order precisely to understand each separately, not to understand the Other Side holistically, without reductionism and categorisation. That very act, of nothing else, would suggest their method was Materialist. The fact that they came from the West is just handy confirmation. ;-) If there was anything at all 'mystical' about their method, it would seem to be very 'manifest' indeed -- no sign that they were merely creating the four world in order to Refute them!
> I bet a God-Learner could tell
> you if Urox and Storm Bull are the same thing....
Oh, definitely. Give me N different God Learners, and I'll give you N different answers, though! I think they'd largely agree with the thesis that they're 'the same', but you'd get all sorts of unlikely stories about the theism vs. animism methodological issue. Probably faffle such as 'he's really a theistic entity, but the animists get some Compensatory Bonus/cheat outrageously', the same, but vice-verse, or that there's a single entity, with a theistic aspect and an animist aspect, but otherwise differing not very much.
Cheers,
Alex.
End of The Glorantha Digest V7 #684
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