Analogies

        Heys folks

        ELMAL & YELM         While Peter M is quite right about the *cult* of Elmal weakening in Sartar, that says nothing about the *mythology* of Elmal, which is basic to Heortling life. The sun is Elmal - just look up and you can see his streaming hair, watch his golden spears penetrate the haze. Elmal, strengthened and purified by Orlanth at the Dawn. Ideas of the Evil Emperor being the sun are Lunar ideas, gaining new currency since the invasion.

        AFRICAN ANALOGIES         Keith:

>While on holiday I read a biography of Shaka Zulu. During the early
years I

>kept thinking that the whole situation sounded a bit like a bunch
of Cattle

>raiding Sartarites unified later on by Shaka Argrath. For a non
Western

>'Cattle is Wealth' analogy it was pretty interesting.

        The African analogy has also been intriguing me. The approach to kinship and the style of kinship terminology used by Greg in his guise as the unknown author/translator/editor of 'Report on the Orlanthi' reflects the British structural-functionalist school of the thirties. The two outstanding theorists of that school were EE Evans-Pritchard, who worked with the Nuer, a clan based cattle-herding society on the Upper Nile (with clans of twenty thousand or more!) and Meyer Fortes, who worked among the farming/herding Tallensi of Ghana. The ethnographies can help us see how societies in some ways similar to the Heortlings work in a way that straight historical/legal recreations of say the Irish Celts or the Anglo-Saxons can't.

        GLORANTHAN ANALOGY         Another more of less random analogy - it's struck me with renewed force lately (or maybe its was just Alex battering me about the head) just how strongly Greg's central myth of Glorantha reflects the central Greek mythology as portrayed in Hesiod's 'Theogany'. Yeah I know - its a game you can play, but the central progression of ages and events is strikingly similar, and even some of the names of the gods are the same. In Glorantha's case it may have been filtered through Steven Weinberg's mid-seventies work on the first three minutes of the universe, with the explosion of the Spike as the big bang and the various epochs representing the progression of energy through different forms and combinations until atomic matter reached the form it persists in today. Stray thoughts...

        John