Re: Inspirations for Gloranthan Myth

From: Nils Weinander <nils_w_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 09:09:51 +0200


John Hughes writes a lot of interesing myth parallells, which reminds me that it was a rather surprising revelation for me when I realized that Yelm borrows a lot from indian Shiva: he is both the great king and the lord of ashes. In his destroyer (Shargash) aspect he destroys the corrupt world to make place for the new, clean one.

In Vithelan myth, Vith is inspired from both Shiva and Vishnu. The god/antigod theme has parallells in indian myth. One conspicuous difference though is the lack of a destroyer aspect of the high gods of Vithela (though I have a very heretic idea for this as well).

> The Bible does not seem to feature heavily in Greg's inspiration, but this
> may be to do with our cultural taboos about treating the Bible as myth. A
> pity in some sense, for the Old Testament is filled with heroes and
> tricksters and heroquests if we read it with our mythic senses tuned.

OTOH, the Malkioni remind us of both christianity and islam, and Hrestol has similarities both to Christ and the martyred saints.

One can also make a parallell between malkionism and ancient greek philosophy with the God Learners as pre-socratic natural philosophers and the modern malkioni theoogians as post-socratic moral philosophers.



Nils Weinander
The world is a beautiful place and it's worth fighting for

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