The original Emperor wasn't explciitly identified with Yelm. One might surmise either that is was Yelm, all along, and this knowledge was lost; or that the original Emperor was someone else (a corrupt and megalomaniac Orlanthi King, say), and only later conflated; or both, or neither. ;-)
> Yes, and I don't think the removal of divination will make it go
> away, even though it makes it less obvious.
Personally I don't think it ought to be removed, merely made somewhat more "oracular". Which isn't to say it isn't clear enough to the people looking for the sign, mind you.
> Theism in Glorantha seems to
> have a kind of nasty, cynical edge with gods obfuscating to their followers
> and those followers exploiting the gods for magical power. I don't like the
> image very much. If divination is fuzzy, vague, and limited to priests
> (maybe like the Bible was, pre-John Wycliffe), it lets most of the rank and
> file off the hook but makes the priests fairly corrupt.
I don't the the "cynical" gloss is appropriate at all. Obviously theism does anthropomorphise the divine to a fair ol' extent, but a theistic deity is still not simply a big guy on a cloud somewhere, on his mobile to his mortal clients. To put it in Theyalan terms, they're bound by the Compromise, which means they're simply not capable of micro-managing the affairs of their worshippers. They're pretty much required to act only with their prescibed domains, and to act in those domains reasonably consistently. Thus it's entirely possible for two sects of Humakti to be completely at loggerheads over this or that doctrinal or practical matter, and still be "within the envelope" of acceptable Humakt worship. One may be "more correct" than the other in some marginal sense, such as having superior access to some aspect of Humakt's magic, say. Sometimes these differences are explictly recognised, too: we have aspects, sons, heroes, not such monolithic deities, with unitary cults.
The same is more or less true for other theistic takes. The Pelorians have traditionally accounted for such things by the whole Masks schtick; some greater power is behind each worshipped form, which one can approach to a greater or lesser degree, according to how inherently efficacious and situationally appropriate the particular Mask is.
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