It's well-known (at least from back in the bad old days of RQ) that you can check someone's "initiatory status" readily enough. What I don't this is really true is that lets one automagically determine questions of "heresy". Divination about matters of fact "Are you now, or have you ever been, a Delecti-consorting Duck Hunter?" is surely possible, and if that fails, call in a LM guy to sit under a sheet for a few hours. (Nee the Reconstruction rune magic.) Exact reliability arguable, but certainly possible. Delecti-consorting's an extreme enough case that cult, vows may have been broken, which is _very_ likely to show up. (Nee the Reconstruction rune magic.) But stuff like "Is Otnyr Greenblade a miserable heretic, due to his following a geas which is against all known Culbrea tradition?" is getting into "Hit it and hope" territory, I think. Humakt's been humouring his religious practices up till now, so while it's possible a raven will fly through the window and try to peck Otnyr's eyes out, he'll be struck down by a Sever Spirit, or whatever, I'd not bet the farm on it. So if the question is religious schism, I think we have lots of room for that, as I argued elsePost.
> Which makes
> religious courtroom dramas hard to pull off. Unless, of course, there's
> deniability in divination. "Humakt didn't mean you were blameless; he meant
> your were without shame...."
That's a subtler question, and for me is very much in the realm of "whatever floats your dramatic boat". The questions are: what are the domains of the deities, and how much do they 'know', or seem to know, about certain events? How reliable is getting an answer of any sort, within such fields? How "oracular" do the answers tend to be?
As far as legal proceedings and the like are concerned, bear very much in mind that divinition is mediated by the divinee. If he's an outright liar, a fraud, mistaken in his interpretation, or biased due to his religious leanings or personal attitudes, the results can be partly or wholly skewed. Accordingly such statements from divination would any more more weight than any other sort of statement from that person, broadly speaking. (Outright lying is admittedly very likely, since this would be literally taking one's god's name in vain.) After all, which is the better witness statement: "I saw with my own eyes Ketil kill that man", or "I have asked my god, and he has told me that Ketil is a murderer". (Swings and roundabouts, for me.)
> Strange to say, this cleared some things up for me. Yelmalio has
> never been a problem, but I had assumed a closer connection between the
> myths of the Heortlings and the Pelorians, at least since the 1st council.
> It's still awkward, but comprehendibly so.
They was certainly a spirit of detente at one point, but clearly not to the point of mythic identity, else Elmal would have disappeared entirely. (I know some people have solved the "Elmal Problem" by deciding exactly this.) Plus things have gotten a lot worse since then, as regards Heortling/Pelorian relations, so some "mythic rollback" is Always An Option. You simply rediscover an old myth, do the odd snazzy quest or two, and get some handy "beating up Solars" magic, rather than that useless "making peace with the Solars" guff.
> So, is there any difference in
> the status of Elmal in Dragon Pass vs that in Ralios (where, presumibly the
> Pelorian influence isn't as strong)?
Very likely. OTOH, the Bright Empire was there in spades, plus there are other, native solar traditions (the Galinnnninnn (add a few more n's to taste), notably), so precisely how it's different is not a simple topic, I suspect.
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