> Roderick Robertson wrote
>
> >What is the Sun on Earth? Apollo? A big ball of flaming gas? Ra? Mithras? El
> >Gabel? Sol Invictus?
>
> A better way to phrase this: is he Apollo or Helios?
Not necessarily better, but both seem to me to be "live" issues in Glorantha. We have both "large scale disagreements" as to the nature of the cosmos, and "small scale disagreements" as to whether to eat bird on a Fireday, or whatever. I don't think either is terribly easily to resolve in theory, but one way or another they seem to be perfectly tractible in practice. IMC, the answer to questions like "are the four (or so) major worldviews equally valid?" are in effect either "No!" or "who cares?", depending in what respect you're asking. Clearly I still have a meta-opinion about that (or twelve), and equally, it might be of crucial imports to some games, I can see that. As to more local-scale, endogenous disagreements, I may have a greater or lesser 'working model' in mind as to what the 'underlying reality' is, but I feel it's a rather in principle hard task to put oneself in the position of, as part of running a once a week roleplaying game, I shall undertake to know better than the fictional people I'm "simulating", and have neat answers to the cosmological questions they seek answers to for their entire lives, without feeling I'm being limiting, prescriptive, and selling the entire exercise short. Sure, it would equally be a cop-out to simply say, "whatever story sounds good", or "the victory to those with the mythic guns", but then again, I'm not advocating that, either.
Thomas McVey:
> and Hipparchus in 130 BC stopped all the fun by measuring the distance to
> the sun.
He did? I thought he was vague at best, the uncertainty on this topic being a major difficulty in his measurement of the distance of the moon, which he nevertheless got an excellent estimate of (in terms of earth diameters, at least).
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