me:
> >Orlanth himself is a mixture -- he is a god who knows some dragon
> magic,
>
> He is a god who fights dragons. The only time he was their friend
> was when he was beguiled.
Surely he gained some dragon knowledge then? The cult of Orlanth Dragonfriend still exists, at least in theory, right?
>
> >rules over spirits(Kolat, again),
>
> Kolat may rule over spirits but Orlanth does not.
Orlanth rules over Kolat, doesn't he? There are spirits in the Storm Tribe as a result. That they "live up in the hills like a crazy spirit-talker" doesn't make them Strangers, merely strange.
> >The Red Goddess is even more of a mix -- she has sorcerous parts,
> theistic
> >parts, mystic parts, and presumably animist parts, as well as a touch
> of
> >chaos and maybe some draconic power somewhere.
>
> The Goddess is a theistic deity with a transcendent self. Chaos
> also makes up a large proportion of her. Animist powers (Jakaleel)
> and Sorcery (Makabeus) are known within her but seem to be minor.
A better way, perhaps, of making my point -- from "close up" the groups that worship the Goddess can be discerned as theist, sorcerous, etc, but from far away, her worshippers are All One. As you point out, the Goddess has all these "parts." She is a mixture of things. That even her most fervernt worshippers can't easily (if at all) bridge between the different Worldviews that the Goddess encompasses is surely their problem, not Hers.
> >Similarly, the landscape around an Orlanthi Tula will be a mix of
> things,
> >mostly animist and theist.
>
> The landscape will be mostly theist. Spirits will come a distant
> second.
Agreed, but they are there, and certainly more likely than essences or mystical forces of any kind.
> >Your god-talkers can deal with the daimon in the hill to get the
> >rockslides to stop, but the forest spirits will require a visit
> >to the Earth Witch.
>
> Just because the Orlanthi refer to them as forest spirits does
> not mean they are spirits in a God Learner sense. They can
> easily be daimones and contactable by a God-talker.
Well, yeah, but clearly there's a need for spirit-talkers, too (if for no other reason than they clutter the landscape of King of Dragon Pass), so there must be some spirits around. I suspect that they are likely to "pool," so you have pockets of spirits in an otherwise daimonic landscape. "Don't go near Red Clay Cave, now, there are strange things that lurk there." This makes more sense to me than the idea that every 10th (or 50th or whatever) tree has a spirit rather than a daimon.
> >Even
> >Zzabur, who can calculate the circumfrence of the Universe, cannot
> define
> >its center, the Invisible God.
>
> He can. Whether the Invisible God (that which is knowable) equals
> the universe is a separate philosophical issue altogether.
He can? Really? Geez. It's probably just as well that he's hiding out in Brithos - -- I would think that the Invisible God would be too much for any mortal thing (I'm assuming that Zzabur has the capacity to die) to comprehend fully. Yikes.
Peter Larsen
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