>It's easy to get confused and think of gods as being 'people' in some
>sense. They aren't. Humakt is death works the other way around too,
>Death is Humakt. Whenever you read a myth from another culture where
>Death is personified as a god, you have to remember that it's in some
>way directly related to the Death the Heortlings know as Humakt.
I agree with the first part here, but I don't know if the second part is all that practical -- there are a lot of gods with death connections that I don't think can be seen as part of Humakt (Bb Gor, Maran, Zorak Zoran to name a few). Are Somash, Elmal, and Yelm all the same god? I don't really think so, although some Godlearnerish screwing around could make them more alike.
>The Heortlings are the greatest storm worshiping people in the world.
>They know more secrets and powers of the storm than any other people
>and worship it as Orlanth. Therefore Orlanth is the Great God of
>Storm. The Heortlings also have a god of the sun, but they only
>know a few limited sun powers. The Dara Happans also worship the
>sun, but they know far more secrets and powers of the sun than any
>other culture, so their sun god is the Great God of the Sun. Yet
>Elmal is not a pure subset of Yelm, he has foibles and limitations
>that Yelm does not have, and fulfils a place in Heortling culture
>that Yelm cannot. Therefore Elmal is not Yelm, even though the sun
>is still the sun for both cultures.
I don't know. I think there's a sharper division here (between say Elmal and Yelm) for everyone except the most esoteric and enlightened sun worshipper. They are both the sun, but I don't think a priest of Elmal and a priest of Yelm would agree that they were the same sun. After hundreds of years of conquest, worship ofElmal might be absorbed just by dint of people defecting to Pelorian Solar gods, but you could still argue there was a difference.
>Alkor gets his fertility powers from his mother Alk, not his father
>Shargash. Eninta gets her birthing powers from Ernalda, but expresses
>them in a more specialised way. You are not comparing like with like.
Well that's a good argument, but its hard to create a one to one correspondence since we don't have a HW write up for Shargash. Maybe this should be tabled until we do.
>I think Peter Metcalfe and I see eye to eye on this :
>
>>Now by acknowledging Orlanth, I do not mean that they must have
>>some sort of entity called Orlanth in their pantheon who dresses
>>up like the Heortlings do. Instead they have some sort of entity
>>whom the Orlanthi can recognize as their god.
Actually, I agree, too. It's those similarities that allowed the Godlearners to be such a problem. I just don't think worshippers are likely to see it this way.
Peter Larsen
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