Great Gods and other Great Gods.

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 19:33:09 +0100 (BST)


Peter Larsen:
> 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.

They're obviously not "part of" the "Heortling Humakt"; I think what's being proposed is that they're (in some sense, or to some degree) part of "Great Humakt", or "The Death Rune", or "the transcendent power of biting the big one", or however you'd want to characterise it. (The need for such qualification is a tad annoying, and in large part caused by persistent rumours of a "Carmanian Humakt" -- for gods' sakes people, at least give us the odd glotal stop to work with here...)

The tricky thing about this about debate is that clearly, theists anthropomorphise their gods to a fair extent, and to a high degree certainly think of them as being discrete entities (give or take the occassional Ineffable Mystery). But if you want to create some sort of Grand Unified Cosmology (as you probably do, if you're a God Learner, an Illuminant, or Carl Fink), then you pretty much have to bin such notions immediately. One might start off by thinking of the divine world as a wave function, and the observable deities as quanta... OK, that's not necessarily an especially edifying image, but one might argue that in things like collateral worship, what's happening is that one is strengthening a certain part of the divine domain, which is perceived by you in one manner (for example, Huamkt's death powers), but also by other cult(ure)s as, for example, a portion of Zorak Zoran.

On Great Gods; I think there are indeed essentially two definitions here, and I don't think they always agree. (Martin L. confuses the issue some more by "proving" Shargash is a GG by implicit appeal to two further definitions, neither quite agreeing with the existing ones...) But the overlap between the exemplars of the two is pretty high, so it's not _quite_ as bad as it might have been.

Cheers,
Alex.


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