If you'd be happier with a form of words such as "such evidence as there is", then that will suffice.
> >Since he has a specific "husband" role, including both sexual
> >pleasure and procreation, his Fertility aspect seems to me to
> >be fairly considerable. ("Equal amounts" was not part of my
> >proposition.)
>
> Since most gods can be said to have similar roles, I do find
> it very dubious to point to those roles as being evidence of a
> Fertility aspect and thus Tolat is a fertility deity.
I'd be glad to hear of an example of a deity whose role of singledivinitiedly climaxing and impregnating an entire nation, without any "mundane" intervention (MOBly revisionism aside) is "similar".
> In any case, Tolat only does this once a year and considering
> the full importance of his destructive nature, I'll hazard the
> guess that the night of Uxorial Ecstasy is the _only_ time that
> he's capable of doing so.
To paraphrase Sandy P, "once is evidently more than enough".
> >What do you mean by "the" classification of the divine world?
> >The point is that there are many such.
>
> "the" refers to the system that you were objecting to, being
> based on gloranthan publications, past and present.
No.
> >You're clearly appealing to an objective one,
>
> I am? It is?
Yes.
> >and either "not giving a damn" about the subjective
> >cosmologies of cultures where they differ from this, or assuming
> >that _they do not differ_, which I would certainly dispute.
>
> I said nothing of the sort. I said I didn't give a damn
> about the philosophical basis of the classification and
> simply used it for its utility value. The issue of whether
> cultural cosmologies differ from it is a completely different
> question from whether the classification system is objective
> or subjective.
On the contrary, that is precisely the same question. I'm not speaking of "subjective classification" in the straw-man sense of "I, myself, think the gods are like [blah]", I mean pertaining to different cultural/religious perspectives.
> In the case of Dendara/Entekos, it is unambiguously recognized
> that Dendara is the same as Entekos, so how is this specifically
> relevant?
This is specifically relevant becuase that is _not_ unambiguously recognised, and because it specifically _fails_ the obvious "common initiation" test. (To recast this as "same or different aspect" is to propose more problems than one is likely to solve, I think.)
> >this is a pretty clear indication
> >that this is not the case, at least for the Gloranthans concerned.
> >The proposed identity _is for them_ uncertain.
>
> I really need examples before I could either affirm or demolish
> this. I don't know for which gloranthans is the identification
> of God X with God Y is uncertain and for the known case of the
> Dara Happans/Orlanthi, the identities [Orlanth/Terminatus,
> Shargash/Jagrekriand, Yelm/Evil Emperor etc] are certain.
I suspect this will lead to a series of unchecked assertions rather than either affirmation of "demolition", but try:
Orlanth/Shargash
Humakt//Shargash
Tolat/Shargash
Dendara/Entekos Ernalda/Oria Ernalda/Dendara
And here's an easy one:
Elmal/Yelmalio.
> You are assuming that the Heortlings look at Shargash and see
> the Annihilation/Void rune.
That's not _my_ assumption; rather, that's my inference from your apparent contention that Shargash _is_ the Great God of Annihilation/Void, and that such associations have universalist significance and recognition.
> They don't but see the Shargash rune which does not have chaotic
> connotations and is somewhat present in their own runic system
In other words, the "Core" rune of Annihilation/Void is essentially unknown to the Heortlings, and they blithely "miss" Shargash's allegedly fundamental runic association entirely? This is surely to either suppose a Core rune set that isn't very core, or some Heortlings that are fairly dense.
> >That they don't suggests to me that either he isn't,
> >in any usefully universalist sense, or that the Orlanthi have some
> >quite different perception of said Core Rune (which would rather
> >negate the point of it being a Core Rune).
>
> They have a different perception of the Core Rune but its power
> is still the same.
And this perception is what?
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