> > 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 single-
>divinitiedly climaxing and impregnating an entire nation, without
>any "mundane" intervention (MOBly revisionism aside) is "similar".
Given that I do believe in MOB's revisionism (I even tried to write it into the Glorantha:Intro but the wicked editor excised it most foully), I can't give you an example with the criteria that you specify. In any case, the description of Imperial Age Trowjang in the Glorantha:Intro as "a civilized land of women living under the benign rule of red-skinned demigods" is support for MOB's position IMO.
With the recent information about daimones/godlings in Thunder Rebels, I don't think that Tolat is singlehandedly responsible for all the couplings on that night, but that he sends godlings from his realm to do all the grunt work...
> > 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".
But 1/297 does not make a "significant fertility aspect".
> > 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.
No, it isn't. If the system is subjective (i.e. being the cosmology that the god learners arrived at), then cultures will still differ from it. If it is objective (i.e. Greg has a little piece of paper with the list of the Great Gods of Glorantha), then cultures still differ from it. In any case, I cannot see why the question of objectivity has any bearing on whether cultures can differ from it.
> > 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.
You infer wrongly. I do not argue that the runes are the basis of gloranthan reality but rather _labels_ for cosmological forces. Thus I am distinctly unperturbed by the Heortlings and the God Learners having two labels for the same force.
> > 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?
No. They see a fundamental force but do not recognize it in the same way as the God Learners do.
> > They have a different perception of the Core Rune but its power
> > is still the same.
>And this perception is what?
Destruction as opposed to Annihilation/Void.
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