Re: Great Gods

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 20:04:53 +0100 (BST)


Peter Metcalfe:
> Which is the meaning of element that I was objecting to. Since
> Lodril is a Great God of a realm and Turos is also a god of
> that realm, then Turos cannot be a Great God (unless he was
> another name for Lodril).

This sort of reasoning is precisely the objection I have to the whole "divine identity" business. Who says all portions of the divibe have to be reductible to "the same as", "is strictly included by", or "is wholely different from"?

This gets even messier (or worse, Procrusteanly neat) when we start to add assumptions like there being exactly one great god per core rune (or other similar concept. Sustaining such a proposition is almost inevitably going to involve adding further assumptions that such and such apparently different gods _really must_ be the same, as they're (part of) the same god, or indeed further lengthening the list of fundamental concepts...

Better, I think, to take the approach that Great Gods are as much cultural conceptions as the gods are themselves; there are clearly "real" forces of high divinity (or accessible transcendence, if Julian will forgive me...), but they are not, or at the very least not necessarily, conceptualised in the same "discrete lumps" by each religion.

> I am being rather precise about this because I feel that if we
> start loosening the definition (like admitting Dayzatar as
> a Great God) then the definition ceases to have any useful
> utility and also creates the question of how the God Learners
> ever came up with such a concept.

You're basing your whole argument as to the "core" definition of Greater God on a document that does cite Dayzatar (and worse...) as one, of course. It's not clear that your suggested reconciliation of the various senses of "great god" is entirely consistent with any of them.


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