Re: The Glorantha Digest V8 #542

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 20:57:32 +0100 (BST)


Jörg:
> The pre-Lunar Odayla of Sylila may not offer a Great God worship, but
> covers all of known Heortling Odayla stuff plus a whole lot of Heortling
> Orlanth stuff, plus a strong celestial presence later usurped or
> conquered by the Red Goddess. The Great God behind Odayla may be covered
> by Orlanth.

Excellent example. Odalya is the great god of the Sylilans, in the cultural sense (at least). But he's only a minor deity to the Heortlings. Does this mean that one of them is "wrong" (he's not a "real" great god, Sylila has over-hyped him; or that the Heortlings have "overlooked" his Greatness), or that it's legitimately possible to conceptualise the same "divine terrain" in different ways, one ascribing attributes to one (great) deities, one ascribing them to another.

A common thread seems to be that once a (cultic conception of) a deity gets "too big", it becomes difficult or impossible to worship as a "whole thing". Heortling style worship of Orlanth the Great God is a marginal proposition, anything much more would be impossible. (Or worse, Lokayadonism.) But I don't think, at least from the theistic worldview, that this necessarily converges on one unique "thing" as a "maximal possible worshippable being".


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