> > 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"?
I don't understand how Alex derives the second statement from reasoning that I employed in the paragraph. What I do believe is that Great Gods can be distinguished from Lesser Gods of their element and from other Great Gods. How this is the same as "all portions of the divine" is beyond me.
>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.
Which I have not done. In fact I have repeatedly stated my belief that the scheme is _broken_ (w.r.t. Dayzatar, Eurmal and so forth) rather than to force any fitting to the concept. At the most, there is one Great God per Core Rune would be a far better statement of my belief and this is in line with what various gloranthan publications say.
>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...
Rather than waffle about what is "almost inevitably" (although "not" would be much more accurate) the consequence of my proposition, I would find it more helpful to actually point out something wrong or at least to answer some of my questions (such as how you would treat Dendara/Entekos in HW if you think the goddesses are distinct, or what precisely is the problem with the fused aspect other than it being new and not engraved in the HeroWars rules etc).
>Better, I think, to take the approach that Great Gods are as much
>cultural conceptions as the gods are themselves;
Yuck. The gods are _not_ "cultural conceptions" but real beings. I do not see why we have to treat gods as intrinsically unreal (as labelling them conceptions implies) just so to get cultic variation across glorantha.
>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.
So is there a culture that blurs the "discrete lumps" of, say, Storm and Sun? If cultures can tell differences in forces of high divinity apart, then surely those differences are _real_ and not merely due to "cultural conceptions"?
You could point out that the difference in Death and Destruction are not well-defined and this is true. However I am not grounding the identities of the high divinities on lexical labels but the forces themselves. Since Humakt and Shargash are distinct entities, there is a real difference between those forces.
So what meaningful improvement do we get by abandoning Great Gods and adopting High Divinities?
>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.
Yes, and I have explained several times why I did this (namely the recent distinction made in Hero Wars between Gods and Spirits which was not known when the document was written).
>It's not clear that your suggested reconciliation
>of the various senses of "great god" is entirely consistent with
>any of them.
I do believe that I said the following quite some time ago:
::I don't believe that the definitions are _always_ equivalent ::but that a few gods are recognizably Great and that the ::definitions that we have are imperfect (to some extent or ::another) ways of delineating their greatness from hoi theoi.
so I fail to see where Alex gets the idea that I think my definition is entirely consistent with all senses of Great Gods.
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