> > 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.
>And (at least?) one Core Rune per Great God, no?
Yup. The sole case of a Great God with more than one core rune is Eurmal. Since he is the first suspect to defy the rules, I'm not very worried about his doing so.
>These are problematic enough to be getting along with.
Every time you says something is problematic, you don't explain _why_.
> > Yuck. The gods are _not_ "cultural conceptions" but real beings.
>The gods are not "beings" in for example the sorcerous or mystical
>understandings of Gloranthan;
Since the gods do not exist in the sorcerous (and animistic) understandings and are felt to be illusions in the mystical understanding, the above observation is completely beside the point. They are real entities in the theistic understanding and any exposition of theism that has theists not worshipping gods is at best totally wrongheaded IMHO.
>different theistic religions conceive
>the same "portions of the divine world" as _different_ beings (cf
>the Dendara/Entekos example again);
No, they do not. The description of the Dendara/Entekos does not suggest anything remotely like what you like to think it does and there is no other example of a portion of the divine world being recognized as different beings. All that the published material does indicate is that different places have different names for the _same_ being.
>and even some divine pantheons recognise the gods are not being
>"discrete commodities" (see the "masks" conception extant in
>Peloria).
Well considering that the Pelorians would recognize that Thunderous, All Father and Adventurous are masks for Orlanth and that Urox and Humakt are not, I fail to see how this molehill proves that one god can be mistaken for another. Yes, sometimes, masks are shared by gods (and there are numerous better Heortling examples for this) but even then there is no confusion: a Harsti knows damn well whether he is ultimately worshipping Orlanth or Issaries.
> > 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.
>That is not what "labelling them conceptions" implies.
You may think it doesn't, but it must assuredly does imply this to me. I want a glorantha where people can worship gods and not have to muck around with cultural conceptions. Given that nobody has seen fit to say that animists and sorcerers don't use spirits and principles but cultural conceptions of something almost not entirely like spirits and principles, I do not see why we have to abandon our common sense in the case of theists and declare they aren't worshipping gods but cultural conceptions of divinities.
>Rather the point is that there's "something real" which is some cases
>effectively impossible to describe in a single finite sense.
So? And we should disavow all intention of affirming the reality of gods in glorantha just to get this obscure point across? Thunder Rebels p177 and p207 make this point far more clearly without abandoning the commonsense "you worship a god" position.
> > >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"?
>I am quite clearly not saying they're entirely mutable.
I don't see anything about whether the Forces of High Divinity (henceforth FoHD) are mutable or not in the passage that I was responding to. Hence my question about whether worshippers can mistake one FoHD for another.
>Storm and Sun and probably are as near universal as makes no
>difference, and aren't exactly in much danger of overt "overlap".
Well since there are only two FoHDs that are mutable (Disorder and Illusion), one wonders why we have to have a system which that makes mutability of FoHDs as a core concept instead of an easier system in which the FoHDs are not mutable with mutable exceptions explicitly noted. If it works for the Periodic Table then why not for the gods?
>But you
>wouldn't get an entire set of "core runes" that _any_ two major
>cultures would agree to entirely, much less that any would. (The
>HW:RiG core rune set is explicitly caveated as to say as much.)
I am not interested in the core runes because they are at best lexical labels and we've established that cultures have different lexical labels for each force. What I am interested in is the forces that those labels denote and cultures will agree on whether their immutability.
> > 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.
>This is wholly circular. Death and Destruction are completely
>distinct because they correspond to different Gods, whom we assert
>to be Great in the particular sense of corresponding to Core Runes;
Wrong. Humakt and Shargash are great not because any assertion, but because gloranthan publications describe them as such (Humakt: RQ Companion, RQ3 book 5; Shargash: Glorantha Intro) and also links the greatness to the "holding" of a particular rune (RQ3 book 5). Hence there is not circularity.
> > So what meaningful improvement do we get by abandoning Great Gods
> > and adopting High Divinities?
>In what sense am I suggesting "abandoning" Great Gods?
When you made the unnecessary distinction between the cultural concept of Great Gods and the FoHDs.
> > so I fail to see where Alex gets the idea that I think my
> > definition is entirely consistent with all senses of Great
> > Gods.
>I didn't say what I thought you thought it was; what I said was,
>_I_ didn't think it was completely consistent with _any_ of them.
And this is a problem in what way? Since I had already admitted that all definitions are imperfect, I fail to see the need to point this out as though it was something I was completely and utterly unaware of and thus a critical flaw in my reasoning.
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