Eurmal isn't necessarily any sort of pro-- difficulty in that respect, at least if you believe he's a "different being" from Bolongo. (Is Bolongo a Great Spirit? Was that a classification job too futile even for the most masochistic GL theorist?)
But that's largely by the by, since the real thrust was that the HW "definition" (since IIRC, it never really so much defines as alludes) of a Great God doesn't seem to imply this has-Core-Rune-ness, and my gut feeling is that trying to make them up is either going to involve shortening the one list, or lengthening the other, fairly significantly, to establish such a property. (And yes, I have several such examples, and no, they likely wouldn't go undisputed, so I'll pout it no more strongly than that for the moment.)
> > > 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.
Far from it. It illustrates there's not a single accepted universal account of the cosmology is this sense. It's far from a given that there's a single accepted "universal theist" account, which is what we're essentially disagreeing on.
> 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.
This would some hypothetical exposition, I assume.
> >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.
You seem to be suggesting that I'm suggesting replacing an account in which one states crisply "those are the same being" with one where one can equally crisply state that "those are different beings". On the contrary, I'm suggesting that things aren't always crisp (or at least not "consistently crisp", depending on whom ones asks).
> All that the published material does indicate is that different places
> have different names for the _same_ being.
This is often the case, of course. (Or at the very least where "the same" means mythically similar enough to be "magically inter-operable", such as when one demonstrates magic to be effective on one as one the other, or similar tests to do with their common perception on the GP.)
> > > 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.
Well, I want a Glorantha in which people can worship gods, and not have to muck around with lego bricks. I want to have a Glorantha in which the Paradox Solution is left as is, until perhaps some 3/4-crazed PC decides to "solve" it by egregious means, not one where it's "explained away" by making supposed uncontroversial assumptions as to the answer to the question the whole debate was about in the term face. Likewise, given the tortuous RW history of the development of the Elmal saga, I'd rather like to think that the situation _in Glorantha_ was nothing like so cut and dried as "everyone agrees" that they are the same divinity, so what's all the fuss about?
In order for people to worship gods, I don't need to have a game system or cosmological rubber stamp to tell them that _their_ conception is universally agreed to be correct (which they won't have in any case, outside the realm of theism), what I need is for their worship and understanding of the gods to be correct _in it's own terms_. (Or "... and it's true for them", to repeat a familiar Stafford mantra.) Why should it be troublesome to have two theists, from for example utterly different pantheons, to be able to "prove" by HQ, or otherwise make magically effective, superficially contradictory things? It's already established to be true between the "different systems", after all.
> 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.
The issue isn't whether they're worshipping "gods", but of "what is a god?" My objection was to for example your use of "being", which implies some sort of discrete, anthromorphised entity. (Which is _a_ conception of what a "god" is, but not a universal one.)
> >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.
TR is pretty much neither here as far as this discussion is concerned, since there's rarely, if ever, going to be any major cosmological dissent within a given pantheon. The Orlanthi are doing well if they have one coherent opinion on Shargash's place in the cosmos, never mind two or more mutually contradictory ones... The more significant question is whether the Solar (say) and the Orlanthi perspectives always agree on what sort of divine taxonomy is correct.
> > > >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.
But the concept of "mistaking" one for another _assumes_ that there's a crisp distinction in the first place. If the "cosmic rune sets" vary from pantheon to pantheon -- _as they do_ -- then inevitably there will be beliefs of the sort that "Orlanth is just another god of cosmic order-breaking, like Shargash" or "Shargash is just another death god", to wit, understanding "foreign" divinities in terms of a native understanding of what the FoHDs are. (Yes, I know this will simply cause renewed trench warfare about those examples, but those won't be "definitively" settled until some sort of "official cultural core rune list" appears for each, which will likely be about, ooo, never.)
> >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?
Because religion is less successfully treated by reductionist thinking than chemistry, at least if religion be religion (and chemistry be chemisty). There's no Subjective Electron Plane (at least this side of the whackier accounts of QED...).
> >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.
Runes are supposed to be a great deal more than lexical labels, but it amounts to the same think: I do not think that all Glorantha cultures and religions (or even just all the theist ones) agree on a particular number and set of "cosmic forces".
> > > 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.
I can't even locate this reference right now, even with liberal use of the "grep" command, but IIRMOC, the point is that it seems to be generally agreed that these definitions are not precisely equivalent in extent (though they overlap considerably), hence there is a distinction to be made -- and one which becomes _necessary_ in those cases where it is at least arguable they are in one
It's not great terminology, though, and I can't honestly recall suggesting it as such. Then again, I've perpetrated worse notational abuses in my time. (Calling one "Greater God" after RQ3 and the other "Great God" after HW might be just a bit _too_ subtle.)
> > > 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.
I find it necessary to point it out, as you continue to freely transpose the definitions without any such qualification, such as when you contend that Odalya cannot be a Great God in the HW sense because he isn't a Greater God in the RQ3 sense -- that cannot possibly be proof of anything, if you admit, at least on and off, that the two are not equivalent. (It might be evidence, on the basis that the two sets are highly similar, but proof it cannot possibly be.)
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