Re: Animists & Doraddi

From: Jerome Blondel <bwbfc_at_yahoo.fr>
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 10:48:40 +0200

Peter Metcalfe:

> >Leaving aside other special abilities, what's left is the practice of
> >contacting the spirit world through ecstatic worship. Perhaps shamans
> >are specialists of it.
>
> Perhaps they are - but what does it mean to be a Shaman then? We
> have a pretty good idea of what increasing levels of theistic worship
> involve (the sacrifice of the Self to the Divine Powers) but we don't
> have a similar equation for animist religion, nor what distinguishes
> a shaman from other animists.

[...]

> The only different that I can discover is that most Shamans travel
> as discorporate spirits (HW:RiG p208) while non-shamans must enter
> it body and spirit together.

It sounds enough to make a significant difference. Shamans appear as the only people who can be in the spirit world as spirits. If my understanding of the terminology is remotely correct, one can bring back the idea that they integrate the spirit world. Doing this repeatedly they come and go between life and death, sharing their time with the spirits, like Amuron among the Doraddi.

> I'm a bit leery of whether the firemaking motif will still remain.
> Greg's already used it prominently in the non-Shamanic Yelm
> religion and it seems a bit careless to recycle it unchanged for
> the Doraddi.

I can think of a snake leaving its skin again and again. I don't know much about RW snakes. Maybe the Doraddi horned ones leave their old skin when it burns, or burn it before they leave, which suggests the theme of an animal reborn from its ashes (re-hashed?).

Jerome



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