donald_at_grove.demon.co.uk (Donald R. Oddy) :
>Firstly broo are chaotic creatures (so normal rules don't
>always apply)
I think that's very unconvincing. Dumb animals manage to reproduce sexualy without concious heroquesting, why do humans have to be so different? What's wrong with them that they have to perform rituals to do what all the rest of nature manages to do instinctively?
>and secondly they don't care what sort of creature their rapes
produce
>so a lot of the detail of the heroquest is unimportant.
I don't see what that's got to do with anything. Either a heroquest must be conciously performed or not. If not, then the questin is, is there a heroquest at all?
As I have said though, I think the term Heroquest is probably not the right term in this situation, but rather a form of ritual magic. Perhaps if we talk about instinctive ritual magic we can achieve broader consensus.
Robert Darvall ?
>They don't have rites in common. Heortling rites are not the
>same as Yelmic ones. I'd suggest, as I did earlier, that the
>conception quest is more difficult the further you get from home.
I'm sorry, I should have been more specific, but I was assuming that you would have read my orriginal post on this point, in which I was more clear. To recap, I am not suggesting that all gloranthan human cultures use the same rituals, but that they have rituals for almost all the same things. They all have greeting rituals, mariage rituals, feasting rituals, etc, etc. These are not the same, but they corrspond to each other very closely. Since these reituals are very varied it seems unlikely that they were transmitted across glorantha (you'd expect more similarity other than just having the same categories of rites), or they arrise naturaly from innate human behaviour - i.e. human ritual behaviour is at least partly instinctive.
Since nonsentient animals display ritual behaviour that is obviously instinctive, I'm very surprised that so many people seem resistent to the idea that Gloranthan humans can perhaps do likewise. Especialy since we know that many Gloranthan human populations are descended from nonsentient animals. Indeed some of them were in fact nonsentient animals awakened to conciousness (awakened herd men).
Finaly, what do we gain by deliberately making gloranthan humans inhuman, as requiring that they perform planned magical rituals to concieve seems to do? To me the most compelling thing about glorantha is that we can apply what we now about ourselves to learn more about glorantha. What can we possibly gain by breaking that conection? Especialy since Glorantha is already well populated with nonhuman species ripe for such experimentation.
Simon Hibbs
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