Simon Hibbs:
> I don't think anyone has ever considered Samurai to be
> in any way mystical whatsoever. They were a purely
> secular feudal caste. Some happened to e udhists, while
> others were just Animists. Why they're being linked to
> Jedi escapes me.
Possibly because there's a slippery slope anxiety here. If we admit that Shaolin monks are in some sense mystics, then next it's Jedi, then it's Zen samurai, etc...
(I notice that violence seems to the the common thread in these rejected cases. I assume that diposes of any notion of the Bhagavad Gita as having any Greg-sense-mystical content...)
> I can see Greg's definition of Mystics, and it realy is
> very narrow indeed. IMHO it's a very technical definition,
> and I'm not entirely convinced of it's game utility.
I must admit I'm seeing the Roadmap here, myself. Reading between the lines I'd guess the gist seems likely to be along the lines of: "true" mystics are fundamentally unplayable; people who use theist (etc) magic with a transcendent objective are to be treated as theists (though this wouldn't rule out some sort of expanded rules treatment of them, of course); there are no magical effects other those from the known otherworlds, or the (by previous assumption unplayable) 'mystical' ones.
> If Taraltarans for example are not mystics, are they theists?
> Is Centipede-Style martial artists some form of animism?
> If so, I can't help finding such an approach rather disapointing.
I think that both these cases are "innatists", in the sense of the magic they use proximately (though I think they're both mystics in the broader sense, which is what distinguishes them from other "innatists", and that this is worth capturing in some descriptive sense, if not also a rules one). Theism would be more 'normal' as a pre-mystical path in the wider Lunar context though, I think.
Simon Bray:
> In relation to Dervishes, I would think that their practices are more
> Animist in nature than mystic (in accordance to the game mechanics) e.g
> using vigorous physical activity to push the body to the limits until you
> can perceive the Otherworld.
If you could cite me a RW comparative religious text that makes such a categorisation, I might be convinced, but as it stands this seems like HW-defination-inspired square-peg bashing. Sure, the Dervishes use an ecstatic method, but I don't think that necessarily implies that their objective is the spirit world (or that it's 'misapplied').
Chris Lemens:
> It makes sense to me that someone
> who has had an mystical insight might be trapped by
> the power of that insight and be unable to transcend
> it further. For example, if we say "you are the bow"
> is a mystical insight, the archer might become more
> entangled with the bow, and thus be unable to progress
> further mystically. However, he would have the
> benefit of this mystical insight, which (since
> mysticism has no otherworld) must be expressed in one
> of the worlds we know about. So, "you are the bow"
> could be a common talent, a theist feat, or whatever.
> This attempted mystic would have to learn that there
> is no bow, there is no being, and there is no you;
> giving all that up would be difficult.
This is of course the point of having organisations associated with "mystical" religions (it being otherwise rather a solitary and nonspectator sport). Keep the student from confusing ends and means. Of course the downside is that "mystic" ashrams can systematise the error, rather than the means of avoiding same.
> On the other hand,
> any mystically derived insight (the exception to the
> exception, I think) must be expressed as a common
> talent, an animist spirit, a theist feat, etc., so we
> need no other rules to contain or explain mystical
> insights. Just write down an ability and assign a
> number to it.
But if we're just going to write down an ability and assign a number to it, we need hardly go through the palaver of deciding if it's "really" a charm, feat, or spell, when a) quite possibly it "really" isn't, and b) it may obscure the internal logic of the story to force it to be called such a thing.
> There are no rules, there is no mysticism, there is no
> digest, there is no Greg.
"But Master? If there is no Greg, who can it be that scripture says is Always Wrong?"
*prepares to be, where the righteous flame, is not* ;-)
Kevin P. McDonald:
> So... there is a kind of magic (cheers, Nick!) that is neither theistic,
> sorcerous, or animist. It is practiced through the application of
> transcendant methodoligies but is not *actually* mysticism.
I don't think Greg's saying this, and I'd have (if I'm reading him right) to agree here. OK, granted, there's stuff like the Liberation Bolt, but that's not really magic in any game-relevant sense at least, and are never effects 'caused by' the mystic's immediate actions or will. Effects that are magically manifest in the inner world, short of the 'truly mystical', are all mediated through the known other worlds, in some sense. Granted this leaves some uncertain cases, but I don't think they're outright exceptions to this.
(I think that the 'Dragon World', frex, is not a 'different' otherworld, but a different preception of the 'familiar' otherworlds, collectively (perhaps together with the inner world itself).)
> It is not
> mysticism because its practitioners are not attempting, at this
> particular stage in their spiritual journey, to fully disengage from the
> world and directly experience the transcendent. They have not fully
> developed renunciation.
This is true of _all_ mystical/ascetic practices, though. Take a novice of _any_ mystical tradition, however non-violent/Sitting/Orthodox/etc, and prevent him from 'entagling himself further in the errors of the world' by sleeping, eating, panhandling for money, going to the loo, etc, and he'll encounter the corresponding Obvious Difficulties. (Though one strand of philosophical difference is whether one sees the material world as an obstacle plain and simple, or a vehicle.)
> (There is a danger, here, BTW. I don't think it helps to say explicitly
> which paths are true and which are false in Glorantha. One of the nice
> things about Glorantha is that oppinions in context are more important
> than what is "actually" true - at least for me.)
Indeed. It's hard to escape from what's Greg's saying that in real world myth, Bodhidharma and Yudhishthira were misguided idiots, and that anyone analogous in Glorantha would be either be a "failed mystic", or something (not clear what...) explicitly and categorically different from a "mystic".
> Finally, not all eastern magical martial-arts traditions use a
> transcendant methodology. IMHO, some eastern magic sounds more like
> sorcery than mysticism - the practitioner learns the secrets of how
> energy moves and works in the world, and attempts to tap into and
> control its flow. Other traditions would involved theism or animism.
This would certainly be true for me of a HW treatment of RW eastern martials arts, and I'd suppose it to be true of Gloranthan ones, too.
Cheers,
Alex.
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End of Glorantha Digest
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