> You're reading far too much into my words. I don't believe that
> heroquesting involves time travel. The only statement I've
> made is that the
> heroplane (being outside time) allows a quester from the present to
> interact with questers from the past or (potential) future.
> Time travel (in
> any Ray Bradbury kind of sense) not at all intended.
We're just tripping over some fine points of language. The following is just for the sake of clarity.
I think that the heroplane is timeless in the way that a picture is two dimensional - it lacks depth. But a picture can certainly appear to have depth, using perspective projection techniques. In the same way the hero plane is timeless, but has the appearance of having time such as when a mortal experiences a heroquest. This is a consequence of the quester's experience though, not a property of the hero plane itself, in just the same way as we experience the sense of depth of a picture without it actualy having any depth.
As far as interactng with questers from the past or future goes, this appears to happen but we're falling over the inadequacies of langauge again. We've already discussed the extent to with 'people' in heroquests are realy people. They might be aspects of a personality, or manifestations of what a person has done or might do, rather than being the actual person in the sense we are familiar with. So then saying that you met someone from the past in a quest is an ambiguous statement, because the actual experience could be interpreted in so many different ways.
Let's look at the rollig rock example again. In a heroquest you can interact with the potential that the stead will be destroyed in a way that is alien to physics. It's also alien to our familiar notion of time, because untill the stead is actualy destroyed, there is no 'destruction of the stead' to interact with. In a similar way, past heroquesters might have intracted, in some way, with your character's potential to exist. That potential might manifest in all kinds of strange ways. They might merely have interacted with the potential that someone (not necesserily you) might do what you later did, and that potential might manifest as a person, but because of the ambiguious nature of personality and self in heroquesting we can never realy be sure what lies behind these experiences.
I also made a mistake in one of my posts. I said that if you kill me in a heroquest, then I'm dead. Well, that's not always the case. You might actualy have killed a part of me, just as Sheng Seleris killed part of the sovereignty of Moonson. In heroquests, as in myth, death can reprsent a destructive* transformative experience (*they all are), rather than True Death. However if you used the actual power of death on me in a quest then yes, I'd realy be dead.
Simon Hibbs
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