Roderick and Ellen Robertson <rjremr_at_...> wrote:
>
> Even a number of Christian
> saints (or at least, until the Vatican demoted them) were accreted
> from other pre-christian peoples (St. Nicholas, St. Brigid).
I think Nicholas is a fairly well-authenticated 4th-century bishop in Asia Minor--certainly he's still on the Catholic calendar.
But while St. Nicholas is an historical figure, and a genuine Christian hierarch, I think it's fair to say that his cult has been conflated with a lot of pagan rituals/legends/customs. Saint Nicholas may be strictly Christian, but "Santa Claus" is a melange of people and legends from all over.
I'm sure that sort of thing goes on all the time in Glorantha. Those folks in Tarsh worship a huntress-god who fights trolls? Ah, clearly they're talking about Vinga. They call her "Gerlat"? Ah, yes, of course Vinga sometimes adventured in disguise. Yes, sometimes you can import an entire god from elsewhere, but at least as often you'd just shoe-horn the foreign god into some role in your own pantheon. (Case in point, Yelm and the "Evil Emperor".) And with the God-Learners helping things along...
And to complicate things, in Glorantha I expect you can really change the gods by changing your understanding of them. I speculated once that this could have happened with Zorak Zoran--cultures all over Glorantha might decide that any number of "evil demon did bad stuff" myths are about ZZ. As a result, he gets propitiation, and his role as "psycho demon who might show up anywhere" gets reinforced.
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