Bryan Thexton says:
>I may be heretical in this interpretation, but I always read the
>blessings to have an implied "our" or "these" in them. Bless [our]
>warriors, bless [these] plows, and so on. I would think you could
>only bless a heathen if he either joined the community (something
>which I view as a formal and magical event that somehow ties you into
>the power of the collective), or indirectly by, say, blessing a
>number of ploughs, but then letting a heathen use one of them.
Good point, and one that could be easily inserted into spell names. Maybe "our" (as you point out later) could vary from blessing to blessing. "Bless our village's crops" will help anyone who lives in the village (and ; "Bless our champion's sword" would work on the sword of the Humakti who has sworn herself to the Lord (polluting her spiritually, too, but probably not hurting the liturgist). I imagine that this is one reason why mixed worldview communities don't much exist -- blessing fields already "treated" with a feat probably does no good and annoys the daimons.
>I see blessings and curses as being mostly very specific, with a
>tight underlying logic (possibly very arcane logic, I'll grant you)
>that has the same rigor as a mathematical proof.
And here's a difference between liturgy and sorcery -- the liturgist only knows the final formula; the wizard understands the proofs and techniques needed to construct it. The liturgist, for example, is capable of calculating the area of a circle ("Bless our wheat") and the circumference of the same circle ("Bless others oats"). He does not understand how the two fomulae relate, nor can he generate the volume of the sphere ("Bless our crops"). If enough corruption has crept into the texts or a variable has changed (a new breed of wheat, for example), the blessings won't work, and the liturgist won't know why. All of which adds to Malkioni conservativism: no animal husbandry here, or the blessings will all fail!
Thanks, it's all coming into focus now.
Peter Larsen
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