>> Bargain with. It's a much more direct transaction than sacrificing
>> to a god.
>>
>> You give the spirit something it wants in exchange for what it can
>> do for you. That might be remembering a friendly ancestor in exchange
>> for information or the soul of the chief's virgin daughter in exchange
>> for destroying an enemy tribe. IMO a lot of the rituals are to do
>> with contacting the right spirit and avoiding dangerous ones. You won't
>> contact Storm Bull for example without a lot of blood and alcohol. A
>> few heads of chaos beasts will get you some anti-chaos magic.
>
>Hmmmm, this gets me to thinking. Especially given how much more
>spirits are prone to possessing (benignly or not) people than are
>essences or daimones....maybe part of the ecstatic thing is that
>many/most spirits crave human expererience and/or emotion? So part
>of what you are doing is experiencing the feeling that the spirit
>wants, which draws it to you. Perhaps part of the negotiating
>process is actually a sharing of that feeling.
>
>Alternatively, spirit thought is so weird that to deal with them at
>all, you have to break out of your normal channel of thinking, and
>that is what all the drinkin and dancin is about.
>
>The latter is closer to what little I've seen written on this. The
>former is much more evocative, at least for me, however. "Well, if
>you want to contact the Brother Wolf spirit, you have to have the
>scent of the hunt on you, the thrill and the hunger need to fill your
>mind. So you spend all day fasting, and take the herbs that make the
>world brighter, then the shaman and you ritually stalk the sheep. As
>you carry on the world falls away, and you are stalking it through
>the first forest. It is bleeting in terror, and you can feel the
>great wolf stalking closer. Finally you leap on it and gash its
>throat and drink deeply of its blood, and as you howl your victory
>the spirit comes, and enters you to. It wants to gorge on the kill,
>but you demand that first it give you...." Well, not quite
>cannonically correct, but much more evocative than "You get stoned
>enough to think like a wolf, and pass through into the spirit world,
>into Brother Wolf's demense. There you bargain with him for...."
You really need to read some of Greg's writing on the subject, he can explain this sort of thing much better than I. I expect there is something of his on this in the archives of the Glorantha digest.
Certainly from a gaming point of view it is important to evoke the atmosphere of such encounters just as invoking a Malkoni saint should involve visions of benevolent people haloed in bright light. The basic transaction in the spirit world is still a crude exchange though. I would also suggest that there is far more bargaining and then performing than doing and then demanding an exchange as you describe. A lot of the spirits are far more powerful than any shaman or character, so you don't want to be fighting them.
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/
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