>>As I understand it, the Ralian survivors adopted the Orlanth
>>religion pretty much in its entirety - like the folk of Talastar. I
>>suspect the cult of Humakt in Ralios would look extremely
>>familiar to a Heortling.
>I'm confused. Why would the Ralians (note well, that I referring
>to all Ralians and not just the highlanders) adopt the Orlanthi
>_pantheon_ in its entirety? The Talastari were Orlanthi since
>the Storm Age and so had good reason for adopting the Heortling
>rites but that's not true for over half the Ralians.
At the Dawn, the Talastari could not be described as "Orlanthi" until after they met with the Theyalan missionaries. Take a look at this Myth of the Month to get an idea of the wretched state of the non-Heortling Dawn Survivors:
http://www.glorantha.com/new/myth.html
The Hagolings were typical survivors of the Darkness - wretched and poor, both materially and spiritually. The Hagolings knew nothing about being Orlanthi in the Storm Age and knew but one verse in forty two stanzas of the missionary song. They had essentially lost their culture and their religion in the process of surviving the Darkness - until the Theyalan missionaries arrived.
I suspect that things were very similar for the Ralian survivors - they knew their ancestral protector, or their spirit-animal, or the sacred ancestral place that protected them from the doom of the world, but they had effectively lost their culture and religion. Until the Theyalan missionaries came and sang them the missionary song. Who knows, maybe they knew one verse in twenty one?
Jeff
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