Something as ancient, profound and universal as Uleria must be worshipped and acknowledged in a thousand forms and a thousand different ways: loved, hated or maligned. But it's Ernalda who tamed the Storm Tribe, not Uleria; and Vela who directs the healthy appetites of men and women into intimacy and marriage. For most Heortlings, Uleria is long ago and far away.
Of course Uleria is far bigger than just sex, difficult as that may sound. :) The old RQ3 writeup by Greg and Sandy also emphasised the communal and social gifts - which brings her priests and priestesses closer to Miko's descriptions of Greek courtesans - and fecund reproduction. The RQ3 Cults Book stated that there are few actual temples to Uleria anywhere: which to me means she's a goddess of shrines and charms and shady bowers, of graffiti carved on temple walls.
Mikko's description of the hetaerae ('equals') reminded me of my own RW
mythological analogue for Uleria.
Remember the woman in Gilgamesh, the 'harmitu' who transformed the beast-man
Enkidu into someone fully human through sex and instruction? Who made him
self-aware and 'wise, like a god'? The word means 'love-priestess' or
'temple prostitute', though the term has no perjorative associations - quite
the opposite. These women were also second millenium business entrepreneurs
who could introduce strangers and traders to the right people, setting up
contacts, buyers and sellers, providing a home, company and local insight to
far-travellers. They were high society hostesses, coaching their clients in
local social graces and customs.
This is close to my concept of Uleria, and IMG you will find a few such priestesses (men *and* women) in the cities of Sartar, providing to Lunar traders and officials - coaching them in the finer points of Sartarite language, boasting, gifting, and belching at table. A few may even have recruited Heortling assistants. To Heortlings of course, this is exactly what *kin* are for, which may be another reason for their bias against Uleria.
John
(Comatically Erotolucid)
I had in my hands a substantial fragment of the complete history of an unknown planet, with its architecture and its playing cards, its mythological terrors and the sounds of its dialects, its emperors and its oceans, its minerals, its birds and its fishes, its algebra and its fire, its theological and metaphysical arguments... - Jorge Luis Borges, 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'.
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