I've been involved in a conversation about Gloranthan magic in the context of a particular campaign. My friend is running it with Solar System and the campaign focuses a bid deal of attention on the different otherworlds and choosing with which to interact with and how. It's really about choosing your identity and stuff.
Anyway, I've been able to explain pretty much everything about everthing else, but explaining veneration and saintly magic seems to be beyond me. My friend is now convinced that anything that has to do with saints is actually theistic worship. . .
This is what the Glorantha wiki has to say about the subject:
"Veneration: Right method to interact with Essence Plane entities.
Zzaburi don't "worship" anything in literal meaning, but they interact
with otlerworlds with abstracted images of scripted book magic."
"Sophism: Sophism is the logical worldview. There are two main schools
of thought - Zzaburism the philosophy that the creative force is
impersonal and Malkionism the philosophy that God made the world."
"Sophistic Magic: Magic as practiced by Sophists largely takes the
form of spells. Venerators can also seek aid from Saints resulting in
Blessings."
. . .
We also know that sorcery is something you know. I can grok how the sorcery that the sorcerers use works, but saints, veneration and blessings are beyond me. I get how you can decode scripture to learn wizardly magic, but how is worshiping a saint something you know? How are the blessings something you know as opposed to something you are or have?
Olli Kantola
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