Re: what is animism?

From: David Cake <dave_at_...>
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2013 14:46:39 +0800

On 01/01/2013, at 6:34 AM, Jeff <richaje_at_...> wrote:

> Misapplied worship is not a rules concept in any HQ2 publication nor does the term appear in the Guide. >

I had certainly noticed its absence. And also that the Guide usually refers to 'deitiies' regardless of whether the deity in question is normally approached as a god or great spirit (or essential being, for that matter).

I will be thrilled if the concept of misapplied worship has been more or less removed from the canonical understanding of Gloranthan metaphysics.

I had a lot of issues about its applicability - once you got to thinking about it, the number of exceptions or seeming exceptions seemed to be pretty large. And it never made any intuitive sense to me - in real world occult traditions, there seems to be no such rule. And it never really seemed to add anything to the game - it just branded a whole bunch of traditions as 'wrong', while making special exceptions of others (Urox/Storm Bull for example) to declare them, though superficially in the same category, as 'not wrong'.

Looking to the future, the big bomb still to drop in terms of changing conceptions of Glorantha after the Guide (plenty changed in the Guide, but it doesn't have a lot of detail about magic in practice) IMO is the various implications of the Xeotam Dialogues snippet. There seems to be a general feeling that the Xeotam Dialogues are the new basis for understanding How Sorcery Works in Glorantha, and while that has big implications for Sorcery obviously, it also makes it more or less explicit that the beings manipulated by sorcery are the same beings as woshipped by the divine. While that doesn't exactly relate to the misapplied worship question, I think it does make it explicit that the various approaches to magic are more interrelated than previously considered, even on a 'day to day' basis.

Cheers

David

>>

>>> David Dunham

>>

>>> Probably depends on the culture/tradition. I suspect those in parts of

>> Fonrit seek to enslave their spirits. Others might "eat them" (to

>>> integrate their abilities).

>>
>> Oh absolutely. I think the exact terms are tradition (or even religion as a
>> whole) based. I do think the basic practitioner/shaman split is along the
>> lines of "Can follow the rules"/"Can break some of the rules or make new
>> ones". (Plus the bits about having a fetch or coming back from the dead,
>> but even that I would make tradition specific.
>>

>>> Some may even give gifts — which starts to resemble divine magic.

>> "Misapplied worship" does work, as well (even if less "efficient").
>>
>> I don't use misapplied worship, since it never made any sense to me.
>>
>>
>> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>>

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