> [The Priestesses] may have directed Waha as the role model for the bulls.
Waha is not a role model for the bulls. He is a role model through his own virtues, teachings and deeds for the Men of Prax. He is a Deity in his own right, acts as he sees fit and does not act as a tool of the Eirithan Bene Gesserit.
>> The moment I see pseudo-anthropological jargon ("quasi-cannibalistic"?), Wakboth kills a shadow-kitten. Avoid salting your arguments with them.
> I'll have to doom an entire line of alynxes to extinction if you don't see my point.
But that's just it. I find it harder to see any merits in your arguments because your jargon gets in the way. If it's relevant to the point, trying writing it out in simple language. If it's at best tangential to the point, delete it.
> The bipeds may have cross-bred between herds - there are no biological barriers to stop them, and that's what apes do, however sapient.
You keep referring to the proto-Praxians as being less than human and I have only cottoned on why. When Sandy wrote that the Survival Covenant increased the intelligence of the eaters, he wasn't thinking that the pre-Darkness ancestors of the Praxians were apes or anything like that - he was referring to them having been driven dazed and stupid *by* the destruction of the Great Darkness.
> The Hidden Kings are the best documented case of quasi-cannibalism during the Greater Darkness (sorry, kitten). What did they do? They took beast shape (wolves) and hunted other beast shape survivors (deer, direct kin of Heort).
What they did was actual cannibalism, nothing quasi about it. The relevance of this to the Survival Covenant is extremely weak - Waha isn't making people feed of their own kind - and isn't adding anything to the debate. All it is is a debatable category that illustrates very little.
> In my book, that makes Heort more of a cultural hero than Waha, who stuck with the desperate survival mechanism and made it a rule to be followed even after the Darkness.
Joerg, the expression I used about Waha was that he was a Cultural Founder. I'm not interested in hearing a theory about how great a cultural hero Heort is, I can see all that from the Book of Heortling Mythology. But ending the hunger of the hidden kings is not by any definition founding a new culture.
And as for the Survival Covenant being a "desperate survival mechanism", I disagree entirely. Are the Heortlings engaging in a "desperate survival mechanism" when they eat cows? Are the Pentans desperate for riding horses? Moreover the existence of desperate implies an alternative. Which is what? 1500 years after the Dawn, what alternative do the Praxians have in living on the Wastes? Lastly mechanism is just tedious jargon that doesn't add anything.
> Yet the Pentan-descended cattle of the Pol Joni do quite well in the better places of Prax (the same areas occupied by the True Horse Tribe until 220 years before Derek).
The Pol Joni cattle are Heortling-descended (The Pure Horse Tribe never herded cattle) and they survive in the better places of Prax because those places are non-chaparral and the cattle cannot thrive in the chaparral. Lastly how is the Pol Joni way of life a better alternative to "desperate survival mechanism" or the "quasi-cannibalism" of the Survival Covenant?
>
>> What Waha is equivalent to is deities like Orlanth and Vingkot, Lodril, Pamalt, Hyalor and so forth rather than a silver age hero.
> I disagree. Vingkot is the only acceptable comparison in that list, but Vingkot made his laws before the Chaos Age. Hyalor did create a nomad society, but he too did so in the Storm Age, like the Founders of the Beast Riders. The main difference in what Hyalor did is that he adopted a non-kin spirit as his steed.
Okay, this entire debate started because I pointed out that Waha founding a culture fitted more thematically to the Golden and Storm Age rather than the Great Darkness. The substance of your objection to Hyalor and Vingkot in my list is precisely that I was making. And FWIW the Praxians are not kin to their beasts anymore than the Heortlings are to their cows.
> Orlanth, Pamalt, Lodril are deities that led their peoples out of the struggles of an earlier change of Ages, so there is a parallel there, but none of those changes were nearly as apocalyptical as the Chaos Age.
Once again you admit the parallel between them and Waha.
> All of them are Great Deities in the cosmic scheme, too - all Waha is is a fringe culture's male role model.
The Praxians are not a fringe culture.
> If you insist on pulling out the rules mechanic "Waha has two runes", well, that makes him the equal of Pelaskos or Diros. Or Gagarth and Thed.
Or Kyger Litor (Man and Darkness).
Thed rightfully has two runes as mother of the Broos but I don't see a source for Pelaskos or Gagarth having two runes. Oakfed in Pavis: Gateway to Adventure is just given the fire rune so Gagarth, his equal, in Nomad Gods would be the same.
>
>> Eiritha and the Protectresses are not interchangeable in the tribal myths.
> "Sable Eiritha did X" (and the same story told with bison, rhino, whatever) describes many of Eiritha's deeds.
The Protectresses are distinct from the Herd Eirithas.
> The animal nomads had a cultural level somewhere between homo erectus, neanderthals and very early homo sapiens while wandering through Genert's Garden.
But you don't have any published material that they were not homo sapiens or had a Pliocene culture. All you have is Sandy's dicta which doesn't say what you think it does. For all extent and purposes the inhabitants of Genert's Garden were fully human and all your speculations about the plains apes being kindred to the herds is merely a pet theory. So rather debating it at length, could you just drop it? I'm far from convinced and your speculations about it couched in your dry pseudo-scientific manner is just dull to read.
> Well, what cult are [the Founders] part of? Certainly not Storm Bull's cult, and yet they are a male thing.
The Founders are their own cult, worshipped to provide tribal identity.
>
>> Debatable. Who set Oakfed free is not stated, only that they
>> are men and that they did it to keep him alive.
> They are the inhabitants of Tada's Land.
It's not said that they are and the boundaries of Tada's land is poorly defined. Simply assuming it to be equal to current Prax is debatable.
>
>> [Waha] would have magical means of fighting the wildfires, like
>> tricking it into lighting an inescapable bundle of fibre and wood
>> (Sartar Companion p276).
> This is an animist society.
If you had troubled to read the reference I gave, you would have seen that it was from the Kolat writeup.
> No fire-fighting feat of Waha is required, and still "Waha stopped the Wildfire".
Except that Waha does have magics from Oakfed as long ago as Cults of Prax. So giving him fire-fighting powers in light of statements saying that he fought Oakfed doesn't seem that big a leap.
--Peter Metcalfe
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