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Religion, Satire, and MGF


mfbrandi

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20 hours ago, Eff said:

because nobody in Glorantha practices religion like anyone in the ancient world did.

This is an important point.  Gloranthan religions do work differently, because of the magic that comes from the gods. Seeing and experiencing that has to have an effect.

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7 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

I'm confused. What culture are you referring to here?

Because I see Orlanthi culture as quite dogmatic

I am referring to IRL Pre-Hellenistic Greek religion (according to Burkert). The reviewer (Jonathan Barnes) was highlighting the contrasts with Christianity, but as you say one might contrast it with Orlanthi religion. At first, I thought I was being beaten up for suggesting Orlanthism was dogmatic (etc.), but now people seem to be saying that it is, but they like it that way. 🤷‍♀️

7 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

While some players and GMs might approach RQ like that, that's not actually how the gods and people in Glorantha have been portrayed. Very specifically to your quote, kinslaying is evil (aka, chaotic).

I am obviously misremembering something: what happens to an Orlanthi whose Moon or Chaos rune is awakened in adulthood initiation? I thought that was Hamlet had his chips. If so, surely they don’t hire in strangers to do the deed and witness the clan’s shame.

As for the equation of Chaos and evil: “An Illuminate knows as truth that Chaos is, in and of itself, neither evil nor inimical.” (HQG, p. 204 but doubtless in various places all the way back to Cults of Terror.) And if it is known, it must be true. But equally, we have Greg saying, “Act chaotically (rape, cannibalism, etc.)” — and I am sure he didn’t mean to suggest that rape was neither evil nor inimical. This is the doubleness in presentation that I see (and which is not necessarily a problem, if acknowledged) but which — if I have him right (apologies if not) — @soltakss does not. Is the problem Chaos? Is the problem the self-torment chaotic creatures can experience? Is the real problem self-deception, failure to co-operate, and absence of creativity?

Spoiler

The dark side of Nysalor is not, as one might expect, merely alignment with Chaos … Once a being has realized that there is no final difference between Chaos and Law, he may later make a similar but false parallel between his personal ethics and his personal desires, reasoning that since there is no ultimate division to the former, neither is there any final difference between the latter. The parallel is not consistent, however, since both Law and Chaos create in different ways, and all creativity rests upon co-operation between elements of existence … Without co-operation and creativity, the being is a parasite, living off or stealing the products of others without exchange … In this sense, fully Lawful beings can be as much agents of the dark side as was the worst Gbaji prophet. — Cults of Terror, p. 87

7 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

Now, this I sort of agree with... certainly with your other statement about PC's religions becoming more PC to fit 'modern' morals and standards. Runequest has become more woke... and that disappoints me.

I am not a member of the anti-woke brigade, and I have nothing against political correctness. If the default player character religion must come with a religious morality (which is what I was questioning), better a correct one than an incorrect one, no? It may sometimes be fun to play a knuckle-dragger, but there are other routes to it: buck your own religion’s morality; join ZZ or Urox. If — purely as an example: I am not having a dig at anyone in Glorantha or on Earth, nor am I making claims about history — we decided it would be “bronze age authentic” for all cultures to have “honour killings”, nonetheless we would choose to be inauthentic in that matter, no?

7 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

As mentioned before, the gods are real. Your character has seen this reality, multiple times … So, for the most part, yes - power is what gives you a sense of morality.

As you say, you are not the only one to make this point, but I confess to not understanding it. I don’t think I suggested anywhere in this thread that the Gloranthan gods weren’t real, nor that the Greeks thought their gods weren’t real (which is not to say there were not “atheists” in the ancient world, see for example Tim Whitmarsh’s Battling the Gods for a discussion).

How do we get from the gods are real and I have met them to religions must come with moralities? Jeff suggests something transactional: if you don’t knuckle under to the god’s will, it won’t lend you its power. So that is something of an in-world explanation, but it is not an answer to the game design/worldbuilding question: why design gods with that bargaining power? After all, we sometimes think of Gloranthan gods — especially the powerful ones — as stuck in a loop and lacking free will. And isn’t it also part of the setting that cunning or innovative magicians can tap/harness the power of the gods without a by-your-leave? It seems there were options.

On the other hand, Aunty Ludwig once said that there are two conceptions of religious morality:

  • God commands it because it is right;
  • it is right because God commands it.

LW was not a believer but called the second conception the deeper one.

Edited by mfbrandi
there *are* two conceptions …

NOTORIOUS VØID CULTIST

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19 hours ago, Jeff said:

I think you are taking a poetic panegyric praising a god (Greg wrote a lot of those back in the days - GRoY, Entekosiad, FS, and the unpublished Lunar materials were filled with them)

Oh, those are very useful as colour, if nothing else.  Those poems would exist in Glorantha and could be used, for example, by NPC priests.  So is there any chance of seeing the Lunar ones someday if they aren't even in the Stafford Library?

Edited by DrGoth
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20 hours ago, Eff said:

I think that there's an entirely separate factor here, which is that Gloranthan religions as they are understood in the contemporary fandom's center are actually neither paleopagan nor Christian, they're (without much acknowledgement) primarily derived from contemporary occultism and para-occult beliefs

Although, with the benefit of hindsight, a bunch of hippies banging on about “eroto-comatose lucidity” back in the mid-eighties should have tipped us off — I imagine my eyes glazed over at that point (I don’t remember).

So maybe the key Gloranthan conflict isn’t that between Orlanth and Yelm, Winter and Summer, or … whatever, but between Aleister Crowley and … who? Alan Watts? The cosmic battle of the dodgy DWEMs.

NOTORIOUS VØID CULTIST

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4 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

How do we get from the gods are real and I have met them to religions must come with moralities?

Dirty Harry, Harry Potter and Doctor Who are all as undeniably real to you or me as Gloranthan deities to a Gloranthan; you can visually experience their existence, optionally while intoxicated.

All express a morality; it is hard to see how any even partially coherent set of visually-presented stories could not do so. Text can hide the the things it doesn't want to show, even be ambiguous over whether an encounter is consensual.  In visual media by default everyone has an expression at all times. If a face is hidden, that is a directorial choice that is usually pretty easily interpretable[1].

People commonly choose the visual media they follow based on it having a compatible morality[2].

Textual media is different; it is much more common for, say, someone to read a book from the POV of a serial killer when all the bad stuff that happens to the victims can be  simply be left off the page.

[1] the exception is something like rashomon, which is specifically not a depiction of reality, but visualization of conflicting testimonies before a judge.

[2] Although sometimes there is a lack of a full range of choices, at least away from the cosmopolitan heartlands of the Lunar empire.

Edited by radmonger
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4 hours ago, DrGoth said:

This is an important point.  Gloranthan religions do work differently, because of the magic that comes from the gods. Seeing and experiencing that has to have an effect.

I would say that Gloranthans practise religion as people in the ancient world would have if their beliefs were true and demonstrable, like an Orlanth rune lord able to demonstrate lightning. Or an initiate's experience of seeing the other worlds ( spirit world, gods' world, hero plane ....)  Not just jawbone from a priest.

 

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30 minutes ago, radmonger said:

Dirty Harry, Harry Potter and Doctor Who are all as undeniably real to you or me as Gloranthan deities to a Gloranthan; you can visually experience their existence, optionally while intoxicated.

....

People commonly choose the visual media they follow based on it having a compatible morality.....

You lost me on both of those points.

I am sure of the difference between fiction and reality, whether it is in print or in video.  Gloranthans are sure it is reality.

I don't see any of the media -  Print, film.  video. Voice, or pantomime -  as having a built in version of morality.  Print can carry any moral  message you want, from Hitler"s to Gandhi's.  Yes I have heard " the medium is the message" but at best that is hyperbole.  At worst, it is confusing framing.  

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4 hours ago, DrGoth said:
On 4/30/2023 at 10:43 PM, Eff said:

because nobody in Glorantha practices religion like anyone in the ancient world did.

This is an important point.  Gloranthan religions do work differently, because of the magic that comes from the gods. Seeing and experiencing that has to have an effect.

Except - it's not true.

Many in the ancient world (and not so ancient world) practice religion like in Glorantha.

The only difference is that in Glorantha, other gods are just as real as yours. IRL, that's not true (mostly).

This thing about magic - believe me when I say that people have believed in miracles (or magic) from various sources for tens of thousands of years. We should look at it like a rather weak god with little Rune Magic.

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31 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

I would say that Gloranthans practise religion as people in the ancient world would have if their beliefs were true and demonstrable, like an Orlanth rune lord able to demonstrate lightning. Or an initiate's experience of seeing the other worlds ( spirit world, gods' world, hero plane ....)  Not just jawbone from a priest.

 

I think you're doing a dis-service to the believers of those times. Considering that sometimes they would be under the influence of hallucinogenics (and sometimes without being aware of it), and being in an ecstatic trance situation, they would experience their gods.

And when things out of the ordinary would happen (or when they needed it to be), again, they'd see their gods intervening. Luck, chance, fate, accidents, coincidence, synchronicity...

Sure, it's not quite the same as in Glorantha, and the priests (and initiates and other Rune levels) can't make it happen on command. But other than that, there's not that much difference.

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9 minutes ago, radmonger said:

All express a morality; it is hard to see how any even partially coherent set of visually-presented stories could not do so. Text can hide the the things it doesn't want to show, even be ambiguous over whether an encounter is consensual.

Interesting.

I guess we are all familiar with the idea that we may betray our (moral) viewpoint on the world by the pictures we choose to show — at least if we show enough of them. Is it true? I don’t know. It is an empirical matter, I guess. But wouldn’t it sound just as plausible said of words: say enough and you will betray your morality? So I guess that is not what you have in mind.

And if you had no morality to express, would your picture story be incoherent? Why? (Or the pictures have their own morality to barf forth, independently of the teller?)

Is there something special about pictures? Certainly, a sequence of pictures needn’t reveal whether an encounter — I assume you mean a sexual encounter — is consensual.

But even supposing we could see that — we see Orlanth stab Yelm, and let’s suppose we can see that Yelm (in this version) did not consent to be stabbed — what then? Is stabbing Yelm good, bad, right, or wrong? Seeing it happen doesn’t tell me, does it? And whose morality is being expressed: mine; Orlanth’s; Yelm’s; that of the person who said “sit here, watch from this angle”?

Even if we thought pictures (or visual experiences) were a magic route to the truth of things, that pictures always showed all the salient facts — and we don’t: surely, you can “lie” with pictures — then what? How do we get from the facts to the moral evaluation of the facts? (To an ought from an is.)

Rashomon/In a Bamboo Grove I guess we could say fails the coherency test — if we take out the frame of giving testimony to the magistrate. But now reshoot the film as a courtroom drama: you just see the witnesses giving their testimony. Now it is coherent, so does it express a morality now? If so, why is that imagined version different from the one we know? If not, then some movies express a morality and some don’t even when coherent. (Even then, there are likely to be background assumptions: these are the visual storytelling conventions; this is the assumed moral background of storyteller and spectators. Probably …)

And what if the various myths of Orlanth are like Kurosawa’s fragments and won’t cohere into a consistent morality (even for those with the secret decoder ring)?

But maybe I have misunderstood you completely.

NOTORIOUS VØID CULTIST

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16 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

The only difference is that in Glorantha, other gods are just as real as yours. IRL, that's not true (mostly).

No, real life is very even-handed in this: everybody’s gods are equally real.

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NOTORIOUS VØID CULTIST

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4 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

So maybe the key Gloranthan conflict isn’t that between Orlanth and Yelm, Winter and Summer, or … whatever, but between Aleister Crowley and … who? Alan Watts? The cosmic battle of the dodgy DWEMs.

As I ramp back up to speed, it strikes me that one of the best bits of unclaimed treasure from the HeroQuest era was the randomized log line on the old site, "the hero wars are between [X] and [Y]," where the specific poles around the conflict would shuffle every time you loaded. So the key Gloranthan conflict is between all of the binaries we see and can negotiate a compromise around on the one hand and all the others on the other. The hero wars never really end.

For me right now looking backward like some kind of angel of history the real war is between Klee and Millet, a kind of immediate broadway boogie-woogie relationship with these once-fake gods versus the sentimental nostalgia that sees only a disenchanted world in sore need of restoration, "if only" things worked that way. Or character and player, Glorantha and published product, Being There Now and Being Here Then. And this is not so much a war so much as cosmic forces caught in the act of "wrestling."

So the Gloranthans are as anxious and grounded in profane experience as we find it useful to bring into their world . . . their nights are full of meaningless dreams from beyond the gate of horn full of the soul singing to itself and not the brush of the divine, their days are spent in the daydream of skill checks, they have personalities and concerns that deviate from the eternal cycle of ritual time. Even the priests get shit wrong all the time. They aren't constantly running divination. It's something they have to turn on and when it's used up, they're alone. That's when they fight each other and you get the good messy MGF drama.

And maybe the people here on earth aren't so alienated as some like to think. It isn't the 1950s any more, Campbell left Sarah Lawrence behind, Eliade's office caught fire. Jung defined god as whatever got in his way, "violently and recklessly" fucking him up like the passenger in the Gospel of Thomas you need to express before it kills you. The real war in these terms is always going on: the sun going down bloody in the west and coming up bright on the other side, strangled in the crewcut corridors of Beloit College and reborn in California. There are always exactly enough players to fight that war.

But I haven't really been paying attention to the thread. I'm mostly pleased to have an occasion to use one of the memes that only comes out every couple years

kibbo.thumb.jpeg.35e596e817ba4039108e1c3296217b6f.jpeg

 

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1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

But even supposing we could see that — we see Orlanth stab Yelm, and let’s suppose we can see that Yelm (in this version) did not consent to be stabbed — what then? Is stabbing Yelm good, bad, right, or wrong? Seeing it happen doesn’t tell me, does it? And whose morality is being expressed: mine; Orlanth’s; Yelm’s; that of the person who said “sit here, watch from this angle”?

In that particular example, Orlanth, as a force of change, challenged the Evil Emperor, who represented stifling stasis, and killed him, thus rebelling against him and overthrowing him.

Yelm cultists see this as foul murder that broke the Divine Harmony of the Golden Age. Orlanth cultists see it as a valid act of rebellion.

Which is right? They both are, when looked at through the lens of each side. A completely impartial observer might say that Orlanth murdered Yelm using the new power of Death and thus broke the world, so that is bad. The Orlanthi might say that not killing the Emperor might have been worse. Who can say?

In my opinion, absolute moralities don't work in Glorantha.

Simon Phipp - Caldmore Chameleon - Wallowing in my elitism since 1982. Many Systems, One Family. Just a fanboy. 

www.soltakss.com/index.html

Jonstown Compendium author. Find my contributions here

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23 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

So what happens if the CA sees a small child about to be attacked by a large non-Chaotic predator?  I am not a pacifist, and would kill the wolf

Would Sleep work on a wolf ? if so there's the answer saves the child....doesn't kill the wolf.

 

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17 hours ago, Agentorange said:

Would Sleep work on a wolf ? if so there's the answer saves the child....doesn't kill the wolf.

 

Let's assume for the sake of argument that this CA doesn"t know Sleep, or that the POW vs. POW fails.  My point is the morality, not the magic and the die rolls.

 

Edited by Squaredeal Sten
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23 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

...why Gloranthan religions seemed to be such that Gloranthans would:

  • fret about life after death

...

Well, because Otherworld experiences are so ubiquitous in Glorantha, and reverence toward (even worship of) ones ancestors is common.

Most Tribes -- and thus, a key bit of identity -- are based on a founding ancestor.  Many families (a minority, in the major "spotlight" cultures like the Orlanthi & Lunars) actually practice ancestor-worship; enough that I think most citizens know & like (or at least respect) some of the folks who do that.  The Necropolis in Esrolia has annual "day of the Dead" excursions, where Ancestors come back to visit their families.

So, they mostly know of an "afterlife," and know that some Really Bad Stuff (chaos, etc) can destroy someone's afterlife.  Really good & successful folk -- heroes &c -- can win an especially-nice afterlife (feasting in Orlanth's Hall, etc); hostile/evil forces can imprison you in a Hell, instead.

So, concern about life after death seems... normal.
Like, it'd be really, really weird NOT to have the concern.

 

23 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

... why Gloranthan religions seemed to be such that Gloranthans would:

  • take the lead from their gods about who to hit with a big stick and how generally to carry on;
  • model themselves after their gods

...

Again:  it's hard to see anything other than (following their teachings & emulating your god) as doing the right thing (for this use, "right" meaning "what your god teaches").

You've got stuff like the Ban spell priests can use, and Spirits of Reprisal from the deity.  You've got deities that do the Geas thing, including various "we don't call it a geas, but..." matters, such as CA and pacifism, Wind Lords who have to Riddle every Sun Lord and offer Heroic Service to every Earth Priestess, etc etc.

The Rune-spells themselves give strong indication how your deity wants you to behave, e.g. Orlanth Adventurous wants you to go adventuring, etc.

I'm kind of not-seeing how you might not acknowledge that the gods care about the behaviors of their followers.

C'es ne pas un .sig

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12 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

I am obviously misremembering something: what happens to an Orlanthi whose Moon or Chaos rune is awakened in adulthood initiation? I thought that was Hamlet had his chips. If so, surely they don’t hire in strangers to do the deed and witness the clan’s shame.

Vasana the Vingan, one of the RQG pregen adventurers in the core book, begins with Moon as her second elemental rune. The Hero Wars era stuff was quite a bit more extreme on some of these things and I suspect that’s a big part of why they’re not canon. On the other hand, embracing the chaos rune is something different, but at that point I’d suspect it’s a consequence of something beyond the unfortunate initiand simply “choosing evil” or some-such.

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1 hour ago, hipsterinspace said:

Vasana the Vingan, one of the RQG pregen adventurers in the core book, begins with Moon as her second elemental rune.

The Moon Rune is about power and balance. There's no reason at all why an Orlanthi PC cannot have Moon as either first or second elemental Rune. You just have to determine what that means for the character.  It may be that rather than immediately reacting with the Violence is always an Option approach that the character is the calm at the center of the storm and spends time meditating on right actions first. Or it may be that the Moon Rune simply affords the character more POW and allows her to rise quickly through the ranks of initiates to become an Orlanthi priest.  Or the character is simply more open to the "Strange Gods" just like Argrath (as seen in Prince of Sartar during initiation) - the Bat Goddess is one of those strange gods, and may speak of other ways to invoke the Storm (perhaps through shamanism, perhaps through sorcery, or some combination).

Edited by jajagappa
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36 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

The Moon Rune is about power and balance. There's no reason at all why an Orlanthi PC cannot have Moon as either first or second elemental Rune. You just have to determine what that means for the character.  It may be that rather than immediately reacting with the Violence is always an Option approach that the character is the calm at the center of the storm and spends time meditating on right actions first. Or it may be that the Moon Rune simply affords the character more POW and allows her to rise quickly through the ranks of initiates to become an Orlanthi priest.  Or the character is simply more open to the "Strange Gods" just like Argrath (as seen in Prince of Sartar during initiation) - the Bat Goddess is one of those strange gods, and may speak of other ways to invoke the Storm (perhaps through shamanism, perhaps through sorcery, or some combination).

Absolutely, I think it’s a great change. Some of the personality recommendations I’ve seen for Moon rune are introspective, contemplative, or open-minded, which I think are all things that make a lot of sense for a would-be Orlanthi hero.

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17 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

No, real life is very even-handed in this: everybody’s gods are equally real.

A lot of true believers don't believe that.   In an odd way, Glorantha is closer to those comic books which include Greek Gods and Norse Gods and ...

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If it helps you to understand Glorantha as "what if mythology was real", I think that's great. Your character can literally shoot lightning from their fingertips, because that is what's written down in the pages of the rulebook. That's the buy-in and the vehicle for you to enjoy yourself. The perception of there being great differences between ancient Mediterranean "polytheisms" and Gloranthan cults doesn't really hold up, though.

I think the furthest you can push that claim is that Gloranthan cults tend to more strongly feature elements of "mystery religion" than the worldviews and practices of antiquity. But mystery practice was nonetheless pervasive in the Aegean; it might have touched everything in one way or another. It wasn't just Eleusis and Orphics and Mithraeums. It was also Curetes and Dactyls, and the Temple of Saturn, and Gallae, and the rock drawings in Valcamonica. Initiation and other such liminal rites were also nearly universally practiced across the Earth until only up to about the past century or so with no great breaks in the continuity of that practice.

I also haven't seen much fretting about the afterlife in Gloranthan material. They just acknowledge that it's there. Most groups seem to have a cheerier interpretation than the eastern Mediterranean underworld ("life continues on the same, except a bit worse in every way"). But it's also not hard to find great diversity even in that, for example about a thousand kilometers to the south of Hellas, where death was kind of a big deal.

As far as moral authority goes, this is fairly separated from the question of cult. The exception is the tip of the iceberg which is unfortunately grossly over-represented in the history and archaeological insight available to us, being public cult. When the divine is displeased, that displeasure manifests itself to the transgressor. When a polity transgresses against the divine, the polity suffers for it, especially if they had bargained not to do so. But the desires of the divine aren't an absolute measure of right or wrong, and they frequently conflict with human wishes and livelihoods. So this too was ultimately transactional, most of the time. Propitiatory. Covenanted.

19 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

No, real life is very even-handed in this: everybody’s gods are equally real.

Tee-hee! It's a rare miracle these days, but people can learn and acknowledge when their beliefs are wrong. They can change their beliefs to accommodate other encounters and revelations, too. And there's plenty of room for distortion and deception in the divine for either world: for example, how we Anglophones et al continue to talk and think about these things with the vocabulary and latent assumptions of Latin Christianity, even if we believe ourselves divorced from it.

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20 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

Except - it's not true.

Many in the ancient world (and not so ancient world) practice religion like in Glorantha.

The only difference is that in Glorantha, other gods are just as real as yours. IRL, that's not true (mostly).

This thing about magic - believe me when I say that people have believed in miracles (or magic) from various sources for tens of thousands of years. We should look at it like a rather weak god with little Rune Magic.

On the contrary, Gloranthan theistic religion's emphasis on the necessity of psychological similarity between the worshiper and the god is an entirely modern thing. It exists as a development of modern psychology and the adaptations of magical practice to the 19th and 20th centuries. It cannot really be found in the descriptions of religious practice, which are focused primarily on proper action, with proper mindset being implicit to one's status as a different kind of person. It certainly seems beyond belief that ostraca and votive offerings were used in the context of the offerers believing they needed to think like the god.

Contemporary pagans and occultists often seem to feel the need to retroject their practices as continuous and antique, just like traditional religion's practitioners did. But to confuse :20-power-illusion: for :20-power-truth: would be a mistake. 

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Though a Lunar through and through, she is also a human being.

"I just read an article in The Economist by a guy who was riding around with the Sartar rebels, I mean Taliban," -Greg Stafford, January 7th, 2010

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My last word on this:

  1. I am awed by the majesty of the storm
    — I am a romantic;
  2. I achieve oneness with the storm
    — I am a mystic;
  3. I draw power from the storm
    — I am a magician (or a miller);
  4. I pray to the storm not to demolish my house
    — I am a propitiatory worshipper;
  5. I fetch some dynamite to “help” the storm demolish my neighbour’s house
    — because it told me to
    — I am a nutter.

If opposing forces are held in balance for the good of the world, when does a wise person pick one of those opposing forces and attempt to help it to victory?

A better harvest tomorrow. Apocalypse a week next Tuesday.

Edited by mfbrandi
trimmed option 5

NOTORIOUS VØID CULTIST

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23 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

I don't see any of the media -  Print, film.  video. Voice, or pantomime -  as having a built in version of morality.  Print can carry any moral  message you want, from Hitler"s to Gandhi's.  Yes I have heard " the medium is the message" but at best that is hyperbole.  At worst, it is confusing framing.  

 

Then I don't understand what you mean by the word 'morality'. You can write the sentence 'i don't have a morality, i just do the right thing'. But you would find it difficult to draw two cartoons, one in which one person was following their morality, and another in which they were doing what they thought was the right thing.

Back in the 70's, Normal Spinrad wrote a book[1] which was framed as written by an alternative history Hitler who emigrated to the USA and became a pulp sci-fi writer. In the book-within-a-book, Hitler's plans for WWII are presented as a sci-fi narrative, with evil Dominators serving as the literal puppet-masters of naiive Universalists. Luckily the heroic Argrath[2] has the will to do what, after the fact, everyone acknowledges was the right thing to do...

That's the same physical book, containing two diametrically opposed morals (Hitler was good in the inner book, and evil in the outer). It seems to me that it would be difficult to pull that trick off in a film; either you show the dominators as being literally evil mindsuckers, or an unfairly persecuted minority. if you managed it, it would be by tricks of perspective specific to the film media. These wouldn't apply to a hypothetical future media that was a 3D 360 perspective covering all senses, including pain. With interactive responses, driven by a chatbot, when you talked to the characters.

And it is the latter which mainstream theistic Gloranthans:

1. experience when they visit the other side.

2. have their local experts hold to be 'real'. At the very least at the level of documentary footage, not fiction. But also commonly as the true or higher plane of existence, of which the mundane world is a mere shadow.

3. has been proven and adapted, over several thousand years of history, to be effective guidance in leading a happy life while not getting your land sunk under the waves.

4 gets you superpowers.

 

Note that, for  sorcerors and mostali, neither is true. They hold that the visual stimuli theistic initiates experience while interacting with runic power nodes are purely hallucinations, containing no information the participant didn't already know. Some mostali[3], would perhaps reluctantly admit that using the human visual cortex in that way, rather than relying on logical reasoning alone, is surprisingly effective.

And then illuminates are those who can do #1, and so get #4,  while believing #2. The trick is to not treat the mundane world as equivalently illusory and consequence-free, and so ending up running afoul of #3.

 

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Dream

[2] translated as 'Feric Jaggar'. I suspect you can track the linguistic mutations from Sartarite to German.

[3] those who are full-on cyberpunk rather than merely steampunk

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1 hour ago, radmonger said:

Note that, for  sorcerors and mostali, neither is true. They hold that the visual stimuli theistic initiates experience while interacting with runic power nodes are purely hallucinations, containing no information the participant didn't already know. Some mostali[3], would perhaps reluctantly admit that using the human visual cortex in that way, rather than relying on logical reasoning alone, is surprisingly effective.

I mean, those sorcerous perspectives still recognize the gods as in some sense real, they just don’t recognize them as being worthy of worship. They’re fully willing to accept that theistic worshippers are seeing some portion of a truth, at least truth as they experience and draw on it, but that’s qualified by the fact that it’s only a part of a greater entity within a much, much bigger story (hence the monomyth). There’s a reason the God Learners could (and did) tap myths and otherwise twist and alter them to gain incredible power, and why the gods themselves broke the compromise to doom them.

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