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Date        : 2008/11/16 16:01
User        : lalomartins
Edit Summary: Anthropology of Bigworld religions

@@ -192,4 +192,45 @@
  
  Finished is the story :)
  
  [from a story in IRC, dated 11/02/2008, 18:30 -0500 UTC]
+ 
+ =====Anthropology of Bigworld religions=====
+ Saving a discussion from IRC, 2008-11-17
+   * gros left the room (quit: Read error: 104 (Connection reset by peer)).
+   * lalo: I should rename one of my unfinished gods to “peer”
+   * Ryo_: I would suggest, though, adding lore to existing gods before adding new gods, maybe :)
+   * lalo: nah
+   * lalo: the reason I started the whole “new gods” thing years ago was that the pantheon feels awfully... incomplete to me
+   * lalo: I figured if that was fixed, then it would be less awkward to add lore
+   * lalo: I tried my hand at some religious lore too, at about the same time or a little later, but it didn't feel right... gros hated it :-P
+   * Ryo_: :p
+   * lalo: as I see it, Gaea, Devourers, Ruggilli, Sorig, Ixalovh and Valkyrie are from the old human pantheon.  Gorokh and Valriel may also be originally worshipped by humans but from a different region.  The others came from contact with the respective races and got incorporated into the “modern” pantheon by sincretism, although I still believe nobody in the game-world sees Gorokh and Valriel as existing in the same pantheon as the others
+   * Rednaxela: Well, in some ways in the game-world, I think that Ruggilli/Ixalovh are in their own class just like Gorokh/Valriel, and similarly Gaea/Devourers are a bit set on their own. One could almost call Mostrai/Lythander/Gnarg a group of it's own as well as they're aligned to relatively specific races.
+   * gros [n=lauwenma at unaffiliated/gros] entered the room.
+   * lalo: Mostrai/Lythander/Gnarg are definitely different
+   * lalo: Rugilli/Ixalovh and Gaea/Devourers I can see as the kind of “different” you would still find inside a pantheon
+   * lalo: Gaea/Devourers are “special” more or less to the same extent that Poseidon and Hades were, or, say, Hel
+   * gros: From what I have heard:
+   * gros: Valriel was the Goddess of Justice in Khelens. It later incorporated elements of various pre-existing bigworld angelic cults.
+   * lalo: oh, that's a story I could stand by
+   * gros: Gorokh is probably an old deity dating from the ancient Haemdel civilization; incorporated in the imperial pantheon as a nemesis of Valriel, later associated with demonic cults of Bigworld, and mostly a synthesis of evilness in most of its forms.
+   * gros: Ruggilli, Sorig, Ixalovh are all coming from primitive elementalistic cults of the forces of nature. Probably druidic-like, maybe from the tribes that inhabited the Southern Khelens. Incorporated in the Pantheon as a cheap mean of ensuring population control, since they are not really "good" or "bad", but may be both, depending on their action.
+   * lalo: something, I'm not sure what but probably the fanatic guy mini-quest (used to be in scorn, I believe moved recently with much of mikee's stuff) got me the idea that many Valriel-ists believe Valriel to be the only true god
+   * gros: Mostrai/Lythander/Gnarg are obviously racial personifications of some of the major races. It is quite probable that those races have had larger pantheons as well, but the humans only borrowed the most widespread/known ones.
+   * lalo: or maybe Lythander is really plural in Elven language much like Devourers and the elves just don't bother to tell the lowly humans they're getting it all wrong :-P
+   * gros: Mostrai probably came from Dwarves of Fargo, though this is questionable; Gnarg takes his roots from the shamanic practices of the goblin tribes of Bigworld. Lythander seems to be a late synchretism of various primitive nature-related spirits worshipped by bigworld elves before the arrival of humans.
+   * ***Rednaxela thinks this should perhaps be recorded in the wiki articles on the gods or somewhere? :)
+   * gros: Gaia and Devourers are more difficult to trace. Gaia seems to be the result of a syncretism between imperial divinities of nature and fertility, the Mother of All of the Fendrakhis, and various Bigworld nature spirits. Its cult is widespread, yet subject to a lot of regional variants, so it is unclear where it exactly came from; the lack of a "center of faith" for Gaians is telling about a pluricultural origin.
+   * gros: Devourers are not well known. It reminds the old Songor beliefs of the ghosts haunting the fringes of our world, hiding in shadows, and making things and people become old.
+   * gros: This is consistent with the dwarven belief in "Red-Iron-Makers": spirits gnawing the life of iron and other metals, oxyding them.
+   * lalo: I have images of Devourers being a secret, fringe cult in Khelens
+   * gros: That's why a lot of dwarves carry gold with them - gold is the only effective defense against the Red-Iron Makers.
+   * gros: Devourers would also come from forbidden cults with mysteries in imperial Khelens:
+   * lalo: I also kind of imagine the modern Devourers cult is a re-creation, old but not as old as going back to Khelens
+   * gros: those required long initiation, secret rituals of passage, and involved sacrifices. They probably again relate to more ancient cults that saw nature as a savage, dangerous thing that's always asking for blood.
+   * lalo: maybe the old cult was finally extinguished, but some time later some kids found reference to it, and unable to figure out how it worked or the name of the individual gods/spirits/whatever the old cult worshipped, they started calling themselves “worshippers of the Devourers”
+   * gros: The current Devourers cult is probably a syncretism between the old imperial cult, the local primitive views on the "cycle of death", and the fears and mysticism that surrounded Scorn during the early dragons wars.
+   * gros: Ragnor, sorry for the lateness of rely - that's definitely nice.
+   * gros: Traces of the older or less known cults can be found in various blessed weapons names, like Ilrya.
+   * lalo: there's the weird detail that followers of Devourers are actually undead themselves... maybe the current cult was started by undead as either a ploy to get followers, or a legitimate cultural rejection of the gods of the “living”
+   * gros: My theory is that they consider death as part of the natural cycle of existence, and accept it so much that they become undead, in a way.


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