Banestorm

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Or is there something in particular about Norse and Slavic native beliefs that you think makes adherents of such traditions especially vulnerable to conversion?

Sadly, yes.

Indo-European religions (which includes Keltic paganism) and Abrahamic religions are both memes, but the Abrahamic memes (Judiam less so than the two main ones) causes irritation of the mucuous membranes, making the carriers cough and sneeze on their surroundings, whereas Indo-European religious memes never evolved this highly useful ability.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Sadly, yes.

Indo-European religions (which includes Keltic paganism) and Abrahamic religions are both memes, but the Abrahamic memes (Judiam less so than the two main ones) causes irritation of the mucuous membranes, making the carriers cough and sneeze on their surroundings, whereas Indo-European religious memes never evolved this highly useful ability.

Funny image!

I take it you are strongly interested in native Indo-European religions.

Does this interest extend beyond Europe to include Zoroastrian beliefs?


Do you use Zoroastrians in Arth?

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

'This Christ, he was so tough, that after hanging on the cross for three days, being stabbed with a spear and then buried behind a rock in a cave, he put the rock to the side and got away. And thus Odin took him to Valhalla - alive! And did I mention that he conquered Rome with an army of twelve?'

That's pretty damn close to how the missionaries try to "sell" Christianity to the Norse, in my Ärth setting. And, not incidentally, fairly close to how they sold it to them in our timeline.

As a historical phenomenon, it was called Germanic Christianity, and was about getting testestorone-poisoned macho northeners to "buy" into what is essentially a torture victim - someone who surrenders to his arrestors, knowing that he'll be subjected to hours of extremely painful and humiliating torture. A decidedly lily-livered individual, as far as they are concerned, not worthy of any worship (nor of sacrifice, or even respect). So you tweak the tale a little, and "sell" him as a macho badass, for the first few generations.

It even matches historical depictions. Jesus-on-the-cross was not a popular artistic motif in the 10th century (I've been told here, reliably, that Jesus-on-his-throne was preferred), but when he was portrayed that way, crucified, in the north, he was portrayed as being in charge like a boss, and grinning because everything was going exactly as he wanted it.

I've long wanted to write a short story, "The Triumph of the White Christ", essentially the same as your sample above (minus the reference to Valhal, but possibly having Jesus pluck Odin's eye out because it offended him somehow), just a lot longer, but I don't yet know enough about Christian mythology, so if I tried doing it now, I'd have to make a lot of stuff up, which would make the short story a very weak didactic tool for my Ärth setting. The trick is to tweak as little as possible.

[combatmedic]

Read the Dream of the Rood.



But of course Christ is very much a willing sacrifice, Man and God who suffers torment and death for the sake of others. That's always been part of the story. He could have prevented his own death quite easily.
Edit- I see that the article you linked mentions the Dream of the Rood.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Funny image!

It may offend a few, but that's actually how religions work.

The various pagan religions of the North (Hinduism is Indo-European too, but I don't know a lot about it, and it seems to deviate from the pattern in some ways) evolved in isolation, in a climate devoid of memetic competition. This means that historical pagans were never indoctrinated to resist strange and foreign ideas. That's not to say that they were open-minded, just that they didn't cultivate a culture of close-mindedness.

Also, pagan customs each evolved on their own, seperately, with the pagans seeing little or often no connections between them. So a pagan does things A, B, C and D, and does not do things E and F, but if you try, you can interfere with him doing C, talk him into stopping doing it, witout this touching at all upon items A, B, D, E and F.

Finally, pagans, did not initially need to explicitly self-identify as being pagan. They just implicitly, tacitly, identified as being members of the community and following the age-old traditions of the community.

Christianity and Islam (Judaism less so - but only somewhat less so) evolved in a milieu of intense memetic competition, with temples and organizations and preachers each trying to "sell" their own memes. Christianity (and Islam too) also split into sects with differing beliefs.

Notice how the Christian creed (I heard it a lot when going through confirmation class, even though I never intended to take confirmation. I think it's called the Nicene Creed, essentially the same used by Danish Protestants in the 1990s as when it was formulated about 1500 years earlier) defines the belief with painstaking exactness? It's detailed to a degree that seems absurd to an atheist like me.

But the reason is that originally, creeds were used so that Christians of the same sect could recognize each other, and so that they could detect differences in beliefs and thus know whom not to associate with (e.g. so that Donatists could shun Arians, Catholics, Monophysites or Gnostics) .

Also, Christians and Moslems, and also the Jews (who may have gotten the idea of monotheism from that famous Egyptian pharao, Ahkenaten - or possibly from somewhere else, I forgot where, if it wasn't the Persians), had to cultivate a culture of closed-mindedness so that they would be resistant to foreign (heretical!) ideas. Because (and I'm inclined to ascribe too little importance to this, because I tend to care more about values-influenced behaviour than about what's inside someone's head) the salvation of their souls were at stake! If you do not believe correctly, exactly, you'll end up in Hell!

Finally, Abrahamics identify as or with their religion. What are you? I'm an X! That was necessary because not everone you met were a fellow X. Even in the town you lived in. Maybe even (although not so often) in the village you lived in.

It wasn't necessary for pagans, early on, because the only time they met someone who were not their kind (different kind of pagan, or non-pagan) it was during trading, or raiding, or outright warfare.

Originally Posted by combatmedic

I take it you are strongly interested in native Indo-European religions.

Does this interest extend beyond Europe to include Zoroastrian beliefs?


Do you use Zoroastrians in Arth?

I am quite interested in Zoroastrianism (courtesy at least in part of Phil Masters, author of "GURPS Arabian Nights"), and it will play some role in Ärth, but I don't know how large a one.

The Moslems recognize (again: "GURPS Arabian Nights") followers of other scriptural religions as being worthy of some rights and some degree of respect, but are divided in how broadly this applies.

They all agree that non-scripturals like the pagan Kelts, Norse and Slavs, are infidels, but the more narrow interpretation, and most common, is that it's only fellow Abrahamic religions like Judaism and Christianity (including most if not all Christian heresies, which is why many heretics prefer living under Islamic rule as the lesser of two evils) but also very obscure ones like Mandeism (who have John the Baptist as their primary prophet).

The question is what to do with non-Abrahamic religons that are still scripture-based, and the Zoroastrians is one such example (Buddhism is another, but I don't think Buddhism is very widespread in Ärth. It's certainly very, very illegal in China because of their Lich Emperor - yes, that one). I can well see Zoroastrianism surviving in Persia, as a mostly-underground movement symbolizing resistance against or at least silent rejection of their Arab conquerors and overlords.

On the other hand, the Arab Caliphate is the one of three that is most tolerant, so most likely to function according to the broad version of the "Ahl al-Kitab" principle. So it's probably a case of some practicing openly, some doing so covertly.

Magic isn't illegal in the Arabic (or Hispanic) Caliphate either, so the Zoroastrian magi will be able to use their magic within the bounds of the law (no murder or fraud, and so forth). I just don't yet know what shape their magic system will take. There's learnable spell magic, in principle similar to the system from GURPS Magic (just without all the bugs), which is secular, and then religious magic mostly comes in the form of inborn divine blessings (usually manifesting at or shortly after puberty), some for Kelts/Druids, some for Abrahamics, and at least Rune-Carving (although that's fairly secular) for the Norse (and to a lesser extent Kelts, and others), and Royal Powers as a sort of mixture of Indo-European paganism and Christianity (with Arthur Pendragon and Olav Tryggvesson as examples - possibly Boudica too).

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

But of course Christ is very much a willing sacrifice, Man and God who suffers torment and death for the sake of others. That's always been part of the story. He could have prevented his own death quite easily.
Edit- I see that the article you linked mentions the Dream of the Rood.

The buggy part, from a historical pagan point of view, is that that kind of altruistic sacrifice makes no sense.

Odin sacrificed his eye, and did the spear thing, for direct personal gain. That makes sense (in GURPS terms, he inflicted one disad on himself, and took some penalized HT rolls at the risk of dying or becoming permanently crippled, in exchange for some nifty stuff straight out of GURPS Powers).

A chieftain or King may sacrifice himself in order to save his clan or his people from Chaos (even though that's non-trivial to simulate with game mechanics). That makes sense too.

But the idea that all people everywhere constitutes one single tribe, and that one person can be so extremely altruistically caring (dont' talk about love - the French troubadours haven't invented love yet!) that he gives his life for them, and not even in a relatively swift and painless human sacrifice, but in extremely painful and humiliating torture, is very, very, very, very odd.

The gain itself also seems highly speculative. At least with regular human sacrifices, you see that they work. You kill a dude (or a chick), swiftly (or less so, if you're a Kelt with a penchant for large Wicker Men) and according to custom, and then the harvest comes in okay. At least kinda okay. It would definitely have been worse if we hadn't snuffed him (or her)... Probably. Why take the risk of not doing it, after three bad years in a row?

But this Original Sin thing, it's abstract and speculative. The Norse did buy it, in the end, but it was a hard sell.

[combatmedic]

Sounds cool.

You've obviously given quite a bit of thought to this aspect of world-building (the role of religion, and how magic reflects and interacts with religious beliefs)

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

The buggy part, from a historical pagan point of view, is that that kind of altruistic sacrifice makes no sense.

Odin sacrificed his eye, and did the spear thing, for direct personal gain. That makes sense (in GURPS terms, he inflicted one disad on himself, and took some penalized HT rolls at the risk of dying or becoming permanently crippled, in exchange for some nifty stuff straight out of GURPS Powers).

A chieftain or King may sacrifice himself in order to save his clan or his people from Chaos (even though that's non-trivial to simulate with game mechanics). That makes sense too.

But the idea that all people everywhere constitutes one single tribe, and that one person can be so extremely altruistically caring (dont' talk about love - the French troubadours haven't invented love yet!) that he gives his life for them, and not even in a relatively swift and painless human sacrifice, but in extremely painful and humiliating torture, is very, very, very, very odd.

The gain itself also seems highly speculative. At least with regular human sacrifices, you see that they work. You kill a dude (or a chick), swiftly (or less so, if you're a Kelt with a penchant for large Wicker Men) and according to custom, and then the harvest comes in okay. At least kinda okay. It would definitely have been worse if we hadn't snuffed him (or her)... Probably. Why take the risk of not doing it, after three bad years in a row?

But this Original Sin thing, it's abstract and speculative. The Norse did buy it, in the end, but it was a hard sell.

Anglophonic quibble-


Comte hadn't invented altruism yet.The word is quite a recent invention. He made it up himself.

I think you are confusing Medieval French/Provencal notions of romantic and courtly amour with the Christian idea of 'love.'

[Jovus]

It's worth pointing out, before we get too far into claiming what historical truth is, that memetics isn't a science. It's an idea by analogy, which makes it attractive, but it doesn't have and has never claimed the proper ontological grounding to make claims about truth.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Anglophonic quibble-


Comte hadn't invented altruism yet.The word is quite a recent invention. He made it up himself.

I think you are confusing Medieval French/Provencal notions of romantic and courtly amour with the Christian idea of 'love.'

In a way I am confusing those two notions, yes. Altruism clearly existed as a phenomenon, before Comte invented the word, but I remain somewhat sceptical that people talked endlessly about love before the troubadours invented it as a concept (there's much to like about the "Rome" mini-series, but I wish they hadn't used the L-word).

I also think that my "love doesn't exist"-stance forces players to think, to think harder and deeper about what their characters actually want. By banning the word "love", they become forced to use synonyms, most (all?) of which carry various connonations, making it possibly more specific. Is your character infatuated with this NPC? If he is, cool! That's something we can work with. Did the young gay clerk develop a crush on you, but you're straight? Cool, that's a conflict with some potential humour in it, depending on how your character reacts.

Ruling out romantic love turns out, once you examine it, not to rule all that much at all. Except a lot of sappy and vague talk. Want to boink, want to own, want to be with, all that is more specific. Making the campaign and the world richer.

The ancient Greeks (Aristotle? Wikipedia has an article on it, I think, or else TvTropes does) identified four different kinds of love. They were also quite specific, in the case of pederastic reliationships, about one being the lover and the other being the loved.

I just think that forcing players to think harder about what their characters want, is gainful in the long term.

(Love will almost certainly have reached Yrth, by the way, well before 2012 AD. I believe its memetic success was due to inherent infectiousness, rather than random chance.)