A Sound of Sheer Silence

I'm going to cross my streams a bit here, incorporating some stuff from my other blog that reviews and discusses tabletop role playing games , my hobbyist passion.  More specifically, I want to talk about Glorantha, one of the most interesting and compelling fantasy worlds that I have encountered.  Glorantha was the creation of Greg Stafford (1948-2018), though Stafford preferred to say that he "discovered" Glorantha.  The best way to get a handle on Glorantha is to compare it with Tolkien's Middle Earth.  Tolkien's world is marked by the fact that Tolkien was a linguistics scholar, a product of upper-class English education, and a devout Roman Catholic.  By contrast, Stafford's world is marked by the fact that he was a mythology scholar, a product of the 1960s and 1970s Bay Area American counter-culture, and a practitioner of various Native American religious practices (he died while in a sweat lodge, to put perhaps too fine a point on it).  Glorantha is a...

μόνος, or "monos," means "single" or "only."  θεός, or "theos," means god, originally in the sense of entities like Zeus or Athena.  Together, it is pretty straight-forward--monotheism is a assertion that there is "a single god."  Fair enough. But, within this framework, there are actually a number of permutations.  Rather than spell them all out in the beginning, I'll cut to the case--I believe in and interpret monotheism in the maximum possible way.  I believe there is one and only one divine, transcendent principle, period.  And that singular divine principle, as Aquinas would say, "everyone calls God."  Now, I understand that singular divine principle to be compatible with the assertion that the Son of God came to earth and lived among us, but for the purposes of this reflection that thorny issue is not really relevant, so let's set it to the side. So, only one divine, transcendent principle.  This means, by defini...