Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2120513" data-attributes="member: 7240">I do that all the time too. Congruencies between different systems are easy to see. My whole faerie campaign is a world mythology thing where the Japanese Tengu are in the same category as Shakespeare's Titania and Oberon. So it's not that I don't see these points of correlation regularly myself and sometimes incorporate them into games.However, when I translate things into gaming terms, the there is a price to pay for imposing a transcultural meta-structure on these phenomena. The result of doing an RPG Golden Bough is that one is inevitably forced to present magic (and possibly other parts of physics) as working differently from the way the culture in which they are situated understands them to work. This dissonance then directs the play towards discovering the true nature of the world. If that's not the project I want the campaign narrative to centre on, it can become distracting.I doubt that. Most hagiographies I've read were written before 900. Certainly, the ultimate laundry list style is Gregory of Tours and he's about as early and southern as one can get without resorting to the earliest hagiographies of Late Antiquity like Antony and Martin.I guess. Thinking that way is not really a big deal to me; that's one of the main ways I normally perceive the world. I think the ease with which I see things that way is part of what orients me to finding the ways that underneath superficial and generic similarity, there is often real and irreconcilable difference. Thinking like a 17th century Jesuit is not all that hard really but if one thinks like that all the time, one's games always end up being commentaries on the familiar rather than escape into the alien.OK -- you want a two-paradigm approach for the Western versus the Eastern hero? Both heroes are responses to the clientage/patronage paradigm. But they theorize opposite ways out.Eastern heroes transcend clientage through self-sufficiency. Western heroes overcome clientage by trumping their patron. One can generalize this through essentially the whole Western canon -- Agamemnon is Achilles' patron but this relationship is trumped by Achilles' divine parentage. Medieval holy men were situated within a pyramidal hierarchy; the moments where they were special were those in which they appealed directly to God and trumped the hierarchy. In the East, the ultimate expression of heroism is to be so self-sufficient as to make the patronage system in which you are situated irrelevant. If the capacity to expel demons inhered in Antony, he would be a perfect Eastern holy man; but because it is situated outside himself, he is a Western holy man.This is one of the reasons Sufism is interesting to study: Gnosticism has hybridized with enough Eastern thought that that Sufi stages of awareness progress from "There is no God save Allah" to "There is no God save He" to "There is no God save I." Gnosticism is used here as a transition from trumping to transcending.The Western Faust is ultimately someone who violates the patronage system in an unacceptable rather than virtuous way -- he extracts power from patrons through threats or manipulation rather than suplication -- the definition of demonic magic. Now, how does this come back to the Knight? Well, it foregrounds the fact that the exceptional qualities of the knight must necessarily be those that make him attractive to his ultimate true patron. Now, one can see why the D&D cleric cohabits so much more comfortably with polytheism. Or why the grail knight has to be modeled through the paladin rather than the fighter -- one could argue, in fact, that the fighter class is a generically unobtrusive embodiment of the Oriential heroic ideal of self-sufficiency (but really he's more an embodiment of post-enlightenment Western ideas thereof). So that's why I cannot answer your question. The qualities that make a knight a knight are not the qualities that make him a good fighter. A knight is a good fighter but it is his humility and righteousness that make God enhance his latent fighting capacities.I really can't follow you here. Not in that I don't know what you're saying but in that I don't pay attention to the things you're asking me to look at. It would be sort of like moving into a discussion of hockey at this point; sure, I've lived in Canada all my life but hocked is surrounded by an SEP field.It's not defined by Christ -- it just so happens that this key point where John and <s>Paul</s> Mark contradict eachother, the gospels express a tension that appears to have been in effect throughout the Western tradition.The only point I was trying to express here was that hypostasis is at the core of a lot of what is going on in the West. The Western body cannot approach perfection without an exogenous factor. The Eastern body can mainly be understood as approaching perfection due to endogeonous factors. But, as Burke observes, we are all, Western and Eastern alike, "rotten with perfection."You can't. That's why I get so cranky. One must convert the monk into either a humility-powered creature or into a Faustian one. I think the humility-powered monk is one that would be easier to do because humility is also an Eastern value and is also a requirement for transcending clientage. But once he becomes a humility-powered creature, the question then arises: why is his share of divinity circumscribed by the precise physical bounds of his body? And there's no answer to that question within the pre-modern Western tradition. If one wants to factor divinity out of election, there's plenty of post-enlightenment stuff out there but, of course, that's what I'm trying to get away from in D&D -- costumed modernity.Anyway, a most interesting discussion so far.</blockquote>

Verification