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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 482495" data-attributes="member: 7240">This revisionist treatment of Norse mythology is just the sort of thing I was talking about in the violence done to European polytheism by analytic logic. We all know that Loki leads the giants across the rainbow bridge to slay the gods, unchain Fenris the Wolf and destroy the cosmos. But here's another story about Loki: Once, he, Thor and Odin traveled to another world to the court of another Loki, Utgaard-Loki where Loki fought against Utgaard-Loki on the side of Odin and Thor. Utgaard-Loki is generally, in the story, considered to also be Loki. It's like those episodes of the Superfriends when one of the superheroes, let's say Aquaman for the sake of argument, has been abducted and you see all of the other heroes discussing how to rescue Aquaman, including Aquaman himself. The difference is that in many types of polytheism, this kind of thinking is not an error or oversight, it's part of a fundamentally different worldview. In the campaign world I am running now, I created a perfectly consistent mythology and history and then had to go back and paint in the "inconsistencies" so that the apparent inconsistency actually pointed to a more profound truth about the subject. Here, I have to say, the philosophy of the Runequest mythic world is fundamentally superior to D&D; Runequest's treatment of religion incorporates the "inconsistencies" that enrich pagan myth as well as understanding the importance of religion as the backbone of social organization.</blockquote>

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