(ii) The Three of Ys are male, female and elemental.
(iii) The Time Patrol must prevent a counter-historical feminine monotheism in Northern Europe.
(iv) A Montivalan household of mixed religious loyalties but with a Catholic majority has a discrete shrine to Athena in an upper room.
(v) At the Buddhist monastery, someone was going to spend time in the Kuan Yin chapel. (I think that the word "chapel" was used.)
Some of us participate in rituals focused on such figures while understanding them as mythological and metaphorical, not literal. See Myth.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, many Catholic churches have chapels dedicated to the BVM or one of the other saints. And CATHEDRALS might well have several such chapels.
I thought most Ysans in Anderson's THE KING OF YS were "hard polytheists," believing their three chief gods Taranis, Belisama, and Lir to be LITERAL beings. Not merely symbolic "principles."
And I recall how Tiphaine d'Ath, once a hardened atheist, was so badly shaken by her encounters with the sinister Powers acting thru the CUT, that she was no longer sure God or gods were not real. So, ever so reluctantly, she came to believe in Athena.
At first I was confused by the distinction made by Stirling about "hard" or "soft" polytheists. That the former literally believed in their "gods" as real beings while the latter only thought of them as myths or ideas or some vaguely defined "principles."
Sean
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