PhilHibbs said:
I've been thinking about the God Learners and their manipulation of cults. What happens when the God Learners are kicked out, as happened in Fonrit? Are their influences on the indigenous religions being purged, or have they taken hold? It's easy to jump to the conclusion that, say, Ompalam cultists will want to expunge sorcerous influence and go back to the ancient divine mode of worship, but on the other hand you don't see many Christians keen on expunging the Roman influence on Christianity and going back to the Saturday Sabbath that Jesus observed.
It depends on what they did.
Much of the God Learners' work seems to have been the systematic cataloguing and linking of myths. Since they looked at multiple cults, they discovered mythic connections between cults that the cults had forgotten. These myths could well have remained, because they are useful to the cults and fit in with the remembered and provable myths. Other myths were imposed on cults by the God Learners to make the cults fit into certain templates and make them behave in certain ways, these myths could well have been abandoned by the cults. But, once a myth has been created it is always available to use, so it is always possible to rediscover a forgotten God learner myth.
Those cults that had been enslaved by the God Learners and threw off the shackles would have more reason to abandon God Learner practices. Malkioni sects have far more reason to do this that divine cults, in my opinion. They would go back to their old Scriptures and would abandon most of the Abiding Book imposed on them by the God Learners.
PhilHibbs said:
On a slightly wider point, am I right in concluding that the God Learners have had their best successes with divine religions, are working on draconic mysticism in Kralorela, but haven't made many inroads into shamanic practices yet?
I think their best successes were in uniting the Malkioni sects into one religion. It ultimately failed and those sects bounced back to possibly harsher and more orthodox versions of themselves.
The Path of Immanent Mastery seems to have been a God Learner success. They proved that they had an easy way of becoming dragons without having to do all that mystical mumbo jumbo. To a certain extent, the approach worked as it survived the God Learners and was accepted by the Kralori, who could easily have driven the cult into the sea or have had a dragon devour it.
They used many divine cults to spread their empire, but I am not sure how much they changed those cults. Issaries, Lhankor Mhy and Eurmal seem to have retained a great deal of the God Learner structure, at least from a RQ-cult point of view. I'm not really sure about other cults.
As for shamanism, I don't really know. They were active in Pamaltela, but we don't know a lot about Pamaltelan shamanism, so can't really say how much it was changed. They don't seem to have affected Praxian shamanism, although their allies were the True Horse People of Prax, their shamanist practices might have changed but they died out.
