[UA] Jesus Christ, SuperAvatar!

[Allen Smith]

On Dec 6, 12:22am, James Palmer wrote:
> > > Hinduism has rather more gods than three - I mean, technically
> > > everything comes down to Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, but then
> > > they're all part of God/the Absolute/whatever, so it's rather
> > > splitting hairs.
> > 
> > Quite... although sometimes these distinctions can make distinct
> > differences, as in the combats between Arianism, Orthodoxy, and all
> > the other varieties in the early history of Christianity.
> 
> True, but generally the Western Hindus are too sappy to do anything about
> it

Or are actually paying attention to the pacifistic elements in Hinduism...

> and the Indian Hindus prefer to all get together and gang up on the
> Muslims and the Sikhs.  Boy, the BJP are scary.

Quite, although they actually really haven't done that much, even
though they're technically the government in India.

> > > In an 'orthodox' Hindu UA game, then, Entropy would be Shiva, Order
> > > Vishnu, and Brahma the incarnate Godhead.  Or maybe Order is Brahma
> > > and the Comte de Saint Germain is Vishnu
> > 
> > And, as it happens, Avatars of deities (although not in the UA sense - 
> > more a part of that deity being around in a human being, or the deity
> > being expressed through a human being, depending on how you look at
> > it) are part of Hinduism. The Compte as Krishna?
> > 
> 
> I don't think Krishna has Avatars per se, though I may be wrong - he's an
> Avatar of Vishnu himself.  Compte as Vishnu Avatar makes sense, given the
> whole preservation of the world thing.

I wasn't thinking of the Compte as an Avatar of Krishna - I was
thinking of Krishna as a past identity of the Compte.

> Heh.  Scary thought.  Hinduism has a whole descending/ascending worlds
> thing - i.e, the world starts off (well, doesn't start off, because it's
> circular, but you get my meaning) near perfect, then the next world is
> slightly less perfect, and so forth, all the way down to the Kali Yug, the
> worst world, after which things start to get better again.  Now, Hinduism
> generally believes we're already in the Kali Yug (each world lasts
> thousands of years).

Right. IIRC, there's a related religious tradition which believes that 
we're far enough into it that it's perfectly normal for the religious
tradition in question to be declining - the decline of "true" religion 
is part of the decay.

> What if the PC's discovered that we're actually in the best possible
> world, and it's all downhill from here ...

Urr... nasty... although it doesn't quite fit with the
Godhead-determines-the-next-reality UA idea. Possibly there tend to be 
trends, and we are at what would normally be the peak of those trends, 
but the proper Ascentions can turn the trend around? It'd be a basis
for a Cosmic-level game.

> > > 'lila' - creative divine dance/play - would be an interesting
> > > concept to apply to UA cosmology - the idea that the world is a
> > > game between the Clergy.  Could lead into the self-referential
> > > plot from Over the Edge.
> > 
> > Hmm... nice. I like. Shiva Nataraja from Kult could also be
> > brought in here, although that would make it _not_ an _orthodox_
> > Hindu UA game.
> 
> Who he?  Some kind of evil demiurge, I presume, being from Kult.

Evil or not is a rather good question. He's a being who can dance
things into and out of existence, and is said to be the one to dance
the Illusion out of existence (as he did with the Berlin Wall in
Kult)... the problem being that he also may be destroying sections of
True Reality (he doesn't make a real distinction between the two). His 
followers can become able to do Time and Space Magick by dancing. He's 
in Legions of Darkness, BTW.

	-Allen

-- 
Allen Smith				easmith at beatrice.rutgers.edu
	

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