[UA] Edible clay?

[Nick Wedig]

>Today I had to track down two kilos of edible clay. From Romania.

Play-Dough is edible, or at least non-toxic, IIRC.  But that's probably not what's involved here.

>But come on. It's EDIBLE CLAY. Dirt sent solely for the purpose of
>ingestion.

Solely? Not intended for molding into things?

>Two questions:
>
>1 - What's the real deal with this sort of thing? Religious ritual, quack
>healing, wierd fetish or not? What real-world rituals and myths are based on
>eating clay and dirt?

Well, there's Adam being made from Clay, and the golem as well.  But not really eating them (though there's that stuff witht he golem eating a paper with mystic writing).  I recall a middle eastern myth (Babylonian?  Sumerian?  I forget) where the hero creates sheep from clay, brings them to life by feeding them stuff, and that's where sheep came from (which they then went on to eat).

>2 - What use could you find for such a thing in a UA campaign?

I've always seen mechanomancy as an extension of the Jewish golem myths, which are a mirror of god's creation of Adam from clay.  Not sure that helps any.

(There's also a story about Albertus Magnus building a working robot, which was destroyed by St. Thomas Aquinas, Magnus's student, because Aquinas thought the creation of life was God's role, not man's).

Mr. Teapot
lost his philosopher's stone

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