Quite some time ago, on a different Traveller-related mailing list (the
now-defunct Traveller-Culture, I believe), a discussion of the Vilani
and gnosis managed to get started. I found this posting in my
"bhq/further thoughts" folder, not associated with the list in question.
It occurs to me that this might provoke some discussion, so... have at.

Summary: The Vilani development of a form of gnosis would lead to an
acceptance of some forms of psi.

Explication: If I have understood the previous discussions on gnosis
properly, it can be viewed as being a concern with the dichotomy between
'world' and 'self'.  On Terra, where the environment and the physical
body are compatible, the 'self' portion of the dichotomy became
concerned with specifically the spiritual aspects of 'self', largely
relegating the physical aspects of 'self' to being included with
'world'.

On Vland, this dichotomy would have developed differently. The
environment being more clearly incompatible, the dichotomy between
'self' and 'world' would reasonably have included the physical aspects
of 'self' alongside the spiritual.  In essence, the physical 'self'
represents a manifestation of the spiritual 'self', rather than
representing a part of 'world' that 'self' uses as a vessel for a time.

This leads to two possible views of death - in the first view, the death
of the physical self represents the end of all manifestation of 'self';
the physical 'self' and the spiritual 'self' are inextricably linked,
and the state of the physical 'self' always is an accurate manifestation
of the state of the spiritual 'self'.  This leads to a culture which
would mourn death, and which might very well lead to the technologies of
mummification and memorialization, as with, for example, the Nile valley
culture.

In the other view, the death of the physical 'self' represents a new
manifestation of the spiritual 'self', one which no longer feels a need
to manifest physically, and is hence 'more developed' and more
unrestricted. This leads to a culture which would celebrate a death
rather than mourn it, and which would likely lead to a dynamic culture
willing to push the limits of knowledge, in a quest to develop beyond
the need for a physical manifestation.

Although my gut feeling says that what follows is more likely with the
second culture than with the first culture, it would be possible under
both cultures that development of psi powers - specifically those
dealing with _self_ (the Awareness group, the Clairvoyance group and
teleportation-self) - would be viewed as spiritually favorable,
representing a different level of control over the spiritual 'self' and
therefore its manifestation of the physical 'self' than most people
have.  Other social/religious phenomena that might be expected to
develop would include those that show tolerance for extremes of
conditions or strong control over the physical self - firewalking,
living burial, and so on - many of the things that we normally associate
with Indian fakirs or other forms of mysticism from that part of the
world, whether we believe that they actually happen or not.  The modern
intolerance of psi is a result of the psychohistorical experiment that
culminated in the psionics suppressions, and of the association in
dominant Solomani traditions of psi manifestations with 'devil worship',
'sorcery', or 'witchcraft'.

As a side thought, this could also lead to two different words used to
refer to groups of people that the Solomani occupiers might not realize
are significantly different in their meaning, because of the way they
associate certain sounds with certain meanings - thus, we might have
'bilanidin', an inhabitant of Vland, generically, and 'bilanii',
grammatically and semantically a caste (having religious status,
possibly as priests, gurus, holy men, etc.), those of Vland who have
achieved a certain level of control over their self-manifestations -
what we would call psis.

Comments/discussion?  Can anyone flesh this out better?  Should they?

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