Frequently Asked Questions

The Circle of Steel has a num­ber of applic­a­ble mean­ings to us. In it’s broad­est sense, this is the arc described by the tip of a sword held out-stretched as a man turns in place, the extent with­in which he is the absolute mas­ter of his destiny.

When two men stand togeth­er, the cir­cle is expand­ed as each guards the oth­er’s back, and a space is made between them for that which they val­ue. It is also the ring of shin­ing steel formed when men stand upon the wall, pro­tect­ing and main­tain­ing those who shel­ter with­in their strength and determination.

It is likened to the unyield­ing adamant sym­bol of own­er­ship which adorns the pret­ty neck of a kajira.

It is the name of our com­mu­ni­ty here, tak­en for all those rea­sons and all they imply.

The Circle of Steel Community is com­prised of like-mind­ed Goreans who share the same basic under­stand­ing of what the Gorean phi­los­o­phy is, and have deter­mined to live it in their dai­ly lives, and have cho­sen to stand togeth­er. Free men and women, and their prop­er­ty, who are capa­ble and will­ing to assert their place and build it and main­tain it. Not all who vis­it here are of the Circle of Steel com­mu­ni­ty, but some may well join if they dis­cov­er that they are of like-mind and mettle.

Yes, with caveats. A kaji­ra is prop­er­ty, her pri­ma­ry instruc­tion should come to her from her own­er. If she posts here, she requires the per­mis­sion of her own­er to do so. Not only will she be held account­able for her words, but so too will her own­er. To this end, before a kaji­ra can post here, her own­er needs to come, look it over to see if this venue is suit­able for his prop­er­ty, and drop us a mes­sage stat­ing that the kaji­ra has his per­mis­sion to post here, along with a way to con­tact him should there be an issue in the future. The col­lar is a sym­bol of own­er­ship, and when own­er­ship is tak­en seri­ous­ly and active­ly main­tained, the col­lar has mean­ing and val­ue. We will accept noth­ing less at the Circle of Steel.

Certainly! But they should be aware that while unowned, here on the Circle of Steel they are sub­ject to the dis­ci­pline of every Free per­son on the site. If they are dis­pleas­ing, in word or tone or atti­tude or action, they can and will be held to full account for it. There is one area of excep­tion; the giv­ing out of per­son­al con­tact infor­ma­tion. If an unowned girl wish­es to do such a thing, do it else­where, not on the Circle of Steel. If such infor­ma­tion is request­ed or demand­ed, refer the indi­vid­ual to this FAQ, and to the man­age­ment if they wish fur­ther clar­i­fi­ca­tion on what “N‑O” means. This is not a mat­ter of choice for the unowned girl, it is our policy.

First, because we regard the con­tri­bu­tion of one’s works to be a bind­ing con­tract between con­sent­ing adults. The Circle of Steel includes the state­ment, ‘dis­trib­ute’, because some works are down­load­able in var­i­ous forms which go beyond a screen dis­play. Second, because when you con­tribute your work, you are giv­ing your word to the Circle of Steel. We con­sid­er this to be more bind­ing than any legal doc­u­ment, and you will be held to it. You are expect­ed to hold us to our word, as well.

The Gor nov­els were writ­ten by Dr. John Lange, PhD in Philosophy. It is worth not­ing that Dr. Lange was a Philosopher before he wrote the first Gor nov­el, and dur­ing the times when he wrote the first 26 Gor nov­els. A pro­fes­sion­al Philosopher, a man paid to think about, write about, and teach, phi­los­o­phy. That is his context.

A bunch of gamers in AOL devised a ‘lan­guage’ for Gor which they named after a clan of the Wagon Peoples in the Gor nov­els. Most of the words in ‘Kassar’ are not in the Gor nov­els at all, and some of them are just laugh­able. Well, laugh­able until Rask of Treve finds out that some­one thinks his name means, ‘ass’ 😉 . Generally speak­ing, use of any of the ‘Kassar lan­guage’ is an excel­lent way to pro­claim that you’re an idiot who was taught by idiots, and all of you were too lazy to pick up a Gor nov­el and read it for your­self. It serves a use­ful pur­pose in this regard.

All of them! The prin­ci­ple is that we uphold and respect the rights of own­er­ship amongst Goreans. This is where the Circle of Steel is going to clear up the issue of copy­right, appli­ca­tions, and a few oth­er tricky top­ics. This can be a pain in the neck to under­stand, so this is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to be as clear as we can on it. This by no means com­plete or even author­i­ta­tive (copy­right law is pret­ty involved stuff); con­sult your local copy­right lawyer if you find your­self being infringed upon, or infring­ing (our dis­claimer!). The pur­pose of all copy­right, trade­mark, and patent law is to ensure that a cre­ator is able to be the sole ben­e­fi­cia­ry of the fruits of their cre­ation, for a rea­son­able peri­od of time before that cre­ation is wide-spread enough that it is con­sid­ered the shared prop­er­ty of soci­ety. It par­tic­u­lar­ly applies to com­mer­cial pro­tec­tion; if you write a best­seller or invent a car that runs on air, you deserve to be rec­om­pensed what­ev­er the mar­ket will bear. For exam­ple, in court, try­ing to sue some­one who has infringed on a copy­right is like­ly only going to be finan­cial­ly prof­itable if the infringer has made monies that should have belonged to the copy­right hold­er, or has dam­aged the copy­right hold­er’s abil­i­ty to prof­it from their own works. Caveats! Also known as ‘Fair Use’, the lim­i­ta­tions on exclu­sive rights; Public vs Private usage. Public usage of copy­right­ed mate­r­i­al is gen­er­al­ly for­bid­den, while pri­vate usage is usu­al­ly per­mit­ted. An exam­ple would be a DVD movie that you pur­chase, the law pro­vides for a back-up copy used for your own pri­vate pur­pos­es. Another exam­ple would be own­ing a hard­copy book, the law pro­vides for you to also own an elec­tron­ic copy of the same book, for your own pri­vate pur­pos­es. This is also known as ‘archival pur­pos­es’. Commercial vs Non-Profit. In gen­er­al, you’re not per­mit­ted to make mon­ey from the fruits of anoth­er’s cre­ation with­out a spe­cif­ic agree­ment to per­mit you to do so. Educational usage. Using copy­right­ed mate­r­i­al for the pur­pose of edu­ca­tion, and ‘dis­tance learn­ing’, is also per­mit­ted under spe­cif­ic con­di­tions. Refer here to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, sec­tion 403. Amount of mate­r­i­al used. A small por­tion of a work can be used for com­men­tary, crit­i­cism, report­ing, teach­ing, schol­ar­ship, and research. What per­cent­age is con­sid­ered ‘fair use’? So where does the Circle of Steel fit into this? We’re a pri­vate, non-prof­it, edu­ca­tion­al site and orga­ni­za­tion. Do the math. It’s impor­tant to under­stand that there’s more than one degree of copy­right pro­tec­tion avail­able, and you have the option of choos­ing which is appro­pri­ate for you and your works. [b]Copyright © 2006 John Gorean, All Rights Reserved[/b] This label placed in a doc­u­ment indi­cates the most strict degree of copy­right pro­tec­tion, and the one which most peo­ple are famil­iar with. What this means is that you retain full con­trol over your work, no one else can legal­ly copy it, mod­i­fy, dis­play it else­where, etc, unless you have made a delib­er­ate agree­ment with them to per­mit them to do so (post­ing in the Circle of Steel con­sti­tutes just such an agree­ment between the author and the Circle of Steel). This is the ONLY form of copy­right pro­tec­tion which is enforced by spe­cif­ic copy­right law. The oth­er cat­e­go­ry which the law enshrines is pub­lic domain. The pub­lic domain means that the work is freely avail­able to any­one to use as they see fit. In copy­right law, it’s all or noth­ing. While this sounds nice in the­o­ry, in real­i­ty it may be a lot more than what’s nec­es­sary for your work. The orig­i­na­tors of copy­right law nev­er envi­sioned the mod­ern media age and the inter­net, the vast wealth of infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge at the aver­age per­son­’s fin­ger­tips and the need to keep from ‘rein­vent­ing the wheel’ a mil­lion times over, each year, for each new work. U.S. copy­right law has­n’t come to grips with this issue yet, either, so a group of pri­vate cit­i­zens got togeth­er and cre­at­ed the Creative Commons con­tracts. Creative Commons. You’re going to see the Creative Commons licens­ing more and more as time goes on, this is a real­ly great idea and it’s exact­ly what we’ve need­ed for mod­ern infor­ma­tion con­trol. It’s even being embed­ded with­in web pages, show­ing the read­er exact­ly what use they can apply to what they’ve found. So what exact­ly is it? The Creative Commons web­site makes it very easy to under­stand and even eas­i­er to gen­er­ate your own con­tract license for your work, by answer­ing a few sim­ple ques­tions. The Circle of Steel strong­ly advo­cates the use of the Creative Commons licens­ing method for authors. The Creative Commons license per­mits you, the author, to decide exact­ly what rights you need, and under what con­di­tions you will per­mit your work to be used by oth­ers. I know there’s a temp­ta­tion to say, “I want total con­trol, I will relin­quish no rights, no one can touch my work!”, how­ev­er, when we’re speak­ing of mate­r­i­al that’s meant to teach and share ideas, espe­cial­ly in today’s mod­ern elec­tron­ic envi­ron­ment, that atti­tude is not only very dif­fi­cult to enforce, it’s also self­ish, self-defeat­ing, and destruc­tive. Creative Commons has an excel­lent, easy to under­stand web­site explain­ing how it works, how to get a cus­tom-tai­lored license, and how to apply it. Additionally, you can find a good explaina­tion of the Spectrum of Rights avail­able to you, as well as anoth­er explaina­tion of How it Works.

I am called LionHeart, which is the lit­er­al trans­la­tion of my actu­al name. I am a man who walks the Gorean path.

We’ll stick to the rel­e­vant parts of this lit­tle bio. I first read the Gor nov­els in 1978, when I was 15 years old. They were great SciFi/​Fantasy reads and they began impact­ing my psy­che and under­stand­ings from that point for­ward. I was 20 years old when I first met peo­ple who lived by the Gorean phi­los­o­phy. They were the some of the men and women of the Tuchux, and I was adopt­ed into the Wolverine clan. Further explo­ration of Gor was short­ly inter­rupt­ed after that by mil­i­tary duties and a mar­riage. When I resur­faced, about 10 years lat­er, I had an inci­dent which brought Gor flood­ing back to me and I embraced it, re-read­ing all of the books and putting every­thing I could to the test in real­i­ty. Almost all of it worked per­fect­ly and made per­fect sense. I count my days as a Gorean man from the time when I began to actu­al­ly live by those ideals and prin­ci­ples in the phi­los­o­phy; March of 1996.

On February 14, 1998, I decid­ed to vis­it ircGor for the first time, as a gift to my kaji­ra who had been cajol­ing me for a year to come see how peo­ple were play­ing it as a game. After some ini­tial dra­ma, The nick­name I chose was ‘Navarre’, and I found­ed #Port_​Kar after con­clud­ing that irc was a good medi­um to help peo­ple learn about Gor and the Gorean phi­los­o­phy, par­tic­u­lar­ly after see­ing how so many were fail­ing to under­stand what they were doing. In that spir­it, I formed the House of Kar, and the Family known as Karians was born. The Gates of Port Kar remained open for 3 years, before I closed it down to push all of it’s mem­bers to move for­ward on their own to con­tin­ue to learn and grow. I includ­ed myself in that num­ber, and that is when I set aside ‘Navarre’, for ‘LionHeart’.

No.
Port Kar was a dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ty with a dif­fer­ent pur­pose, geared towards teach­ing and train­ing peo­ple who knew noth­ing of Gor oth­er than on-line role­play, in the hopes that they would dis­cov­er it was more, and begin to live it.
The Circle of Steel is for peo­ple who already under­stand that there is a Gorean phi­los­o­phy and are striv­ing to live by it’s prin­ci­ples and val­ues. In that regard, per­haps it could be regard­ed as Phase III of the process of becom­ing Gorean. That which came before is acknowl­edged and accept­ed, but we’re well beyond those ear­ly steps now.

The short answer is, no, it is not. If that’s a prob­lem, I wish you well in your inter­net explo­rations… elsewhere.
The Circle of Steel is inspired by the Gor nov­els. It does not seek to replace them, but rather, use them as our foun­da­tion and spring­board into the real­i­ty of liv­ing our lives by the Gorean phi­los­o­phy. The books, as impor­tant as they are to obtain­ing a foun­da­tion­al under­stand­ing of Gor and what it means, are bound with­in the fan­tas­tic imag­i­na­tion of John Norman. A fan­ta­sy world with fan­ta­sy species and fan­ta­sy cul­tures and fan­ta­sy lan­guage. The point of all that fan­ta­sy is to pro­vide a set­ting to illus­trate a live-able phi­los­o­phy and demon­strate the val­ue of that phi­los­o­phy to us, as human beings. This is a cru­cial thing to under­stand; a phi­los­o­phy is inde­pen­dent of cul­ture (or world), and even of time peri­od. It’s based on prin­ci­ples and val­ues which tran­scend the cul­tures which inter­pret those prin­ci­ples and val­ues in a fash­ion that works for them. And that’s what we do here. If some­thing makes sense to bor­row from the fan­ta­sy of Gor, we glad­ly do so and enjoy it’s mean­ing­ful­ness. If it does­n’t, there’s not much point in han­dling it oth­er than to note that it’s a fan­ta­sy arti­fact that has no val­ue in the real world.