I'll get to the male/female question in my next post--but the answer is that the dwarfs, like all the other species on disc world (and most human races) have historically treated females as subservient and lesser beings. The reason there is no dwarf in Monstrous Regiment is because Terry has dealt with the dwarf problem in 5th E and T.
But as to the Summoning, the key to understanding it is to watch what it says, and what it causes Sam to think and/or say. The Summoning Dark is not simply a Dwarf belief, though it has been working with dwarfs for about the past 10,000 years. Certainly it draws on the anger that Sam has which is provoked by Ardent's arrogance. Sam gets angrier and angrier until, with Angua, he stops following Argent and goes down the boarded off tunnel where he touches the door and gets "infected" by the Summoning Dark (hereafter SD). This creature has (read the italicized portions) never seen a mind like Sam's
The creature swam through a mind. It had seen thousands of minds since the universe began, but there was something strange about this one. ...
The creature was old, although it would be more accurate to say that it had existed for a long time. When, at the start of all things, the primordial clouds of mind had collapsed into gods and demons and souls of all levels, it had been among those who had never drifted close to a major accretion.l So it had entered the universe aimlessly, without task or affiliation, a scarp of being blowing free, fitting in wherever it could, a sort of complicated thought looking for the right kind of mind. Currently--that is to say for the past ten thousand years, it had found work as a superstition.
Clearly, the SD (as it is called by the Dwarfs, predates the dwarfs. It looks for rage and anger--so it seems likely that it lured Sam to it. But it is not initially directed at turning Sam against the Dwarfs. The first indication of it is when he confronts the stupid trolls who are delivering Chrysophase's request for a meeting. And he threatened your family,his hind brain added. He had it coming-- And Sam notices the pain in his hand and the stab of the headache.
I think that Sam, who has a large reservoir of controlled anger, would probably have acted in somewhat the same fashion on his own. But, it is only the fact that the Guarding Dark becomes aware of him and begins watching and thwarting the SD's efforts that keeps Sam from going berserk long before Koom Valley. But, it does want to get him to Koom Valley to kill the Grags and if not killed in the process to die insane. But the GD saves him from the efforts of SD when he refuses to kill the Grags--not for pity, but "You don't kill the helpless. You just don't." It has left it's mark when it existed. "I salute you, said a thought that was not his, and he felt the sudden absence of something whose presence he had not noticed before."
The point is that Sam's rage is much stronger than before. He is being manipulated even though he denies it during the time and after. But that means that Sam and GD are stronger together than SD--which makes him the man who is capable of saving AM from the effect of another Koom Valley.
