Getting Back to Our Roots

Question: Do you use mythology in its most original form (for instance, originally as far as I know Ragnarok was the end. No world came after it until Christianity started aping the mythology) or do you use the more modern understandings of the old myths (see aforementioned piece of possibly inaccurate mythology)?

Yes and no. Trying to get to the pure "roots" of any mythology is a thorny endeavor and doesn't always serve Scion the best that it can be served.

You obviously don't want to crawl all the way down to the bottom of the well of comparative mythology, where everything is distilled into the same Indo-European root mythologies and therefore Zeus and Marduk and Dyaus Pita are all the same guy; unless you have a hankering to run a Scion game with a drastically reduced number of pantheons and parents who are more archetypes than personalities, that's going to be directly counter-productive to the game, not to mention very fiddly and theoretical in many cases. We do try to use the most "original" versions of a given culture's mythology wherever possible, but it's not an unbreakable rule and we definitely deviate when it makes sense to do so. For example, the Egyptian religion lasted for thousands of years, and during that time changed drastically, not always as a result of outside influence but just because the Egyptian culture itself evolved during that time; trying to stick only to the zoomorphic half-gods and ephemeral primordial figures of the Old Kingdom and excluding all the vibrant mythical developments that followed would be counterproductive again, shutting us and our players away from a lot of cool (and very legitimately Egyptian) stories and material. Does that mean we have to make a lot of choices about what versions of a god from what area with what consort and what syncretizations to use? Yeah, it does, but that's just part of the way mythologies work. If they live long enough as living religions, they change and evolve; you can see it at work in the modern day, even, by comparing the stories of the Vedas to the visibly changed religious landscape of modern Hinduism.

So it's really less that we try to get back to the most "original" mythology than it is that we try to stick with what is most likely to have been that culture's view of their religion, gods and selves. We look for what will give us the most awesome myths, interesting deities and antagonists, and culture-specific details, and while we'll always try to start with the oldest material, pretending that, say, Persian influence on Slavic religion never happened is an exercise in futility. It did happen, and it shaped and influenced Slavic myths thoroughly during the time that the religion was practiced; the Simurgh may be originally Persian, but pretending that there is therefore no such thing as the Slavic Simargl, which has been changed and twisted until it's a completely different thing anyway, would be robbing the Slavs of some of their own unique flavor and myths. Likewise, removing Nezha, one of the most famous and beloved of characters from Chinese myth, would be more technically accurate as he's originally an import from India, but doing so would be a disservice to the Chinese culture that has made him a unique part of their religious landscape. Cultures have always borrowed from one another to some extent; we obviously don't want to include weird interpretations from other cultures that don't match what a given religion and people thought about themselves, nor do we want to do anything that damages the cohesiveness of a culture's themes and imagery, but it's inevitable that there will be some leakage across lines.

And, of course, there's always the problem of sourcing. To address your Ragnarok example above, while it's true that some scholars believe the idea of Baldur's resurrection to be a Christian invention to align him with Christ and the idea of the world being rebuilt after Ragnarok an embellishment by Christian writers seeking to draw pagans into the fold, it's also true that these are just theories and we can't prove them one way or another. The Norse myths, like a lot of others (the Irish and Slavs suffer from the same problem), have only come down to us because they were recorded by Christian writers like Snorri Sturluson or Saxo Grammaticus. We don't have any firsthand, purely Norse written sources to go to in our quest to stay as close to the Norse myths as possible. We can look at the Eddas and say, "This looks very similar to Christianity, so it might have been added later rather than being an original part of the story," but since we have no idea what the original story was, we pretty much have to make a choice about whether or not we want to believe the writer. It's entirely possible that there also was always a myth about the return of the world after Ragnarok in the Norse canon - similar myths in different religions pop up all over the world all the time, and there's no reason this might not have been one of them. It basically comes down to which scholarly theory you want to follow: that Snorri was recording the ancient tales faithfully in the poetic Edda, or that he was editorializing (either intentionally or as a result of the myths themselves having already begun to be Christianized) to add Christian elements. And we have no way of knowing which is true, because other than Snorri, Saxo and a few other fragments from the Norse and Germanic lands, there's no other written record of what the ancient Norse believed.

So we include the end of the Ragnarok stories, because we have no reason not to; some people think they belong, some don't, and neither really has a better case than the other, so we chose the option that gives you more stories and cool stuff to work with in Scion. We don't assume that Snorri is wrong about a multitude of other things - we take his descriptions of gods and the other stories he tells about them at face value, after all - so we're not going to assume he's wrong about the return of Baldur and Hod or the survival of Lif and Lifthrasir, Magni and Modi, Vali and Vidar, et al.

We don't use other cultures' interpolations of a religion if we can help it (get out of here, Greeks and your syncretization of Set and Apep!), and modern misconceptions give us hives (please, nobody else send us any more emails about how the Aztecs thought the world was going to end in 2012), but when there's nothing to say one way or the other, we'll almost always err on the side of including an interesting myth.