Goddess of the Polis

Question: Can we talk about Athena? Her description lists her as the Goddess of Civic Virtue and a Dispenser of Justice, and yet she does not actually have The Arbiter according to you. In exchange, she has The Beast? I understand Athena is closely associated with owls, but does mythology really portray her as a savage hunter, a creature of pure nature, instead of the creator of law and order, the chancellor to almighty Zeus himself?

Sure, we can always talk about Athena!

First of all, there's no exchanging going on; Athena has always had Animal (Owl) associated, even in the original Scion rules. Our changes to Athena involved removing Health, Justice and Epic Wits and subbing in Guardian.

You seem to be working off an extremely narrow idea of what having Animal means; there's no reason that having Animal all the way up to the Avatar means you have to be a "savage hunter" or a "creature of pure nature". That doesn't make sense for those who have animals who aren't predators (like Ganesha with Elephant), who are generally gentle in nature (like Hathor with Cow), or who are domesticated (like Hecate with Dog). Just as there are different animal totems and they mean different things, so I would assume that gods of those animals express their Avatar differently. Athena's connection to the owl is specifically because it represents wisdom and thought; while becoming the Beast would certainly make her very bestial and inhuman compared to her normal self, it probably doesn't look at all like the aquatic murdertrain that happens when Sobek becomes the Beast for crocodiles, because they're very different animals. After all, you wouldn't stunt them the same if you were playing them, so why would Athena?

I suspect some of this confusion comes from the Avatar for Animal as written in the Scion books, which does a great job of only presenting the Beast as a slavering hunter-monster, perfect for the Tezcatlipocas of the world but hardly exciting for the Manannan mac Lirs. I'm not sure whether they decided that they could throw a general umbrella over it because of Protean Understanding or whether that particular writer just didn't give people with Animal (Honeybee) much thought, but it doesn't work very well as a blanket generalization for a highly specialized purview. John and I have been meaning to mess around with purview Avatars for a while now, and I think there's a question about them in the queue already, so we'll probably be talking about that soon. (Thank god no players are close to getting them, yet. Please stay Legend 10 as long as possible.)

Anyway, on to Justice. Athena does have close ties to justice; she invented the basis of our modern court system, and in no universe are we going to dispute that that probably means she has at least a few Justice boons in her bag of tricks.

At some point, however, we realized that we couldn't give every god associateds based on them inventing things, because that often has nothing to do with what they're god of. For example, Tezcatlipoca supposedly invented fire, but he's clearly not a god of fire (and there's one standing right there anyway - hi, Xiuhtecuhtli!). Sometimes inventing something does point to a solid link between a god and a purview - Anubis inventing mummification, for example, is certainly one of the many reasons he has Death - but it's almost always followed up by the god actually doing something with that thing they've invented, not wandering off and letting some other god take up the mantle. Thoth gets to keep his associations with Academics and Intelligence because, after inventing math and writing, he kept doing things with them and became their patron; Xipe Totec doesn't get to keep his association with War, because while he supposedly invented it, apparently he's been taking a coffee break since then and it's Huitzilopochtli who is clearly the dude in charge of that particular facet of the universe.

And for Athena, we couldn't find evidence of her actually having anything else to really do with Justice or the administration thereof. She doesn't do any judging, arbiting or law-giving on Olympus, certainly, because Zeus is the only one who gets to do that up there; he's the traditional creator of law and order in ancient Greek myth, not her (though she certainly helps enforce it!). She isn't involved in mediating when there are trials or disputes - in fact, more often she's one of the disputers, such as in her spat with Poseidon over Athens or her involvement in the argument over who was more beautiful that eventually started that pesky Trojan war. She absolutely is one of the closest and most trusted advisors to Zeus, but that's because she's his war tactician and resident smartypants, not because she gets to make decisions on matters of law and state (if anybody ever gets to make suggestions about those to Zeus it's Hera, and even she doesn't do it much because it makes him cranky when people try to tell him what to do).

So Athena lost Justice for us because, while we're sure she has some Justice boons, it just wasn't a strongly-connected enough concept that we thought she should have the Avatar of it. Her civic connections to Athens are insanely strong (believe me, after having recently been to Athens, that is clearer than ever before. Also, if you want to talk about owls, you cannot turn a freaking corner in Athens without falling over one of Athena's owls. I think some stowed away in our luggage, because the owl population of our house has definitely gone up since we came back), but her status as the patron, protector and most worshiped goddess there still doesn't really have a lot to do with the dispensement of justice or the creation of law, which is mostly overseen by Zeus even in her sacred city. But it is definitely a badass thing to be the hyper-popular goddess of a city that spends most of its time yelling about how great she is and how no one can ever hurt them with her watching over them, and we decided that was best expressed by Guardian.

So Justice out, Guardian in. And owls are here to stay.