Saturday, September 15, 2012

Creative Reconstructionism

Question: Have you all looked into including Mammon as one of your Titans in the write up? I'm finding the concept very fascinating and very universal among all the pantheons. "He" could even be a Titan against Aten! Great source of conflict. I guess this isn't so much a question as what's your opinion on him and would you be interested in including it in your write-up? I'm excited... I'm gunna go write all the games now.

Heh, well, we certainly love excitement, and you should go write all the games now. Storytell like there's no tomorrow, anonymous!

As for us, however, we probably won't be using Mammon for anything, mostly because he doesn't fit into Scion's setting very well (or if you shoehorn him in, not in a very powerful role). The word mammon or mamona in the Bible actually usually only represents a concept, that of materialistic wealth or greed; it comes up occasionally, usually so it can be highlighted as an impediment to the righteous. It refers to riches as a concept that may be held in higher esteem than religion - Matthew 6:24 says, "No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money," and the word they translate there as "money" (or in older versions of the Bible, "riches" or "wealth") is mammon.

The waters become murky because the poetic reference above semi-personifies the idea of mammon for emphasis, and this was taken and run with through several later editions of the Bible. Greek translations added personifications to the idea of wealth in successive editions, and as a result early writers in the fourth and fifth centuries expanded that personification to create the idea of an actual being named Mammon. The Catholic church, which loves to personify things from the Bible and invent crazy, magnificent hierarchies of insanity around them, then took the idea and ran with it with their normal aplomb, so by the twelfth century Christianity had basically invented the idea of a demon named Mammon from nothing more than Greek linguistic confusion. He was assigned various random roles - he's a fallen angel! he's the Canaanite god of greed! he's the ambassador of Hell! he's really another name for Beelzebub! - but most of them were based on bad information, unsourced theology and the Church's tendency to create its own new mythology from the misinterpreted scraps of others'.

From a point of view of ancient mythology, there's no such being as Mammon; he's a classic example of human error and misinterpretation. There was no Canaanite god by that name, nor with any of the attributes Christianity assigns to him, nor is there any demon or Titan-like antagonist that comes close to his description. He's a fabricated creature based on Christian linguistic misinterpretation and embellishment - he's no more a legitimate Canaanite mythological figure than is Beelzebub, who started as a Hebrew misrepresentation of Baal and has become a completely unrelated and bizarre figure.

If you're really excited about Mammon, you could of course invent reasons he exists in Scion; perhaps he's some Titanspawn creature that took on that convenient role upon escaping Tartarus, or maybe some trickster god is doing things in that guise in order to prevent anyone from finding out who he really is. If you have a plot that might benefit from doing that - especially if you're involving a lot of Christian imagery and stories - then there's definitely nothing stopping you.

And alas, he really does look, from the outside, like a figure that would make a great Titan - greed tends to be a big tripping-up point for a lot of gods and a lot of heroes. It's just that he doesn't really exist, nor ever did, so we'll be giving him a miss along with most of the rest of the intricate bizarreness of Catholicism.

(If we were playing In Nomine or something heavily Christian-based, though, oh, man, Mammon is a great place for creative ideas.)

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