Welcome to the crazy grab-bag vlog, in which we answer ten thousand (or six) questions in one flurry of manic activity!
Question: Why doesn’t Tlaloc have Animal (Crocodile), Animal (Turtle) or Water?
Question: How do you feel about a deity having multiple active Scions at any given time?
Question: How do you deal with public revelation? What if they drop Canopus into traffic, or throw lightning on the evening news?
Question: Who are the gods of Scotland?
Question: How would you handle a player wanting to father a new race of vampires? What kind of powers do you think they'd need? What about spawning other races of creatures?
Question: Who is the top magician out of every magic god/goddess of every pantheon? I'm pulling for Odin!
Today's installment features an outdoor adventure with loose wild animals. Because that's how we vlog.
I teased you about your hair last vlog. You're looking pretty hot now!
ReplyDeleteI agree. Rrow.
DeleteWho would win between Hermes and Hecate? Not triple Hermes, but just Hermes?
ReplyDeleteA tough call - they have different kinds of specialties and MOs, so I think it would probably depend on what the contest was. Hermes specializes in the Shenanigans school of magic, while Hecate's more about mysterious and cosmic powers.
DeleteThe Tlaloc answers really make sense when you explain them like that. In fact I feel kind of stupid for not thinking of it myself. I do love Ketilla's writeup though, especially the jade hands and feet.
ReplyDeleteOn a completely unrelated note, would Scotland have some Aesir influence because of the Norse inroads made there?
Don't feel stupid - it's a common question we've heard in a few places about Tlaloc, and it's logical why it comes up. :)
DeleteThe indigenous Celts were probably almost all Tuatha/Nemetondevos, but there were definitely Norse raids on Scotland and possibly Norse settlements in the north as well, so it's not too far-fetched that there might be some influence. Most of the Norse/Pictish interactions were of the battle and death kind, but you could definitely do a lot of stuff with what the Aesir and Celtic gods might have been doing behind the scenes.
If I remember correctly, Bast has some magic and prophecy, but I do not think its on the same level as the major ones. Like I would not have her associated with it, but she has some powers. The reason I say this is because I believe at one point and still now, she protects Thoth's spellbooks from going out in the world and destroying everything, so that kind of tells you how powerful Thoth is if by just having his books you could destroy the world.
ReplyDeleteThe third question, I am glad someone asked cause it was something in the back of my mind just wondering. It would seem like some parents would advise their children to stay in the shadows and others that would throw their children in the limelight.
She had Prophecy in the book, but I'm not really sure why, since I can't come up with any points in Egyptian myth wherein Bastet really has anything to do with knowledge of the future or anything. I'd say she probably does have some Magic, though, just not at a super high level.
DeleteYeah, I think whether or not your parent wants you in the limelight depends a lot on who they are and what goals they're pursuing. Some gods may want you under the radar for stealth missions or ease of travel; others may want you front and center for some reason, and the majority of them probably don't care much either way.
Yeah, there is no real stories of her doing that. I think she is a romanticized version of herself in the books, where they wanted to give her a lot of power for being the Egyptian Goddess of Secrets, but I always thought of her being a Guardian of secrets, not a knower of secrets, if you catch what I mean. If not, I'll try explaining it some other time.
DeleteIt seems like a lot of the gods though were either put on a pillar to be a great and powerful being or were cut off at the knees to be some small fry.
As for the gods and their scions, even in the books they had it the same way we are talking about. Where some of them were not so flashy and some were extremely flashy, Like Donny. Either way, there is usually a plan if they want you to be a secret or to be out there and noticed. They are not going to send someone who uses a lot of sun on a stealth mission that they need to not be noticed. lol.
I've played with the idea of having the son (or daughter) of a Scion of Hermes and a Scion of Thoth (both Visted, neither Visited, or mix and match) being Fated to assume the mantle of the Trimegistus if/when he/she apotheosizes. Good idea? Terrible idea?
ReplyDeleteDefinitely not terrible! I think it'd be very interesting, both from the angle of not being sure who the real Trismegistus is and the political ramifications of passing the title on. Either of the old gods might object to some upstart taking on a mantle that was clearly "theirs", and they might be playing a colossal intrigue game against one another through those children. (Also, for an extra layer of confusion, I'd totally leave it ambiguous about whether those kids were really blood children of Thoth/Hermes, or actually the child of the other and adopted - let's just keep those waters between the two muddied as much as possible!)
DeleteUnrelated question, but still relevant to the vlog:
DeleteHow do you guys handle Heka, the Egyptian personification/deification of magic? Titan? Lesser god? On one hand, he certainly isn't Legend 12 like Thoth, but on the other, I find it hard to think of the personification/deification of magic as being worse at magic than Thoth.
Heka is possibly a candidate for an obscure and mysterious Titan Avatar, being a direct representative of a primal cosmic force and all.
DeleteIt's not totally satisfying to me, but it's an idea to play with.
I always thought that trimegistus was a crowlian/golden dawn invention, but I guess they just took him on as their main god along with Horus (age of Horus and all that).
ReplyDeleteJust the opposite, in fact - the English magical orders called themselves "Hermetic" after Hermes Trismegistus because he was the great magician of myth, not the other way around. :) Hermes Trismegistus is originally a result of Greek and Egyptian syncretism, with the Greeks attempting to conflate their Hermes with the Egyptian Thoth, and he pops up all over a lot of Greek historical texts. HT supposedly wrote the Hermetic magic texts that the Golden Dawn and other orders after it based their practices on.
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ReplyDeleteOk, I loved the discussion on Magic Gods, but there's one thing I'm not getting. You mentioned a few Gods (Parvati, Enki), who don't actually have the Magic purview associated last time I checked, and yet according to you they are better Magicians than the actual Gods of their pantheon that have Magic, so, why don't they have that as a purview?
ReplyDeleteGlad you enjoyed it. I thought we explained while we were talking about it, but lemme recap about those two specifically.
DeleteEnki: It might be hard to hear, but after we mention him I say that I dont think he actually has magic so he doesnt count. We only really mention him because the Babylonians dont have a legend 12 magic god and so we were scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to come up with someone.
Parvati: Although the three ladies some magic because of the concept that embodies them that we talk about, we actually meant Lakshmi. Parvati had magic in the raw so our brains just skipped about it.
We get into a problem with the devas finding a master magician because magic in scion encompasses luck, and Ganesha and Lakshmi only have it because they are luck gods. So on further thought it should "probably" be brahma, but even he has "magic" the purview in a very different way. It lends itself to the end of the question about how the eastern cultures dont deal with magic in the same way, and so the question almost doesnt apply to them.
Oops, missed the Enki explanation in the video. Thanks for the Deva explanation.
DeleteI have no idea whether this vlog is still being monitored, but for anyone who still cares, the answer to the "gods of Scotland" question is a bit more complicated. Scotland as we know it is basically an outgrowth of the Kingdom of Dal Riada, which was formed when a group of Christian Irish sailed over and conquered most of Caledonia, which had previously been held by the Pictish clans. The Picts and their culture were largely absorbed by the Gaelic-speaking Dal Riadans, and very little is known of their myths--like the Brythonic Celts, their stories were wiped out by invaders (the Saxons, Jutes and Angles, in the case of the latter) before anyone wrote them down. The Irish and Welsh were lucky enough to have monks that chronicled the old stories, thus explaining why the Irish and Welsh gods are still widely known, while the Brythonic and Pictish gods have been relegated to guesswork. Claiming that the Tuatha were the "main gods" of Britain is misleading--while there are a lot of similar themes throughout the varying Celtic mythic cycles, the Irish, Welsh, Picts, and others had varying and divergent pantheons.
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