Life on the River

Question: Okay, I have three questions about the Pesedjet. First, did you make any changes to their godrealm? Second, how many moon gods do they have? Finally, do the four sons of Horus - the gods of the canopic jars - live in the overworld or the underworld?

Answers about the Pesedjet - hit it!

1) We actually haven't really decided what to do with the Egyptian Overworld, to tell you the truth. This is mostly because, in all technicality, they kind of don't have one. Egyptian cosmology is very specific about the world's parts and divisions and about the passage into the afterlife, but when it comes to the abode of the gods themselves, it's surprisingly sketchy. Some scholars believe that the gods were simply considered to live in the sky among the stars; others point out that the lack of a fixed overworld suggests that they were believed to be among humans, inhabiting the world as divine powers instead of living in a kingdom of their own. Another popular theory is that the gods were thought to have inhabited their temples, thus being concretely located in their centers of worship. Still others think they probably all resided in the paradisaical afterlife of Osiris' kingdom in Duat, not because they were dead but simply because it was the nicest place around, though this theory is usually countered by other scholars who point out that Osiris being trapped in Duat is clearly something that separates him from the other gods. Certainly some of the death- and judgment-aligned gods of the Pesedjet spend a lot of time in the underworld, but this is always in pursuit of their jobs, not necessarily because they live there. The only possible direct reference to an overworld home of the gods is in the Pyramid Texts, in which there is mentioned a place called On over which Ra was king, but there's no description of the place aside from a possible implication of it having grasslands.

Scion tries to solve this problem by just creating an Egyptian-flavored river-overworld called Iteru (literally just the word for the Nile), which is a nice compromise since it both sets the gods apart from humanity but also retains that idea of them as part of the most important features of the world, especially the all-important river. We really don't know if we're going to keep it, since it sticks in our craw with all its made-up-ness, but then again it's not doing a bad job, considering the lack of basis the writers had to work with. Our PCs have so far only encountered gods of the Pesedjet in Duat, the World or their private Sanctums.

2) The Pesedjet have a lot of moon gods! The most famous is of course Thoth, who bargained an extra five days out of the year by playing games with the moon and thereafter used it to set the course of time for humanity, but he's not the only one. Khonsu, a hawk-headed moon god variously associated with Thoth and other lunar deities, serves as a deity who embodies light in the darkness and illumination and protection for nighttime travelers. Bastet was originally associated with the sun, but her heavy syncretization with Artemis after the Greeks began to trade culture with the Egyptians saw her transform into a lunar goddess for several centuries until the end of the ancient Egyptian civilization. Finally, way back in the misty beginnings of the Old Kingdom, we find the ancient moon-god Iah (literally "moon"), a personification of the moon that lost ground to the younger moon-gods in the later centuries of Egyptian religion and in Scion terms is probably an ancient Titan.

3) Egyptian myth doesn't tell us where the sons of Horus reside, but since they have to do almost exclusively with protection of the dead, we consider them to have their residences in Duat. Our PCs have actually met them there, where they discovered that they have no taste at all for hanging out with people who spend millennia collecting human body parts.