Thesis Defense

Question: I know you strive for accuracy, but first person reference material is hard to find! Percentage-wise, how accurate do you think each of your pantheon representations are?

First-person reference material ain't just hard to find; for most of these pantheons, many of whom died thousands of years ago in the popular public eye, it's literally impossible. Unless we happen to find some ancient Sumerians frozen in a glacier somewhere who we can thaw out and ask some searching religious questions of, that's just the way it's gotta be. For those religions that do have modern worshipers, the modern practice and beliefs are often vastly different from those of the ancient religion that they came from, making those first-person accounts we can get access to of varying degrees of usefulness.

However, I'm not sure this is a useful question. We can't give you a "percentage" of accuracy, which would be a meaningless number; compared to what, with what criteria, on what scale? I could say, "Eh, 90%," and send you on your way, but other than being a nice encouraging number, it wouldn't actually give you any good idea of what that means our content is like.

But I can try to give you a better answer, and that's this: they're always exactly as accurate as we're able to make them. We strive to get as much reference material as possible for each project, to talk to as many experts as we can gain access to, to take into account both traditional scholarship and new theories and discoveries, and to weigh the many conflicting options out there as well as the possible influence of modern versions of the gods involved. Those are things we are always reaching for to the best of our ability, but realistically, how successful we are varies from pantheon to pantheon with the shifting amounts of our access to those things. For some pantheons, like the Anunna, there's a glut of mythological scholarship and material to draw on; for others, like the Alihah, there's practically none. For some pantheons, like the K'uh, it's easy to get our hands on English-material and speak to local authorities on the subject; for others, like the Bogovi, we had to field-translate Croatian and sift through reams of opinions with very few sources to back them up. For some pantheons, like the Elohim, worship has been dead for thousands of years and is easy to study and interpret without worrying about change; for others, like the Apu, the influences and incarnations their gods have taken on over the centuries have colored and changed the information available on them. We never say, "That's probably good enough," if we know there's another book or source we haven't tapped yet, and we never say, "Eh, let's just ignore that so we don't have to explain why it's different in modern religion," if something interferes with our current progress.

I'll be the first to say that we could never claim 100% accuracy. We weren't in ancient Babylon and neither was anyone else, so anyone who makes that claim is lying. We also can't claim 100% accuracy to what we know now in the modern day, and that's again something nobody could say - there are too many different theories and digs and languages and possibilities and scholarly circles involved, and no one person could ever know the details of all of them, let alone know which were accurate in the long-ago. But we do our best, and we never put anything out there that we don't feel has real, solid accuracy beneath it and as many cool features and cultural concepts included as we can find. We're uncomfortable with anything less.

So I can't give you a percentage; sorry. In very specific scientific terms, we are more accurate than some yutz using Wikipedia and pagan reconstructionism messageboards for a casual writeup done in a few hours, but less accurate than a Harvard professor who speaks fourteen languages and has personally unearthed parts of Kom Ombo.