Question: Do the Orisha have the same Overworld/Underworld as the Loa?
Question: What is the Overworld for the Orisha?
The short answer is no, and the long answer is in this previous post about the Orisha cosmos and how it doesn't want to conform to any of our silly European notions of Overworld and Underworld.
The modern ideas of the Loa Underworld and Overworld are heavily based on Christianity, but you can certainly use them for Scion's purposes if you want to; the Orisha are the Loa as well, so that new cosmology can be used to replace the haziness of the old if you need a neat solution. Syncretic religions are kind of pick and choose menu of things to include as necessary, so there's no reason to ignore them unless you're planning to play more purely African.
Good to see this I've been debating what I should do about my rewritten orisha/loa underworld. I've decided olokun has death since he's basically old world agwe. (Correct me if wrong) I want to place iku who shows up in what seems like random sources as titan god/goddess incarnation personification of death any suggestion
ReplyDeleteOlokun is basically old-world Agwe, and I think he could work as a death god; while Agwe is mostly about maritime law and sea stuff and doesn't actually have a lot to do with Death (we think the Scion books put him down there because they wanted him psychopomping), Olokun is the god of the Middle Passage and the souls of the many Africans who died there, thrown overboard by the slavers who had kidnapped them. He's definitely got some deathly chops.
DeleteIku might make a Titan Avatar, although he appears in so few stories that I've always wondered whether he would work better as a lesser god. The story in which Oshun defeats him by stealing his "talismans of power" could be interpreted as her helping bind him to Tartarus during the first war, though?
Anon fomented here thanks for the reply. I was at work and on phone when I commented and was worried my question wouldn't be understandable cause I type it so hurriedly. I was just so darn excited to see the very thing I was working on being talked about lil. Thanks again
Delete@ Anne: I never heard the story of Oshun and Iku, only knew Eshu had defeated him. Can you tell me where to read it up?
DeleteThere's a short version of it on our Oshun page, under the title "Oshun and Death". :) It was pulled from a couple of different sources in various forms, but the version we used most closely is from Murphy's Oshun Across the Waters: A Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the Americas.
DeleteAfter reading this post, the old post, and the comments for both, I keep thinking that the easiest way to deal with this situation is just to stat up Orun as some sort of West African-themed "otherworld", neither a full Underworld or a full Overworld, but a mix of both. I think it's even implied in the books that the Underworlds are themself a part of the Overworld dedicated to the keeping of the dead, clustered around Tartarus. In-canon explanation: not all pantheons bought the concept of an Underworld, especially not keeping the dead so close to the imprisoned Titans. Some just kept the dead in their own Overworld.
ReplyDeleteOr is this just a mad idea nobody would like to touch with a ten-foot pole? ;)
I don't think it's mad. :) Although it would require a ton of research to carry off, I think - Orun itself has very very little to go on that doesn't appear to be borrowed from monotheism, so it's hard to really build anything without doing a lot of inventing. There is definitely a flavor of the "otherworld" rather than separate overworld/underworld, however, so I could definitely see that working.
DeleteHey, even Scion doesn't manage to use the easy division all the time. The Nemetondevos don't have an Overworld in canon and just live in the Underworld with the souls of their people, and the Scion books completely skipped the Irish Underworld (confusingly because one does in fact exist, but whatever). We've written a whole pantheon that doesn't even have one (the Alihah), so there's plenty of room for creativity.
That's. basically what I did I just let the dead kind living amongst the Orishas especially since the Yoruba and most of their diasporic religions having a reverence to their ancestors and believing that they lived amongst them. I also have the Baron partying across the ville keeping them in check and trying to throw enough legendary parties to reach god hood
ReplyDelete