Bowl Full of Wisdom (and Cake)

Hey, folks. Today John and I have death fevers and are way not fit to be on camera, so we're going to have to leave you with a normal post instead of our usual vlog. We're sorry. We might be able to vlog later in the week, but my class schedule's pretty rough, so if you don't hear from us, we'll definitely be back to our normal Saturday schedule next week.

And in the meantime, a question!

Question: Why does Ganesha have Animal (Elephant) associated? As far as I know, he never DOES anything with elephants, beyond having an elephant's head, and by that logic Nergal should have Animal (Lion).

You know, this is a tricky one, and one of those places where a hard-and-fast association rule is difficult to put into effect. The acquisition of Ganesha's elephant head is certainly not the usual kind of myth we'd look for in justifying Animal; after being beheaded by his father, his head was hastily replaced with that of a local elephant in order to restore him and pacify his understandably upset mother. It seems as if the unlucky elephant in question just happened to be the closest appropriately-sized critter when Shiva needed a backup cranium.

But Ganesha does indeed have Animal associated in our games, and yet does not have any myths where he runs around commanding or creating animals. He's not the only one; several of the Netjer are similar (for example, Anubis, who appears with a jackal's head but doesn't do much with actual jackals) in that they are strongly associated with an animal but without any myths that portray them interacting with them much. So how do we make that association call, when we decide against Animal for other gods in seemingly the same boat?

This is one of the places where cult worship and symbolism sometimes come into play in our associations-assignment process. Ganesha's religious presence and symbolism do involve elephants, and so had to be taken into account. Temples to Ganesha have been known to keep elephants, even large herds of them, in his honor and to involve them in religious festivals in his name; perhaps more importantly, Ganesha's connection to the elephant is also deeply symbolic, representing wisdom, intelligence, memory and perception, all qualities that the Hindu religion believes are innate to both elephants and Ganesha himself. In a very direct way, Ganesha embodies elephantness, for lack of a better word, appearing as an eternally elephantine, ever-constant symbol of all the qualities a Hindu would consider the animal to have.

Just as the Animal purview is split into two general categories - doing things with your animal, and being your animal - so are there different kinds of Animal gods. It's a lot easier to pinpoint one of the second category if they're nice enough to do things like transforming into their animals or showing up as their animals all the time, like Bastet running around as a cat or Tezcatlipoca transforming into Tepeyollotl, but there are a lot of gods of a lot of religions out there, and a blanket rule can't cover all of them. Ganesha is a god who always appears as an elephant at least in part and who furthermore permanently embodies all the qualities of elephants in an intentional way, so he seems to us to be a great example of a god that has Animal by virtue of really being an animal himself rather than by virtue of commanding or spending time with them.

We have a lot of other gods like that, actually - for example, Sekhmet, who was conceived of as a lion for embodying the animal's ferocity and power and whose cults kept lions in the temple in her honor, or Huitzilopochtli, who despite having no myths in which he does anything with hummingbirds was so inextricably linked to the birds that they were said to be the souls of his dead warriors and the creature became one of his names. It's much easier to give someone Animal when, like Mah, they're actually hanging out with or creating that animal, but it's not the only time it's possible. Just like every other association, we love examples in myth and lean on them whenever possible, but iconography, symbolism and cult worship always have the opportunity to weigh in as well.

In the end, like all associations, it comes down to a judgment call based on the specific god's situation. In our opinion, the elephant is one of the central and inescapable parts of Ganesha's character, and he must have the purview associated with him.

As for Nergal, I don't know what to tell you, friend. I was in favor of him having Lion, John wasn't, so he is what he is now (and I would say go either way, nobody's going to be too upset).