Jet-Setters

Question: Besides the Deva and Yazata, what are some good examples of gods from one pantheon showing up in the myths of another pantheon?

Ooh, goody, cross-culturalism!

The big showstopping example we always pull out for our players is a specific myth in which the Aesir and Bogovi almost go head-to-head in person. The Nemtsi (a Slavic word meaning "mute", because they assumed that since they couldn't speak Slavic they didn't know how to talk), an invading tribe of Germanic warriors, rolled into Slavic territory with an eye toward conquering the native people and started busting the place up. The Slavic army, though valorous and capable, started losing badly, and the Bogovi realized that this was because the Aesir were actually marching into battle and directly supporting their people. There was a massive uproar in the Slavic Overworld as various gods got really pissed off about it and called for action, but in the end Svarozhich reinforced their already long-standing law: the gods don't interfere in the affairs of mortals, period, so despite the fact that the Aesir were definitely cheating by doing so, the Bogovi were still going to remain on the sidelines. Of course, the first rule of the Bogovi is We Have Lots of Laws and the second rule is And We Break Them Constantly, so as soon as Svarozhich wasn't looking, several of the other gods got involved anyway, most notably the three warrior sons of Veles riding into battle and Perun barbecuing the opposing general with a particularly enraged thunderbolt. The gods did not clash directly against one another, but only because Svarozhich got the rest of the Bogovi together in time to form a multi-god Perun containment team, thus depriving humanity of the spectacular possibility of a Thor vs. Perun throwdown (but then again, probably also saving humanity from being totally flash-fried during the course of events, so that was good). Other, less excitingly dangerous Slavic myths also exist in which captured Nemtsi prisoners denounce the Bogovi and call upon Odin, Thor and Frigg by name, although luckily for everyone involved none of them show up, so it's clear that the Slavs were quite aware of the gods of the Germanic religion and concerned about their encroachment into Slavic territory. Curiously, there are no reciprocal Norse records in which they seem to have noticed any of the Slavic gods... but then again, since the Aesir have no qualms about going into battle whenever they feel like it, they might have assumed that since the Bogovi didn't show up, they didn't actually exist. Incidentally, this myth is possibly a garbled, mythologized account of the incursion of the Rus into Slavic territories; we think of them as quintessentially Slavic now, thanks to their settling in Kiev and becoming so ubiquitous that they even lent their name to modern-day Russia, but they were probably originally from Sweden and only became part of the Slavic landscape thanks to a long, slow process of cultural assimilation.

That myth is awesome, but it's also a pretty big exception - very seldom do gods from different pantheons show up in one anothers' myths as themselves, acknowledged as foreign powers. More often, they'll simply be reimagined by the ancient myth-tellers as previously unknown gods of their native pantheon, which is why the Romans just call every thunder god Jupiter regardless of whether or not that's actually who he is, and therefore Jupiter has a lot of odd, quirky little myths associated with him that probably were originally attached to someone else. The Deva and Yazata are the strongest crossover deities, some of them even retaining the same name in both religions, but even they have split almost totally to the point where even some historians hesitate to call them the same deities anymore.

However, there are still tons of obvious import gods who wander in and out of various cultures' stories without breaking too much of a sweat. Isis does this all the time - for example, when Io escapes Greece as a cow, driven away by Hera's jealousy, Isis receives her and makes her one of her priestesses, and we already talked a little while ago about her involvement in the myth of Iphys and Ianthe. In some fringe Egyptian myths, Set marries Anat and Astarte, the Canaanite goddesses of war and love, as a consolation prize for losing his bid for the throne against Horus, which is almost certainly the result of someone confusing him with Baal but nevertheless became a firmly-entrenched story in northeastern Egypt for a while. Quetzalcoatl just sort of casually saunters through each of the Mesoamerican religions in chronological order, becoming a universal symbol of the region despite being interpreted differently by each different culture there, and Australian culture-heroes are famous for "traveling" between different nearby peoples, resulting in a wide range of stories being told about the same characters across a geographical area, since naturally they did different things in the territories of different peoples. And, of course, the Celts are an absolute mess of cross-pollination, most obviously in the case of the Tuatha, who share half their roster with the Welsh pantheon and are not apologizing for it (I'm looking at you, Nuada of the Silver Hand, who is suspiciously similar to the Welsh Nudd of the Silver Hand, off fighting magicians in nearby Wales. Nobody's fooled).

And, of course, early Middle Eastern religions love to do this - it's not just Persia! Anyone who's read the Bible knows Yahweh is in there saying, "Don't worship Baal, he sucks and no one likes him," and the early days of Islam include myths in which followers of Muhammad literally go out, seek out the other gods of the Arab people and kill them to make way for Allah as the sole power in the region, such as the story in which the famous Islamic hero Ali beheads al-Uzza to force her to stop "haunting" a grove of trees that was probably once a place of worship dedicated to her.

Of course, when it comes to syncretization and line-blurring, plenty of gods could be said to be in one anothers' myths if you're willing to consider two similar figures the same or follow scholarly theory down the rabbit hole. These are our favorite examples, but you can definitely rustle up a few more!