Animalia

Question: Scion treats all myths as real, right? So then, how does it treat animism? In some cases it is obvious, like how the Aztec gods have the nahualli animal forms, or how certain gods occasionally take on the form or aspects of animal (Zeus as a cow, Ganesha and his elephant head). But what about before them, when people revered certain animals? Does every pantheon have a couple of animals among their number?

This question is a giant complicated ball of wax that is trying to ask about a bunch of different stuff at once. I'm going to try to untangle it - stay with me, folks!

To begin with, I'm not sure if animism means what you think it means; I might be wrong, but the question makes it sound like you're implying that animism refers to the reverence of animal spirits and/or the belief that animals themselves are religious figures. Those ideas are bound up in animism, but the term actually means much more than that. It comes from the Latin word animus, which means spirit or breath, and refers to the much broader religious concept espoused by some cultures that all things have religiously significant spirits. That includes not just animals but also plants, natural features of the landscape, inanimate objects such as rocks, or even the abandoned bodies of the dead. Native American religions are most often cited as the best examples of animist belief systems, since many of them believe in the spiritual essence of the animals and landscape around them, and the Shinto religion of Japan also has more than a touch of that idea of spirits-in-all. When Disney's Pocahontas sings "Colors of the Wind", she's trying to describe to John Smith the animist religion of her people.

So while animism includes the idea of animal spirits, it is actually a much larger concept. This question seems to be more about the animals only, though, so we'll skip all that spirits-of-trees-and-wind stuff for now.

As you note, most religions have some kind of concept of animals and their place in the general spiritual hierarchy of things. Some consider the animals themselves to be magical or spiritually powerful in a way that humans generally are not; American religions, in particular, often do this. Sometimes it's because they believe in a spirit world, as the Inuit do, into which animals are naturally more able to enter and understand than humans, or sometimes it's because animals are more beloved by the gods, such as in some Middle Eastern cultures, and were therefore created with more powers than humans. In a few cases, especially in Africa and North America, myths will outright say that animals were given such spiritual powers as compensation for the fact that people hunt and kill them for food.

However, as with all mythologies, the religions they came from are vastly different in character, so even when animals are important, that doesn't necessarily mean that the ways in which they are important are comparable. Most pantheons have at least a god or two who have animal totems in some way, but the Teotl, who acknowledge animals as the second half of themselves, are very different from the Netjer, who use animal imagery to represent abstract concepts about themselves, who are in turn very different again from the Aesir, who only command beasts but do not embody them themselves.

What's important to remember about the All Myths Are Real model - which we've talked about in depth before, if you missed it - is that all things are true, but that truth isn't necessarily universal, and it may be true in a variety of ways without cheapening the authenticity of the game's treatment. If the Japanese believe that there are little kami inhabiting many inanimate objects, well, that's true, then; but it might be true only in Japan, or only when interacting with certain Japanese elements, or correlate to some concept in another culture that is fundamentally similar but that they experience in a different way. Often this is done through PSPs, as is the case in our Japanese example here; theoretically, the game says that there are kami everywhere, but since nobody who doesn't have Tsukumo-gami can interact with them in any way, they might as well not exist except for the gods of the Shinto religion. It's a little bit like the way light doesn't "exist" for people who have been blind since birth; you can tell them about it, but since they can never experience it in any way, it's both true for you and not true for them.

I think the ultimate place this question is going (see? it's all over the map!) is toward the idea of animal totems as the original deities or spirits worshiped by ancient societies, and whether or not they count as "gods" in Scion's framework. It's a concept visited by both Joseph Campbell in his Primitive Mythologies and Neil Gaiman in his excellent novel American Gods, and definitely one that's food for thought, especially when we think about the commonly-held theory that the earliest religions of humanity probably involved worship of important animal totems rather than anthropomorphic figures. If, in the ancient pre-recorded times of man's history, we worshiped the bear or the deer or the eagle as themselves, then where are those gods now?

Part of the answer lies in the fact that religions, even ones with strong structure and hierarchy, are living and changing institutions and they have all evolved and adapted over time. Many of those ancient animal gods actually are still around, right under your nose, because they've evolved into the familiar forms of the gods of Scion's current pantheons. The Netjer are a great example of this; many of them were originally zoomorphic in form, and the Old Kingdom artwork of them shows them simply as animals, worshiped without any humanoid form whatsoever. Sobek was originally just a crocodile, Hathor just a cow, and Sekhmet just a lion, and they only became human-like and gained human-like stories later in the religion's evolution. Figures like the Coyote deities of North America are still animal in shape most of the time, but they have gained human-like myths of their exploits and may even take on human form sometimes, placing them perhaps a little earlier on this evolutionary continuum than the older Netjer.

So, for some pantheons, those gods didn't go anywhere; they just changed. Some of them still run around in their animal forms, like Tezcatlipoca rolling up as Tepeyollotl when he doesn't feel like being humanoid, while others, like Baal, have translated from embodying their totem animal to becoming its master instead. This process also works in reverse, by the way, with some animals that were once worshiped as deities being demoted to merely monsters or magical talking animals in half-forgotten folklore; and even more rarely the god and the animal may split entirely, as in the spectacular case of Ninurta in Mesopotamian mythology, who sheds his animalistic form which becomes the Anzu bird, and he the god who controls it.

Another option is indeed that those animal-level gods are still around, but are just lower Legend than most of the heavy hitters of the current pantheons. They don't have much in the way of surviving mythology or stories, after all, and long ago lost their worshipers; in some cases, even the people who used to worship them are gone, moved away, become part of new ethnic groups or even gone extinct. They may still linger on alone, pantheonless if they were not part of a larger group, or perhaps they died in the first Titanomachy, when they had no fellow gods to take care of them and not enough power to defend themselves. If they were part of a pantheon that still exists, they may roam the Overworld, Legend 9 and all but forgotten by humanity and even their fellow gods. Some of them might now be minions of the Titans, absorbed easily into the greater realms of the ideas they once represented.

But if such prehistoric animal totem gods do exist, we know nothing about them, and anything we tried to do with them for Scion would be invented; by definition, they predate recorded history and we therefore know only what we theorize about them. We can look at cave paintings or make guesses about what might have come before those animal beliefs we did have the opportunity to write down or preserve orally, but they're just guesses.

It would be over-simplistic to say that every pantheon has some of these animal gods; not every ancient culture assigned the same importance to animals or, if they did find them important, thought of that importance in the same way. Many cultures, for example, had a concept of a "master animal" - usually the most important animal in the local ecosystem, which was revered above the others and believed to be able to spiritually interact with humans, but was not actually deified and instead conceived of as a race comparable to humans that existed alongside them. And even the master animal concept wasn't always thought of the same way by every culture; some western African cultures thought of the antelope as the master animal because it was their most important food creature and they needed its permission to catch and eat it, but some of the Brazilian rainforest cultures thought of the jaguar as the master animal because it was the most powerful predator of the area and could therefore be considered its "ruling race".

But it's definitely possible for many pantheons to have such gods, and if you want to do something in a story with them, they certainly might be out there. The animal kingdom - everything living, in fact - has been thought of as a power in its own right by most peoples throughout history, and Scion has many, many ways of illustrating that power. As many as there are different treatments of animals across world myths, in fact.