One and Only Sun

Question: Would the Netjer be as pissed about the Amarna art period as mortals were? I imagine that portion of history as a whole bothers them. On that note, how do you run Akhenaten's worship of the Sun Disc Aten in your games? Is it a Titan as in the books or...?

Indeed, the Netjer were probably pretty annoyed about the Amarna period, which was when the cult of Aten was at its height and all other Egyptian gods were officially declared by the state to be subordinate to him or merely other expressions of his might. While the shenanigans of mortals don't normally annoy gods too much - people are going to make inaccurate graffiti, it's just something they do when their brains are too tiny to really comprehend the divine correctly - the Amarna period represents a time when the Netjer were not being given their due as deities thanks to the interference of Aten and the mortal dynasty that supported him, and even if they wouldn't normally care about what mortals are up to, they certainly care about that. This is a Piety pantheon, which means anything that tries to claim they aren't important and divine is going to severely rub them the wrong way.

There might be degrees within the pantheon, however. Ra's an interesting case, because on the one hand the early stages of Atenism heavily syncretized him with Aten, the better to get around the then-powerful priesthood of Ra to prevent them from shutting the whole thing down too early. Ra is therefore the only god, by virtue of also being a major sun-deity, who could really be said to have partaken in Aten's fame and fortune and to therefore possibly have benefited slightly from the whole messy affair. But, on the other hand, Ra was also unquestionably the preeminent power in Egyptian religion before Aten arose, so even if he was peripherally involved in the Aten cult, his own cult seriously suffered until it was restored by Smenkhkare a few decades later. In that sense, Atenism was more of a personal insult to him than to any of the other gods, so he might have been the most cranky of the entire lot. While Piety would make it pretty difficult for any of the Netjer to really like what was going on, it's also still possible that some of them - those who were already obscure, for example, or whose worship was already suffering under Ra's supremacy - might have taken a certain satisfaction in watching the most powerful of the Egyptian gods get knocked down a peg or two, even if it only lasted for a little while.

However, that was then and this is now, and the Netjer probably aren't upset about it anymore. The succeeding millennium of Egyptian worship struck Atenism from its rolls thoroughly and viewed the entire period as an unfortunate and bizarre incident that didn't deserve any real religious merit, and the gods were appropriately reinstated and venerated for centuries to come, so it's probably easy for them to feel the smug superiority of having crushed the upstart who dared threaten their power and reasserted their dominion as the most important deities of the region for a long, long time. The Netjer are not a particularly reactionary or grudge-holding pantheon, so they're more likely to sneer at the Amarna period's ridiculous antics than actually get upset over them so long after the fact - after all, the better deities clearly won that one, so there's nothing more that needs to be said.

We do indeed consider Aten a Titan; he has many obvious hallmarks of one, from his indistinct form and distant worship to the religious character of his cult that wanted to undermine all other gods in his region, but we don't use him quite the way the Scion books do. He's not the "main" antagonist for the Netjer, since that title undisputably goes to the terrible serpent Apep who must be battled by the gods each day to keep the world from plunging into darkness, but he is still an antagonist and danger to them and must be dealt with when he pokes his head onto the scene. We used the book's vehicle of Aten-as-sole-Avatar when we started out games way back in the mists of time, but now that we're a little oler and wiser we would probably avoid that; there's no reason to ignore other sun- or light-aligned Titans in favor of smashing them into Aten, since that's annoyingly syncretic and robs the game of neat bad guys it could be using, and the idea of Aten as a monotheistic entity isn't really accurate anyway. Even during the height of his power, the other gods of Egypt still existed and were still worshiped, and only the most radical fringes of his cult tried to actually claim they didn't. Atenism was definitely one of the earliest forms of religion that trended toward monotheism, but it wasn't true monotheism and we're not huge fans of pretending that it was. Breaking down the whole spectrum of monolatrism/henotheism that occurs in between polytheism and monotheism is pretty simplistic, and you guys know we don't do simplistic when we can help it.

If we were rewriting the Titanrealm of Light right now (someday soon, maybe!), Aten would certainly be in it, but he would not be the only Avatar. There are not as many obvious Titans of Light across world mythology as there are for other realms, since humanity tends to think of light as a friendly and benevolent force, but they are out there and should get their time to shine (ha!), too.