These People Are the Reason Sophia Archimedes Changed Her Name at God

Question: The Gnostic deity Sophia and others seem promising as possible deities for Scion. If you had Sophia, the Demiurge, and others as Gnostic deities to be Scions of, what kind of contribution do you think they could add to the Setting's plot/story/background?

Question: Is it actually possible to do a Gnostic pantheon? I mean, the Demiurge would sound like a really awesome Titan Avatar.

All right, folks - I hope you were ready for branch monotheism and medieval wackiness, because apparently that's where we're going today!

Gnosticism is one of the first really serious schools of Christianity to deviate substantially from mainstream belief, and is largely based on Platonic philosophy that was incorporated into fledgling Greek Christianity of the time. Like most religions, it's very complicated and has a lot of specific features gained or lost through different splinter sects and doctrinal additions, but the major features are these: that the world was created by the Demiurge (either God or a servant of God), that it is not truly reality but rather the poor material facsimile that is all most humans can comprehend, and that true salvation can only be achieved by seeing past the material to true enlightenment, a state called Gnosis that is achieved when one is aided by Sophia, the personification of wisdom. Some branches of Gnosticism recognize the existence of various lesser "deities", but always under the understanding that these are mere aspects or emanations of God rather than separate beings; others assign the creative Demiurge all kinds of bizarre alternate personas, ranging from viewing him as God to the Devil to an unrelated deity or demon to an interloper from another universe and everything in between.

Gnosticism, no lie, is bananas. Various branches of it, while holding onto the same basic ideas it started with from Christianity, have been influenced by a lot of other beliefs and cultures. Persian-flavored sects believed that the Demiurge was Ahura Mazda, creating the world, or alternately that it was Angra Mainyu, perpetrating the great lie by building the imperfect representation of the world on top of the real truth of enlightenment (and incidentally, doesn't that bring up some great Indo-Aryan conflux, too, with the idea of the physical world as created by Brahma not being real?). Egyptian-flavored sects believed that the Demiurge was Ra, or Ptah, or an unnamed son of one of them, or simply God as he was believed in by the Coptic Christians. Greek-flavored sects followed the common Greco-Roman practice of personifying abstract concepts and are responsible for most of the ideas of the Aeons (lesser "gods") and Sophia herself as living creatures of the cosmos, which were in turn passed to various other kinds of Gnosticism, and by the time the religion largely fell out of favor (around 300 C.E. or so), there were almost no parts of it that hadn't been influenced by one another in some way.

As you can imagine, scholars have had an absolute field day with Gnosticism, pretty much unceasingly from the nineteenth century (when study of it was resurrected by the Enlightenment) up until now. While various other religions' deities and ideas have clearly filtered into various sects of Gnosticism, the religion itself has its origins in Christianity; various branches claim they predate Christianity, but we have no records of its existence before the rise of the worship of Christ. The basic skeleton of Gnosticism is still largely Christian (and Judaic) as well, with a single distant God (who may or may not be the same as the creator figure, depending on the sect) in charge of all of humanity and lesser beings, even supernatural ones, subordinate to his will. The idea of achieving salvation through secret knowledge is explored further in the later medieval Christian branches of Mysticism, although seldom with as much craziness involved. The familiar figures of the Christian prophets are usually present as well, although whether they're messiahs or false prophets also depends on the particular flavor you're rocking.

If this looks crazy to try to fit into Scion's setting, that's because it is. We are probably never going to seriously approach the idea of trying to fold Gnosticism into Scion, for a few reasons. To begin with, its core ideas are Christian; especially in the older versions of Gnosticism, it comes across much more as a religion for people who are in the process of converting from polytheism to Christianity (which is, in all likelihood, what it mostly was, bringing holdovers from local polytheistic religions slowly in to be reinterpreted into the framework of monotheism). You can see a lot of Gnosticism still hanging on in modern forms of Christianity, in fact - for example, Sophia is still acknowledged in Catholicism, as a personification of the spiritual understanding of the Holy Trinity rather than an actual being. And that makes trying to adapt Gnosticism into a Scion pantheon subject to all the normal problems of working with Christianity and other monotheistic religions; at its heart, it's not a collection of equal deities, but rather a single God with various subordinate personas or servants, which doesn't play well with a polytheistic setting.

Another reason is that for many of the strongly polytheistic-flavored parts of Gnosticism, the polytheism in question is actually borrowed from various outside religions that already exist in Scion. The Netjer, Theoi and Yazata are already covering many of the most blatantly pantheonic aspects of Gnosticism, which should come as no surprise since those aspects are often directly acquired from them in the first place. Even Sophia exists already in ancient Greek religion as an abstract personification of wisdom, although she isn't particularly important and it's only once Socrates and Plato start involving her in their philosophic (literally philo-, "friend", and sophia, "knowledge", combined into one word) endeavors that the word/persona is given all that much importance.

And, finally, Sophia and the Aeons are personalities, but not true deities; they are not worshiped separately and do not have their own cults, and were always understood to be subordinate emanences of the original and ineffable God. Even the Demiurge, which depending on the strain of Gnosticism might be God himself or an intermediary creator made to take over the job, sometimes an agent of good who performs things that God is too large or important to manage and sometimes an agent of evil who by creating falsified realty keeps humanity from achieving true enlightenment, is really just a "part" of God, not a separate being. This wouldn't necessarily totally preclude them from being considered a pantheon - after all, Hinduism uses some of the same ideas - but there's too much monotheism going on here and precious little reason to try to split the whole mess off into something that fits into Scion's worldview.

But your question is really "Can I do this in Scion?" and the answer, of course, is yes. We wouldn't do it, but we're not the only game in town. Games that already roll with monotheism in some form or another should be able to fold Gnosticism into that with ease, and even those who don't are of course free to decide any darn thing is legitimate as a pantheon if they want to. You could decide that Sophia, Horon, Ecclesia and the other emanations of God are deities in their own right and stat them up, and since you're far away from us, we won't be around to frown and wag our fingers at you.

There are also plenty of ways to monkey around with Gnosticism without trying to invent a gnostic "pantheon", too; for example, you could claim that any one of the other religions that influenced Gnosticism is actually responsible for the movement's popularity, and that the gnostic sects were a result of the Theoi or Yazata or whomever trying to reclaim their worshipers from the new threat of Christianity. You could also decide that while Gnosticism itself is monotheistic, the emanations subordinate to God within it are actually aliases or alternative names for gods or Titans of other pantheons who used this opportunity to influence Christianity according to their own agenda. Or maybe those "gods" are in fact former Scions, who rose to godhood during the rise of Christianity and found a way to make their mark and be worshiped within it in a way that their firmly polytheistic parents were not flexible enough to do. It's a tricky idea to work in, but not really any more so than other brands of monotheism, so if you're game for anything like that, you should be able to give it a shot.

For our games, we're pretty certain that Gnosticism is at its root a variation on the usual Judeo-Christian monotheistic theme, so we're unlikely to add it to the overall polytheistic world of Scion. But of course, you're always free to pursue whatever you like in your own!