The Source of Saturday

Question: Can you recommend a good source for the Baron Samedi-Samhain connection theory you once mentioned?

Actually, no, although I can tell you where we tripped over it. This is one of those theories that is floating around and referenced by several different works, but that is never visited in-depth enough that we could say, "Oh, here's the book/article/whatever that explains it thoroughly."

For those who haven't seen us mention it before, the basic gist of the theory is that Baron Samedi, a New-World-only loa with no African roots that we know of who seems to have sprung up out of nowhere to become part of his current religion, is influenced by or even a later version of the lesser Irish god Samhain, who was brought over by Irish migrant workers and indentured servants who shared their stories with the local African slaves, thus creating a modern synthesis deity where none had existed before.

We first ran into the idea of Irish influence on African diaspora religions in Margarite Olmos & Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert's Creole Religions of the Caribbean, which does not mention Irish influence on the Baron but does point out that his wife, Maman Brigitte, has been pretty obviously influenced by the Irish Brigid and that the rainbow-goddess Ayeda Wedo has gained a few suspiciously Celtic traits, most noticeably the legend that her crown or treasure may be found at the end of the rainbow (and, incidentally, Ayeda is married to Damballah, who is frequently associated with the Irish Saint Patrick because of the former's status as a god of serpents and the latter's famous exploits driving said serpents out of Ireland). From the other end of the spectrum, Sean O'Callaghan's To Hell or Barbados, which is mainly concerned with the cultural movement of Irish people displaced or forced into slavery in the Americas in the seventeenth century, spends some time discussing the influence of Irish myth and religious practices on both indigenous people and African diaspora slaves that they came into contact with, including a nod to the Baron. We've also seen the Samedi theory pop up in various books on modern vodun worship, but not much from the scholarly end of the spectrum, so I don't have a great citation for you there.

Maman Brigitte's Irish roots are much easier to find information on, and you can usually find at least a throwaway line about how Brigid probably influenced her in both diaspora religion texts that mention that Brigid might have been imported to color Maman Brigitte and Irish mythology texts that mention that Maman Brigitte may be a much later form of the older Brigid (in particular, they often cite Maman Brigitte's connection with death as possibly being descended from Brigid's invention of mourning for her slain son Ruadan). Her clearer connection to Celtic myth doesn't necessarily mean that her husband also came from the isles, of course, especially given the cavalier mix-and-match of American religions around that time period, but it still does paint a picture of some filtered European influence from that area in Loa that don't occur in the old African religions.

Basically, to us it looks like a theory someone once came up with that a lot of people said, "Hey, that might be plausible, neat!" but then no one ever actually did any thorough research or wrote any authoritative paper on it, so it remains ethereal and homeless in the scholarly community.

We like to use the theory of an Irish-based Baron Samedi (because what other theories do we even have about that guy?)and Maman Brigitte as an in-game universe explanation for where the "rootless" gods of the American religions might have come from, but it's only a theory, and not a very solid one at that. No one should confuse it for gospel truth, and while we might use it as an in-game plot device, it would be super religiously incorrect (not to mention very douchey) to try to use it to tell actual modern-day worshipers of vodun that any of their loa don't "belong to them" or are otherwise secretly Europeans in disguise. Even those gods who clearly do have European influence in their history are firmly part of the diaspora religions now and have their own unique character and religious importance.

So for us, in the game world where gods are discrete beings who can run around and do things and be interacted with as characters, Samedi and Brigitte are former members of the Tuatha who migrated to the New World and reinvented themselves as loa who spend their time bolstering the ranks of the Orisha; but don't go extending that to how real people might experience their religions in the real world. We like our games rooted in authenticity, but they're still just games, and like everyone else on the planet, sometimes we just have to take a guess and pick the theory we like most.

Lesser Nobility

Question: I'm kinda new to your Scion world, (which I love, keep it up) and maybe I haven't found it yet, but what happened to Baron Samedi? I remember that Vivian was his Scion. Does he no longer exist?

I feel like we've answered this question ninety-something times, but it's always been either in comments on other posts or emails from concerned citizens, neither of which is easy to find with our search function. So here you go, guys, the Baron can have his very own blog post!

Nothing happened to Baron Samedi (okay, well, things happened to him in our games because he has bad taste in friends, but not in the default setting), nor did he somehow spontaneously cease to exist. While we removed him from the playable roster for the Orisha thanks to his comparatively lower Legend rating and lack of mythology, that doesn't mean he somehow disappeared from the universe; there are loads of minor gods in every pantheon who aren't Legend 12, and the fact that they aren't rocking it up on our family trees doesn't mean that they don't exist. Believe me, we would have committed near-genocide of the Dodekatheon minor god corps, not to mention the numberless Babylonians, if we tried to say that no gods of lower Legend exist. They're still in the world and still just as available for players to interact with and learn to love or despise, and as long as they're at least Legend 9, they can even have Scions if they so choose.

Vivian was and is the daughter of the Baron; his removal from the ranks of the Legend 12 also did not cause her to suddenly mysteriously become someone else's Scion or anything like that. In our games, the official assumption is that Baron Samedi is a former Scion of one of the Orisha himself (most likely Eshu, but it could have been any of them) and a minor god who rose to power fairly recently in history after the African diaspora, along with a number of other younger gods who make up the ranks of the American loa that obviously aren't as old as the orisha of Africa. His influence in Haiti and Louisiana still exists just as it does in the real world today, and since lesser gods are just as capable of having Scions as the big ones, Vivian is still his daughter, a success story of a Scion able to eclipse even her parent's importance with a little heartbreak and elbow grease.

The entire point of Scion is to play and hang out in a world where the polytheistic gods are real, and the Baron is still one of them, even if he lacks the roots in ancient Africa and crazy stories of exploits that the rest of his pantheon has. Everyone should still feel free to use him to their hearts' content, as well as any other god that doesn't appear as a Legend 12 heavy hitter on our site but is still an interesting character in mythology.

The African Face

Question: Just wanted to ask why story-wise you guys seem to focus more on the Loa's African roots then their slightly more modern New World interpretation? Is it because the New World interpretations are kind of a mix of several other religions and traditions? Also, how does the distinctly New World Baron Samedi, fit in with your more African Loa?

No "slightly" about it! The African diaspora religions in the Americas - Candomble, Vodun, Santeria and their other variants - are very, very modern. West Africans first came to the Americas as slaves in the sixteen century, and the diaspora religions grew from there; the oldest roots of them are barely five hundred years old, making them the preteen younger sibling of most of the other mythologies in Scion's universe.

But the native religion of the Yoruba in Benin and Nigeria is much, much older, with traces of cult and stories that date back to about the fourth century B.C., making them contemporaries of the Roman Empire and comparable in age to religions like Shinto that started around the same time. The orisha that became the New World loa have a long tradition of worship and colorful stories on their home turf in Africa, from that misty B.C. time until today, when it's estimated that there are still around a million worshipers in Africa. They are in every way awesome, and more than deserving of a spot in Scion's cast of divine characters.

There are three main reasons, in light of all this, that we much prefer to talk about the orisha as the pantheon of the Yoruba of Africa, instead of using the Scion books' exclusively American version of them:

It leaves out too much awesome stuff. There are tons of awesome, hilarious and fun stories about the orisha of the Yoruba, and yet not a single one of them appears in the Scion line. Because the diaspora religions of the Americas are a heady mix of native African religions (not just the Yoruba but also other African beliefs brought by slaves from different parts of the continent, many of them from totally different mythologies), Christianity, native American beliefs and folk magic, they retain next to nothing of these awesome old stories. The Yoruba slaves who brought the religion with them couldn't write things down and risked severe punishment for even trying to orally retell their stories to others, and as a result almost all of the old mythology was forgotten or retained only in vastly pared-down or mutated form. The epic stories of Shango's problems with his wives, Ogun's bloodlust-fueled rampages across the world, Eshu's world-class asshole medals or Obatala's drunkenly benevolent creations are lost when you ignore the African roots of the loa and orisha, which is a great big damn shame. That's not to say that the diaspora religions haven't given birth to new stories and myths about their gods, because they certainly have; but why on earth would we want to lose out on the old ones by pretending that only the new ones exist?

Nothing else in the setting does that. This is the big one for us: why on earth are the Loa the only pantheon in Scion that uses a modern religion instead of the original ancient one? Seriously, it doesn't make any sense. We're not replacing the myths of the Tuatha de Danann with the new forms of them worshiped in modern Celtic paganism, are we? We're not deciding to roll with the way Asatru treats the Aesir instead of what they do in the Eddas and sagas. But that's exactly what we're doing with the Loa when we decide to frame them as an American pantheon based in Haiti, Cuba, Louisiana and Brazil, and it's very out of character for the rest of the game's setting. I'm actually pretty sure there are a few reasons that this was originally done: the game's aimed at primarily American gamers, who have heard about voodoo in their popular culture but don't know much about Africa, and White Wolf has always had a particular vodun fondness in its lines (which you can see most prominently in WoD, but really, they pop up all over the place!) that probably made it easy to translate over, and they most likely figured that there was no point in working on an African pantheon nobody had ever heard of but still needed to include something from sub-Saharan Africa to make the line vaguely global. The result is that the books use the Loa as the representatives of Africa in the game's world, but bizarrely do so by ignoring the very African religion they came from, instead relying on the very modern, very Europe- and Christianity-influenced diaspora religions.

That's kind of super lame for Africa. And dude, that kind of sucks, you know? Here we are getting to delve into the awesome ancient cultures of China and Japan and Greece even the Aztecs, and yet when it comes to Africa, we're told, "Well, that sounds like a lot of work/we aren't sure it would sell well, so here's voodoo dolls instead." That sucks! Why does every other mythology in the game get the benefit of their ancient traditions, native stories and pantheon of awesome gods, but the Yoruba have to roll with only what survived on a different continent in altered form after centuries of slavery? Sure, the average gamer doesn't know a lot about African mythology that isn't centered around the Nile, but why should that mean that it gets thrown away? The solution is to tell those awesome stories, to give that awesome background, and to include the Yoruba pantheon as a vibrant and amazing set of gods in its own right, just as the game books do for every other group of gods.

And the kicker, of course, is that this doesn't even mean you have to lose all the fun New World versions of the orisha! A Scion of one of the Orisha could be aligned with any form of him over time, just as a Hindu Scion might see his parent as the Vedic Rudra or the more modern Shiva and be able to do cool stuff related to whichever version he likes. If you're a Scion of Shango, you're absolutely free to play with the African myths about Shango, or the New World Trinidad-and-Tobago myths about Shango, or even with the stories of Saint Barbara if you want. You can still flavor your Scion with whichever version of his father you please, just as a Scion of Lugh might go with his Welsh or Gaulish versions without batting an eye. If you want to be a blues-playing, devil-pacting Scion of Kalfu from Louisiana, the fact that your parent is actually the African god Eshu won't make a single bit of difference to your pursuing that concept. Plenty of gods have changed over the course of their religions, gaining different forms or ideas attached to them; the orisha are no different.

And that's exactly why we think they shouldn't be treated any differently, and that their religion shouldn't be demoted to second-class status just because the average gamer might be slightly more familiar with the modern version. The orisha are not American gods that used to be in Africa a long time ago; they're African gods that have surprising influence in the Americas. Embrace and love their roots, because they're every bit as awesome as the roots of every other pantheon in Scion.

As for the Baron, he's always the point of contention that comes up when we talk about this stuff, because he's both the most popular and recognizable of the New World Loa, and yet also one of the few among them that has absolutely no origin in Africa as far as we can tell. He's entirely homegrown in the Americas (primarily Haiti), which puts him in the same odd, awkward position as other thoroughly modern gods: obviously legitimate, since he has grown up as part of this religion and is definitely regarded and worshiped as a god, but also obviously outside the pantheon proper. You see a lot of this in the diaspora religions because of one of the points we mentioned above: African slaves were imported from all over the continent and often had no language or religion in common, meaning that they shared their beliefs, and furthermore they worked alongside laborers from still further distant cultures, including poor immigrant Europeans, native American servants and Amazonian tribesmen. The result is that sometimes the diaspora religions adopt religious figures from a completely different mythology that has nothing to do with their own, and you end up with such "rootless" gods as Baron Samedi.

Our favorite theory about the Baron, and the one we currently use in our games, is that he might actually have his roots in Celtic stories rather than African ones, most specifically the figure of Samhain, who plays a very minor role in the Tain bo Cuailgne. The scholarly theory goes that Irish immigrant workers laboring alongside African slaves might have shared some of their fairy tales and mythic stories, and that the Baron grew out of the African synthesis of those things into their own religion, pairing him with another possible Irish import in Maman Brigitte (who, under this theory, is most likely borrowed from the Irish Brigid). Since we have no African origin for the Baron, we enjoy that fun side explanation for him, making him a Tuatha refugee who jumped ship to a new religion in the Americas and made it his own.

But of course you don't have to use that - it is, after all, only a theory, and definitely not one that has a great deal of hard evidence other than obscure linguistics to back it up - so the Baron can be handled pretty much any way you want him to. We're most likely going to consider him an adjunct to the African pantheon - probably a god who isn't quite Legend 12 yet (because, while he's very cool and famous, he also has very few stories of actually doing anything) and is one of the younger generation of New World loa that are buttressing the ranks of the Orisha. But if you love the Baron, love the diaspora religions and want to keep him a Legend 12 top dog along with everyone else, we certainly won't stop you.

Our entire aim in rewriting the Loa to become the African Orisha is to include more awesomeness in their toybox, not less. So keep on loving them as Louisiana voodoo priests, as the saints of Santeria and the orixa of Candomble and the big goddamn pimps of Xango, and do whatever you want with them. We're not here to tell you what you can't do; we want to give you a whole lot more that you can.

Party Time! Excellent!

Question: Veles, the Baron and Loki force the mortal world to entertain them with a festival devoted to them. What kind of crazy consequences do you think this would have? Also, would you think a pantheon tied to honoring deceased gods though songs and festivals would be valid concept for a new pantheon and PSP?

Wait, Veles started a giant mortal festival party and didn't invite Radegast? That's about to get awkward.

I'd imagine such a festival would be the usual; for the gods, the only real danger would be Fatebonds incurred while setting it up, or possibly during it if they happened to show up in person. For mortals, it would probably involve a lot of shenanigans and carnival-esque games and pranks, as well as a lot of alcohol and food. One of those hungover, I-regret-my-religion moments for everyone the next day.

It'd actually be interesting as an experiment, because, like many things in Scion, it would be something that's never happened before. Veles, Loki and the Baron are all parts of very different religions, so by setting up a festival in their joint honor, they'd be merging themselves weirdly and probably confusing a lot of mortals. The festival's flavor would probably vary wildly depending on where they did it, who the mortals were and how many of them were already members of one god or another's religion, and whose personality emerged more strongly. Mortals would likely interpret the two gods they didn't recognize as some heretofore unknown god of their own religion - ah, of course, the mighty Loa Loke! - or perhaps invent an entirely new religion around the three, believing them to be their own pantheon. It would depend a lot on what the gods caused those mortals to believe; left to their own devices, they'd have to try to figure out what was happening on their own.

As for creating an ancestor festival PSP, I think that could definitely work; ancestor worship has a strong presence across the world but is mostly unrepresented in Scion at the moment, which relies on the Death purview for anything having to do with the spirits of the honored dead. However, the important part about designing a PSP is that is needs to be the core concept of a pantheon's religion or theme; it can't just be something they kind of do but that everyone else does, too. You need it to be iconic for the pantheon the same way blood sacrifice is for the Aztlanti or geasa for the Tuatha, so your PSP should really only be about ancestor festivals if your pantheon's most central and important concept is the worship of the dead through festivals. This pantheon should be presiding over a religion with regular ancestor sacrifice, communication and celebration as the most important thing it does; if that's the case, then this PSP makes perfect sense, but if that's really only a kind of fringe thing they do occasionally, it might not be strong enough to be the foundation of a PSP.

A pantheon that is all about drawing power or giving thanks to previous generations - to a degree even stronger than the many religions that already include ancestor worship - would definitely be a very cool concept to build on. It's especially appropriate for Scion, since any new gods who were once Scions have a whole universe of other gods and ancestors who have gone before them that it couldn't hurt to make friends with.