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.

Brigid, Brigid, Brigid!

Question: Why is Brigid not a god with Artistry as an associated purview? For that matter, why does she not have ANY associated purviews? If the implication is that she is not as important/powerful of a god in that pantheon, then that seems strange, seeing as how she is still venerated under the name of St. Brigid. Just curious.

Hey, friend! We've covered this one before (Brigid is so popular, it comes up a lot!), so check out previous discussions about Brigid and her saintly syncretizations here and here. The short version of it is that, in Irish mythology, Brigid is almost a non-entity; she barely appears and does nothing of real consequence, and is clearly far less important to the myths than pretty much everyone else. She marries Bres to legitimize him as ruler of the Tuatha; when he goes rogue, it's said that she fights with the Tuatha instead of with him; and when her son Ruadan is killed, she invents the art of keening. And that is literally the sum total of all the things Brigid ever does in Irish mythology. She is at about the same level as folks like Sif or Hebe when it comes to not being particularly important.

As for Artistry, we are super excited about it being in the world now for gods and Scions to use, but we don't want to give it to every god who wanders by with a passing familiarity with crafts. For those who aren't doing anything special with it, it's likely they have some levels of Artistry but not the whole purview, or even just a good number of dots of Art. Brigid is said to be the patron of metalworkers, but she never does anything even remotely related to it in any story, so she's not rocking the Avatar alongside people like Hephaestus or Brahma.

Lady of Kildare

Question: Hypothetically, what associated Epics/Purviews would Brigid have using her more modern and saintly incarnation?

Sigh. I hate to be boring for you, friend, but we don't have an answer for that. We assign associated Epics and purviews to gods based on as much in-depth research, reading and investigation as we can pull off, and plan them according to the tales of their deeds in ancient myth and the details of their worship in their ancient cult centers. We spend a lot of hours on each and every god's associations, trying to make sure that they most accurately represent what that god does and is about, that they give a clear picture of the powers most strongly tied to that deity and provide their Scions with the opportunity to more easily follow in their footsteps.

But we're not going to do a bunch of research on St. Brigit because we're never going to make her playable, so we're not going to have an answer for you.

We don't run saints as playable parents in Scion (although some folks do, and they seem perfectly happy with the arrangement!). Consequently, unless we have a specific plot seed that demands it, we don't do a lot of research into individual saints. We would if we were running a heavy Christianity-based game in which the saints were major actors, but we're not, so we don't. We've got a vague idea that st. Brigit is associated with, like, healing, and maybe fire? But we're not going to go look it up.

We do use gods and goddesses as playable parents in Scion, but we long ago decided Brigid wasn't going to be one of them, simply because she has almost no surviving associations or stories to lend her importance. She marries Bres the Beautiful to cement the Tuatha alliance when he's the High King, and when her son Ruadan is killed in the ensuing war, she invents keening in order to mourn him. She also owns some famous livestock. Those are her only appearances in what we still have of Irish mythology (as always, suspect and piecemeal because it was recorded by Christian monks who were euhemerizing the snot out of it, but it's all we got), and we have next to nothing left to tell us what her worship might have been like. Based on all that, we have to assume she's probably only a Legend 9 goddess - we'd let someone play her Scion, but we doubt anyone's going to take us up on it.

It's a widely accepted theory that the original goddess Brigid was syncretized with St. Brigit at some point, though since we lack details on what Brigid was about, we can't know what features of St. Brigit are from the goddess and which are from Christian folklore and religious history. If you'd like to play with Brigid as a playable parent and want to fill her out with associations from St. Brigit, we're not going to stop you, but neither are we going to do the research on it for you. It's not because we hate you; it's just that it would be a lot of work for something that we aren't going to use, and we just don't have the hours left to cram into our days.

We'd suggest getting together with Storytellers who do run Brigid as playable and see what they use if you're looking for some guidance, and good luck!

Blood Will Tell

Question: I have a player who is interested in playing a Scion of Brigid. She seems to be around legend 9 according to her stats on the site. If Brigid were to go up in Legend, would the Scion gain her parent's recently acquired associated powers? Or does being a Legendary being already cement the scion into the associated abilities that Brigid created her with? Thoughts?

Alas, I'm sure this isn't what your player wants to hear, but no. Brigid is indeed fairly low-Legend as gods go, and if she's going to be a Scion's parent and a major player in your game, it's quite possible that she'll go up in Legend, but that will not have a retroactive effect on any Scions she creates before then.

The entire idea of associated powers and abilities is that the ichor, godly blood, that flows in a Scion's veins carries with it some of that god's powers. You inherit them because they're part of your parent's bequest to you, a divine genetics, if you will. But you can't inherit something your parent doesn't already have, and Brigid's newfound powers will not affect a Scion who already existed and was invested with her old ones.

To use a science fiction analogy, if you have a child, and then you're exposed to toxic radiation and develop a crazy mutation, you might pass down that mutation to any new children you have. But your first child is not going to spontaneously mutate just from being related to you, because she was born at a time when that wasn't part of the things you could pass on to her.

Divine powers work the same way. A Scion already has their parents' divine ichor in their veins, and is now busy transforming it into their own ichor for their eventual godhood. Brigid developing new powers will not change the ichor her Scions already possess.

Saint Brigid of Kildare

Question: Would Brigid being revered as Saint Brigit by Irish Catholics have a major impact on her personality? Would she be more tame and reserved than the rest of the Tuatha?

That entirely depends on how you want to run syncretism in your games.

Brigid's a very classic example of religious syncretism; while not one of the most important of the Irish gods, she became extremely well-known thanks to her syncretization and eventual absorption into the character of the Catholic Saint Brigid, who has plenty of magical tales and ideas attributed to her thanks to the ever-wonderful embellishing nature of Irish Catholicism. She magically heals people, she predicts the benevolent future, she curses bad people with misfortune, and so on and so forth, generally having a lot of magical elements, like most saints, to back up her holiness and divine favor.

You certainly could decide that these elements might have influenced and shaped the character of the goddess Brigid; after all, Scion's setting includes Fatebonds, so if she were to have accrued enough of them when St. Brigid's legends were being born, they might have caused her to change with them. But if you do so, you have to be aware of the implications for all other religions and deities, because Brigid is far from the only one who suffers from strange syncretization.

If Brigid is going to be affected by the persona of St. Brigid, then will you also be changing Tlazolteotl to better resemble the Virgin Mary? Will you be reframing Baldur as Christ, Baal as Beelzebub, Vishnu as Buddha? Will you be considering all later syncretized forms of Egyptian gods to be closer to how the Greeks thought of them than the Egyptians? What about the Hindu and Shinto pantheons - are they all only what later Buddhism may have made of them? Where are you planning to draw the line when it comes to what syncretization by humanity does and does not do to a god?

The rife cross-culturalization of many ancient religions means that we generally don't give deities powers and stories based on their associations as saints, demons or members of other pantheons, because doing so usually means losing much of their original, unique cultural flavor in favor of dragging in someone else's religious view of them. We prefer the gods in as close a form to their heyday among their own people as we can get them (which varies depending on source material, but we take what we can get!), because part of the fun of Scion is the vast difference between different mythologies and the cultures they come from. Then, too, there's the fact that Christianity and other syncretic religions like it are comparatively young; in Scion's setting, most if not all the gods should have stopped meddling in the World by the time they became popular, which means that they wouldn't be gaining Fatebonds and it doesn't really matter what humanity decides to associate them with because Fate's power isn't behind their syncretizations or comparisons. Just as we've talked before about treating monotheistic religions as largely human inventions, so would their associations and attempts to absorb other religions be mostly human happenings.

Now, I could see Brigid being affected by St. Brigid's stories, but there would need to be very good reasons for it. You'd need to know, as a Storyteller, why she was still running around in the World getting Fatebound when the pantheons had long ago withdrawn, why she did the things she did as St. Brigid, what it might have done to her personality and what the long-ranging effects of all this was, in more dimensions than just what she has associated for XP purposes and whether or not she has a lot of dots of Courage or Piety (also, note that having Piety makes it really, really hard to pretend you're part of a different religion). More importantly, you need a good reason to do all this work, especially if you aren't planning on doing it for every god in the game. If Brigid is directly involved in the plot due to PCs' origins or actions, then you have a reason to work on her - but the answers to the questions about need to have something to do with the plot and the PCs. If the PCs or the plot they're heavily involved in make it so that Brigid needs to be involved and needs to have something to do with Catholicism, then by all means, have at it - but if not, I would steer clear of it lest you open a can of neverending, ravenously syncretic worms.

Generally, we leave Catholicism, along with most other monotheistic and more modern religions, as human creations that probably don't affect the gods much, because it's simpler and stays closer to the themes and ideas we enjoy in Scion; the gods may use them when convenient (particularly the Loa are notorious for doing so), but they aren't defining factors of their personalities. You can certainly decide to make syncretism a major theme for a particular deity, but doing so is a large undertaking, and if you don't have a solid reason to do so, it more often than not may be a lot of window-dressing busy-work for the Storyteller that doesn't meaningfully connect to the game the Scions are playing in the first place.

More interesting to me than trying to stuff gods into their syncretic roles is exploring how they feel about them; some might find them amusing, others might be offended, and I imagine a lot of them feel it's more imperative than ever not to go getting Fatebound in the World if that's what people are going to turn them into when they do.

This is why they need Scions. They so do not want to get any of that on them.