Question: Are there any other cultures that have a divine end of days scenario aside from the Aesir and Ragnarok?
Oh, sure, tons of them. Eschatology, the study of the events of the end of the world, is not a purely European concept at all; many other cultures have their own ideas of what will happen at the death of the universe, some of them specifically marked and dated, others only implied.
The Norse stories of Ragnarok are very specific about times, places and people involved and so on, largely because they're predicated on prophecies. Details have been furnished by seers and soothsayers who have the ability to see into the future of Fate's weave; other cultures may not have as strong an emphasis on prophetic visions, and instead base their end-of-the-world scenarios on information gleaned from scripture or estimations based on their cosmological concepts of time and space.
One of the most famous, thanks to its religion still being a thriving and living one, is the end of the Kali Yuga in Hinduism. According to Hindu theology, every "day" - equivalent to literally millions of years, varying from four to several hundred depending on the scripture and sect - for Brahma, who experiences time much more slowly than mere humans, is equal to four ages in the world, roughly 24,000 years total. These four ages are the Satya Yuga (Age of Truth), in which religion, wisdom and prosperity are the rule of the universe; the Treta Yuga (Age of Three, referring to the number of pillars of Dharma remaining to support things at this time), in which evil begins to afflict the world but great heroes also arise to combat it; the Dvapara Yuga (Age of Two, referring to the now only at half-strength number of pillars), in which humanity is flawed but also kingly and learns to expiate their sins through study of the holy Vedas; and the Kali Yuga (Age of Kali, here referring to the asura Kali, not the goddess of the same name), during which humanity has degenerated into wanton sin and depravity and forgotten all but the most basic teachings of Hinduism.
We're currently in the Kali Yuga, which started at the moment that Vishnu left his last earthly incarnation, according to most interpretations of Hindu mythology (yes, just as in Greek mythology, we are the worst ever crop of humanity. Go us). Just as in the Norse myths of Ragnarok, the end of the Kali Yuga - and therefore the end of the world, when Brahma blinks and restarts the world once more at the beginning of the Satya Yuga - there are several prophesied events, culminating in a final showdown between the asura Kali, who is the one who has destroyed all righteousness on earth during the centuries of the Kali Yuga, and Kalki, the final avatar of Vishnu, who is destined to defeat him and in so doing end the world and make it ready for the beginning of the Satya Yuga again.
There's a ton of scripture out there on the Kali Yuga, not to mention reams of literature written by Hindu theologists and philosophers over the past thousand years or two, so if you want to really dig into it in detail, libraries and the internet are ready to help.
Of course, seldom in Scion do we discuss the problems of the Deva without also mentioning the Yazata, so a quick side trip into Zoroastrianism gets us another awesome end of the world scenario. The ancient Persian word for the event is Frashokereti, meaning "things become excellent", and as in Hindu tradition the world is broken up into ages, although in this case there are three instead of four (the first two were the Age of Creation and the Age of Pollution or Combination), and we're currently heading into the Age of Separation, when good and evil fight for supremacy.
According to Zoroastrian prophecy in the Avesta, the end of the world will be ushered in by the Saoshyant, a special hero and the son of the great Ahura Mazda himself (or in other traditions, Zarathustra), born from a virgin who bathes in a lake in which a trace of the supreme god's semen was left in order to impregnate her. The Saoshyant (who in Scion terms is definitely a kind of super specialized Scion, although in what terms totally depends on your take on Ahura Mazda) will wield the weapons of Vahram, resurrect the righteous dead to live again and lead the Yazata against the evil forces of the daeva, eventually defeating them. The gods will then melt the world into rivers of molten lava and metal, which will wash over all living things; the worthy and good will be able to wade through them to become one with heaven in bliss, but the evil will be utterly destroyed, along with Angra Mainyu and all his daeva minions.
Slightly north of Persia we run into the Slavs, who have their own eschatological forecast; according to Slavic tradition, Svarog lives for one million years, each day of which is the entire lifespan of the World (more than a little bit similar to Brahma, eh?). Each "day", he slumbers in the egg of the sun until he awakens in the evening, at which point he sweeps everything in the universe - all creation, living things, even the other gods - into one big pile and reconstitutes them into the pure stuff of creation, which he then fashions into the next world. This is called Sweeping Day and happens continually and regularly, like clockwork, and each time he recreates the Bogovi to take over their traditional foes, reborn with no memory of the last world. There's no specific time frame given for this, so we don't know how many years each world lasts; technically, Sweeping Day could be at any time, which is sobering. Someone with Prophecy should get on figuring that out.
We've also got the Mesopotamian religions; while they don't have any particular predictions for what will happen when the world ends, they do have an exact date. According to Babylonian texts, the world has a lifetime of "twelve times twelve sars", where one sar is equal to 36,000 years, so therefore the world is scheduled to last exactly 5,184,000 years. Furthermore, at the time of their civilization, they believed that there were only twelve sars - 432,000 years - left to go and that the vast majority of the world's lifespan was already over. So if we assume that's counting from the beginning of the major time of power for the Babylonian empire, around 1800 B.C.E., we're looking at a precise date for the end of the world in the year 430,200 C.E. In other words, too far away to care (which is probably what all that theoretical math was supposed to mean in Babylonian texts in the first place).
The two other major end-times scenarios that come to mind - those of the Aztec and Egyptian religions - are conditional, meaning that they aren't scheduled as an inevitability but will happen only if specific events occur first. For the Aztecs, we're currently living in the fifth world; the previous four worlds were each destroyed by large-scale disasters brought on by squabbles between the gods, in each case leading with the defection or destruction of the current sun deity. While there is no forecasted end of the world, it's understood that if the current sun - now embodied by Tonatiuh and protected by Huitzilopochtli - is destroyed or goes rogue, the fifth world will be destroyed as well. Depending on the tradition, some Mexican sources imply that a sixth world would then be created with a new god serving as the sun, while others - possibly more modern or influenced by Christianity - claim that the fifth world is the last one and that its destruction would spell the final and incontrovertible end.
Things are far more uncomfortable for the Egyptians; their cosmology is based on the idea that Ra, as the original creator of the universe, may at any time decide to become tired of it. If that occurs, he will decide to simply go to sleep, and as a result the world will be destroyed until such time as he decides to wake up and give remaking a new one a shot. While this hasn't happened yet, it's been a very near thing at least once; in one Egyptian story, Ra decides he's disenchanted with the whole affair and is about to pull the plug, and Hathor, goddess of beauty, joy and sexuality, narrowly averts disaster by lifting up her skirt and flashing him a full view of her incredibly attractive genitals. Ra is so amused he laughs uproariously, and then decides that he couldn't possibly destroy anything that awesome, so the world lives on another day. He could, however, decide to destroy the world at any moment; the only other end-of-the-world note is that Osiris is the only god expressly said to survive that apocalypse and be able to converse with Ra afterward, although he's not always very thrilled about the prospect.
With all this madness going on, there are plenty of doomsday possibilities to play with for Scion games. This is your hour to shine, oracles and prophets!
Showing posts with label Egypt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Egypt. Show all posts
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Sunday, November 3, 2013
From the Victorian Era to Modern Hollywood: Egypt Never Gets a Break
Question: From one mythology nerd to another I felt the need to share my outrage over something. Have you heard of the upcoming movie "Gods of Egypt"? It's supposed to be a mythological epic starring the aforementioned gods, only they were all cast as white actors. Since I've seen a lot of your blog posts dedicated to correcting pop culture misconceptions about world mythology so I wanted to hear what you thought of this one.
Oh, Hollywood, what the hell are we going to do with you?
Yes, we're aware of Gods of Egypt, although it's still in pre-production and probably won't see the light of day for a while yet. And yes, although casting is only half-done, all the actors so far are as white as white can be.
This is not awesome, and the reason it is not awesome is that Egyptian gods would presumably look Egyptian, and the ancient Egyptians were emphatically not white. A lot of the perception of them as looking kind of Caucasian comes from the nineteenth century, when egyptology suddenly came into vogue as a sort of exotic, interesting pastime for the European elite. Egyptian artifacts were being dug up and taken to Europe by amateur archaeologists and private collectors, easily avoiding any trouble from an Egyptian government that didn't have much power to prevent them and was predominantly Muslim-controlled at the time anyway and consequently didn't much care; in fact, selling ancient Egyptian relics to European tourists was one of the most booming ways to make money in Egypt for a while. Europeans, especially in England and France, held theme parties where they dressed up as Egyptians (theoretically) and ate Egyptian food (supposedly) and discussed their latest finds. Some even actually procured mummies to display and even unwrap in their salons for such parties, and disposed of them after they were done impressing their friends.
This pop culture craze for ancient Egypt went hand in hand with the archaeological world really starting to seriously try to study and interpret the long-gone civilization. The Rosetta Stone had finally enabled translation of some hieroglyphs at the turn of the century, and the next several decades were rife with scholarly theory, investigation and intrepretation, some of it insanely wacky. There were the hysterics that mummification was a magical process meant to create the undead, the theories that the Egyptians must have been monotheists and that all their pantheon of gods were merely aspects of the same one deity... and the idea that the Egyptians were white, which has stuck around stubbornly for centuries now. The theory went that since the Egyptians had slaves from Nubia and other areas of Africa which were depicted as of darker skin than themselves, they must have been the white "master race" of the time period, using the lesser Africans as their servants while they concentrated on their great feats of art and culture - which, of course, could never have been achieved by anyone other than white people in the first place.
It's a pretty disgusting theory, but that's the early nineteenth century for you. Slavery was still common, people were still seriously and perniciously advancing the idea that Africans and other people of color were not actually humans or at the very least inherently inferior to Europeans, and science was still trying to prove things through phrenology. It was a weird time.
At any rate, what all this means to us today is that we've got this old, shitty idea of Egyptians-as-white-people still kicking around from the days of poor scholarship of yore, and apparently it's one of the harder ones to get rid of, in spite of how stupid it is. Egypt is, of course, in Africa, within spitting distance of the Canaanite- and Arab-dominated peninsulas to its east, and you know what ancient race lived there that was white? Nobody. The answer is nobody. This is pretty obvious when you look at Egyptian art; even thousands of years later after it's been through who knows how much weathering and fading, the people depicted in Egyptian painting and sculpture are clearly not in the neighborhood of Caucasian.
Of course, exactly what color skin they had is sort of up for debate, since they've been gone for thousands of years and there have since been plenty of influxes of foreign blood, from the Greco-Roman arrivals from the north, African imports from the south and west and Arab influence from the east. The last is particularly prominent in modern Egypt, which was under Ottoman rule for a long time. But European, or European-looking, they definitely were not. (Except for parts of the Ptolemy dynasty who were actually Greek. But they're a late development.)
Which brings us back around to Hollywood and its total inability to not whitewash supposedly Egyptian characters. It's that same weird old misconception we have about Egyptians-as-Caucasians, only now it's also part of the Hollywood tendency toward making the vast majority of its characters white whenever possible unless directly marketing to an audience of a different race or ethnicity. Gods of Egypt isn't doing anything new, sad to say. Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra is one of our most famous images when it comes to Egypt, and have you guys seen The Mummy Returns? You know, the part where Rachel Weisz, one of the whitest people on the planet, is an Egyptian princess?
But, anyway: Gods of Egypt. Alas, it is full of white people. Very talented ones, mind you (guys, I would probably pay to watch Geoffrey Rush sit in a bus station for six hours humming to himself), but it's not hard to see why so many people are disappointed in Hollywood once again deciding to tell a story about a different culture and then cast nobody who bears even a passing resemblance to them. I'm sure Jamie Lannister will probably do a fine job as Horus, but how many actors of color could have done the same but never got the chance?
We have to say we don't have high hopes for the movie itself; mythology movies have been almost uniformly awful for the past few decades, and while we'd love to be proved wrong by this one, we're not holding our breaths. But only time will tell!
Oh, Hollywood, what the hell are we going to do with you?
Yes, we're aware of Gods of Egypt, although it's still in pre-production and probably won't see the light of day for a while yet. And yes, although casting is only half-done, all the actors so far are as white as white can be.
This is not awesome, and the reason it is not awesome is that Egyptian gods would presumably look Egyptian, and the ancient Egyptians were emphatically not white. A lot of the perception of them as looking kind of Caucasian comes from the nineteenth century, when egyptology suddenly came into vogue as a sort of exotic, interesting pastime for the European elite. Egyptian artifacts were being dug up and taken to Europe by amateur archaeologists and private collectors, easily avoiding any trouble from an Egyptian government that didn't have much power to prevent them and was predominantly Muslim-controlled at the time anyway and consequently didn't much care; in fact, selling ancient Egyptian relics to European tourists was one of the most booming ways to make money in Egypt for a while. Europeans, especially in England and France, held theme parties where they dressed up as Egyptians (theoretically) and ate Egyptian food (supposedly) and discussed their latest finds. Some even actually procured mummies to display and even unwrap in their salons for such parties, and disposed of them after they were done impressing their friends.
Yes, that is some people posing proudly with the thousand-year-old mummy they just unwrapped and poked around in. Please have your Virtue Extremities in the designated areas.
This pop culture craze for ancient Egypt went hand in hand with the archaeological world really starting to seriously try to study and interpret the long-gone civilization. The Rosetta Stone had finally enabled translation of some hieroglyphs at the turn of the century, and the next several decades were rife with scholarly theory, investigation and intrepretation, some of it insanely wacky. There were the hysterics that mummification was a magical process meant to create the undead, the theories that the Egyptians must have been monotheists and that all their pantheon of gods were merely aspects of the same one deity... and the idea that the Egyptians were white, which has stuck around stubbornly for centuries now. The theory went that since the Egyptians had slaves from Nubia and other areas of Africa which were depicted as of darker skin than themselves, they must have been the white "master race" of the time period, using the lesser Africans as their servants while they concentrated on their great feats of art and culture - which, of course, could never have been achieved by anyone other than white people in the first place.
It's a pretty disgusting theory, but that's the early nineteenth century for you. Slavery was still common, people were still seriously and perniciously advancing the idea that Africans and other people of color were not actually humans or at the very least inherently inferior to Europeans, and science was still trying to prove things through phrenology. It was a weird time.
At any rate, what all this means to us today is that we've got this old, shitty idea of Egyptians-as-white-people still kicking around from the days of poor scholarship of yore, and apparently it's one of the harder ones to get rid of, in spite of how stupid it is. Egypt is, of course, in Africa, within spitting distance of the Canaanite- and Arab-dominated peninsulas to its east, and you know what ancient race lived there that was white? Nobody. The answer is nobody. This is pretty obvious when you look at Egyptian art; even thousands of years later after it's been through who knows how much weathering and fading, the people depicted in Egyptian painting and sculpture are clearly not in the neighborhood of Caucasian.
Pictured above: not white people.
Of course, exactly what color skin they had is sort of up for debate, since they've been gone for thousands of years and there have since been plenty of influxes of foreign blood, from the Greco-Roman arrivals from the north, African imports from the south and west and Arab influence from the east. The last is particularly prominent in modern Egypt, which was under Ottoman rule for a long time. But European, or European-looking, they definitely were not. (Except for parts of the Ptolemy dynasty who were actually Greek. But they're a late development.)
Which brings us back around to Hollywood and its total inability to not whitewash supposedly Egyptian characters. It's that same weird old misconception we have about Egyptians-as-Caucasians, only now it's also part of the Hollywood tendency toward making the vast majority of its characters white whenever possible unless directly marketing to an audience of a different race or ethnicity. Gods of Egypt isn't doing anything new, sad to say. Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra is one of our most famous images when it comes to Egypt, and have you guys seen The Mummy Returns? You know, the part where Rachel Weisz, one of the whitest people on the planet, is an Egyptian princess?
But, anyway: Gods of Egypt. Alas, it is full of white people. Very talented ones, mind you (guys, I would probably pay to watch Geoffrey Rush sit in a bus station for six hours humming to himself), but it's not hard to see why so many people are disappointed in Hollywood once again deciding to tell a story about a different culture and then cast nobody who bears even a passing resemblance to them. I'm sure Jamie Lannister will probably do a fine job as Horus, but how many actors of color could have done the same but never got the chance?
We have to say we don't have high hopes for the movie itself; mythology movies have been almost uniformly awful for the past few decades, and while we'd love to be proved wrong by this one, we're not holding our breaths. But only time will tell!
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Etymological Excitement!
Are you going to be renaming the darkness Titanrealm? 'Cause I see you named it Keku and you have a Titan Avatar named Kuk, both of which are part of the Egyptian myth and, as far as I know, they are the same person, just different names. If you are not, can you elaborate on this subject?
Sure, though I don't think too much elaboration will be needed!
"Keku" is simply the ancient Egyptian word for "darkness". There is no real legendary locale in Egyptian myth that could lend its name to a Titanrealm, and since the place is the source of all darkness and the homeland of all the darkness problems constantly plaguing the gods of Egyptian myth, we figured there was no reason not to use it as the name of the place. Keku isn't a person; it's just a noun.
However, the confusion comes in for Kuk, whose name also means "darkness" - it's just a slightly different form of the same root word. Kuk is a person, one of the primordial Ogdoad and the personified representative of darkness within it, so it's not surprising that his name is very functional and just tells you what he's about. All of the Ogdoad are like that, in fact; his counterparts are Nu ("water"), Huh ("eternity") and Amun ("hidden"), for the respective gods of water, eternity and invisibility.
So when we talk about Keku, we're talking about exactly what the word means: darkness, the realm of lightless shadow in which all the Darkness Titan Avatars brood. It's a place, not a person, and is always referred to one. Kuk's name is etymologically almost identical to Keku, but that's just one of the perils of dealing with Titans, who are so old that their names are often just nouns that refer to a concept. We use the more common form of his name to differentiate him from the realm, which uses the generic noun form, and everybody can go home happy.
So never fear, there's neither an accidentally doubled Titan Avatar nor a linguistically confused misnamed realm at play here. It's just that Egyptian mythology is very fond of naming its Titans nouns instead of proper names.
Sure, though I don't think too much elaboration will be needed!
"Keku" is simply the ancient Egyptian word for "darkness". There is no real legendary locale in Egyptian myth that could lend its name to a Titanrealm, and since the place is the source of all darkness and the homeland of all the darkness problems constantly plaguing the gods of Egyptian myth, we figured there was no reason not to use it as the name of the place. Keku isn't a person; it's just a noun.
However, the confusion comes in for Kuk, whose name also means "darkness" - it's just a slightly different form of the same root word. Kuk is a person, one of the primordial Ogdoad and the personified representative of darkness within it, so it's not surprising that his name is very functional and just tells you what he's about. All of the Ogdoad are like that, in fact; his counterparts are Nu ("water"), Huh ("eternity") and Amun ("hidden"), for the respective gods of water, eternity and invisibility.
So when we talk about Keku, we're talking about exactly what the word means: darkness, the realm of lightless shadow in which all the Darkness Titan Avatars brood. It's a place, not a person, and is always referred to one. Kuk's name is etymologically almost identical to Keku, but that's just one of the perils of dealing with Titans, who are so old that their names are often just nouns that refer to a concept. We use the more common form of his name to differentiate him from the realm, which uses the generic noun form, and everybody can go home happy.
So never fear, there's neither an accidentally doubled Titan Avatar nor a linguistically confused misnamed realm at play here. It's just that Egyptian mythology is very fond of naming its Titans nouns instead of proper names.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Desert Heat
Question: I have heard that sex in ancient Egypt was accepted and there were very little taboos on men or women. That both men and women were allowed to have sex with whoever they wished without being seen as promiscuous as long as they were single, the only real Taboo being adultry. Was ancient egypt really that sexually free?
This week is shaping up to be a trial run for my surely wildly popular new column, Anne Writes About Ancient Sex.
Honestly, the answer to your question is no. There has never been a human society in which there were no sexual taboos whatsoever (at least not that we know of); just as a generality, almost everybody disapproves of bestiality, and the ancient Egyptians are no different (I know the gods do it, but what the gods are allowed to do and what humans are allowed to do are vastly different).
Incest was definitely practiced by the pharaonic royal lines, but it wasn't common among the people; it was specifically something done to preserve the royal bloodline, not a general practice (which is not to say that it was illegal for common people; we just don't know and don't have any records of it). Having sex in religious areas like temples that were not specifically designed for it was also taboo, as doing so could be considered disrespectful to the priesthood or gods who resided there.
Most notably, male homosexuality was, at least under some conditions, pretty taboo in ancient Egyptian culture; when it turns up in stories it's generally in tones of mockery, and the Book of Going Forth by Day includes deceased people swearing that, along with many other sins they have not committed, that they have not had homosexual intercourse (which is described as "a deviation from Ma'at"). Declarations from the royal court decreeing to their people not to engage in homosexual intercourse have also been discovered, most notably by Ptahhotep. The interesting thing about male homosexuality in ancient Egypt is that it's definitely around and not always in negative terms; rather, it seems more that it depends on what role a man plays in a homosexual encounter how he ends up being seen. There's less apparent stigma attached to being the pitcher than the catcher, if you get my meaning, which is pretty nicely illustrated for us in the myth of Set and Horus: who's considered politically dominant is based on who sexually dominated the other, and while Set is humiliated when Horus' semen is discovered inside him, Horus is not looked down upon for his part in the presumable sex that occurred. It also depends on where you are in ancient Egypt; Memphis, for example, outright considered homosexuality forbidden for men, while other places do not have concrete records or seem not to have addressed it. Some stories of pharaohs (like Neferkare) having sex with other men heavily stress that the affair was a secret and would have been looked down upon if discovered, while others (like Akhenaten) seem to have been more widely known (but then again, I think we all know that Akhenaten does whatever the hell he wants regardless of religion or popular opinion).
As for generalized promiscuity, though, you're right; not only do there not seem to have been any restrictions on sex before marriage, but some Egyptologists actually think that having had sex might have been a requirement before young girls could get married, a sort of practice run and affirmation of fertility. Several religious festivals, especially those belonging to fertility goddesses like Hathor or Bastet, have been recorded by ancient historians as encouraging people to have sex as a celebration of life. (And while we're talking about the ladies, we don't know of any prohibition against female homosexuality; nobody ever seems to mention it.)
As with all really old civilizations, most scholars on the subject have to admit that we don't really know too much about it. We have a few direct writings, a few things we can infer from stories or art, but in general there are a lot of things we just have no clue about (take pedophilia, for example: there's no evidence that the ancient Egyptians were either okay with it or opposed to it, as it never seems to come up). In Scion's setting, unless your game is actually set in ancient Egypt, pretty much anything goes for the busy modern Scion; after all, that kid's a modern person with modern mores, so he or she's likely to already have an individual idea of what is and isn't fun, sexy, or forbidden. I do think you could get some really entertaining mileage out of culture clash between that and parental expectations, though - imagine Horus' probable reaction to discovering that one of his sons has a big strapping boyfriend (duck and cover!).
This week is shaping up to be a trial run for my surely wildly popular new column, Anne Writes About Ancient Sex.
Honestly, the answer to your question is no. There has never been a human society in which there were no sexual taboos whatsoever (at least not that we know of); just as a generality, almost everybody disapproves of bestiality, and the ancient Egyptians are no different (I know the gods do it, but what the gods are allowed to do and what humans are allowed to do are vastly different).
Incest was definitely practiced by the pharaonic royal lines, but it wasn't common among the people; it was specifically something done to preserve the royal bloodline, not a general practice (which is not to say that it was illegal for common people; we just don't know and don't have any records of it). Having sex in religious areas like temples that were not specifically designed for it was also taboo, as doing so could be considered disrespectful to the priesthood or gods who resided there.
Most notably, male homosexuality was, at least under some conditions, pretty taboo in ancient Egyptian culture; when it turns up in stories it's generally in tones of mockery, and the Book of Going Forth by Day includes deceased people swearing that, along with many other sins they have not committed, that they have not had homosexual intercourse (which is described as "a deviation from Ma'at"). Declarations from the royal court decreeing to their people not to engage in homosexual intercourse have also been discovered, most notably by Ptahhotep. The interesting thing about male homosexuality in ancient Egypt is that it's definitely around and not always in negative terms; rather, it seems more that it depends on what role a man plays in a homosexual encounter how he ends up being seen. There's less apparent stigma attached to being the pitcher than the catcher, if you get my meaning, which is pretty nicely illustrated for us in the myth of Set and Horus: who's considered politically dominant is based on who sexually dominated the other, and while Set is humiliated when Horus' semen is discovered inside him, Horus is not looked down upon for his part in the presumable sex that occurred. It also depends on where you are in ancient Egypt; Memphis, for example, outright considered homosexuality forbidden for men, while other places do not have concrete records or seem not to have addressed it. Some stories of pharaohs (like Neferkare) having sex with other men heavily stress that the affair was a secret and would have been looked down upon if discovered, while others (like Akhenaten) seem to have been more widely known (but then again, I think we all know that Akhenaten does whatever the hell he wants regardless of religion or popular opinion).
As for generalized promiscuity, though, you're right; not only do there not seem to have been any restrictions on sex before marriage, but some Egyptologists actually think that having had sex might have been a requirement before young girls could get married, a sort of practice run and affirmation of fertility. Several religious festivals, especially those belonging to fertility goddesses like Hathor or Bastet, have been recorded by ancient historians as encouraging people to have sex as a celebration of life. (And while we're talking about the ladies, we don't know of any prohibition against female homosexuality; nobody ever seems to mention it.)
As with all really old civilizations, most scholars on the subject have to admit that we don't really know too much about it. We have a few direct writings, a few things we can infer from stories or art, but in general there are a lot of things we just have no clue about (take pedophilia, for example: there's no evidence that the ancient Egyptians were either okay with it or opposed to it, as it never seems to come up). In Scion's setting, unless your game is actually set in ancient Egypt, pretty much anything goes for the busy modern Scion; after all, that kid's a modern person with modern mores, so he or she's likely to already have an individual idea of what is and isn't fun, sexy, or forbidden. I do think you could get some really entertaining mileage out of culture clash between that and parental expectations, though - imagine Horus' probable reaction to discovering that one of his sons has a big strapping boyfriend (duck and cover!).
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