The Human Touch

Question: What is up with the Finnish gods getting demoted from actual gods to folk heroes?

What is up is the great bane of European mythographers everywhere: euhemerization.

Euhemerization is the process by which mythology is "downgraded" to folklore, and then to "forgotten history". The term's named for the late Greek historian Euhemeros, who was the first to advance the theory that the Greek gods were once human heroes who were deified over time. Pure euhemerism is the result of the theory that all gods worshiped by humanity have their roots in ancient folk heroes or heroic historical figures, whose stories of actual historic events were magnified and enhanced over time until they became considered gods and humanity forgot their humble roots.

Whether or not humans have ever had gods that were purely divine figures rather than deified humans is of course up for debate. You'll find scholars who believe that humanity has an essential need for deities and has always been creating them to explain the universe and provide them with a religious framework to understand it, and scholars who believe that humanity merely magnifies itself over time and that the roots of all religions are in ancient history. Euhemerism isn't a particularly popular theory for modern mythologists (at least, not in a universal this-is-where-all-gods-come-from way), which is why it sounds so funny to us - in fact, Scion's entire premise excludes the very idea, since the gods and Titans being separate divine beings that can grant their ichor to their children is necessary to the foundation of the game.

Euhemerism is a neat philosophical concept, but, as with so much else in history, old-timey Christians heard about it and then things got out of control. During the centuries when Christianity was most aggressively converting pagan Europeans away from their indigenous beliefs, euhemerization was practiced aggressively as a means of explaining away and devaluing other religions' mythologies and deities over time; Christian missionaries and later the first few generations of converted locals themselves explained that the indigenous gods were just silly overblown stories of things some ancient king or hero did, not really stories of divine powers at all. The pagans were foolishly worshiping their own ancestors in a misguided belief that they were gods, while it was self-evident that there was only one God and these were obviously stories of the exploits of mere mortal men.

Finnish mythology got hit very hard with the euhemerization stick. Christians told Finnish people that they spoke to, conquered or ruled that their indigenous gods weren't really gods; they did it for so many years that the Finnish people who were rapidly converting to Christianity began to believe it, and told it to their children and so on. Stories of the gods' magical exploits were softened, their abilities and actions made less divine and more prosaic. And many of the people who wrote the myths down were Christian writers as well, who intentionally included their own take on the stories along with what the pagan Finns said.

Now, this isn't all something we can blame on Christianization, of course. Some mythologies naturally lend themselves to euhemerization more than others, simply by virtue of gods taking human-esqe actions or stories focusing more on human emotions and interaction between gods than giant magical events. Some mythologies actually do grant their gods apotheosis origins rather than cosmic ones, deifying mortals who do extraordinary things within the framework of their religion, which can further muddy the waters. And some mythologies simply have blurrier lines between heroes, spirits, deities and other magical creatures than others. Every mythology comes from a different culture and thus has different features and themes, so there's no way to treat them all as if they have the same basic framework (try though Scion might). Finnish myth places a greater emphasis on wildlife and overcoming the natural world (usually with tools or moxy) than some other cultures' gods do, which makes it easier to view its main actors as historical or folkloric humans rather than deities if you're so inclined.

So really, Finnish mythology as we know it now is the result of centuries of euhemerization, confusion and dilution of oral and poetic traditions. It probably still contains a lot of its original stories and ideas, while other parts have been altered, humanized or forgotten. This tends to happen with a lot of mythologies, so Finland's not unique in it at all; in fact, northwestern Europe in particular does this all the time, and the Aesir and Tuatha have both been heavily euhemerized over the centuries as well, the former patronizingly described by Snorri and Saxo as mortal kings worshiped by silly pagans who couldn't tell the difference between gods and men, and the latter so thoroughly humanized that some scholars are still fighting over whether Ireland ever had gods of its own.

They're not as "demoted" as some pantheons, and their demotion is really just later humanity forgetting or misunderstanding what it once knew about them. For Scion's purposes, the Finnish gods are as divine as any other pantheon, and as ready to be awesome and divine in your stories.

You Could Name It "Hammered"

Question: How much is known about the Sami gods?

Less than we should know, unfortunately. The Sami, thanks to being nomadic in behavior and shamanistic in their beliefs, were seldom paid much attention to by folklorists studying the area, and most tales recorded about them are low-level spirits-and-monsters kinds of stuff. Early southern Europeans bothering them didn't even figure out that they had gods at all for a while, assuming that their religion was a generalized animism that venerated all life, and once people did figure them out it was all Christian proselytizing all the time. Very few of their myths have been recorded from their largely oral traditions and written down, and even fewer of those have been translated into English (why aren't you interested in neat stuff, English-speaking world, huh?).

Alas, what do those of us who don't speak Norwegian, Swedish or Finnish do? Well, we cry, mostly, but we can also go hunt up the only two real English sources on the subject: Laestadius' Fragments of Lappish Mythology, a nineteenth-century collection by a Christian writer with all the problems you would expect it to have, and Van Cleef's much more modern but also more poetry- and art-oriented God Wears Many Skins. If you happen to speak one of the three languages above, you're likely to have a whole lot better luck looking there than in the English arena. Past those, you'll find bits and pieces on Sami belief, shamanism and deities scattered throughout other books, as footnotes in books on their near neighbors the Norse, Finnish or Baltic people or as usually isolated mentions in general mythology books.

The Sami have a large cast of deities, but we don't know a great deal about many of them other than their names and general area of specialty, and others are identifiably borrowed from nearby cultures that they probably had a lot of contact with. The most obvious is their thunder-god, a big old badass named Diermmes/Thiermmes, who is also called Thoragalles and uses a giant hammer to smash giant trolls in the face. The parallels to Thor are obvious - but he's also sometimes referred to with the epithet Ukko, who happens to be the thunder-god of the Finnish pantheon (who also wields a hammer, and let's not forget Perun nearby with his axe - thunder gods). And yet Diermmes also has unique mythology of his own, most notably the story in which he is constantly pursuing a great golden reindeer around the world, which will end when he succeeds in killing it. He's obviously borrowing from other religions in the area, but the Sami stories about him don't always match up to the attributes he's borrowed from elsewhere.

Most mythographers, when they bother with the Sami at all, tend to lump them in with the Finnish pantheon; it's not really the worst decision anyone could be making, since the religions clearly influence each other and share gods, and its probable that they grew from the same root and simply went in different directions for the settled Finnish farmers and the wandering Sami herders. It's a similar situation to, say, Japanese mythology versus the beliefs of the indigenous Ryukyuan people of Okinawa, who do have their own unique concepts but who also share more than a little of the folklore of their northern neighbors.

To be honest, I think the Sami are very neat and I really wish there was more source material on their gods available (in a language I can read!). But I'm not sure we'll ever see them in Scion - definitely not in the official line, which doesn't have much to gain from a religion most players have no clue exists, and probably not from us, either, as I can't imagine there being enough demand for them and the better-known Finnish gods. But, like many other small pantheons, they are certainly possibilities to be used in games and more than excellent choices as NPCs to flummox Scions who spend their time up in the frozen north.

I think what I got out of this post most is that I really want to see Thor, Diemmas, Ukko, Perun and Perkunas get together and start a band or something.

Fire in the Sky

Question: What myths are there about the Aurora Borealis?

Lots! While you naturally won't see any myths about the Northern Lights from cultures that aren't sufficiently northern, there are are plenty from the cultures of the great white wastes.

Ironically, the name Aurora Borealis is from the Mediterranean (Aurora being the Roman goddess of the dawn and Boreas the Greek god of the frozen north wind), but the Romans were too far south to see the effect very often. Even so, Pliny still recorded a Roman legend that the lights represented famous heroes from the ancient sagas, battling above the earth.

Myths of Finland and the nearby tribes give several explanations for the Aurora Borealis. In one story, the lights are the colored interplay of the souls of the dead, rising into the sky on their way to the afterlife, and they can be called down by humans to speak to them before they depart, though such a thing is dangerous since the dead might take the living along with them when they do leave. In another story, the Northern Lights are the result of a great celestial fox that runs across the sky, and the colors come from him striking sparks against the mountains that fly up into the heavens, sweeping snow into the sky with his tail or causing dazzling lights to reflect from snowflakes caught in his fur.

The Norse have surprisingly few myths about the aurora, which some scholars think may mean that they didn't see it much since it wasn't in the same position all those centuries ago that it is now. Nevertheless, Tacitus tells us that the lights are the bright flashing reflections of the weapons and armor of the valkyries as they ride to war, and therefore they were considered portents of battle to come soon. Some post-Christian Norse writers also thought that the lights might be the result of flames that ringed the far edge of the ocean, possibly an echo of old beliefs about Ragnarok.

Similar to the European myth, the Inuit believed that there was a hole between the earth and the heavens, and that the Northern Lights were the result of souls passing from this world to the next through it, carrying colored torches and often visible in the lights, dancing and feasting, their shadows visible to mortal eyes. Inuit rituals for the Aurora Borealis involved dancing along with the spirits above to honor them. And the Algonquin Native Americans believed that the Northern Lights were the reflections of the fires built by the great creator-god Nanabozho, intended to remind humanity that he is still there and paying attention to them.

Other than Nanabozho, most stories about the Aurora Borealis are closer to folkloric than mythological; they're really about general religious and story beliefs, not about the gods and their myths. But they're still super-neat, and a great place to look for things to add to the Scion landscape!