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.

Snake in the Grass

Question: Why is Damballah, of the Loa, not listed in the Orisha?

Oh, this one's easy! Because Damballa isn't an orisha.

While it's easy to make generalizations about the loa of the Afro-American religions and we often talk a lot about how the loa are just the orisha wearing different clothes, in fact they do have among their ranks gods who are not and never were orisha. The African slave trade didn't just target the Yoruba but rather brought peoples from many different African cultures and religions to the western world, where they syncretized their own beliefs with those of the native Americans and their European masters until they ended up with the vibrant modern diaspora religions. And while the orisha may be the dominant force among the loa, with most of them clearly showing roots stretching back to Yorubaland, they're not the only African imports to be preserved and venerated by their displaced people.

Damballa is one of these non-orisha gods. He's certainly African in origin, and also unquestionably important in Haitian vodun, but he hails not from the Yoruba but from their nearby neighbors the Fon, an African people centered in Dahomey (modern-day coastal Nigeria and Togo, rubbing elbows with the Yoruba from day one). There he was (and still is) worshiped as Da, the rainbow serpent, father of humanity and lord of pythons; in the Americas, he has been split from his originally dual-natured form into a married pair, Damballa and Ayeda Wedo, who together oversee snakes and rainbows alike.

While the Fon and the Yoruba are certainly close neighbors who have shared a lot of culture and ideas over the years, it wouldn't be accurate to say that they're the same people any more than it would be accurate to say that the Chinese and Tibetans are. While they do have a few crossover gods - the most obvious is the trickster god, Eshu to the Yoruba and Legba to the Fon, who is almost identical between the two - they also have plenty of differences. The Yoruba have their own rainbow serpent orisha, Oshumare, and while he shares superficial characteristics with Da, his cult worship is different (and less prominent than Da's, traditionally) and his divine character unique.

So Damballa isn't among the ranks of the Orisha because, well, he isn't. He would be high on the list if you put together a Fon pantheon, however, and is a candidate for that someday-my-dreams-will-come project where we stat up gods who are important but don't have full pantheon writeups yet.

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.

Orisha Ashe

Question: What do you think of the idea of the Loa and the Orisha being separate pantheons? I have not researched enough to be considered an expert, but I think they are thematically different and both have gods not shared by the other. Maybe the Loa are the gods who have not "abandoned" the African slaves and came with them to the Americas. Thoughts?

I think it's possible, but it has the same problems that making, say, separate Greek and Roman pantheons has: one or both of these pantheons will be badly misrepresented by trying to split them off, because they just have too much in common and will lose integral members of their rosters and parts of their cultures if they're separated.

There are indeed different gods between the two sets. The Americas have such creatures as Baron Samedi, Marinette and Damballa, figures who have developed in the last few centuries as a result of synthesis with other religions, peoples and cultures that the displaced African slaves encountered. The original Orisha religions in west Africa have such gods as Oba, Oshumare and the Ibeji twins, who were imported to the New world only cursorily. But the problem is that the most important and major gods between the two are not only the same, but actually haven't changed all that much in their crossing of the ocean, and you can't cut the heart out of either group.

You want a New World Loa-only pantheon to go with the Old World Orisha-only pantheon? Do you still want it if it doesn't have Kalfu, Oshun or Ogun? Those figures are far too important as Orisha to not be members of the west African pantheon, but they're also far too important as Loa to be left out of the New World roster of gods. They're indispensible and nearly identical; neither pantheon can function without them, but it would also be downright inaccurate to try to pretend that these are two completely different sets of gods who don't share about 80-90% of their makeup in common. If you assign them to one pantheon, the other is both crippled and now very much not a good example of what its religion actually believes in and worships.

Of course, the sticky wicket is that they also are different gods; the Exu of Candomble, for example, is no longer perfectly identical to the Eshu of Yorubaland, and the two religions, while they share tons of common ground, are also no longer identical, having evolved over time as all religions do. But, just like Zeus and Jupiter, they're so close that from a game perspective there's nothing to gain from trying to split them off, and they'd just be figures with almost the exact same associations and stories.

This is all general pantheon-splitting stuff, but you're right: theme is important, and I'm here to tell you that there is not a whole lot of thematic difference between the Orisha religion of Africa and its many child religions in the Americas. For one thing, the concept that the Orisha "abandoned" the African slaves is preposterous; it's easy to think of only the Louisiana bayou spirits when talking about the Loa, but the gods the Africans brought with them from their homeland are spread all over the Americas, and in most cases those African gods are still right there with their people. Brazil alone has millions of worshipers who still consider the likes of Shango and Oshun among the most important of their gods; Haiti, also with worshipers in the millions, credits such thoroughly African gods as Ogun with the strength and drive that won them their independence; the rest of South America, not to mention Cuba, still calls upon almost all the Orisha of west Africa, some of them with slightly corrupted names or syncretisms with saints but all of them very firmly alive and active. Orunmila is still called upon for prophecy and wisdom under the name Orule; Erinle's powers over the earth and the human body are still begged for through his shortened name Inle; as Oxala, ancient Obatala is still celebrated and feted as vigorously as he ever was. Many of the Orisha have even taken on new and additional roles based on their New World worship, such as Ogun, who as the god of iron has become the patron of modern weaponry and technology, or Olokun, god of the sea, who has become the patron of all those souls of slaves who died during the Middle Passage and were accepted into his watery bosom.

New Orleans vodun is definitely a strong force in the New World, but it's far from the only African diaspora religion around, and our tendency to let it be the be-all and end-all of our image of the Loa is crippling when we're trying to look at the big picture. Candomble in Brazil, Santeria in Cuba and Puerto Rico, Vodun in Haiti and Shango Baptism in Trinidad and Tobago are all thriving, strong traditions that maintain almost all of the African Orisha wholesale; and that's not even counting Africa itself, and we should count Africa because there are still millions of Orisha worshipers in Nigeria and Benin in the modern day, despite the attempts of Christianity and Islam to weed them out. There are some differences, of course, between the practices of today and their ancient roots, but only as much as any religion has when it grows over a few centuries of new situations and ideas. You might as well try to split Hinduism into two different pantheons by claiming that the Vedic Vishnu must be a different dude from the modern one - he's certainly changed over time, but saying he's a different god would be just plain wrong.

As for thematic differences, I gotta tell you, there are not very many of them. The Loa are all about balance of opposing forces in the universe? Great, so are the Orisha! The Loa are all about the many gods acting together to perform the work of one great creator god (Bondye)? Great, so are the Orisha (they call him Olodumare)! The Loa often change form or have alternate and opposing personas? Great, so do the Orisha! The Loa love to possess and ride their followers in crazy drum-ceremonies? Great, so do the Orisha, practically every day! The Loa are called upon in magical rituals to provide aid or wisdom from beyond? Welcome to the Orisha practice of magical divination! Worshipers of the Loa build elaborate shrines to their gods with delectable offerings of food and trinkets for their favors? What a coincidence, so do the worshipers of the Orisha!

In fact, the only major difference I can think of is the prevalence of death-related spirits elevated to godhood in the Americas, as the Yoruba religion really doesn't do that much (it has the Egungun, spirits of the dead ancestors who can sometimes influence the world, but no proper Underworld or death god), probably a result of the tumultuous time of slavery and its high and brutal mortality rate as well as influence from other religions' ideas of the afterlife. But more gods having Death does not a different pantheon make, and much stronger are the shared themes of the different faiths, such as the concept of the heroic journey of life, in which each man or woman must soldier on through adversity to achieve their personal destiny with help from their patron gods, one of the major themes of both the Yoruba religion and the long and painful passage of its people across the ocean.

Look, I'm not trying to say that the diaspora religions are identical to the traditional religions of west Africa; that's obvoiusly not true. They've been changed by time, distance, trauma and influence from a whole bucket of other cultures and religions that rub elbows with them, and they have built their own traditions and ways of worshiping. They are vibrant and distinct religions, and anyone who says they aren't is being deeply religiously insensitive. But what I am trying to say is that they still very much share a heart, not to mention almost all their major deities. Trying to split them up would give you two very broken pantheons - missing major gods, desperately trying to lock themselves into too-narrow powers to avoid overlap, and constantly confusing everyone with their obvious and un-talked-about similarities.

In fact, that's basically what they look like right now in the original Scion book, and that's why we're fixing them. The Loa are the Orisha - their later forms, their faraway forms, but themselves nonetheless, members of a pantheon that has always been fluid in form and closely linked to its people. Splitting them not only wouldn't make very much sense, it would diminish them both when we could instead be celebrating their incredible versatility and ability to remain major world powers even after the complete European domination of their ancestral lands.

The Orisha are some awesomely badass deities. Give them their props for making it across the sea with their beleaugured people to also be the Loa!

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.

Sleeping with the Fishes

Question: I have a question concerning the Loa. Your site mentions Agwe as the Lord of the Underworld, but he doesn't have the Death Purview. I'm just curious as to why not.

The phrase is misleading, so our fault, not yours. Scion: Demigod sets Agwe as the boatman who collects the souls of the dead and ferries them to the Underworld; while this is all nicely death-flavored, it's really an example of a deity with Psychopomp, not Death. The Loa don't technically have a "lord" of the Underworld in the sense of figures like Hades or Yama; the closest thing they've got is Agwe picking up dead people and the Baron with his retinue of ghede and grave-spirits whooping it up, and neither of them is exactly reigning over the place with an iron fist.

Unfortunately, the Loa are a terrible mess in the original sourcebooks, and we haven't touched much of their stuff online in a while because we knew we were going to need to rewrite them. It looks like they're winning the poll over to the right, so they'll probably be the next project we tackle; in the meantime, there are sadly oddities, inconsistencies and weirdnesses still present in the Loa section of the site that are waiting to be fixed. By rights, Agwe probably shouldn't have anything to do with the underworld at all, as he's a figure associated with the ocean and we've never been able to find anything linking him to the dead even as a psychpomp - but then again, we suspect Agwe won't be staying on the roster after we finish our rewrite, so it may be a moot point.

Yorubaland

Question: Do you know what kind of things you want to do with the Super Loa Rewrite? Any idea which gods you want to take out of the current roster? I'm really looking forward to seeing it (while I know it's a while off yet).

Oh my god, Super Loa Rewrite! I am so excited about this project, seriously, I'm ready to have babies with it. African mythology is so delightfully different from many other cultures' that I can't wait to really get into how to express and explore it through its gods, and the Loa have always been something of a sore thumb in Scion for us, so it's one of my favorite things to look forward to.

I can't give you solid specifics, obviously, because we're still in the process of planning it and haven't gotten to work on it yet (though I think soon we will be starting some new things - cross your fingers!). Major things we want to do are:

• Reintroduce major Yoruba gods who were unfairly excluded because they didn't carry over into the derivative New World religions. I've occasionally seen them in sub-pantheons for the Yoruba, and I applaud the effort to include them in the game somehow, but the idea that the indigenous African gods are somehow a sub-pantheon of the much later New World interpretations of them has always seemed somewhat ludicrous to us.
  
• Remove entirely New World concepts and ideas from the pantheon's overarching theme in order to allow Scions to work as children of the Yoruba pantheon, just as Scions in every other pantheon work as children of the original gods rather than much later versions of them. Those ideas are still available to players who want to pursue them, just as you could play a Scion of Tlazolteotl who thinks of her as the Virgin Mary, but it always seemed bizarrely backward to us that the core books treat the later derivation as the main mythology instead of the ancient religion it was based on. (They probably did so because vaudun is a lot more recognizable to the average North American gamer than Yoruba myth, and because the World of Darkness games used a lot of vaudun imagery and figures, but we're not having it.)
  
• Rework the ever-living shit out of Cheval. Right now it's easily one of the weakest PSPs in the game; even after we worked on it some, it's not coincidence that our Loa have never really bothered with it, because it's deeply underwhelming compared to the likes of Heku, Itztli or Samsara. It's also very narrowly focused on New World vaudun and Santeria ideas, excluding the African roots of the religion again. The new PSP will probably retain some elements of "riding" mortal worshipers, as the Yoruba religion also has a strong basis in doing so, but it will also probably lean much more heavily on African ideas of destiny and the three specialized paths of interacting with divinity (priest, prophet and diviner).
  
• Reassign them a Titan antagonist that makes more sense. Mami Wata is certainly an antagonistic figure, but she can't play with the big boys like Cronus or Tiamat, and she - and the entire Drowned Road, really - was shoehorned into a role that she couldn't really fill in an attempt to fit the Loa into the same format as the rest of the pantheons'. We're not sure yet what their Titan antagonist will be, but it's likely that it will no longer be Water, and we're considering Titans of more traditionally feared African concepts like Disease or Pestilence.
  
• And seriously, these associated powers need fixing, because they're an insane mish-mash smash-up of various different versions of these gods and misconceptions from popular culture. What a mess!
  

As for what gods we're considering removing and adding, those are still up in the air pending our ability to get heavily into research and start making calls, but there are a few that we have clear ideas on. Oshun, Orunmila, Obatala and Eshu, major Yoruba deities, will probably be joining the roster; Damballa, Erzulie, Agwe and Kalfu, who are purely New World figures, will probably be leaving it. We're still up in the air over the Baron and discussing what to do with his bizarre, rootlessly American-only self. Shango and Ogoun will remain, with heavier emphasis on their royal Yoruba roots. As for those Loa who leave the playable roster, they won't be banished from the world entirely, but we haven't yet decided what direction we'll be going with them.

If anybody out there has any questions, issues with the Loa they'd like to bring up, or suggestions or specialty ways of handling them, we'd love to hear about them before we head off to Yorubaland!

Dreamweaver

Question: I've seen Anansi mentioned often in connection with the Loa; is he actually considered a member of their pantheon? If so, why? I mean, I can see him under related African pantheons, but specifically Loa Voduon? Also if he is a Loa, why isn't he on the Loa page?

Anansi is currently allied with and a nominal member of the Loa in our games, which is probably why you're hearing them mentioned together. The PCs made that happen with a blend of fancy political shenanigans, good old-fashioned African travel tales and blind screaming spider-fueled panic, but it's not something that the game came with out of the box. The Loa were attempting to move most of their worshipers and religion back to their African roots, and put Vala's band on getting the support of some of the other African gods to help smooth the transition.

Anansi himself is not one of the Loa; he's from the Ashanti religion, while the Loa have their roots in the Yoruba religion, two distinctly different sets of African myths. He's only about as related to the Loa as the Tuatha are to the Bogovi; they share real estate on the same continent and some common themes, but in general they're separate people with separate ideas that shouldn't be lumped together.

We hope to one day figure out what to do with Anansi, who is clearly god-parent material but who also comes from a pantheon of like four people; until that day, however, he serves as a free agent and adjunct when things in Africa are going down. Just as in North America, Africa really just needs like twenty statted pantheons of its own, but most of them are so obscure for players that they're not priorities.

But old Talespinner certainly does keep on spinning.