End Times

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!

Civilization History Lesson

Question: Sumer. Akkadia. Babylon. Who came first, who came last, and who stole from who when it came to religion?

Well, some of that question's easy to answer, at least! We tend to talk about Mesopotamian civilization as a whole, but "Mesopotamia" is really a geographical label for the fertile crescent area in what is modern-day Iraq, and it covered several successive civilizations.

Sumer came first. The Sumerian civilization is the oldest in history, probably beginning at least six thousand years ago, and it consequently boasts the oldest religion ever recorded, with evidence of cults and shrines starting about five thousand years ago. Though their gods are more well-known in their later Babylonian forms, it is in Sumer that they first became venerated as the patrons of various city-states and areas within the empire; An (who becomes Anu), Enlil (Ellil), Enki (Ea), Inanna (Ishtar), Nanna (Sin), Utu (Shamash) and Ningirsu (Ninurta) all have their roots here. Sumer lasted as the ascendant power in Mesopotamia for almost three thousand years, finally being conquered and largely ending around 1800 B.C.E.

The Akkadian empire definitely rose later than Sumer, but it was also a contemporary of theirs, reaching its peak a good half millennium before Sumer went into decline. The two cultures shared a great deal of language and religious material between them; they basically became "sister empires" that boasted cities that spoke both languages and did as much cultural borrowing from one another as they found necessary. They worshiped mostly the same gods (though they also borrowed from other nearby cultures, particularly the Canaanites), but contributed to their transformation more than a little bit - not only in beginning the transformation of their names thanks to Akkadian taking over linguistically from Sumerian, but also in changing their character. Inanna, who is more of a classic gentle goddess of love and fertility in ancient Sumeria, is a good example; it was during the Akkadian synthesis that she began to gain more elemental characteristics and warlike demeanor.

Akkad lasted an appallingly short time for a Mesopotamian civilization, not quite two centuries old when it collapsed (which means it was both younger than Sumer and didn't last as long - ouch). Its collapse led to the remnants of the empire splitting in two directions, giving birth to the other two great empires of the area: Assyria (which you didn't mention, but they're hella important when talking about Mesopotamian religion!) and Babylon.

Assyria rose in the northern part of Mesopotamia, running from a century or two before Akkad's collapse until about 625 B.C.E., give or take a few years. Like Akkad, they continued the trend of using the original Sumerian gods and adding their own personal touches to them, and again they shaped some of the gods' personalities more toward the way we now know them, including enhancing Inanna's connotations as a goddess of sexuality, emphasizing Ninurta's uncontrollable strength and beginning to venerate Nergal more highly than he had been in earlier religions. The Assyrians also borrowed even more Canaanite religion since they often waged military campaigns in Canaanite lands, with the results being that Baal, Astarte and Dagon might sometimes be seen rubbing temple-elbows with the Mesopotamian gods. Their most unique contribution to the area's mythology was the elevation of the patron god of Assyria, Ashur (a much later, now sun-associated version of the old Sumerian god Anshar), to be the head of the pantheon, which sometimes meant he was considered the same as Enlil and other times meant he was considered to have eclipsed the older king of the gods. They're so all about Ashur, in fact, that they wrote a separate version of the Enuma Elish epic in which it's him that conquers Tiamat, saves the world and becomes the due ruler of the gods.

And finally, the most famous to all of us thanks to the influence of the Bible, there's Babylon. It's the youngest of the Mesopotamian cultures but arguably the most memorably powerful, thanks to its vast influence over other kingdoms (to be fair, some of the earlier kingdoms didn't really have a lot of other peoples to interact with yet) and world-renowned strides in law and culture. Babylon was founded a few centuries later than Assyria, and it remained mostly unremarkable (even being conquered by Assyria a time or two) until the time of that historical rogue Hammurabi, who united its floundering provinces and turned it into one of the military powerhouses of the ancient world. The names of the Mesopotamian gods we're most familiar with come from Bablyon, where Inanna became Ishtar, Utu became Shamash and so forth. We remember Babylon for a lot of things, not least the famous Hanging Gardens that were one of the original Wonders of the World or the Code of Hammurabi, possibly the oldest complete set of laws known to man, but their most major religious contribution is, of course, the indomitable Marduk.

Marduk was around in previous Mesopotamian religions, but he wasn't very important; at best, he was a minor son of Enki or Utu, associated with ran and plant life but mostly eclipsed by the more powerful gods who performed the same functions. But Marduk was the patron god of the city of Babylon - and, more importantly, the special patron god of its famous king Hammurabi, and Hammurabi decided he was just going to go ahead and make that the case for everybody. By royal decree, he had the Enuma Elish written to tell everyone about how great Marduk was and all the awesome stuffhe did, declared him the official king of the gods (which, it was hastily said, was totally cool with Enlil and Enki who were completely happy to step aside for him), and practically overnight transformed him from a minor-league rain-god into the big-brass-balls king of the universe we now know and love. And there he stayed; nobody ever tried to argue with Marduk's reign again (except the Assyrians with Ashur, but look where they ended up), and he rode the wave of Babylonian religion unchallenged until the empire finally collapsed after being repeatedly conquered by the Persians and Greeks in the first few centuries C.E.

It's not really accurate to say that anyone "stole" from anyone else here, because all of these civilizations are really just splinters that split off from one another; they're from the same area with largely the same language and culture, so the difference between them is only as pronounced as, say, the difference between Alaska and the Yukon. They shared common roots and a common religion, which each successive kingdom kept the core of but remade details around to help make it their own. That's the major reason we always have to talk about Mesopotamian religion instead of specifically Sumerian or Babylonian, because, like the centuries of change and growth from the various kingdoms of Egypt, it's not a bunch of different pantheons but rather one pantheon changing over the vast period of time that it was worshiped. Talking about just Sumerian religion would be like talking about only the Old Kingdom in Egypt, when everybody was zoomorphic and the wars between the different divine factions hadn't yet happened; it would leave out too much awesome stuff.

So embrace all of Mesopotamia - Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylon alike. They're different time periods with different rulership, but they're united by a single growing religion that survived for literally thousands of years longer than most others, and mythology from any one of them is fair game for use with the Anunna in games. The politics of the successive kings (Enlil, Enki, Ashur and now Marduk) alone is a place ripe for intrigue and plot stuff, and with this many thousands of years of cult practice and mythology to fall back on, you almost can't help but come up with something awesome for your games.

I don't know if you guys wanted to know that much about time period and kingdom in ancient Mesopotamia, but y'all should know by now that asking me about ancient religions in historical terms is like poking a tiger with a stick.

The Great Below

Question: A question about the Babylonian underworld. Is it a place of torment and damnation like the monothestic hell, or is it just a place where all dead eventually go with no punishment or reward? A quiet, dreary but not horrible place to wait out eternity?

Irkallu is much closer to the second than the first. It's certainly not a place of punishment; there's no element of eventual damnation or paradise to the Babylonian conception of what happens after death. It's merely a final destination; a sort of end-of-the-line holding cell for all the myriad dead.

For the Babylonians, the primary function of the Underworld is to keep dead people in so that they can't venture into the lands of the living. Ghosts of the dead were believed to be capable of very malicious behavior, inflicting bad fortune or sickness on the living if they roamed free, and as such needed somewhere they could be held in order for those who were still alive to be free of their depredations. This is the major reason that funerary rites were important to them; a dead person who didn't get buried was a dead person who might not find their way properly to the Underworld, and thus a menace to everyone around them if they happened to stick around and start reenacting scenes from Poltergeist. It's also the reason that, when Ishtar or Ereshkigal start throwing tantrums and threatening to break down the gates of the place to free the dead, the rest of the gods go to Defcon One until the issue is resolved.

But for the dead themselves, there's no particular good or bad attached to going to the Underworld; you're dead, that's it. A lot of Babylonian funeral hymns stress the idea that death is the great equalizer; a common man and a king both end up in exactly the same place regardless of what they had or were in life (though there are, of course, occasional hymns written specifically for kings where they claim that their status as more beloved by the gods than anyone else might grant them an exception). While Irkallu is pretty uniformly described as dreary, dark and forbidding, no kind of punishment or terrorizing of the dead is ever mentioned. It may not be the most pleasant of places, but it's not a punishment; it's just the inevitable end of the road after the joys of life have ceased.

There are, however, a few interesting mentions of the dead being "judged", usually by Shamash, Sin or Gilgamesh, but what that means and whether it has to do with what they did in life or their behavior in the Underworld itself is an unexplained mystery. Since we don't know of any "punishment" sectors of Irkallu, I'd probably treat these courts and judgments as pertaining to the affairs of the Underworld instead of life before it; after all, if Irkallu has its own entire pantheon of gods that mirror the Anunna in the heavens above as well as more dead people than you could shake a stick at, it probably has more than its share of squabbling to sort out.