See You Next Fall

Question: The autumn season seems to get the short end of the stick when it comes having gods representing it. Think you could come up with a list of a couple that do exclusively deal with that season?

Man, this question just begs for me to retell a Slavic myth that expressly explains why there is no deity for Autumn. The Slavic goddesses include Morena for winter, Vesna for spring and Zhiva for summer, but autumn is unrepresented.

As those of you who are interested in Stribog already know from this old post, that god once fell in love with Chors, the beautiful goddess of the moon. He was too clumsy and socially inept to court her, however, and in addition she was in turn in love with Radegast, the god of the stars and protector of the night skies. Radegast never noticed Chors' interest, but she in turn never noticed Stribog, and eventually the wind god decided to win her through trickery and sneaked into Radegast's palace by day in order to steal his star-spangled cloak. Swathed in the cloak, he waited until nightfall and stole into Chors' bedroom; believing that it was Radegast returning her love at last, she welcomed him with open arms.

Radegast, however, was severely displeased when his cloak detailing the proper positions of the stars was missing when he needed to make his nightly rounds, and after thrashing all his servants and scouring his palace, he eventually discovered what Stribog had done. He went to Svarozhich and Prove to demand that Stribog be punished for his crime, and they ruled that since the child Chors was now carrying was conceived by trickery and rape, it would be taken away from Stribog so that he would not reap the reward of offspring from his behavior. Chors, humiliated and horrified, tried to plead with the gods to save the baby's life, and when they said that they didn't know what they would need another goddess for anyway, passionately begged that the unborn girl be given the post of the goddess of autumn, the in-between time that none of the other seasonal goddesses oversaw. After deliberation, however, the gods decided that autumn wasn't important enough to need a totem goddess, being merely an uncomfortable transition zone between summer and winter rather than a real season, and that there was no reason to appoint anyone its guardian.

As a result of this ruling, the baby was taken from Chors by Svarozhich, who dissolved her into nothingness and decreed that she had only ever been a dream. The proto-Slavic word for dream is yesen, and thereafter the season of autumn was called sen in honor of the girl who would have been its goddess had she lived.

So there's one mythology that straight-up tells you that there's nobody in charge of autumn, and furthermore why it's so. Svarozhich is downright dismissive of the idea, in fact - he says basically that if he makes an exception and declares autumn a real thing, soon everybody is going to just decide to assign a name and totem to random period of time throughout the year and everything will be chaos.

But for the non-Slavs, there are two major reasons you don't see a lot of autumn gods. One is differences in climate across the world, and the other is the fact that that role is usually overseen by the harvest goddess.

For plenty of cultures, and thus their mythologies and religions, the familiar European/North American Spring-Summer-Autumn-Winter cycle is not mirrored in their local environment. In places where autumn doesn't really exist, or at least doesn't exist in a way that differentiates it much from the climate at other times, there's no point to an autumn god existing. The Alihah, for example, are the gods of a region that not only doesn't really have autumn, it barely has seasons at all, with an average deviation of barely 20 degrees celsius between the coldest and hottest times of the year. Since the most marked climate difference in their environment is that between day and night - the latter usually significantly colder than the former - they instead have various gods in charge of the sunlit day hours and celestial night hours. India is another good example, with some regions of the subcontinent substituting monsoon season and its aftermath where more northwesterly peoples would expect to experience autumn (they don't really have spring, either, or at least not in the protracted couple-of-months way Europe does). Nigeria, homeland of the Yoruba, is basically 27 degrees celsius year-round, and its ancient peoples wouldn't know what autumn was if it wandered up and bit them (but let them tell you about the rainy season versus the dry season!).

So autumn doesn't get a lot of help in various parts of the world simply because, well, it doesn't exist there. It's the same reason that you don't get very many frost or snow gods near the equator, or see as many gods of fish in landlocked cultures. (Spring is occasionally in the same boat, but because the idea of "drought/flooding/winter's over, the world is returning to life again" is closer to universal, you'll see more gods of springtime.)

The other major reason you don't see very many autumn gods is that their role is usually totally taken up by the harvest gods. The major aspect of the autumn season, in those cultures that have one, is that it's the end of summer and the time that food is harvested and laid in for the coming winter. But since harvest - and by extension all kinds of ideas of fertility and support of humanity - is such a massively important idea for most mythologies, it naturally usually has its own totem gods already, and an autumn god wouldn't be doing or representing much that they weren't already. The Slavs not only think autumn is silly, but they also don't need an autumn goddess because Mokosh, Moist Mother Earth, is already fulfilling most of that role by being the most important deity of the season as her crops are reaped and her offerings given in thanks for her bounty. When people are already going to be spending most of autumn celebrating Cronus, Demeter, Mokosh and Osiris, do they really need another person who's there because of the time of year but not doing anything new?

So I can't give you much of a list of autumn-oriented gods, because they're frankly very rare beasts. The most major is probably Sarasvati of the Devas, who is sometimes referred to as the alternative name Sharada ("autumnal") and associated with the season thanks to many of her major festivals taking place before the onset of winter (or is it the other way around?). The Greek Anemoi, the four winds, are assigned to a season each as well as a direction, so you can look to Euros, the east wind, for a representative of the declining months of the year. The Roman god Vertumnus is usually considered a fertility god as well as a representative of all the changing seasons, which includes the autumnal months. Various other gods are often theorized to be in charge of autumn, including Veles among the Slavs, Cernunnos and the Matrones among the Celts and even Sif thanks to a possible connection between her golden hair and golden fields of wheat, but these are mostly guesses based on their associations with the harvest (and in the case of Veles, at least, pretty obviously contradictory to the rest of Slavic myth).

But, as always with things that there aren't many gods of - more room for new Scions to take those spots!

Laws of the Russian Frontier

Question: Hey! The Bogovi have no Justice gods... what's up with that?

Actually, they do! He's just not Legend 12. His name is Prove, and he is the justice-y badass who presides over the legal affairs of a pantheon that is totally obsessed with law and order.

Prove is, like many of the Bogovi, a son of Svarozhich, created from the primordial stuff of creation at the beginning of the universe. As the god of law and justice, he always sits in judgment whenever an issue or dispute arises among the ranks of the Bogovi; it was he who ruled that Mokosh be punished for creating the first Scion, that Chors' unborn child had to be sacrificed to properly punish Stribog and that the Simargl had to face judgment for attacking Veles' children.

Prove's generally characterized as a pretty nice guy; he obviously has a full five dots of Order and never contravenes it, but the stories in which he sits in judgment often make a point of mentioning that he's not happy when someone is judged harshly or wishes he could have ruled differently but has his hands tied by the law. As the god of justice, his children are also related to legal matters; the Simargl is actually a composite being made up of his twin sons Sim and Rygl, who are conjoined twins who share a spine that forces them to look in opposite directions, allowing them to see both sides of every legal issue. His triple daughters, the Sudice, are the Slavic version of the Fates or Norns, and they both control the fates of humanity and ensure that their necessary punishments are meted out.

We actually had a hefty debate, when we were statting the Bogovi, over whether or not Svarozhich should also have Justice. As you can probably guess from the fact that he has it in the PDF but not in the website version, I was a fan of him getting it to illustrate the fact that he makes most of the divine laws the pantheon lives by and occasionally levies judgments himself, but John felt that Prove's supremacy in the area of law made it unlikely that Svarozhich, who occasionally submits to his rulings himself, is rocking the Avatar. Either way, Svarozhich certainly has a hefty number of Justice boons to his name.

Old Man Winter

Question: I dearly love your Bogovi write-up. I've been wanting to play a Slavic Scion for ages. Thing is, this Scion's a child of Stribog, and there's a huge dearth of information (legends etc.) about him! Tell me you good people have dug up something more?

Ask and ye shall receive, my friend. I have a soft spot for Stribog, who is sort of a curmudgeonly old recluse that nobody loves and who has no social skills to deal with this situation, and there are indeed interesting stories involving him in Slavic myth.

Probably the most poignant involves the moon-goddess Chors; Stribog had fallen in love with her, but she was only interested in the star-god Radegast and ignored his clumsy overtures. Knowing that Radegast wasn't really interested in Chors, Stribog sneaked into his hall during daylight one day and stole his cloak of stars. He covered himself in it and went to Chors' house, where, thinking it was Radegast finally deciding to return her love, she welcomed him and they made love, conceiving a child. Radegast, however, noticed his cloak missing when he went to do his nightly rounds, and when he found it mysteriously returned later and his servants who had spied Stribog told him what had happened, he complained to Svarozhich. Chors was miserable, Radegast was vengeful, and Svarozhich ruled that Stribog was to be punished by having the still-unborn child taken from him; Svarozhich used magic to draw it from Chors' womb and then dissipate it into nothingness, declaring that the child was now and forever only a dream. The baby would have been the goddess of autumn, which is why there are Slavic goddesses of spring (Lada), summer (Zhiva) and winter (Morena), but not the other season. (According to the myth, it's also the reason that the proto-Slavic word for autumn is yesen, from sen, to dream.)

Nobody addresses how those particular gods' relationships go down after that, but I have to assume that Stribog is probably not popular with either Radegast or his lady-love, and it's the only myth I know of that involves him making any attempt at romance.

The other major story I know of involving Stribog starts with Perun randomly deciding he wants humanity to love him one day, deciding to accomplish this by trying to give them the gift of fire by using lightning bolts to set trees aflame (thunder gods tend to not be very smart). Stribog, as the master of the winds, had been charged by Svarozhich with making sure that fire didn't spread over the earth too much, so every time Perun did this he blew it out. Eventually, after the humans stopped panicking that Perun was going to kill them and realized that fire was pretty neat, Perun went to Stribog and begged him to turn a blind eye to this last fire, saying that it was just a little one providing some comfort and nobody would notice. Stribog agreed, thinking that the fire would eventually die like the others, but humanity figured out torches and then the secret was out. Perun got dragged up before Svarozhich and thoroughly screamed at for breaking the law regarding not interfering with mortals; his excuse was "there are holes in my quiver, some of my thunderbolts must have accidentally fallen out". Stribog was the only person who could prove this wasn't true, but since he didn't want to get in trouble for being an accomplice, he stayed silent and Perun got off with a slap on the wrist.

There are a few other small mentions of him here and there, usually having to do with wind, rain or snow. I believe he's the one that blew the whistle on Mokosh having made the first Scion, leading to the unilateral ban on them that was in effect before the Titans broke out, and while a lot of gods are noted as having secretly given gifts of knowledge or power to humanity, he's one of the few who never does, so he's probably one of the most hardline gods on the stance of not interfering with humanity.

These myths, incidentally, are mostly drawn from Ivan Hudec's excellent Tales from Slavic Myths, which I recommend to anyone who's interested in the subject (they're a lot more poetic there than in my condensed retelling, plus there's some seriously gorgeous art). It's super expensive thanks to only being in print in Slovakia, but I was able to find a copy at a local university library, so there's a chance you might be able to find one without having to shell out a zillion dollars for it.