The Royal Cults

Question: How would you treat the various syncretised composite gods of the New Kingdom in Egypt in the Scion setting? The likes of Re-Horakhty and Amun-Ee are pretty major figures in writings from the time, not to mention the occasional cross-cultural Greek or Canaanite combo god. Do such beings exist in Scion or is it always a case of silly mortals getting their gods confused?

It's generally mortals being confused. Which is understandable when they're dealing with millennia of accumulated religious knowledge, influxes from other cultures over that entire time, and the inventional revisionism of various rulers and cult centers that wanted to make themselves the seat of religious power or associate themselves firmly with particular deities. When people like Re-Horakhty are discussed, in Scion's terms that means that you're probably talking about either Ra or Horus, and which it is depends on the Storyteller's ruling on which is more appropriate depending on the current situation and the godly attributes in play. There's an old post talking about the same issue back here.

Since Ra and Horus already exist, creating separate deities for each of the many composite forms of them would be a nightmare, and it wouldn't really do the game all that much good anyway. Instead, we just treat it as a case of human cults not always mirroring divine reality perfectly, especially when changed by human motivations like politics, and make calls on a case-by-case basis.

Literally Star-Crossed

Question: Hi! I know the Amatsukami rewrite is some time away but I was curious about something. I've heard that Izanagi is a kami associated with the stars as well as the sky, and the myth of Tanabata is a retelling of his doomed affair with Izanami. Is there anything in your research that would indicate that's true?

Well, it is possible that some people might consider Izanagi a stellar deity. In Japanese myth, the stars were created by Izanagi when he drew the heavenly spear out of the earth at the creation of the world and flung the clots of mud clinging to it into space, so he has a connection to stars in that he created them. We wouldn't consider it a strong enough association to make him a star god, really, though, considering that Izanami also helped with the spear-creations and that Izanagi presumably created everything else that exists in Japan at the same time and we wouldn't think of him as a god of Fertility or Water or Earth, either.

As for the mythology surrounding Tanabata, that's actually imported from China, where it's the well-known tale of the Weaver's Daughter and Cowherd's Son, Zhi Nu and Niu Lang; in at least one version, Zhi Nu is the daughter of the Jade Emperor and the saga is played out as a conflict between celestial gods, although in other places it's a folktale of two mortal lovers kept apart by a Romeo & Juliet style family feud. Tanabata is the Japanese name for the goddess, who is patroness of weavers, while Hikoboshi is the Japanese name of her cattle-aligned counterpart. Kept apart by the decree of her father or whatever other outside forces a given retelling of the myth chooses, the two lovers can meet only once per year, when the stars Altair and Vega that represent them line up.

But we've never heard of Tanabata and Hikaboshi being cognates of Izanami and Izanagi, and we don't know of any reason they'd be connected. Izanagi and Izanami have no similar connotations to the two formerly Chinese gods other than the very tenuous stellar connection of being creator gods, and furthermore the mythology doesn't line up; nobody ever forbade them to get together and in fact their pantheon encouraged them, and once Izanami died and Izanagi failed to retrieve her, there was definitely no interest on either of their parts in having a romantic once-a-year tryst even if they could. You could definitely call their relationship a "doomed affair" if you want to, but it's in no way a similar one to that between Tanabata and Hikoboshi.

However, that doesn't mean the Tanabata myth can't do neat stuff in Japan. You might be able to do some cool stuff with what these Shen are doing being so prominent in Japanese myth and whether or not they're seeking some kind of asylum from their pantheon there, and it might also be interesting to remember that Amaterasu is also a goddess with weaving connotations. She isn't a star goddess, but she and her brother and former consort Tsuki-Yomi are both heavenly deities that inhabit the sky but never touch, and there might be something you could mess with in that parallel situation.

Jet-Setters

Question: Besides the Deva and Yazata, what are some good examples of gods from one pantheon showing up in the myths of another pantheon?

Ooh, goody, cross-culturalism!

The big showstopping example we always pull out for our players is a specific myth in which the Aesir and Bogovi almost go head-to-head in person. The Nemtsi (a Slavic word meaning "mute", because they assumed that since they couldn't speak Slavic they didn't know how to talk), an invading tribe of Germanic warriors, rolled into Slavic territory with an eye toward conquering the native people and started busting the place up. The Slavic army, though valorous and capable, started losing badly, and the Bogovi realized that this was because the Aesir were actually marching into battle and directly supporting their people. There was a massive uproar in the Slavic Overworld as various gods got really pissed off about it and called for action, but in the end Svarozhich reinforced their already long-standing law: the gods don't interfere in the affairs of mortals, period, so despite the fact that the Aesir were definitely cheating by doing so, the Bogovi were still going to remain on the sidelines. Of course, the first rule of the Bogovi is We Have Lots of Laws and the second rule is And We Break Them Constantly, so as soon as Svarozhich wasn't looking, several of the other gods got involved anyway, most notably the three warrior sons of Veles riding into battle and Perun barbecuing the opposing general with a particularly enraged thunderbolt. The gods did not clash directly against one another, but only because Svarozhich got the rest of the Bogovi together in time to form a multi-god Perun containment team, thus depriving humanity of the spectacular possibility of a Thor vs. Perun throwdown (but then again, probably also saving humanity from being totally flash-fried during the course of events, so that was good). Other, less excitingly dangerous Slavic myths also exist in which captured Nemtsi prisoners denounce the Bogovi and call upon Odin, Thor and Frigg by name, although luckily for everyone involved none of them show up, so it's clear that the Slavs were quite aware of the gods of the Germanic religion and concerned about their encroachment into Slavic territory. Curiously, there are no reciprocal Norse records in which they seem to have noticed any of the Slavic gods... but then again, since the Aesir have no qualms about going into battle whenever they feel like it, they might have assumed that since the Bogovi didn't show up, they didn't actually exist. Incidentally, this myth is possibly a garbled, mythologized account of the incursion of the Rus into Slavic territories; we think of them as quintessentially Slavic now, thanks to their settling in Kiev and becoming so ubiquitous that they even lent their name to modern-day Russia, but they were probably originally from Sweden and only became part of the Slavic landscape thanks to a long, slow process of cultural assimilation.

That myth is awesome, but it's also a pretty big exception - very seldom do gods from different pantheons show up in one anothers' myths as themselves, acknowledged as foreign powers. More often, they'll simply be reimagined by the ancient myth-tellers as previously unknown gods of their native pantheon, which is why the Romans just call every thunder god Jupiter regardless of whether or not that's actually who he is, and therefore Jupiter has a lot of odd, quirky little myths associated with him that probably were originally attached to someone else. The Deva and Yazata are the strongest crossover deities, some of them even retaining the same name in both religions, but even they have split almost totally to the point where even some historians hesitate to call them the same deities anymore.

However, there are still tons of obvious import gods who wander in and out of various cultures' stories without breaking too much of a sweat. Isis does this all the time - for example, when Io escapes Greece as a cow, driven away by Hera's jealousy, Isis receives her and makes her one of her priestesses, and we already talked a little while ago about her involvement in the myth of Iphys and Ianthe. In some fringe Egyptian myths, Set marries Anat and Astarte, the Canaanite goddesses of war and love, as a consolation prize for losing his bid for the throne against Horus, which is almost certainly the result of someone confusing him with Baal but nevertheless became a firmly-entrenched story in northeastern Egypt for a while. Quetzalcoatl just sort of casually saunters through each of the Mesoamerican religions in chronological order, becoming a universal symbol of the region despite being interpreted differently by each different culture there, and Australian culture-heroes are famous for "traveling" between different nearby peoples, resulting in a wide range of stories being told about the same characters across a geographical area, since naturally they did different things in the territories of different peoples. And, of course, the Celts are an absolute mess of cross-pollination, most obviously in the case of the Tuatha, who share half their roster with the Welsh pantheon and are not apologizing for it (I'm looking at you, Nuada of the Silver Hand, who is suspiciously similar to the Welsh Nudd of the Silver Hand, off fighting magicians in nearby Wales. Nobody's fooled).

And, of course, early Middle Eastern religions love to do this - it's not just Persia! Anyone who's read the Bible knows Yahweh is in there saying, "Don't worship Baal, he sucks and no one likes him," and the early days of Islam include myths in which followers of Muhammad literally go out, seek out the other gods of the Arab people and kill them to make way for Allah as the sole power in the region, such as the story in which the famous Islamic hero Ali beheads al-Uzza to force her to stop "haunting" a grove of trees that was probably once a place of worship dedicated to her.

Of course, when it comes to syncretization and line-blurring, plenty of gods could be said to be in one anothers' myths if you're willing to consider two similar figures the same or follow scholarly theory down the rabbit hole. These are our favorite examples, but you can definitely rustle up a few more!

Tsou What?

Question: This may be super-incredibly obscure, but what, if anything, can you tell me about the mythology of the Seediq, the indigenous people of Taiwan? How close, mythologically, are they to the Chinese mainland, etc.?

Wow, that is obscure.

Taiwanese mythology is definitely an underloved subject, and unfortunately we don't have any particularly good information on a fully-fleshed pantheon from the island (if, indeed, they had one, which isn't totally certain). To begin with, the Seediq are only one of many indigenous peoples on Taiwan, all of whom had their own religious beliefs, some similar to neighboring peoples and some unique. Taiwan may look tiny next to the giant hulk of China, but it's still larger than many European countries and has plenty of room for multiple ethnic groups within it.

The original, native mythologies of Taiwan are poorly preserved, since they were all orally handed down and people were conquering and diluting those cultures a lot earlier than they were interested in preserving them. We know that they had legends of various magical people and phenomena - sun god and moon deities, a race of dwarf-like mountain-dwellers, magical animals who granted unending bounty to the people as long as they didn't get too greedy, and so on. We really can't tell if there's a formal pantheon as such, but certainly there was a religion that involved shamanistic interaction with the natural world and several ritual practices such as facial tattoos (like the ones on this Atayal girl). Those practices have all but died out in the modern day, thanks to outside pressure from conquering foreigners and the supplanting of the native religions with new ones introduced by said conquerors.

Of course, we've figured out stuff about religions with only poor oral sourcing before, right? Yes, but unfortunately the Taiwanese peoples are in a geographical location that made them constantly subject to being invaded and ruled by other people, which means that by the time anyone was recording their ethnography, they'd already been inundated with outside religions for a long time. It's similar to the problem we have with untangling Etruscan and other native Italian religion from Greek; we know they had their own religion before they started syncretizing like madmen, but since most of our information is from after, we don't know how much of it was their own invention that is similar to those of other cultures nearby, and how much they simply borrowed. For example, many Taiwanese cultures have a flood myth involving a pair of primordial siblings who survive it and later incestuously marry to populate the world; that might be native to them, but then again it sounds an awful lot like the myth of Nuwa and Fuxi over in China, and we know that Chinese settlers and traders were sharing Taoism and Buddhism with the island at least by the fourteenth century or so, if not earlier. Sometimes those siblings, or some very like them, are the sun god and moon deities, which is very similar to the myths of Amaterasu and Tsukiyomi as sibling consorts up in Japan, which had its own influence. A narrative in which many suns are overheating the sky and an archer-hero must shoot the extra ones down is an obvious echo of the Chinese story of Houyi, and now many indigenous Taiwanese people claim that there was always an all-powerful invisible god worshiped by their people, despite the fact that such a belief is likely to be a recent import from Christian missionaries, and so on and so forth. It's true that nearby cultures often come up with similar myths entirely on their own, but it's also very hard to tell when that's happening as opposed to cultural borrowing when you don't have a lot in the way of recorded evidence one way or the other.

At this point in history, Taiwanese people are overwhelmingly worshipers of the Shen, with Buddhism and Taoism comprising about 70% of the entire country's active religious population, and Christianity is also a strong force. Indigenous beliefs still survive in a few very out-of-the-way areas, particularly the mountains (which, incidentally, are the traditional territory of the Seediq), but centuries of syncretization with incoming Chinese settlers and the influence of the Japanese, who flatly outlawed native religions when they controlled the island in the late nineteenth century, have combined to make it all but disappear. There certainly do exist some indigenous Taiwanese gods (with those of some peoples better preserved than others), but their influence on the world is almost zero.

Which doesn't mean you can't do neat stuff with them in Scion, of course! Go nuts. Drag them in as part of the Asian coalition against the Titans, plot their revenge against the Shen and Kami for marginalizing them, claim they were actually members of those groups all along or anything else you want. Just know that they're very obscure and hard to find information on (especially in English), so they're a lot more work than most other pantheons and may not be worth it for Storytellers who aren't very excited about using them in a game.

Exotic Imports

Question: How do you explain the origins of gods who are obviously imports from somewhere else? Co-locations of that god? Uplifted humans filling a fateful divine role? New gods filling a fateful divine role?

Each situation of a borrowed god - syncretized, visiting, or anything else - is different, so we always examine them on a case-by-case basis as they come up. There's no way to really make a blanket rule that would cover everybody, and depending on the mythology surrounding a particular deity, any of the options you mention and several others might be appropriate. (Well, okay, except for the human one, because humans can't become gods in Scion. Could be a Scion moving on up, though.)

Some gods are clearly borrowed by one culture from a neighbor, retaining most of the same features and personality; a good example is the borrowing of Aphrodite to become Rome's Venus, who is almost identical to her in every way and has only minor changes here and there that occurred as the new culture added its personal quirks to her legends. In these cases, it's usually best to rule that this is in fact a case of the same goddess being worshiped by two different cultures, something that happened all the time in the ancient world and is certainly not hard for a goddess to pull off if she puts her mind to it. As a Storyteller, you're free to have her show up in whichever form she feels like it and on whatever turf she pleases, because she's just a multicultural deity rather than a true split personality.

On the other hand, some borrowed gods have been syncretized with a local god to form a new synthesis, one that clearly shows both roots but no longer properly belongs to either. A good example is Shango, who in the New World was syncretized with Christianity until he formed the bizarre combo-pack of St. Barbara of Cuba; because incoming Yoruba slaves were not allowed to worship their gods openly, they used Christian placeholders instead, and Shango was assigned to St. Barbara because she was traditionally shown wearing red, one of his symbolic colors, was associated with lightning thanks to the story in which her murderer was killed by it, and was the patron saint who guarded those who worked with firearms and explosives, which matched the temperamental African god's personality. The result, centuries later in Cuba, is a potent religious figure in Santeria who is no longer really either one, carrying equal qualities of the Catholic saint and the Yoruba god, but not really matching up to either anymore. When something like this happens, there's more leeway as a Storyteller to try to figure out what might have happened; you could again say that it's simply one of those two gods using the other as a persona or disguise while in a different land, but you might also decide that Shango becomes Barbara when he goes to Cuba thanks to the weight of Fatebonds forcing him to, or that the new god, so suspiciously similar to Shango, is in fact an ascended Scion of his who took on one of his roles at godhood. There's no single best answer except what you think will be the most interesting for your story.

And finally, there are the gods who are definitely imports but also definitely fully separate and distinct Legend 12 gods in their own right; the example we usually use is Avalokitesvara, a many-armed Indian god on a mission to aid humanity, who in China becomes Guanyin, one of the most popular and widespread goddesses with a plethora of Chinese-centric origin stories and myths. Avalokitesvara is certainly an important dude, but at the same time it would be ludicrous to claim that Guanyin, who is a Legend 12 goddess if there ever was one, is merely an offshoot or disguise he sometimes wears. When you've got this going on, you can decide to treat one as an aspect of the other, but that leads to weird chicken-and-egg questions - we'd normally say that Avalokitesvara is the occasional aspect of Guanyin when she goes to India, since she's more important and probably higher-Legend than he is, but at the same time we know that Avalokitesvara was worshiped significantly before she was, so what gives there? You could rule that she decided to leave India and become Guanyin, but then you're making a weird call that gods who have counterparts in other religions may not exist at all, which is a big bummer for the gameworld. Instead of messing with all of that, we generally rule that if two gods have different personalities and are important in different religions, they're two different people, regardless of whether or not we know sociologically that they came from the same source. After all, we're not about to decide that every European sky god is really just a face of Dyaus Pita, so there always has to be a line drawn somewhere about what you decide to syncretize and what you let be itself. That might mean that these are two related gods, a god and another god who copycatted him in order to get a free ride to fame, a god and his Scion that took over the mantle in a new geographical area, a god and a lesser immortal or even Titanspawn aspiring to godhood, or anything else.

At the end of the day, our inclination is usually toward syncretizing as little as possible; if it's not obvious that they're the exact same person and have nothing to offer separately, we prefer to keep different gods across the pantheons, letting them represent their cultures and religions in their own way. But it's always a decision the Storyteller has to make to best fit their plot and gameworld, so it'll never be exactly the same across the board. And it really doesn't need to be, so no one should feel stressed about doing it wrong.

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!

Study Abroad Program

Question: Aside from the obvious two (Greek/Roman and Aesir/Vanir), which two pantheons have the most overlap of gods with each other?

Damn you, Norse myth, why do you always gotta be confusing everybody? The comparison between these two always annoys me (which is not your fault, question-asker - sometimes I'm an unreasonable person). The Greco-Roman pantheon overlap is not the same situation as the Aesir/Vanir one; the Greeks and Romans are two entirely different cultures on different peninsulas who performed a complicated religious synthesis, while the Vanir and Aesir are both "pantheons" known to and worshiped by the same people at the same time. The Aesir and Vanir are only different pantheons in that Norse myth calls them different factions of gods; they don't actually come from different cultures, the way the Greeks and Romans do. There is some scholarly theorizing that the Vanir might represent an older religion that was subsumed by the Aesir, but even that's all within the general viking area, not spread out between two distinctly different cultural regions.

The Greek pantheon and the Roman pantheon are separate sets of gods worshiped by separate, culturally distinct people who experienced a lot of syncretization between the two of them. The Aesir and Vanir are two sets of gods who are differentiated in the myths of a single culture group - the distinction between them is more like the distinction between the theoi and titanes in Greek myth than the difference between two different religions.

But anyway, I know what you're asking, so don't mind me.

I'm not actually sure how to answer "the most" overlap between pantheons, because there is absolute tons of syncretism all over the world, and Scion does a decent job of trying to simplify it down. You often see distinct gods in Scion because the writers (or John and I) have gone through and already disentangled the synthesis for you, so that you have gods closer to their original forms and never even have to think about the fact that they were actually worshiped in like five other places. Scion goes in and takes Hathor-Isis-Hera-Aphrodite-Astarte apart so you don't have to, so a lot of the syncretism is sort of "invisible"; as the Nemetondevos supplement outright says, Lugh and Ogma might be worshiped in Gaul, but they're already in the Tuatha de Danann so you're not going to see that in the official game material.

If you're just asking who could legitimately be on more than one pantheon's roster at a time... that doesn't really narrow it down much, but it helps a little. Some heavy-hitter gods are all over the map; Ishtar, Isis, Zeus and Lugh are especially notorious, appearing as major figures in as many as six different religions at once, coming from their culture of origin and spreading throughout the lands of various others nearby. Lugh is a major god of the Tuatha de Danann, but also a major god of the Welsh pantheon as Lleu Llaw Gyffes, and also a major god of the Gaulish pantheon as Lugus. Mithra is a major god of the Yazata, but also a major god of the Romans as Mithras, and also a major (if archaic) god of the Hindu as Mitra. Quetzalcoatl is a major god of the Aztlanti, but also a major god of the Maya as Kulkulkan, and also a major god of the Pueblo peoples as Awanyu. The list goes on practically ad infinitum.

If you're looking at pantheons who have the greatest number of outright crossover members that appear in both pantheons, the biggest contenders after the Greco-Roman moshpit are probably the Devas and Yazata, which is hardly surprising since we're pretty sure they were sprung from the same long-ago root religion. The Greek and later Roman conquests of Egypt and the resulting centuries of foreign dynasties also resulted in large numbers of gods crossing over there as well, with Zeus worshiped alongside Hathor and Hermes doing double duty with Anubis and Thoth. The Elohim gods are also major crossovers with the Pesedjet, so much so that Baal's wives sometime turn up as Set's wives and some of the gods, like Kothar, actually had more cult centers in Egypt than in their homeland.

And then there's the divine game of Twister that is Asia, where pretty much every religion is influenced by Buddhism, which carries with it some of the original Hindu gods but also brings other local gods along in its flow. Guanyin alone could easily be said to feature on no fewer than eight different pantheon rosters if you want to get technical, while Buddha himself is now in so many forms in so many places that you might as well give up and either go to grad school or find a liquor cabinet.

With this global free-for-all going on, it seems kind of crazy that nobody really talks about overlap much except between the Dodekatheon and the Dii Consentes. There are two main reasons for that: the first is the ever-present fact that the majority of the game's players and writers are western European or American and thus way more familiar with Greco-Roman mythology than any other, but the second is that for other pantheons, the overlap can be put to bed without destroying the core of the pantheon, which unfortunately isn't the case for the Romans.

See, for most pantheons, we can put those globe-trotting gods in their home pantheon - where they originated, or, occasionally, where they're most prominent and important - and the other pantheons they're nominal members of won't collapse if we do. Nobody's worried about taking Anat and Astarte off the Pesedjet roster, because the Pesedjet have plenty of individual gods of their own and the borrowed ones aren't essential to the religion; nobody's panicking over taking Marici out of India, because the Devas are hardly hurting because she's over in Japan. For most mythologies, the "foreign" gods that overlap on the roster were grafted into the religion on top of its native gods and customs, so while they flavor it, they don't define it. You can kick Mithras out of Rome and not make it any less Rome.

But the problem is that you can't kick Jupiter out of Rome, because then it will be less Rome. The Romans kept their native religion, with its hosts of minor deities and genii, but their idolization of the Greek culture that preceded them resulted in an insane level of sycretization that led to their major gods actually being, in most cases, almost carbon clones of the Greek ones. You can't separate the "Roman" Jupiter from the Greek Zeus; there's no difference anymore. You can't take Juno out of Rome or Hera out of Greece, and you can't deprive either culture of Apollo because they're both seriously using him. These gods are incredibly, vitally and centrally important to both religions; if you removed them from one, it wouldn't make sense anymore. And that's why Scion just says fuck it and smashes the two together, and why people are constantly talking about ways to try to deal with the fact that their major movers and shakers are inseparable but the religions beneath them aren't.

We've talked about it a lot, and I'm not sure we're any closer to a "good" answer to the question now than we were when this blog started. Greco-Roman mythology is what most of Scion is based on, and ironically it also breaks Scion's framework right in half. Those jerks.

As for other gods that appear in more than one religion, there are scads of them - it's actually too big a question, I think, to really give a detailed answer. Our answer to the many forms of various gods is always to play the one that works the best for your game. If you're a Storyteller, figure out what pantheon you want a god to be an official member of for purposes of engendering Scions, and then have a plan for how they interact with and hang out with other pantheons that they've influenced. If you're a player, your Scion can align himself with any version of his parent he wants; if you want to be a Scion of the Hindu Soma and base all your character and background around Hindu religion, you can do that, even if you inexplicably have Asha as your PSP (some Storytellers also allow swapping around to other PSPs for different gods' forms, so check what yours wants to do).

Pantheon overlap isn't just something that happens now and then and mostly around the Mediterranean; it happens everywhere all across the world, because people from different cultures have met, exchanged ideas and fused their religions for thousands of years. Scion usually finds it most useful to carefully separate gods to allow them to shine as individuals, but if you want to dive into the murky waters of syncretic combination, good luck and godspeed, friend.

Aspect of the Whole

Question: How many of the Pesedjet are multiple aspects of the same god in the original myths (i.e. Khnum, your Titan Avatar, being the evening aspect of Ra, or Sekhmet being the orginal form of Hathor)?

The simplest answer: all of them.

The Egyptian gods are the gods of a region that spanned a large geographic area, came into contact with several other large empires and their religions, and covered a vast period of time. We tend to think of some gods, especially the more recognizable ones, as completely distinct; Isis is just Isis, Set is just Set and so on, but in reality the gods were all syncretized, combined, associated and aspected in an enormous and complex process of evolution and specialization. There are in fact almost no Egyptian gods at all that weren't considered aspects of some other god at some point in their existence; they have all been crossed with each other so many times that even Egyptologists aren't always sure which form came first or is more "original".

It's more a process of religious change over time than anything else; the easiest comparison is to modern Hinduism, which has evolved over time from the straight-up stories of the ancient Hindu epics to the modern religion in which everyone and everything is really some aspect of someone or something else. The difference is that, because Hinduism is a part of the modern world and its religious changes can be easily traced, it's not too hard for us to compare its modern forms to ancient ones and see where things have changed and what social and religious factors contributed to that. The ancient Egyptian religion, on the other hand, died over fifteen centuries ago; everything about it looks ancient and "original" to us, and we have far less context to try to figure out who came first doing what. In addition, the fact that various cult centers gave different gods different prominence and therefore assigned them different attributes and associations means that even if we look at a slice from the same time period, we can't always say what the prevailing Egyptian religious view on a given deity was.

Every single god on the Pesedjet's roster has at one point or another been considered merely an aspect of another god; Isis was called part of Mut or Hathor, Hathor was called part of Sekhmet or Bastet, Osiris was considered part of Ra who was in turn considered part of Aten during that god's early rise to power, and so on and so forth. Some gods were associated because they did similar things or had symbolic links, and over time were slowly absorbed into one another as humans forgot those symbolic links or began to take them literally. Nobody is free of the relentless parade of syncretization that occurs over the course of more than three thousand years of humanity practicing a religion; it's inevitable that they'll change everything as their society and philosophies change and new gods rise to prominence or fade into obscurity. We're looking at the confusing end product of millennia of a religion's evolution.

Just as with the Devas, if you want the Pesedjet in your games as a vibrant pantheon, you're going to have to ignore most of the religious rhetoric concerning gods being merely forms of other gods who are merely forms of other gods and so on. Egyptian myth sometimes claims that all gods are aspects of Ra, but having Ra be the only god in the pantheon would be boring, not to mention obviously inaccurate considering the vastly different skills and behavior of the other gods. Instead of worrying about which gods are said to be aspects of other gods (because, again, that's everybody), we choose those gods who have the most vibrant and individual personalities and cults, who show through their myths, legends and worship that they clearly have the clout to be their own deity. Someone like Isis is obviously her own entity, not just part of Hathor, so she makes the cut; someone without an individual personality like Imentet or Sopdu, on the other hand, is more safely considered merely an alternate name for a more prominent god (or just a minor god or goddess not important enough to have a strong cult presence).

The Pesedjet force a Storyteller to make a lot of choices; about which gods are married to whom, are the parents or children of whom, did various famous things or even whether they exist or not at all. Our goal is usually to incorporate the strongest, most well-established deities and their myths into the game; Scion needs that pantheon of individual personalities and deeds rather than a philosophical idea of all gods being one with other gods, so just as with the Devas, it's all a matter of who distinguishes themselves with awesome stories of their exploits and powers.

Saint Brigid of Kildare

Question: Would Brigid being revered as Saint Brigit by Irish Catholics have a major impact on her personality? Would she be more tame and reserved than the rest of the Tuatha?

That entirely depends on how you want to run syncretism in your games.

Brigid's a very classic example of religious syncretism; while not one of the most important of the Irish gods, she became extremely well-known thanks to her syncretization and eventual absorption into the character of the Catholic Saint Brigid, who has plenty of magical tales and ideas attributed to her thanks to the ever-wonderful embellishing nature of Irish Catholicism. She magically heals people, she predicts the benevolent future, she curses bad people with misfortune, and so on and so forth, generally having a lot of magical elements, like most saints, to back up her holiness and divine favor.

You certainly could decide that these elements might have influenced and shaped the character of the goddess Brigid; after all, Scion's setting includes Fatebonds, so if she were to have accrued enough of them when St. Brigid's legends were being born, they might have caused her to change with them. But if you do so, you have to be aware of the implications for all other religions and deities, because Brigid is far from the only one who suffers from strange syncretization.

If Brigid is going to be affected by the persona of St. Brigid, then will you also be changing Tlazolteotl to better resemble the Virgin Mary? Will you be reframing Baldur as Christ, Baal as Beelzebub, Vishnu as Buddha? Will you be considering all later syncretized forms of Egyptian gods to be closer to how the Greeks thought of them than the Egyptians? What about the Hindu and Shinto pantheons - are they all only what later Buddhism may have made of them? Where are you planning to draw the line when it comes to what syncretization by humanity does and does not do to a god?

The rife cross-culturalization of many ancient religions means that we generally don't give deities powers and stories based on their associations as saints, demons or members of other pantheons, because doing so usually means losing much of their original, unique cultural flavor in favor of dragging in someone else's religious view of them. We prefer the gods in as close a form to their heyday among their own people as we can get them (which varies depending on source material, but we take what we can get!), because part of the fun of Scion is the vast difference between different mythologies and the cultures they come from. Then, too, there's the fact that Christianity and other syncretic religions like it are comparatively young; in Scion's setting, most if not all the gods should have stopped meddling in the World by the time they became popular, which means that they wouldn't be gaining Fatebonds and it doesn't really matter what humanity decides to associate them with because Fate's power isn't behind their syncretizations or comparisons. Just as we've talked before about treating monotheistic religions as largely human inventions, so would their associations and attempts to absorb other religions be mostly human happenings.

Now, I could see Brigid being affected by St. Brigid's stories, but there would need to be very good reasons for it. You'd need to know, as a Storyteller, why she was still running around in the World getting Fatebound when the pantheons had long ago withdrawn, why she did the things she did as St. Brigid, what it might have done to her personality and what the long-ranging effects of all this was, in more dimensions than just what she has associated for XP purposes and whether or not she has a lot of dots of Courage or Piety (also, note that having Piety makes it really, really hard to pretend you're part of a different religion). More importantly, you need a good reason to do all this work, especially if you aren't planning on doing it for every god in the game. If Brigid is directly involved in the plot due to PCs' origins or actions, then you have a reason to work on her - but the answers to the questions about need to have something to do with the plot and the PCs. If the PCs or the plot they're heavily involved in make it so that Brigid needs to be involved and needs to have something to do with Catholicism, then by all means, have at it - but if not, I would steer clear of it lest you open a can of neverending, ravenously syncretic worms.

Generally, we leave Catholicism, along with most other monotheistic and more modern religions, as human creations that probably don't affect the gods much, because it's simpler and stays closer to the themes and ideas we enjoy in Scion; the gods may use them when convenient (particularly the Loa are notorious for doing so), but they aren't defining factors of their personalities. You can certainly decide to make syncretism a major theme for a particular deity, but doing so is a large undertaking, and if you don't have a solid reason to do so, it more often than not may be a lot of window-dressing busy-work for the Storyteller that doesn't meaningfully connect to the game the Scions are playing in the first place.

More interesting to me than trying to stuff gods into their syncretic roles is exploring how they feel about them; some might find them amusing, others might be offended, and I imagine a lot of them feel it's more imperative than ever not to go getting Fatebound in the World if that's what people are going to turn them into when they do.

This is why they need Scions. They so do not want to get any of that on them.

Self and Symbol

Question: How do you guys feel about Titan Avatars having cross-cultural AKA's? Aten, Dagr and Hyperion are all the Sun itself, not different aspects of the Sun. Similarly, Lir, Tiamat and Oceanus are all the endless ocean.

Irritated and aggravated, with a side of froth.

Many Titans do in fact represent the same thing through the lens of different cultures; Lir and Oceanus are both The Ocean, just imagined from the perspective of the Irish and the Greeks, respectively. But it's usually not a good idea to try to smash them together, because doing so goes against the very foundation of Scion's premise.

Scion's core idea is that All Myths Are True. This is why you can have several different pantheons doing a bunch of different things at the same time that are apparently contradictory. If you start deciding that anything with the same representation should be counted as the same regardless of the culture or myth surrounding it, the entire setting breaks down. Olympus, Takamagahara and Shamu are all the heavenly abodes of the gods, so shouldn't they all just be collectively called The Overworld, since they're the exact same idea? Hades, Hel and Nepesh are all just different names for a dreary abode of the dead, so we could just save some space and make them a single thing called The Underworld, right? Gae Bolga, Gungnir and the Green Dragon Crescent Blade are all famous magical spears representing their wielders' might, so we could probably just reduce those down and call the composite The Spear, right? And, I mean, dudes like Thor, Zeus and Baal are just taking up space as separates when they really fulfill the same functional roles anyway, so why not just call them one Thunder God that everyone has different names for?

Now we're suddenly playing a different game entirely, one in which Scions can choose their parents from the likes of The Love Goddess or The War God, in which they choose Birthrights from a list of faceless archetypes, go on adventures to the same universal Overworld and Underworld and fight the forces of Fire and Water as large, universal concepts. I'm not going to say that's a bad game - in fact, I think it might be a very interesting game, depending on how it was built. But it's not Scion.

Scion intentionally doesn't take that route because of how much of the world it shuts off. Much of the joy of Scion is in the interactions between the different pantheons, in the larger-than-life personalities of the deities that transcend their symbolic associations, and in the different values and ways of telling stories their cultures espouse. Every culture is unique and tells their stories uniquely; calling any of their characters the same due to shared associations or representations does a disservice to those characters, that story and the culture that created them. The game as a whole is done a disservice by ignoring the interesting and unique concepts, stories and personalities of the places, things and people in them, from heroes all the way up through Titans. Ouranus may perform a similar mythological function to Anu's, but that does not make them the same, any more than it makes Marduk and Zeus necessarily the same person because of their shared role as a king storm-god.

You will seldom find us in favor of things that take interesting ideas and possibilities out of the game instead of putting them in, and this is no exception. Titans have personalities of their own in many myths and take actions of their own accord, even the most primordial among them like Gaia or Pangu. There's so much more to explore if you allow them, like all other parts of the setting, to be themselves instead of mushed-together conglomerations of different cultures' not-quite-matching ideas. You can still explore symbolism, representation and how similar things might affect one another, but it's just as easy to do that without pretending that various cultures were talking about the exact same person when they really weren't, or removing all of a culture's distinctive flair in favor of a grey mass of comparative mythological similarity.

Let Gaia be Gaia, and let Coatlicue be Coatlicue. Their cultures didn't view them as the same person, or even the same kind of person; there's no reason whatsoever for Scion to do so.