Are you going to be renaming the darkness Titanrealm? 'Cause I see you named it Keku and you have a Titan Avatar named Kuk, both of which are part of the Egyptian myth and, as far as I know, they are the same person, just different names. If you are not, can you elaborate on this subject?
Sure, though I don't think too much elaboration will be needed!
"Keku" is simply the ancient Egyptian word for "darkness". There is no real legendary locale in Egyptian myth that could lend its name to a Titanrealm, and since the place is the source of all darkness and the homeland of all the darkness problems constantly plaguing the gods of Egyptian myth, we figured there was no reason not to use it as the name of the place. Keku isn't a person; it's just a noun.
However, the confusion comes in for Kuk, whose name also means "darkness" - it's just a slightly different form of the same root word. Kuk is a person, one of the primordial Ogdoad and the personified representative of darkness within it, so it's not surprising that his name is very functional and just tells you what he's about. All of the Ogdoad are like that, in fact; his counterparts are Nu ("water"), Huh ("eternity") and Amun ("hidden"), for the respective gods of water, eternity and invisibility.
So when we talk about Keku, we're talking about exactly what the word means: darkness, the realm of lightless shadow in which all the Darkness Titan Avatars brood. It's a place, not a person, and is always referred to one. Kuk's name is etymologically almost identical to Keku, but that's just one of the perils of dealing with Titans, who are so old that their names are often just nouns that refer to a concept. We use the more common form of his name to differentiate him from the realm, which uses the generic noun form, and everybody can go home happy.
So never fear, there's neither an accidentally doubled Titan Avatar nor a linguistically confused misnamed realm at play here. It's just that Egyptian mythology is very fond of naming its Titans nouns instead of proper names.
so is there anything left of the Aten from the corebooks or did you throw him in the garbage.
ReplyDeleteAten's definitely still around! He's a great example of a Titan and a major mover and shaker in our games. He just isn't the "main" Egyptian antagonist, but he certainly antagonizes them very capably anyway and is a major part of the Titanrealm of Light.
DeleteThe major antagonist for most of the Egyptian religion is darkness in the form of Apep, but that doesn't mean they don't also have problems with other Titans like Aten.
How about akenaten
ReplyDeleteWhat about him?
DeleteYay! One of my questions got answered. Lol. The explanation of Nouns instead of Proper Names helped me out quite a bit to understand this. It was just I knew some about this cause of my character and I wanted to do research, but it seemed like they were one and the same to me, so I got confused. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteYep, no problem. :) It's a common problem with Titans!
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