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.