The African Face

Question: Just wanted to ask why story-wise you guys seem to focus more on the Loa's African roots then their slightly more modern New World interpretation? Is it because the New World interpretations are kind of a mix of several other religions and traditions? Also, how does the distinctly New World Baron Samedi, fit in with your more African Loa?

No "slightly" about it! The African diaspora religions in the Americas - Candomble, Vodun, Santeria and their other variants - are very, very modern. West Africans first came to the Americas as slaves in the sixteen century, and the diaspora religions grew from there; the oldest roots of them are barely five hundred years old, making them the preteen younger sibling of most of the other mythologies in Scion's universe.

But the native religion of the Yoruba in Benin and Nigeria is much, much older, with traces of cult and stories that date back to about the fourth century B.C., making them contemporaries of the Roman Empire and comparable in age to religions like Shinto that started around the same time. The orisha that became the New World loa have a long tradition of worship and colorful stories on their home turf in Africa, from that misty B.C. time until today, when it's estimated that there are still around a million worshipers in Africa. They are in every way awesome, and more than deserving of a spot in Scion's cast of divine characters.

There are three main reasons, in light of all this, that we much prefer to talk about the orisha as the pantheon of the Yoruba of Africa, instead of using the Scion books' exclusively American version of them:

It leaves out too much awesome stuff. There are tons of awesome, hilarious and fun stories about the orisha of the Yoruba, and yet not a single one of them appears in the Scion line. Because the diaspora religions of the Americas are a heady mix of native African religions (not just the Yoruba but also other African beliefs brought by slaves from different parts of the continent, many of them from totally different mythologies), Christianity, native American beliefs and folk magic, they retain next to nothing of these awesome old stories. The Yoruba slaves who brought the religion with them couldn't write things down and risked severe punishment for even trying to orally retell their stories to others, and as a result almost all of the old mythology was forgotten or retained only in vastly pared-down or mutated form. The epic stories of Shango's problems with his wives, Ogun's bloodlust-fueled rampages across the world, Eshu's world-class asshole medals or Obatala's drunkenly benevolent creations are lost when you ignore the African roots of the loa and orisha, which is a great big damn shame. That's not to say that the diaspora religions haven't given birth to new stories and myths about their gods, because they certainly have; but why on earth would we want to lose out on the old ones by pretending that only the new ones exist?

Nothing else in the setting does that. This is the big one for us: why on earth are the Loa the only pantheon in Scion that uses a modern religion instead of the original ancient one? Seriously, it doesn't make any sense. We're not replacing the myths of the Tuatha de Danann with the new forms of them worshiped in modern Celtic paganism, are we? We're not deciding to roll with the way Asatru treats the Aesir instead of what they do in the Eddas and sagas. But that's exactly what we're doing with the Loa when we decide to frame them as an American pantheon based in Haiti, Cuba, Louisiana and Brazil, and it's very out of character for the rest of the game's setting. I'm actually pretty sure there are a few reasons that this was originally done: the game's aimed at primarily American gamers, who have heard about voodoo in their popular culture but don't know much about Africa, and White Wolf has always had a particular vodun fondness in its lines (which you can see most prominently in WoD, but really, they pop up all over the place!) that probably made it easy to translate over, and they most likely figured that there was no point in working on an African pantheon nobody had ever heard of but still needed to include something from sub-Saharan Africa to make the line vaguely global. The result is that the books use the Loa as the representatives of Africa in the game's world, but bizarrely do so by ignoring the very African religion they came from, instead relying on the very modern, very Europe- and Christianity-influenced diaspora religions.

That's kind of super lame for Africa. And dude, that kind of sucks, you know? Here we are getting to delve into the awesome ancient cultures of China and Japan and Greece even the Aztecs, and yet when it comes to Africa, we're told, "Well, that sounds like a lot of work/we aren't sure it would sell well, so here's voodoo dolls instead." That sucks! Why does every other mythology in the game get the benefit of their ancient traditions, native stories and pantheon of awesome gods, but the Yoruba have to roll with only what survived on a different continent in altered form after centuries of slavery? Sure, the average gamer doesn't know a lot about African mythology that isn't centered around the Nile, but why should that mean that it gets thrown away? The solution is to tell those awesome stories, to give that awesome background, and to include the Yoruba pantheon as a vibrant and amazing set of gods in its own right, just as the game books do for every other group of gods.

And the kicker, of course, is that this doesn't even mean you have to lose all the fun New World versions of the orisha! A Scion of one of the Orisha could be aligned with any form of him over time, just as a Hindu Scion might see his parent as the Vedic Rudra or the more modern Shiva and be able to do cool stuff related to whichever version he likes. If you're a Scion of Shango, you're absolutely free to play with the African myths about Shango, or the New World Trinidad-and-Tobago myths about Shango, or even with the stories of Saint Barbara if you want. You can still flavor your Scion with whichever version of his father you please, just as a Scion of Lugh might go with his Welsh or Gaulish versions without batting an eye. If you want to be a blues-playing, devil-pacting Scion of Kalfu from Louisiana, the fact that your parent is actually the African god Eshu won't make a single bit of difference to your pursuing that concept. Plenty of gods have changed over the course of their religions, gaining different forms or ideas attached to them; the orisha are no different.

And that's exactly why we think they shouldn't be treated any differently, and that their religion shouldn't be demoted to second-class status just because the average gamer might be slightly more familiar with the modern version. The orisha are not American gods that used to be in Africa a long time ago; they're African gods that have surprising influence in the Americas. Embrace and love their roots, because they're every bit as awesome as the roots of every other pantheon in Scion.

As for the Baron, he's always the point of contention that comes up when we talk about this stuff, because he's both the most popular and recognizable of the New World Loa, and yet also one of the few among them that has absolutely no origin in Africa as far as we can tell. He's entirely homegrown in the Americas (primarily Haiti), which puts him in the same odd, awkward position as other thoroughly modern gods: obviously legitimate, since he has grown up as part of this religion and is definitely regarded and worshiped as a god, but also obviously outside the pantheon proper. You see a lot of this in the diaspora religions because of one of the points we mentioned above: African slaves were imported from all over the continent and often had no language or religion in common, meaning that they shared their beliefs, and furthermore they worked alongside laborers from still further distant cultures, including poor immigrant Europeans, native American servants and Amazonian tribesmen. The result is that sometimes the diaspora religions adopt religious figures from a completely different mythology that has nothing to do with their own, and you end up with such "rootless" gods as Baron Samedi.

Our favorite theory about the Baron, and the one we currently use in our games, is that he might actually have his roots in Celtic stories rather than African ones, most specifically the figure of Samhain, who plays a very minor role in the Tain bo Cuailgne. The scholarly theory goes that Irish immigrant workers laboring alongside African slaves might have shared some of their fairy tales and mythic stories, and that the Baron grew out of the African synthesis of those things into their own religion, pairing him with another possible Irish import in Maman Brigitte (who, under this theory, is most likely borrowed from the Irish Brigid). Since we have no African origin for the Baron, we enjoy that fun side explanation for him, making him a Tuatha refugee who jumped ship to a new religion in the Americas and made it his own.

But of course you don't have to use that - it is, after all, only a theory, and definitely not one that has a great deal of hard evidence other than obscure linguistics to back it up - so the Baron can be handled pretty much any way you want him to. We're most likely going to consider him an adjunct to the African pantheon - probably a god who isn't quite Legend 12 yet (because, while he's very cool and famous, he also has very few stories of actually doing anything) and is one of the younger generation of New World loa that are buttressing the ranks of the Orisha. But if you love the Baron, love the diaspora religions and want to keep him a Legend 12 top dog along with everyone else, we certainly won't stop you.

Our entire aim in rewriting the Loa to become the African Orisha is to include more awesomeness in their toybox, not less. So keep on loving them as Louisiana voodoo priests, as the saints of Santeria and the orixa of Candomble and the big goddamn pimps of Xango, and do whatever you want with them. We're not here to tell you what you can't do; we want to give you a whole lot more that you can.