The White Whale

Question: Have you heard about the "Maushop is Moby Dick" Theory?

Question: So I heard about the mythical story of Maushop (also know as Moby-Dick to you whaling fans) at the MLK Day Wampanoag Storytime in my neighborhood. So what would he call this HUGELY popular figure (pun intended) in Scion? (i.e. legendary mortal, titan avatar, really tall scion of the Algonquin pantheon, etc.)

Maushop is a neat dude. We should all know more about him.

Essentially, Maushop is a giant creator deity figure from Wampanoag mythology; various myths exist about him creating many of the landscape features, plants and animals humans rely on to survive, teaching humanity to harness fire for warmth and cooking and how to make useful tools and weapons, and generally being a benevolent and helpful guy as much as possible. He's usually portrayed as fond of mortals and wishing to make their lives easier, to which end many of the good things in life were made specifically out of his goodwill toward them. We would definitely consider him to be a deity; his exploits are way too gigantic (ha) to be those of a mere Scion or lesser immortal, and generally too benevolent and non-dangerous to peg him as a Titan (although he does have his moments, as do most gods).

Maushop's connection to Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale of Melville's massive tome of nineteenth-century existential misery, is twofold. He is often related to whales in Wampanoag myth simply because of his massive size; because he is far larger than any human, he often sleeps in the ocean because it's more comfortable than the mountainous land, and eats whales the way a human might eat fish. In some myths, he is called upon to handle the danger to humanity after the creation of the first sharks and sea birds, turns his own children into orcas so that they can live in the waters, and converses with porpoises and other sea creatures, all of which suggests that while he is generally referred to as humanoid when hanging out with humans, he has more than a passing connection to the ocean. And perhaps most importantly, in the myth in which he departs from hanging out with humanity forever, he does so by walking away into the ocean, appearing one last time as a colossal white whale before swimming away from his people.

The second connection comes from the white American settlers in the same area, much later. When Melville was writing Moby-Dick, he was inspired greatly by the real-life tale of a white sperm whale that had recently finally been killed after terrorizing multiple whaling ships for quite a few years. That particular whale was referred to by the locals as Mocha-Dick; "Dick", the second half of the name, was likely simply pasted on thanks to a custom of naming particularly famous whales with human male designations for storytelling ease (you can see Melville refer to other whales by suffix names like Jack and Tom in the book, actually), but "Mocha" bears more than a little resemblance to Maushop's name. Local lore claims that the whale was called Mocha because it tended to appear around Mocha island, which is off the coast of Chile considerably farther southwest than New England.

But honestly, as far as we know, the conflation of Moby Dick with Maushop is probably mostly a recent embellishment rather than a real case of related stories; the Mocha-Maushop connection is probably just a coincidence, since Maushop was certainly unknown in South America and the whale itself was nowhere near Wampanoag waters (and anyway, "Mocha" is from a vastly different language), and while the story of Maushop turning into a white whale upon his departure is super neat, there's no evidence anywhere that Melville, who was heavily leaning on the story of the Chilean whale, knew about it or incorporated it into his writing. Mocha-Dick wasn't the first or the last white whale of that time period, either, with at least two other white sperm whales killed or captured in the Americas during the nineteenth century and even contemporary sightings of some nowadays (although the confirmed albino whales we have right now are humpbacks, not sperms).

However, Maushop did in fact turn into a great white whale when he left humanity, so players of Scion may yet run into him or discover that he has a connection to the rare albino cetaceans and their generally angry antics. Maybe, like the orcas of myth, these white whales are his children released into the world for whatever purpose he deems necessary, explaining their legendary fame, prodigious strength and often surprising size. Maybe each white whale is Maushop himself, who doesn't truly die when harpooned but remains patrolling the oceans to remind humanity not to get too uppity and forget who the true masters of the sea are, or to punish the European invaders who mistreated his beloved people. Maybe Melville had an encounter with Maushop that the history books don't know about and was writing about him, perhaps as a Herald or in some other Fatebound role. There are plenty of possibilities for those who want to tie the popular novel into Wampanoag myth in their games.

So we say, go for it. The terrifying grandeur of a pissed-off whale is something that players are seldom prepared for.