Lady of the Brightest Star

Question: Are there any significant stories around about Astarte? My player is gonna be a Scion of hers, but I can't seem to find much of her doing anything besides being a cheerleader for Baal.

Ooh, one of the terrifying ladies of the Canaanite lands! There are indeed stories about her exploits, although not quite as many as someone like Baal who has an entire surviving myth cycle to his name.

Astarte is interesting because she is one of Baal's two wives along with Anat, and without a lot of material on the two of them, it sometimes seems like they're fairly identical or interchangeable, with Astarte the less well-defined of the two. Both are goddesses of love and sexuality, goddesses of war, and unflinchingly dedicated to the well-being of their husband Baal; but where Anat has separate stories of wading in the blood of her enemies, marching forth to defeat Mot and bearing Baal's child as a heifer, Astarte lacks these extra myths in the main body of Canaanite religion. We have to look a little harder to find stories of her actions, moving out to the wider world of Phoenician myth and her syncretizations with other cultures. We can start with Philo of Byblos, who in his description of Phoenician religion tells us that Baal and Astarte are the rulers of the universe; Anat may be the war-leader who destroys Baal's enemies, but Astarte is the queen who rules alongside him politically.

The most famous of Astarte's appearances are indeed in Baal's set of myths, which are overall the most well-known Canaanite myths we have. When Yam is declared king of the gods and Baal almost attacks the messenger in a fury, Astarte and Anat both restrain him, one on each arm, and remind him that murdering the messenger is not the wisest of all political moves. And when Baal defeats Yam, Astarte rebukes him for his unnecessary cruelty, telling him that Yam was already his prisoner and that killing him would be inappropriate, before moving on to declare before all the gods that since Baal has won, he should now be hailed as king of the gods without question. Different interpreters of the text have different ideas of what's going on here; Astarte may be telling Baal to back off of Yam because he's their sibling, or because since he was invested with power by El himself it would be politically foolish to outright kill him. But her call to the other gods to accept Baal is also a political power play, and a pretty ballsy one since El, who has previously been in charge of choosing who will rule after him, has not yet authorized that shift in power. Calling for Baal's rulership is in a way directly challenging El, who placed Yam above him, and calling the other gods to support Baal is something of a power coup away from the old father of the pantheon.

But these are pretty small mentions of Astarte, and clearly part of Baal's story rather than her own. However, the story of Astarte and Eshmun is all about her, with no whisper of Baal in sight. In that story - related by Photios, a Greek writer, who in usual Greek style uses Greek names for those involved and calls Eshmun "Asclepius of Beirut" since he is associated with healing like the Greek figure of that name - Astarte (here called Astronoe, "the heavenly" or "the starry", referring to her position as the morning star) falls in love with Eshmun, whose youthful beauty so impresses her that she begins purusing him relentlessly. Eshmun is afraid of her, since she is clearly a powerful and dangerous goddess (and possibly because he doesn't want to be on the receiving end of any jealous retribution from Baal) so he flees from her, and when he realizes he can't escape her completely, finally castrates himself so that she'll have no further interest in him. She catches up to him a moment too late, and he dies in her arms; full of grief, Astarte heals his wounds "with her body's warmth" and he becomes a god of healing, whose shrines were visited by those ill or injured. Eshmun does not appear in other myths besides this one, but is probably a Scion; Greek writers in the area claim he was the son of Apollo, which likely means the god Resheph, who is likewise a plague-associated archer who was often glossed as Apollo by Greek and Roman writers. In Syria, male cultists dedicated to her sometimes ritually castrated themselves in honor of her, echoing Eshmun's sacrifice.

The story of Astarte and Eshmun is more than a little bit similar to the story of Aphrodite and Adonis; in both cases, the love goddess falls in love with a beautiful young semi-mortal, who eventually dies because of her infatuation with him but becomes a resurrected divine figure in his own right. The ancient cults of Anat and Astarte (and Ishtar, over in Babylon) probably influenced Aphrodite and her stories considerably, and since Adonis is likewise a Canaanite import, it's very possible that the story of Aphrodite and Adonis was borrowed from this one about Astarte and Eshmun. Originally, anyway, although by the time Adonis' cult became important with its own mystery religion, they had become firmly separate figures.

The other place Astarte turns up in a major myth is, surprisingly, in Egypt. Thanks to being geographically close to one another, several figures from the Canaanite religion were imported into Egyptian cults in the northeast; gods with similar associations were often syncretized, so that some myths became attributed to Egyptian gods despite being originally of Canaanite origin. This led to the rise of a few areas in which Set and Baal were syncretized, since they were both temperamental storm gods with delusions of kingship, and in some of those areas the idea arose that Set was married to Anat and Astarte, who were given to him as consolation prizes when he lost the rulership of the gods to Horus. In those cults, it is Astarte who is the major figure in the myth of the sea falling in love with her and demanding her as tribute lest it overflow and flood the countryside, and it is for her sake that Set must go out and conquer the sea. It's an interesting syncretized myth, since the sea as the antagonist might have some roots in the Canaanite myth of Baal fighting Yam, with Set standing in for his fellow storm god. Further south in Egypt, Nephthys becomes the lady of the myth instead of Astarte since she is Set's traditional wife, but it's still a neat place to mess around with if you're looking for stuff to do with the Canaanite goddesses.

Astarte may not be the no-holds-barred bloodbath runner and war-monger that her conquering sister Anat is, but she's still an improtant goddess with a lot of neat stories and imagery. Good luck to that Scion of yours - they're about to head out into a the wonderful world of the few intrepid children of the war goddesses, and it's a dangerous place.

This Town Ain't Big Enough

Question: I was reading through your Elohim PDF and saw that there were two war goddesses (Anat and Astarte) and I was wondering if there any other pantheons with two or more gods who covered the same 'area'.

Yeah. That would be... all of them.

While there are occasionally gods who are the only one doing a particular cosmic thing in their pantheon, I can't think of a single pantheon in Scion's geography that doesn't have people who overlap. Ancient cultures didn't put gods in strict boxes where they couldn't branch out, and as a result plenty of gods share associations with other gods in their same pantheon.

Seriously, overlaps are epidemic. The Dodekatheon also have two war gods, with both Ares and Athena rocking the battle-ravaged casbah all over town. The Pesedjet have nine kajillion jillion death-oriented gods, the Anunna can't get enough gods with thunder on their minds, there are literally more than double as many Tuatha gods of battle as there are non-war-aligned Irish deities, the Yazata are like some kind of plant-growing commune and half the Aesir are getting their rune-magic in everyone else's soup.

And all of that's okay, because having overlapping areas of influence doesn't necessarily mean that one god is redundant. Often, two gods may share the same conceptual space but represent different aspects of it, such as Ares representing bloodlust and strength on the battlefield while Athena represents tactical strategy. Both are war gods of the highest caliber, but they don't do the same things and they're not making each other any less relevant or important by existing. Susanoo being the god of ocean storms doesn't make Ryujin any less important as lord of the depths of the sea, and Tonatiuh being the ascendant and personified sun does not diminish Huitzilopochtli's importance as the defender and supporter of the fiery daystar. The fact that there's more than one god with the same associations actually tells you straight out that they do different things; no culture's religion randomly invents a god who has no purpose or doesn't in some important way represent an idea, so if the ancients thought there were two gods of the fertile earth sharing space, you can usually bet that they had different symbolism, purpose or personality.

Some kinds of gods are rarer and therefore more likely to be singular; few pantheons have more than one god of darkness, for example, or more than one love goddess. But some do, and there ain't nothing wrong with that. And for young Scions who are up and coming, the fact that there's room for more than one deity in a given area is very good news indeed.

Sky Versus Sea: Fight!

Question: Do you think the episode of Set, Nepthys and the sea could be played as a conflict between Set and Poseidon?

I think that if you have a fun plot you want to spin off of that, sure, go for it. Egyptian mythology really doesn't have a sea-god thanks to their focus being narrowed down mostly to the Nile and surrounding environs, so there's no easy Egyptian figure to attach to the myth and the personified sea is merely itself. There is also no hint of any Greek influence in that particular myth, but Poseidon is the Greek god of the Mediterranean, and if you wanted to play it as an ancient political grudge-match kind of thing, you probably could.

Interestingly, I've seen scholarly suggestion that that particular myth might be heavily influenced by Canaanite mythology; in an alternate version, Set is instead married to Astarte (who was given to him as a sort of consolation prize after he lost the throne to Horus) and it's her he's saving from the ocean, which therefore probably refers to Yam, the Canaanite sea-god who's always startin' shit. This is probably a result of the fact that Egyptian and Canaanite territories overlapped and that Set and Baal, being both bad-tempered storm gods, might have been slightly conflated or worshiped together by some Egyptians in that area. If you wanted to, you could probably consider it a purely Canaanite myth and decide that it's referring to Baal, not Set, when it talks about going out to fight the sea.

Either way, though, the sea, whoever he is, is going to take a serious pounding to the face if he keeps these shenanigans up.

Storytime!

Question: Your post "Old Man Winter" where you told the story of Stribog got me thinking - another reason why not having family trees for some of your Anne-created Pantheons on the site is an inconvenience is they don't come with a few myths and legends. Could you perhaps share a myth of the Elohim? Baal and Moloch appear as false Gods and nemeses to the Hebrew God in The Bible, but what about through the eyes of their own people?

I love storytime, so yes!

Unfortunately, Moloch doesn't have much going on; he's one of those gods with a ridiculously strong cult presence but very few myths of his actual exploits, similar to other strong-cult gods like Cernunnos. He was especially popular in the areas in close proximity to the Hebrews, which is why he turns up so often and with such censure in the Bible, and that probably contributed to the lack of remaining written record of him, as the Israelites were hardly about to preserve his filthy, filthy behavior for future generations.

Baal, on the other hand, has super fun tales, usually having to do with him electrocuting people he's related to. The most famous sets up the delicious continuing rivalry between him and his brothers, Yam and Mot, which scholars are often impressed by because they really want to relate the Baal-Mot-Yam triad to the Zeus-Hades-Poseidon one but then they realize that there is nowhere near this level of animosity among the gods of Olympus.

El led the Elohim, his innumerable children, for many millennia, but his son Baal was ambitious and chafed against his rule, wanting to seize power for himself. Worried that he might rise up against him and angry that anyone would dare defy him, El turned to one of his other sons, the sea-god Yam, and crowned him king of the Elohim, informing him that if he wanted to rule securely he would have to kill Baal, who was plotting treachery. Yam and Baal waged a massive battle that destroyed large parts of the local countryside, and Baal was beginning to lose badly when Kothar, the smith-god and an ally of Baal's, saw what was happening, crafted two incredibly powerful clubs, and ran into battle to help him. He passed the clubs on to Baal, and Baal was then able to finish the fight, defeating Yam (and, though his excitable sister Astarte called on him to kill him, he left him alive because he was pretty sure his mother would kick his ass if he didn't).

El, having been watching all this go down, immediately claimed that he had always liked Baal best and crowned him king of the Elohim; at the urging of his wife Asherah and Baal's sister/wife Anat, he allowed that Baal should build a new palace for himself and invite all the Elohim to a celebratory feast. Baal called on Kothar to build his palace, but insisted that it have no windows (the myth does not discuss why, but it was a common belief in Canaanite myth that death always enters via a window, and additionally it's implied that without windows Baal won't be able to let out the rain the world needs to survive); Kother in turn insisted that it had to have windows, and eventually Baal gave in rather than have Kothar not finish the project. The palace was excellent, the feast was splendid, and he invited everyone over.

Unfortunately, Baal does not know how to not be an insulting dick to people, so his invitation to his oldest brother Mot, the god of death, offended him by not providing appropriate food and drink. Mot sent a messenger back, refusing to attend and taunting Baal that even though he had defeated Yam, Mot would eventually defeat him as death defeats all living things. Baal, having a storm-god temper, immediately abandoned his feast and marched into the Underworld to fight his brother, where he was summarily murdered because it is a bad idea to fight death gods on their own turf (see also: Ishtar, Ereshkigal).

His wives, Astarte and Anat, mourned him, but Anat is an angry war goddess and swore vengeance, and in turn marched into Mot's realm while he was still weak from battle, killed him, and cut his body into little pieces in retaliation before going home. Mot did not remain permanently dead (it's his underworld, after all), but it took him seven years to recover, and due to his weakened power Baal was able to return to the gods, where he was hailed and beloved by everyone. Furious at this further insult and interference in the realm of death, Mot challenged Baal to fight, and the two were so evenly matched that their battle shook the world and they fought until they both collapsed. At that point, Shapshu, the sun-goddess and messenger of El, arrived and informed Mot that El was officially going to back Baal now, so fighting him would be fruitless. Mot conceded that Baal would be king with extraordinarily bad grace and went home.

The entire story is extremely fascinating from an interpretive point of view, because there's so much going on in it; there's the idea of Death as the final conqueror, Baal as a death/rebirth deity like Tammuz or Persephone (the seven-year time period is about the usual length of time between droughts in the area; lacking as much of a fixed seasonal change, the Canaanites needed their rebirth god to show up when they were having droughts, rather than every winter), the father-god playing his sons off each other, Sky, Water and Death as the preeminent triad of powers, a female war-goddess being the final conqueror rather than the male sky-god, possibly suggesting the female's ability to give birth to new life, the shenanigans with the window and Baal's reluctance to invite danger to himself so that he could nurture the world, the suggestion that Baal's death is a symbolic requirement because of his destruction of the natural order in harming/killing Yam, and so on and so forth.

Seriously, these guys are batshit insane, but they are one of my favorite pantheons ever. We've only had the one Scion of Baal show up in-game, as an NPC, but even that was enough to completely foxtrot what the PCs were trying to do thanks to unscheduled flame/lightning battles.

The Baal Cycle was found on tablets unearthed in the ruins of Ugarit in modern-day Syria, and there are a lot of good translations and annotated interpretations floating around out there. For a really simple and fun to read one, I'd recommend Michael Coogan's Stories from Ancient Canaan (which also includes the tale of Anat murdering some poor Scion over a relic, Asherah ruining some poor king because he failed to honor her properly, and other tales of godly misconduct).