Lord of the Infinite

Question: I'm curious. What about Zrvan seems tricky to you in regards to playing with or writing about him?

Zrvan is actually one of my favorite mythological figures ever, as John is totally tired of hearing me talk about. Every few months I lobby for Zrvan to be the head honcho of our Yazata cosmology, and although I keep losing, I never stop nurturing my total love for this awesome concept.

Zrvan is the major original being from a heretical branch of Zoroastrianism (called, appropriately, Zrvanism or Zurvanism). While Mazdaism, which has since become the reigning faction of the religion and which draws heavily from the revelations of Zoroaster, maintained that Ahura Mazda was the first being in existence and created everything else, Zrvanism claims instead that the first primordial being was Zrvan, the single original god of infinity, who is neutral and inconceivable. Zrvan wished to create a world, so he conceived of and created Ahura Mazda from his mind and desire to create good; but he suffered from doubt when he did so, afraid that perhaps his creation wouldn't live up to what he had envisioned, and from that doubt Ahriman was born. The two opposing forces then created and administered the world, investing in it the good Zrvan had intended and the evil that he had unwittingly birthed.

Zrvan himself does not actually do anything else; there are no myths of his exploits, no further actions on his part and no formal cult worship of him that we are aware of. He's pretty much a textbook example of a Titan, with no connection to the world other than setting the wheels in motion to create it, and he was further marginalized and basically kicked out of the religion by 1000 AD or so, when Mazdaism reasserted itself as the supreme form of Zoroastrianism and Zrvanism was officially declared to be heresy. He's notable (and super cool) because belief in him came with a cosmological theory that included Ahura Mazda and Ahriman as equal and opposing forces that came from a higher power, which is heavily at odds with a lot of later Zoroastrian tradition (thus the heresy label!).

Rolling back around to Zrvan in Scion, however: it's not that we don't think he could be used, and used well and awesomely, in Scion. He's obviously a Titan, and while he has some of the usual Titan problems of being hard to interact with and distant from affairs, so do a lot of other figures. The problem is not with Zrvan himself but with his treatment in the Scion books, which, like a lot of other things in the Scion: Yazata supplement, is a spaghetti-like mess.

Zrvan in Scion: Yazata hits practically every pet peeve about Titans that we have. Instead of being a personality in his own right, he's demoted to being the Titanrealm, making him more akin to a place instead of a being; his Avatars are a collection of the nastiest of the deevs but don't actually have much conceptually in common with Zrvan at all, not to mention not making much sense since there's no reason for the Titan to be more connected to one of his "sons" than the other; and he's helming a Titanrealm of Time that is not, in our opinion, constructed well at all. While it makes perfect sense for him to be involved in a Titanrealm of Time, the concept of time that he represents - inevitability, infinity, age and eternity - does not jibe at all with the realm that has been written for him, which includes copious amounts of modern sci-fi conceptions of time. Which should not surprise anyone - he was written to go along with the original time-traveling Stars purview - but that doesn't mean we have to be happy about it.

We were talking the other day about a hypothetical Titanrealm of Time, one that had to do with the mythic concepts of time - seasons, cycles, infinity, eternity, beginnings and endings - without getting bogged down in distinctly unmythic ideas like time travel or changing the flow of linear time, and if we did have one of those, Zrvan would be the first dude on the list for Avatarhood, along with Chronos and Ananke and other ancient time-Titans of that ilk. It's in that context that we'd love to use him in Scion (or, if we don't end up feeling like there's enough basis for a Titanrealm of Time, in some other Titanish manner). But we are not fans of his writeup in the Yazata supplement, so that's what we're usually talking about when we complain about problems with Zrvan.

But we encourage Zrvan, in general. Get out there, you crazy time heretics.