No Such Thing as Academic Authority

Question: How often do you have to strip away euhemerization to get to the actual myths you research?

This is a weird question. Euhemerization - the practice of later interpreters of myths ascribing the deeds of gods and mythic heroes to those of mere overblown historical humans - is definitely a pernicious problem in any kind of religious study, but it's very complicated and hard to get around. After all, if it were easy to just do a little legwork to get around the issue, scholars wouldn't be so eternally disgruntled about it.

Euhemerism basically assumes that mythology is what happens when so much time goes by that history becomes distorted into exaggerated, fanciful or mystical versions of itself that stop becoming a faithful record of things that happened and starts being passed down as a story for other purposes instead. A euhemeristic approach to mythology seeks to pare it down and try to figure out where the core kernel of "real history" occurred that resulted in this story being told; for example, a euhemerist might say that a story about a god fighting a primordial dragon was originally a tale of a person fighting a large and dangerous animal, maybe on a hunt for food, which got exaggerated over time until the original person was transformed into a god and the original animal into a supernatural monster. Pure euhemerism suggests that all myths are actually just distorted history, although various scholars, philosophers and historians have ascribed to some areas' myths being true history and others true folklore in different time periods and fields of study.

The place we run into the most trouble with this concept is when the only, or most of the only, remaining mythology is recorded by someone with euhemeristic tendencies. The Norse and Irish mythologies traditionally have massive problems with this; because almost everyone who recorded their myths was Christian, many of them had a vested interest in proving that no other religions could possibly be valid, and therefore they presented the mythology either with side interpretations suggesting that it was referring to misconstrued historical events (Snorri does this a lot) or just outright rewriting them to be about humans doing human-level things (Saxo Grammaticus' favorite) with only occasional side notes mentioning that silly pagan people later confused them with gods. We actually have very little remaining mythology of the Aesir, Tuatha or Bogovi that isn't pretty heavily euhemerized, and that means that we actually can't "strip away" the result; instead, we have to attempt to interpret what we've got, in the hopes of correctly evaluating where ancient writers inserted their own biases or added material, and where they were faithfully recording things that they had heard, with a side order of trying to guess what they might have left out in the name of humanizing the story.

And while we hear about it more in connection with European mythologies, which get way more attention and press in western scholarship, this is actually an even more rampant problem in the myths of Africa, Australia and the Americas. Because the vast majority of our preserved and written-down mythology for many of those cultures was written down by European invaders who conquered the local cultures, euhemerism is rampant throughout it. Most of these conquerors were monotheists (usually Christian or Muslim) and therefore used euhemerization as a useful tool to discredit the religions of the "heathens" or "savages" as being obvious claptrap dreamed up by silly natives who couldn't tell the difference between reality and fantasy, and as imperialist conquerors they also often had a strong motive to assert that the indigenous beliefs of places they had conquered weren't real or valid anyway, and that replacing them with "real" religions was in fact culturally helpful instead of erasing their cultural identities. Scholars referring to the native religions of conquered territories as "folktales", "fairytales", or "distorted stories" was a very large force in ensuring that those cultures were never taken seriously as having legitimate stories, religions or histories of their own.

And really, what that actually means is that most of the time there's no such thing as evaluating a myth without euhemerism influencing any conclusions we can come to. Especially for those of us who don't read ancient languages or have access to firsthand sources or oral histories, most research options come from the pens of old, predominantly European writers, all of whom had their own agenda, opinions and biases when they were recording myths. History and mythology aren't objective; they are always told by people, and people always inject their own biases, and when the people telling the story for the past few centuries aren't even the people who originally came up with the story, things are bound to be skewed a thousand different ways. It's literally impossible to begin from those sources and strip away all, or even most, of the material and interpretation added by centuries of later scholarship from the original stories, even when we have something solid to begin with (which we often don't).

So... there's no answer to your question. Researching mythology for the clearest picture of an ancient culture's beliefs and gods is a neverending journey of interpretation and reinterpretation, reading scholars and questioning whether or not they are saying something legitimate, looking at sources and trying to decide their relative importance, and a thousand other things. We can never be totally accurate, in fact probably never even close, and we have to constantly be aware of the fact that not just our own preconceived notions about various cultures and their myths will shape our thoughts and decisions, but also the preconceived notions of generations of historians, chroniclers and writers before us.

We do our best to try to find out as much information as we can and put it in the best cultural context we can, but euhemerism is only one of the many obstacles on the road to success. We have to just keep doing our best, and accept that we're always learning!

Wales Ahoy

Question: So I know by looking at the poll that it will probably be a while before you take on the Welsh, but seeing as their myths have been so Christianized, how do you plan to separate the gods from the mortals? And where does Ceridwen stand? She's always been an interesting figure for me, with a Cauldron of knowledge, shapeshifting, etc., so from what I see she seems like a goddess.

Euhemerization: the bane of northern European mythology. The Welsh suffer from it as much as anybody, though it's not just their problem; the Aesir have their share of scholars who wrote about them as merely folk heroes or heathen mortals whom their people had deified (Saxo Grammaticus being the most notorious), and the Tuatha still haven't shaken that stigma off, being pretty evenly split between scholars who believe they were the pre-Christian deities of Ireland, scholars who think they were probably folk heroes or fairy figures but never regarded as gods, and scholars who think they're just a misremembered memory of some tribe of perfectly normal humans colonizing the island. Because almost every story we have for these northern European cultures has been passed down and preserved by Christian recorders long after the process of Christianization was well underway, we don't have much to give us a truly clear picture of what those myths looked like during the height of the religions that spawned them.

The Welsh certainly had deities, and they can be a little tricky to pinpoint since they (and the Christian writers who immortalized them, most likely) tend to set their gods as very active heroes with human-like failings and vibrant stories, much like their nearby neighbors the Tuatha - in fact, so much like the Tuatha that they sometimes overlap, so some Welsh figures will probably not get their own writeups because they're clearly just Welsh versions of Irish gods already in the game. We haven't yet done a really thorough research run into the Welsh (as you noticed, they're a little behind in the current poll), but as far as purely Welsh figures that are probably deities go, I would look at Gwydion, Arianhrod, Bran, Beli Mawr, Math, Rhiannon, Arawn, Pwyll and Ceridwen as possible members of a Welsh pantheon.

The close connections between Irish and Welsh mythology actually make building a coherent Welsh pantheon even more difficult (which is probably why the Scion books basically treat the Welsh like unimportant cousins of the Irish gods rather than giving them a distinct description of their own), as there are various deities that are clearly cognates to one another, like the Welsh Manawydan fab Llyr being a very obvious crossover of the Irish Manannan mac Lir. The Manannan/Manawydan problem isn't that great since the myths surrounding them could easily be seen as the Irish god simply visiting and dabbling in the affairs of the Welsh, but other gods are much more difficult to separate; the Welsh Lleu and the Irish Lugh are clearly related, but also both clearly too important to just delete one from the roster on one side, while Nudd and Nuada have the same conundrum. Even the Gauls get in on this some with Gofannon, who is clearly a Welsh version of the Irish Goibnhiu/Gaulish Gobnhios, and who plays a major enough role in Welsh myth that he, too, can't really be ignored or relegated easily to being merely an Irish or Gaulish guest star. And, of course, Danu and Don are pretty clearly the same person; but since Danu is a Titan, that's actually an interesting perk of the crossover, as it gives Storytellers lots of room to experiment with what it means for a Titan to spin off several different pantheons instead of just one as most do, and what it means for the various Celtic pantheons to all be semi-connected "cousins" instead of totally separate peoples.

So, yeah, it's something we're definitely giving a lot of thought to, and not everybody on the list above will probably make the cut. We're already considering some important figures from Welsh myth, like Branwen, Dylan, Pryderi or Mabon, to probably be lesser gods or Scions. It'll be a big project, but we're looking forward to it (you know, like we look forward to all the millions of things we haven't done yet but are totally planning to).

As for Ceridwen, while there's a lot of modern new-age silliness surrounding her these days and she thusly gets touted as a goddess of all kinds of things not attested in her original mythology, I do think she's one of the easiest to recognize as a deity who has merely been mildly euhemerized by Christian rewriters. She's one of the most blatantly magical and divine figures in Welsh myth, and while there are some scholars who think she was divinized in later literature and may not have been considered a goddess in her earliest tales, she's mentioned consistently far enough back for me to be on the side of inclusion, and if her son Taliesin isn't a Scion, then god damn, I certainly do not know who is.

Don't anybody get up in arms over choices here - as I said, we haven't really had a chance to do more than skim the surface of what we know about Welsh mythology, and as a result these are just basic lists and plans that will probably change a lot when we do get to working on a Welsh supplement. In the meantime, we'll continue to navigate the thorny thickets of Celtic mythology with as much aplomb as possible, and hopefully someone somewhere is doing awesome things with these crazy kids in their game.