Political Pantheon Party!

Aha! I bet you thought we forgot to vlog today, didn't you? Shows what you know! Not only did we remember, we actually did a whole pile of vlogs in one day, so that if we end up in a scheduling crunch in the weeks to come, you won't go without answered questions and our cheerful faces.

Question: What would you guys think of a game where Scions deal with a number of NPCs in the world bringing their pantheons back to prominance, all the while secretly guarding Zeus's "successor"?

Question: Why does Hades have Epic Stamina associated?

Question: I'm a little bit intrigued by the Orisha. It's crazy how everyone is married to everyone. How does that really work? Are they a big happy family or what?

Question: I'm STing a game and my scions (of Hel, Hades and Odin) are getting to God soon, and I need some ideas on how to make their rise to God memorable.

Question: My scion of Izanagi is finding himself being attracted to Amaterasu. He blames his attraction on being named the god of the moon (Tsuki-Yomi died), so is this argument valid? Also, should he be disgusted with himself since he is attracted to his sister? Would she be his full or half sister, since Izanagi created her and her brothers?

Question: Hey, I noticed that in your Eastern Promises and Gangs of New York games you only allow your PCs to pick four pantheons that actually had some level of cultural interaction. Just wondering if any other major pantheons on your site that could have that kind of thing going on, like say the Celtic pantheons, for instance?

Question: In your games, when and how did the gods learn that the Titans had escaped? Was there some big explosion in the Underworld? Did they simply slip out unnoticed until someone actually checked and saw that they had flown the coop?

Question: The Aztecs have a god of homosexuality despite their obvious dislike of the concept. How does the rest of the pantheon treat him?

Question: Norse vs. Borgovi? SWEET! But, say Loki tricked Thor and Perun into a room together - what would happen? A SPECTACULAR light show, or lots of drinking? OR something else?

Question: Power and responsibility go hand in hand. And with every great decision comes regret. Regret for what could have been, should have been, and what ultimately was. What do the gods regret?

Today's vlog is about gods, pantheons and related issues of their politics and powers. Happy viewing!

Give Mama Some Sugar

Question: I don't believe the Amatsukami were as much into godly incest thing as some pantheons, but how weird would it be for Amaterasu to marry her Scion? Yes, our game went to a very weird place, which is what happens when you annoy Aphrodite...

Weird on an unimaginable and unacceptable level. First, let's talk about divine incest!

Incest is indeed an accepted practice among many gods, even gods of the Amatsukami, but while we modern folks tend to lump all incest into the same category and call it a day, in a mythological context it's important to understand that there are different kinds of incest, and some were considered acceptable behavior for gods while others were seen as heinous crimes. Sexual relations and marriages often occur between siblings (like Isis and Osiris or Shango and Oshun), uncles/aunts and nieces/nephews (like Hades and Persphone or Nergal and Ereshkigal) or cousins (like buckets of gods in different pantheons).

But while those kinds of familial relationships are fairly commonplace, you will extremely seldom see a parent married to a child, and that's because that particular form of incest is almost universally taboo across all pantheons. While sibling relationships make cosmic sense, whether for preserving a bloodline or because at the beginning of time there simply isn't anyone else to hang out with, parent-child ones usually don't fall into the same category. The relationship between a parent and a child is fundamentally different from that between siblings or cousins, having an aspect of responsibility and dependence that isn't usually present between other relationships, and as a result almost every culture worldwide has developed a major taboo regarding it that filters through to their gods.

While there are a few cases of parent-child marriages in ancient myth, they're almost all at the level of Titans who are so ancient and primordial that they're only anthropomorphized perfunctorily, such as Gaia having children with her self-created sons Ouranos and Pontus. Every other time it occurs, it's strongly criticized within the myths itself; Brahma's pursuit of Sarasvati is responded to with disgust, distress and eventually a curse, Orungan's attempt to marry his mother is so heinous she ended up detonating herself to avoid him, and when Enki sleeps with his daughter (and granddaughter and great-granddaughter, compounding his sin), he is punished for it until he has to beg Ninhursag to save him from death by brain-pregnancy. We don't even need to bring up details when it comes to Oedipus.

When it comes to Amaterasu and the Amatsukami, I'm sure you can see where this is going by now. While there are several cases of sibling incest among them - Izanami and Izanagi, Amaterasu and Tsuki-Yomi, Okuninushi and Suseri-hime - there are none between parent and child. The Japanese had enough problems trying to justify the sibling incest among their gods, which involved a lot of apologetic essays about the gods being forced to marry among their siblings thanks to no one else being available and their simply being above the moral laws that bound humanity, without trying to justify a mother getting it on with her son. The pantheon as a whole would find such a thing absolutely abhorrent and indefensable.

So yeah, Amaterasu marrying her own son would transcend "weird" and head straight off into the stratosphere of "horrifyingly not okay" for pretty much all of the Japanese gods (and most other pantheons, too). Which doesn't mean you can't do it, of course; especially if Aphrodite is vengefully ensuring this massive breach of the pantheon's morals and politics, it's totally possible for Amaterasu to hook up with her Scion. It's just that there will be massive fallout, possibly up to and including her being deposed or slammed in the face with hardcore Justice. No one among the Amatsukami is going to be okay with it thanks to it being the seriously forbidden kind of incest, even if they don't come up with other reasons to be upset about it (which they probably can; Tsuki-Yomi, being her estranged husband, would probably not be pleased no matter who she was marrying, for example).

It's not advisable, is what we're saying. Really, really bad things will happen. Aphrodite has chosen a very good, and very dangerous, vehicle for her revenge on you.

Keeping It in the Family

Question: Let's talk about incest. I'm not a proponent of incest but it seems like it should be more common in the ancient world. Nearly every pantheon has its siblings marrying each other, from Zeus and Hera to Izanami and Izanagi, yet the Egyptian pharaohs are the only ones who regularly practiced incest as a religious/political right. If people mirror their gods, shouldn't there be more records of incest among common people?

This really is becoming the Ancient Sex Blog.

Let me start with reversing your last statement: gods mirror their people. From a sociological standpoint, gods are outgrowths of a society, providing whatever they need in their worldview (whether that's somewhere to pray for rain or victory, someone to point to as an example or someone to use as an illustration of laws or customs). Though there are cases where it appears that a custom arises because of a mythical tale involving it, it's much more common for a tale to arise to explain a custom that already exists. When lightning strikes a building, humanity invents a myth about why the thunder god was angry enough to lash out; when an earthquake hits, humanity invents a myth about what's disturbing the earth mother, and so on and so forth.

But this doesn't have much to do with incest! Most anthropologists, if you ask them, name incest as one of (or even the only one of) the universal taboos that almost every culture has. Cases involving sibling marriage are generally the exception, not the rule, and are almost all bound up with royal or noble family lines; intermarriage of siblings in Egypt, for example, had a lot to do with keeping the pharaonic line pure and unbroken rather than with a general positive attitude toward incest (though, of course, reasons it was okay were invented because humanity likes to make sure we have excuses for the things we do).

In light of this, it can look a little weird that the gods seem to be having a 24/7 incest party to which all siblings, uncles and cousins are invited. Some of this is probably just a Genesis effect; when you're the only people who exist at the beginning of creation, what other choice do you have but to marry your siblings? The Chinese explicitly lay this out in the myth where Nüwa is forced to marry her brother Fuxi in order to repopulate the world; she does it, but at the same time also passes down a law to humanity explaining that it shouldn't be common practice and prohibiting incest for mortals. From a cosmological point of view, of course the gods have to marry each other; there just aren't a lot of other options for the big cosmic movers and shakers at the beginning of time. When you're Zeus and your only options are your sisters or the Titans you're about to lead a war against, pesky things like sibling blood ties probably seem less important.

Another, and probably the more important reason, is that the gods are simply allowed to do things humanity isn't allowed to do, because they're divine and they make the rules. Nobody in ancient Greece is going to try to justify incest because one of the gods did it; not only is that sacrilegious, it's just irrelevant, because Zeus and Hades are gods and can do whatever the fuck they want, and Joe Schmodanthes is bound by the laws of human society. There are even cultures that specifically spell it out; for example, when Chinese Buddhism began infiltrating Japan and the Buddhist prohibition against incest started making Izanagi and Izanami look bad, the writer of the most influential interpretation of the Kojiki wrote an entire defense of the two by claiming that the Japanese gods were unique and incomparable to all other deities, and therefore could not be judged by normal standards of right and decency. Gods absolutely mirror their people; the human passions and goals of any set of deities are easy to see and reflect the sorts of stories and passions playing out on a smaller scale among humanity. But they're still gods, and divine law differs from mortal law; there are almost no cultures that try to hold the gods to the same mores as humanity. They're simply above some of those concerns.

There are, of course, cultures in whose myths incest is very definitely not okay - witness Quetzalcoatl setting himself on fire when he realizes he has raped his sister, or the round mockery of incest among the Vanir by the Aesir, or Sarasvati complaining to the gods about Brahma's incestuous attention, or Enki being punished with near-fatal infections after sleeping with his daughter and granddaughter - which probably reflects cultures in which that idea was so strong that even the gods reflected their peoples' disdain for it. A lot of scholars also favor the idea that sibling incest was more common in very ancient times and only became taboo later as humanity started to realize that it wasn't good for genealogical or social structure, and therefore the oldest myths of people still contain an echo of that long-ago tolerance for the practice.

When Ra decides he wants to sleep with his daughter or Poseidon decides his sister is looking mighty fine today, though... that's a time when humanity kind of just has to start whistling uncomfortably and looking at their toes. They're gods. They're bad. They do what they want.