D&D General An Alexandrian Pantheon for D&D

[RealAlHazred]

So, I want to connect Zeus and Osiris/the Apis bull.

Famously, Zeus, uh, "seduced" Europa, a Phoenician princess from Tyre, while she and her friends were picking flowers by the seashore. To do so, he took the form of a white bull. She noticed him among her father's herds and approached him, and he acted tame. She climbed on his back to ride him around, and he took off, running across the waves to the island of Crete, where Europa became the mother of King Minos and the Minoan kings.

This is interesting because points to another syncretism/absorption. Wikipedia notes:

The myth of Europa and Zeus may have its origin in a sacred union between the Phoenician deities 'Aštar and 'Aštart, in bovine form. Having given birth to three sons by Zeus, Europa married a king Asterion, this being also the name of the Minotaur and an epithet of Zeus, likely derived from the name 'Aštar.

I feel like I should be able to meld this with the myth of the Apis bull. Also, Zeus is much, much wilder than Serapis should be -- from what I've read, the Alexandrians, being a Graeco-Egyptian hybrid culture, preferred much soberer gods.

Once the connection is made, the bull is attacked by Serapis' enemies, and killed, similar to the Osiris myth; depending on the source, he was attacked by Set, or by Typhon, or by monsters sent by Set. So, the bull is killed, and Isis must put him back together again. But while she does that, Serapis must wander the Land of the Dead, where he becomes king. Once he is resurrected, he retains the kingship of the Underworld. I'm thinking instead of necessarily reassuming control of the Sky, he instead becomes regent for Harpocrates, the "young sun".

 

[Yaarel]

I was wondering about the eight gods of the "ogdoad", personifications of primordial origins of the universe. They correlate with Hellenist metaphysical speculation. They seem great for organizing the concepts of a theory of magic. The eight are four couples, often portrayed as frog-headed males and cobra headed females, but some iconographies have them fully human appearing.

Maybe go with the eldritch weirdness. Or possibly play more loosely, so that there are eight primary deities of the Egyptesque civilization. Then these eight can look and interrelate however makes sense.

 

[RealAlHazred]

I had been going with the Ennead of Heliopolis, which are somewhat easier to delineate -- the Ogdoad seem very metaphysical and, as you say, "weird." Not that I mind weird.

The Ennead has a good proportion of gods and has the advantage of keeping Set in the mix. In my conception, he's not necessarily Evil in alignment; it depends on the priesthood you're talking to whether he is Evil or just acts from aggressive self-interest (i.e., more towards Neutral). Since I'm doing a lot of syncretism here, I like that Set has, in some areas, relationships with the foreign goddesses Anat (who possibly originated as the upper Mesopotamian goddess Ḫanat) and Astarte (a Near Eastern goddess who may have originated as the East Semitic goddess ʿAštar who may have originated as the Babylonian goddess Ishtar who may have originated as the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna). With one of these goddesses he conceived, uh, the crocodile-headed demon-god Maga.

Uh, no comment.

But that I can probably link to Sobek, the crocodile-god. And, hey, the more the merrier.

It's worth noting that Set and Sobek, despite how they appear in D&D, were not considered evil -- they had protective qualities, and there were pharaohs who considered themselves the avatar of each (Seti I and Unis, respectively). Religion is complex, and deities should probably not have human-comprehensible alignments, even if their worshipers do.

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

Okay, who else saw "Alexandrian pantheon" and thought Alexandrian Wicca?

 

[RealAlHazred]

Okay, who else saw "Alexandrian pantheon" and thought Alexandrian Wicca?

sigh OP has been updated. Again.

 

[Kobold Stew]

There's a lot here, and you've done some great work in trying to make sense of what is a remarkably complex religious landscape in Alexandria. My suggestion, though, is that you take a step back and be sure that this work (a) makes sense of your game world (not just "in" your game world) and (b) is going to be used (because if it's not used by your players, then really it doesn't matter). I'm framing this in terms of how you can take your knowledge of a specific historical situation (Hellenistic Alexandria) and make it gameable.

I'll start with the latter (b): if you have a dozen gods (or more, or less), but a cleric only needs to interact with one, then for most of the campaign, it doesn't matter at all what the theological apparatus is. That's the approach in D&D generally, and it at direct odds with the values deeply ingrained in the polytheism of the Greeks. (Euripides has a tragedy, Hippolytus, about the dangers of over-dependence on a single divinity).

WIthin the ancient Mediterranean polytheisms, there are many gods, because (in part) humans need different kids of divine aid at different times. This means (and I'm simplifying):

1. every community has a different pantheon, but that pantheon is sufficient for its theological needs. (There is always a god to pray for to improve your crops, or seek justice, but it may not be the same one in each community; each community's pantheon is unique). [This is how "pantheon" is meaningful in a religious setting, as opposed to a mythological one. Myths are different, and transcend communities.] When a new need arises, it either gets subsumed under a current god/cult title, or a new one gets added -- adding new ones is easy. Part of why Alexandria was so complex is that it was a large, cosmopolitan city, and multiple cultures with their own divine apparatus had come together.

2. The same god can be worshipped with different cult titles in a given community, but you need to pray to the right one to get what you want. Zeus of Oaths isn't going to help your crops, even if Zeus of Rainfall will. A given sanctuary is dedicated to a god in one particular aspect. No one (except Hippolytus) only uses one god, one cult title. A given polis might have five sanctuaries to different aspects of Poseidon, three to Apollo, one to Artemis, but none to Zeus. It's not that the ocmmunity doesn't believe in Zeus (of course they do), but the current system of sanctuaries is sufficient for their engagement with the unknown.

Fortunately, once this is recognized the system you develop will be used by a cleric, because a cleric of a given divinity, might still pray to other gods for specific benefits, or recognize the multiplicity of their preferred god, and the prayers of the player can reflect the broader system you have developed (possibly in conjunction with them).

Now to (a): how does this make sense of your game? Whatever the theological apparatus was before contact with the Mayans, it will have to have changed after that. I would encourage you to let that be reflected. Some of the Mayan gods will have been incorporated into the worship of existing divinities, some will no longer have been seen as needed (at least not by the Alexandrians), and some will have been imported wholesale because the existing system didn't cover that area, and suddenly there ws a need. There may be a new temple to Zeus-Chac to cover storms and the weather (perhaps at a temple that had been dedicated to Zeus Ombrios) but also maybe a new sanctuary wherever one of the portals were to Ek Chuah, recognizing the trade that has dried up since they have been closed, awith him becoming a god of interdimensional trade and coffee (something the Alexandrians hadn't needed previously). Someone needs to have been the god of the portals. Have the Alexandrians kept the Mayan tattoooing process? There may be acolytes of Acat who speicalize in tattoos, even if there is no formal (city-sanctioned) temple. But the whole thing should be messy, and (especially in the first generation of contact, and the first generation after the loss of contact) in flux. This can also develop pllots for adventures -- what cult titles were overshadowed with the coming of the Mayans, and who has been displaced? The Greeks in ALexandria had already made accommodations for the Egyptian gods, and now they have to do so again. Maybe there's a story of the crocodile gods of the Mayanas and the Egyptians (Sobek and Cipacti) making a play to displace the Greek gods. I don't know, but you have the freedom to create a world where the apparent equilibnrium of an Ennead has been severely disrupted. And again, tying it to adventures makes it relevant for the players who aren't themselves clerics.

That's how I'd approach things gvien your initial premise. Hope it helps!

 

[RealAlHazred]

These are all good points!

Even at the time, there was a definite urge to identify similar gods as the "same" god, but in magical formulae they still bothered to mention each individually. (I mean, you can't be 100% sure they're the same...) I intend to lean into the mess to do what I want; this is basically just my attempt at a baseline from which I can extrapolate thousands of years of development (... and, obviously, put in what I think makes for a fun game.)

I really liked the bit in 3.0/3.5 where a pantheon would have an option for clerics to worship the pantheon as a whole and just choose their domains from a list based on player preference (the character, obviously, feels a "calling" to a specific focus.) In the religious landscape I'm positing for my setting, I'm assuming there are locations still mainly "Greek" or "Egyptian" (with inclusions, but overall that pantheon is still worshiped). And in the cities, you will be able to find the religious structure devoted to that pantheon. But there will also be larger, more ostentatious temples dedicated with the ruler's favorites, which in the case of the Ptolemies means syncretism for political advantage.

One note, the world is called "Maya" not in reference to the Mayan culture of Central America, but rather in reference to the Indian philosophical concept of the "world of the senses," a "magic show, full of changes where things are not what they seem," which distracts you from the unchanging Absolute, i.e. Brahman. Although, I do have (in a different part of my campaign world) an empire of lizardfolk, catfolk, and others, which was created by Aztecs fleeing the destruction of the Triple Alliance by the Conquistadors through a portal, in a parallel to the myth of how they arrived in Central America from Aztlán. It's an interesting locale, but something intended to be discovered by the players during play!

 

[Kobold Stew]

Wherever the portals led to, the culture and beiefs from that place will have (could have) b een accommodated into the Alexandrian pantheon, is what I'm saying.

 

[RealAlHazred]

Wherever the portals led to, the culture and beiefs from that place will have (could have) b een accommodated into the Alexandrian pantheon, is what I'm saying.

Oh, absolutely. When I first started noodling with this setting (I don't know, almost forty years ago maybe) a lot of the settings people were making either had real-world analogues for every deity (Gary Gygax's World of Greyhawk) or actual real-world inclusions (Bob Bledsaw's Wilderlands of High Fantasy); a very few had both (Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms). Nowadays, people go with more bespoke pantheons. But I like the idea that somebody could ask me if they could play a character who resembles an old character they had, and I can say, "Why not just play that character?" Different flavors are generally fairly easy to convert between, except for the outliers of D&D 4E and Pathfinder 2E.

That said, I had considered porting over the Mayan religion, but for various reasons I decided the main catalysts to the southern Empire would be Graeco-Egyptian, with a few foreign inclusions. The fact that my campaign world is higher magic than our world lets me play with the modifications quite a bit.

 

[Yaarel]

Ancient Egyptian religions are difficult to keep track of. Each town has its own religious system, and even each of these shift over periods of time. @RealAlHazred, I think the approach of your OP is correct, to specify a single town Alexandria during a specific time period Hellenist Ptolemaic.

I was thinking about Osiris-Apis, aka Sorapis, Sarapis, Serapis. He is essentially the sundisk. The sun is the light of the sky (whence Greek Helios) whose sunlight is lifegiving energy (whence healing Asklepios). The sun sets in the west and then travels thru the upsidedown underworld illuminating the souls of the dead there (whence earthy Pluto and underworld Hades). The sun then rises again in the east, thus a cyclical death and resurrection of the sundisk. The sundisk is the chief deity (whence Zeus) (and the aspect of the fertility of the bull Apis probably relates specific stories of Zeus in the form of a bull). The identification of Serapis as Egyptian Amun of the primordeal Eight, literally the "hidden one", associates the cosmic transcendent aspects of creation, where the sundisk visually represents the mystical creative force. The identification of Serapis with the wine of Greek Dionusos, probably relates to the deathly aspects. The crushing of grapes relates to death and the alcohol of wine relates to a pleasurable and joyous afterlife in the underworld, whence pouring libations of wine to the ground. Hence the sundisk Serapis also functions as a luminous lifegiver to the underworld and as the cyclical mediator between both the dead under ground and the living above ground.