Of Gods and Ideals

As I noted in my previous post, the gods of Tellene come across more as Platonic ideals of certain concepts than the gods of earth mythology. In our world's mythology, the gods are personifications of nature, and their emergences, births, wars, marriages, deaths, and so forth are symbolic representations of the forces of nature. For example, it's been speculated that the myth of Baal's death at the hands of Mot (the god of death) in Ugaritic mythology is either a symbolic retelling of the cycle of the year, with the dry summer months of the Levant being reprented by Baal's (the storm-god's) death, or else that the myth was inspired by a particularly harsh drought and famine. My own personal speculation is that the fall of the Titans in Greek mythology was a symbolic representation of the shift in Greek devotion from their old gods to those of the Sidonians / Phoenicians. (The triad of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades being Hellenizations of Baal, Yam, and Mot.)

Tellene's mythology, as presented in the sourcebooks so far, is fairly static. The gods have personality, but little history beyond a vague war in the past that resulted in the death of eleven of the original fifty-four gods (six per alignment, showing that the "idea" alignment in Tellene is True Neutral--a typical ideal in D&D campaign worlds). There are, as already noted, no relationships between them, beyond all being children of the Creator, though there are alliances and enmities which will surprise no one looking at an alignment chart.

Those tendencies are endemic of campaign worlds developed during the 2e to 3e era of Dungeons & Dragons: Every element must have its opposite, to the point where a salamander (a kind of fire elemental) must be balanced with an "ice salamander" and a paladin must be balanced by an anti-paladin (or blackguard, in 3e). "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" is a phrase that seems to sum it up.

KoK underwent most of its development during this phase, which is somewhat frustrating to me. Ancient mythologies weren't so "balanced," and the symbols of the gods tended to be what was most important to the people in the time that they arose. Some of these seem trite to us. For example, the Mesopotamian god Enlil was symbolized by the mattock. That seems trite and humble to us, but to the stone-age-turning-bronze-age people of Mesopotamia, the mattock was an astounding invention that revolutionized their lives and made agriculture and cities possible.

That actually fits with some of the elements of Tellene pretty well. For example, the Overlord's sacred animal is the draft horse. Sounds trite, until you realize that the Overlord was imprisoned at the dawn of human history, probably at about the same time that humans were starting to domesticate the animals. The draft horse, therefore, becomes a symbol of man's dominance, of taking control of nature rather than being subject to its whims. The Overlord, therefore, was probably the first god of civilization in Tellene.

If so, that tells us something of the moral dimension of Tellene: Dominance, the rule of the strong / high-born over the weak / low-born--or for that matter, the dominance exhibited in domesticating animals--is naturally the province of Lawful Evil, and can never be wholly channeled for Good. On the other hand, tilling the fields and bringing forth crops, represented by the Holy Mother and the Raiser, are inherently Lawful/Neutral Good activities. Conversely, the extreme liberation offered by the Guardian and the wild unpredictability of the Storm Lord are actually more akin to each other than to the tilling of the fields. This is much in contrast to our own world, where the Ugaritic texts viewed Baal as being integral to civilization, as the Levant (unlike Egypt or Mesopotamia) was completely dependent on the winter rains to survive.

The easiest way to reconcile this is that the Holy Mother, Raiser, or Mother of the Elements is the goddess of the gentle rains, and the people of Tellene see a quantitative and moral distinction between rain and storm. One wonders if the Elosi or those of the eastern side of the Reanaaria Bay would have a different view, since a handful of heavy storms a year might be the only rain they get at all . . .

In Greyhawk, the cultures that originated the various gods are noted. No such luck in Tellene: Pretty much everyone seems to know that there are exactly forty-two gods, and every culture has its own name for each and every one of them. While that somewhat offends my own sense of mythology and the possibilities in pagan syncretism for adventures and stories, let's work out the ramifications. The gods each represent "a specific characteristic or related characteristics of the Creator." In other words, they're all what the ancient Greeks would call a hypostasis ("that which underlies," or "essence"): The personified manifestation of some aspect of a god. For Christians, the idea of a hypostasis actually carries over into the Bible as well, which presents Jesus Christ as the incarnate hypostasis of God's Word (John 1:1). Presumably, given that there were originally an even number of deities (six) for each alignment and that the gods were apparently created in opposition to each other, the alignment of Tellene's Creator is either the ultimate in Balance (True Neutral), or else she is simply above such human classifications.

In any case, this to me suggests that while the gods of Tellene have some will and volition, each is basically the personification or hypostsis of those characteristics of the Creator that they exemplify. In some ways, they are more like the Platonic ideal of those concepts than they are living beings: Unlike the gods of Earth's mythologies, they have neither eldest nor youngest among them, nor are they intrinsically connected to each other in families linked by marriages and births. Moreover, in most KoK material, the gods are addressed by their titles rather than their proper names. While I recognize that part of this is keeping things convenient for the DM, I'm going to suggest that it's also an acknowledgement that the gods are more ideals than individuals.

So why do they have names at all? And why do the names rarely seem to be linguistically linked (as in, different pronunciations of the same name, like Baal and Bel, aka Marduk, in our world)?

My personal solution: The names of the gods are the names of the heroes believed to be their most recent avatar to that particular culture. For example, in my version of Pekal, Hokalas isn't just the Riftmaster's proper name, but the name of the human who was the last avatar of the Sorceror Supreme and who established his school in what would become Bet Rogala.

This means that in different times and places, the avatars of the gods would have had different relationships with each other--both in Tellene's literal history and as symbolic unions of these various concepts. This gives me a lot of room to develop Tellene's mythology for my own campaign.

Admittedly, it also gives me more of a chance to cannibalize old campaigns for my Tellene's mythology as well as the chance to have both modern heroes and villains become the new avatars (if the campaign reaches that level).