Jan. 3rd, 2003 11:40 am
Putting Mora where my mouth is
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
muckefuckSo if I'm tired of fantasy gods like Pelor (Classical Greek for "monster", btw) and Norebo, what does wind my clock? Here's one of my better creations (IMHO), a goddess for my Greek-analogs named Mora.
The Cheirides live primarily on a long peninsula I named the Pelo:rone:sos by analogy with Peloponnesos (a contraction of Pelopos ne:sos, "Pelops' island"). They conquered it from the previous inhabitants, a race of giants called the Pelo:ra [see above]. Before I'd worked out any of this history, however, I coined Moradiccia as the modern name for the southern parts of the Peloronesos. I don't know where the inspiration came from and, years later, I decided I needed to rationalise the choice. Here's how I did that:
Moradiccia <- Ch. Moradikia "country of the Moradics" <- Ch. Moradikos "of the Morades" <- Morades "descendents of Mora".
So far, so good--but who is Mora? Clearly, she's the legendary founder of an ancient state in that area, but what's she like? I'm not sure where I got the inspiration for the next step--probably from the fact that mora is Greek for "division" (specifically, divisions of the Spartan army). I decided she was actually a goddess and her domain was "transition", the passing from one area or condition to another. I began to brainstorm transitions: life/death, day/night, summer/winter, sea/sky, inside/outside, etc. (Much later, when I realised I hadn't gone quite far enough in rationalising Mora's name, I started to look at Indo-European roots. I found *mer meaning "flicker, gleamer" and reconstructed her name as *Mor-wa "flickerer"--the flickering light of dawn and dusk, the vacillation between one state and the next.)
Of these, the transition from life to death seemed the most important--and I definitely wanted her to be an important goddess. Drawing inspiration from the world of Celtic myth, I decided there was a subterranean otherworld across the ocean to the west and Mora was the deity who led souls to it--a psychopomp, in other worlds, like Hermes. From this, travel was added to her domain. This was appropriate, since I had already determined that the Moradiccians were a seafaring race.
I soon decided, however, that transitions were too numerous to give Mora command over all of them, so I made a little family among whom to parcel them out. Responsibility for gates fell to her daughter, who I eventually named Optria or Opatria from Greek ope: "opening". As commander of the thyraiai, or door-spirits, she protected the inhabitants of the house from harm. As deity of the "little gate" between the womb and the outside world, she became patroness of childbirth, virginity, and matrimony. Thus, she became something of a domestic goddess. (Though to prevent her from being too retiring, I made her the domestic goddess who will totally fucking kill you if you piss her off. She's a particular enemy of rapists, for instance.)
Her son started out as Aktios, god of the seacoast (the transitional zone between land and sea). This struck me as too specialised, however, and I extended his domain to the surface of the sea--the transition between water and air. (Benthys, my Poseidonesque sea god, was relegated to the depths.) As Pelagios, he took on the role of patron of sailors and I justified this mythically by making him the pilot of Mora's boat. I decided he needed a better name (the two above are just descriptions, really--"he of the coast", "he of the sea") and settled on Tallas from a root meaning "weigh, measure". On the basis of this, I'm thinking of making him the god of weights and measures and, possibly, even commerce, but this doesn't seem to go well with his shifty, unreliable nature.
I'm just now begining to look for a husband for her, and I've tenatively settled on a god who lives at the very boundary of the world and is her consort as ruler of the the Skoteina Pedia or "Twilit Plains". But as I expand the mythology, I may choose someone a bit more incongruous. After all, Indo-European myth is filled with incongruous pairings (like Njordhr and Skadi or Hades and Persephone). As I pointed out in my previous post, the entire thing is a perpetually a work in process. [I wanted to add a quote here from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cassielsander about some pursuits being all about the process, not the result, but my little fishing expedition in his lj didn't turn it up. Oh, well, you get the idea.]
But you see the point: None of these deities can be summed up in a word or two. Describing Mora as "goddess of transitions" doesn't really tell you anything about what she's like or what she does. Gates are more concrete, but saying the Opatria is "goddess of gates" wouldn't tell you that she's invoked for protection against sexual assault or at marriage ceremonies. That's what I like. That's what real-world deities are like. Look at the Catholic saints! These are the modern Western equivalent of the minor deities of the ancients and there are patrons for every possible profession. Some of these are completely straightforward (e.g. Matthew was a tax collector, so he's patron of tax collectors), others seem complete arbitrary. Martin of Tours, patron of gooseherds? Agatha of Catania, patron of bellmakers? But there's a definite logic underlying the assignments.
In fact, when I read Lakoff, I got a glimpse at what this logic is. These categories--domains of gods and saints--are exactly the type he talks about, the type that humans naturally come up with when they're not particularly trying to be all rigourous and scientific. They're exactly what you'd expect if they'd grown organically through the daily practices of hundreds of years and not made up by a game designer in two hours. (Actually, the Greeks have their share of "made-up" gods as well, abstractions that appear mostly in poetry and were never the object of a living cult. It's no surprise that these should show similarities to the made-up ones that appear in modern literature.)
It helps that my deities weren't made up in a single session either (and that they're not subject to any commercial demands, such as keeping the product G-rated and understandable to teenagers). Each time I come back to them, I see different aspects; sometimes, I forget what I doing before and take them in a different direction, or come up with contradictory ideas and try to reconcile them later. (For instance, I forgot I'd invented Tallas and began work on another seafaring son of Mora; now, I'm seeing whether I can synthesise the two or if I need to add another member to the family.)
This is what can keep me up until three in the morning, leafing through the stack of dictionaries and grammars at my bed and filling new pages and palimpsests with incomprehensible scribbles. As derivative as it is, it's the only real creative work I do any more and I'd be much sadder without it.
The Cheirides live primarily on a long peninsula I named the Pelo:rone:sos by analogy with Peloponnesos (a contraction of Pelopos ne:sos, "Pelops' island"). They conquered it from the previous inhabitants, a race of giants called the Pelo:ra [see above]. Before I'd worked out any of this history, however, I coined Moradiccia as the modern name for the southern parts of the Peloronesos. I don't know where the inspiration came from and, years later, I decided I needed to rationalise the choice. Here's how I did that:
Moradiccia <- Ch. Moradikia "country of the Moradics" <- Ch. Moradikos "of the Morades" <- Morades "descendents of Mora".
So far, so good--but who is Mora? Clearly, she's the legendary founder of an ancient state in that area, but what's she like? I'm not sure where I got the inspiration for the next step--probably from the fact that mora is Greek for "division" (specifically, divisions of the Spartan army). I decided she was actually a goddess and her domain was "transition", the passing from one area or condition to another. I began to brainstorm transitions: life/death, day/night, summer/winter, sea/sky, inside/outside, etc. (Much later, when I realised I hadn't gone quite far enough in rationalising Mora's name, I started to look at Indo-European roots. I found *mer meaning "flicker, gleamer" and reconstructed her name as *Mor-wa "flickerer"--the flickering light of dawn and dusk, the vacillation between one state and the next.)
Of these, the transition from life to death seemed the most important--and I definitely wanted her to be an important goddess. Drawing inspiration from the world of Celtic myth, I decided there was a subterranean otherworld across the ocean to the west and Mora was the deity who led souls to it--a psychopomp, in other worlds, like Hermes. From this, travel was added to her domain. This was appropriate, since I had already determined that the Moradiccians were a seafaring race.
I soon decided, however, that transitions were too numerous to give Mora command over all of them, so I made a little family among whom to parcel them out. Responsibility for gates fell to her daughter, who I eventually named Optria or Opatria from Greek ope: "opening". As commander of the thyraiai, or door-spirits, she protected the inhabitants of the house from harm. As deity of the "little gate" between the womb and the outside world, she became patroness of childbirth, virginity, and matrimony. Thus, she became something of a domestic goddess. (Though to prevent her from being too retiring, I made her the domestic goddess who will totally fucking kill you if you piss her off. She's a particular enemy of rapists, for instance.)
Her son started out as Aktios, god of the seacoast (the transitional zone between land and sea). This struck me as too specialised, however, and I extended his domain to the surface of the sea--the transition between water and air. (Benthys, my Poseidonesque sea god, was relegated to the depths.) As Pelagios, he took on the role of patron of sailors and I justified this mythically by making him the pilot of Mora's boat. I decided he needed a better name (the two above are just descriptions, really--"he of the coast", "he of the sea") and settled on Tallas from a root meaning "weigh, measure". On the basis of this, I'm thinking of making him the god of weights and measures and, possibly, even commerce, but this doesn't seem to go well with his shifty, unreliable nature.
I'm just now begining to look for a husband for her, and I've tenatively settled on a god who lives at the very boundary of the world and is her consort as ruler of the the Skoteina Pedia or "Twilit Plains". But as I expand the mythology, I may choose someone a bit more incongruous. After all, Indo-European myth is filled with incongruous pairings (like Njordhr and Skadi or Hades and Persephone). As I pointed out in my previous post, the entire thing is a perpetually a work in process. [I wanted to add a quote here from
cassielsander about some pursuits being all about the process, not the result, but my little fishing expedition in his lj didn't turn it up. Oh, well, you get the idea.]But you see the point: None of these deities can be summed up in a word or two. Describing Mora as "goddess of transitions" doesn't really tell you anything about what she's like or what she does. Gates are more concrete, but saying the Opatria is "goddess of gates" wouldn't tell you that she's invoked for protection against sexual assault or at marriage ceremonies. That's what I like. That's what real-world deities are like. Look at the Catholic saints! These are the modern Western equivalent of the minor deities of the ancients and there are patrons for every possible profession. Some of these are completely straightforward (e.g. Matthew was a tax collector, so he's patron of tax collectors), others seem complete arbitrary. Martin of Tours, patron of gooseherds? Agatha of Catania, patron of bellmakers? But there's a definite logic underlying the assignments.
In fact, when I read Lakoff, I got a glimpse at what this logic is. These categories--domains of gods and saints--are exactly the type he talks about, the type that humans naturally come up with when they're not particularly trying to be all rigourous and scientific. They're exactly what you'd expect if they'd grown organically through the daily practices of hundreds of years and not made up by a game designer in two hours. (Actually, the Greeks have their share of "made-up" gods as well, abstractions that appear mostly in poetry and were never the object of a living cult. It's no surprise that these should show similarities to the made-up ones that appear in modern literature.)
It helps that my deities weren't made up in a single session either (and that they're not subject to any commercial demands, such as keeping the product G-rated and understandable to teenagers). Each time I come back to them, I see different aspects; sometimes, I forget what I doing before and take them in a different direction, or come up with contradictory ideas and try to reconcile them later. (For instance, I forgot I'd invented Tallas and began work on another seafaring son of Mora; now, I'm seeing whether I can synthesise the two or if I need to add another member to the family.)
This is what can keep me up until three in the morning, leafing through the stack of dictionaries and grammars at my bed and filling new pages and palimpsests with incomprehensible scribbles. As derivative as it is, it's the only real creative work I do any more and I'd be much sadder without it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
More arbitrariness needed!
Here's something I know you can sink your teeth into: many saints were the victims of a confusion of tongues. St. Maurice, for example, was thought to be black because people thought his name came from 'Moor'. How 'bout some similar wackiness with the Gaean gods, o master linguist? I challenge you!
Re: More arbitrariness needed!
As for puns and folk etymologies, my world is full of them. In fact, I usually don't settle on a name unless it has a couple of meanings. For instance, Dumna derives her name from Proto-Celtic *dubna: "deep one" and she is, in origin, independent queen of an underground kingdom of fabulous wealth. However, in Victorian languages, it is altered to Don(n)a, a homonym for the modern reflexes of domina "lady". As a result, she is viewed as a matronly goddess and married off to Hupater, the Jovian sky-father.
His name is an altered form of Hypatos "highest above" (from hypo). Originally, he wasn't the head of the pantheon, simply the one whose domain was at the highest altitude. But, as society became more patriarchal, he became viewed as a divine paterfamilias. His rival was E:lekto:r, who the gods elected their leader even though he has no wife and children. But his name has nothing to do with electing--his name is related to e:lektron or amber, the shining mineral, and he's a god of light. (Since the two gods represent divergent approaches to rulership, you can tell a lot about a society from which one it favours. No prizes for guessing who's chief god in the Empire of Thyatis and who first among equals in the Republic of Darokin.)
The modern Darokinian form of Tallas is Tallant which means "cutting". I'm still deciding where I want to go with that--patron of merchants? Of executioners? Of tailors? Speira, a victory goddess, has a name which could mean "sparrow", "spear", or "strewer". So the sparrow and spear are her emblems and her domain extends from war to grain. And so on and so forth.
Re: More arbitrariness needed!
Wait, wait, I'm thinking like a gamer again. I'm sure patron of (yawn) tailors would be very interesting as well.
Re: More arbitrariness needed!
Re: More arbitrariness needed!
no subject
no subject
So have I answered your question or just talked around it?
no subject
Sure. Thanks.
I asked the question because your post made me think about how religions in a typical default D&D world would be different from real-world religions. If the gods truly exist, have defined forms and portfolios, and are in regular, unambiguous communication with at least some of their worshippers, you'd almost certainly lose a fair amount of the weirdness that exists in real religions. ("Why am I hearing from all these damn gooseherds all of a sudden? I'm the god of scholars and scribes! Bob, you'd better send a messenger down and tell 'em to direct those prayers to you, because I'm sure not planning to do anything about the avian cholera!")
I think the religions you've set up for Gaea are aesthetically far superior to standard D&D religions, and they're obviously much closer to real life. Still, I have to admit that there's something seductive about a really simple, straightforward system, where gods provably exist and let you know more or less what they want from you, where you don't have to worry about the Problem of Pain or the Problem of Evil, but where there are still gods who are worthy of being worshipped, as opposed to ultra-powerful humans with the morals of wolverines in heat.
no subject
Of course, if some gods are--to use a corporate analogy--unwieldy conglomerates, others are the slimmed-down core-competency near-monopolies that are the darlings of the current market. ("Heliolatry: It's what we do best.") The mana system is flexible enough to allow for more than one divine business model, as it were.
Ken on Tallas
Maybe it goes the other way round; he began as a shifty dude because he's god of the sea, which attached him to the (shifty, unreliable) merchants (much like Hermes is the god of commerce) who also travel by sea a lot -- and who then attached him to weights and measures(*), because they worshiped him and had to rely on him themselves. Also, given the amount of false weights and short measures attendant with inter-city (or even inter-guild) commerce in the pre-modern era, I don't think it's as big a problem as all of that.
* Maybe they even took the old name of "Thalass" (cognate with "thalassa" -- "the Sea!" as us Xenophans remember) and changed it to "Tallas" to refer more explicitly to weights and measures, and then made up a folk-etymological myth to back it up, about how the First True Weights and Measures floated miraculously over the sea foam like Elisha's axe when Suppliedes and Demandides invented the joint-stock company, and they named them after the god who sent them. Or something.
Re: Ken on Tallas