Ian.Plumb wrote:
Apologies in advance -- this is a bit of a hobby-horse of mine.
Ok, Ian started it, so blame him, not me…
The flawed understanding of polytheistic religions in roleplaying games is in my opinion a heritage of D&D. What most people don’t fully understand about polytheism in antiquity (the model for polytheism in rpgs) is mainly that every polytheist does fully acknowledge the existence of
all gods, even those in foreign pantheons, and that he prays/sacrifices to whatever god he happens to need at the time. Your travel by sea? Sacrifce to Neptun for a safe passage. A war is on? Sacrifice to Mars that it passes you by. You are taking your wares to the market? Sacrifice to Mercury to strike a good bargain. You have an eye on a pretty wench? Sacrifice to Venus that she falls for you. She has fallen for you? Sacrifice to
Priapus that you perform according to expectations.
Polytheistic religion is not a very personal, devotional thing where you are expected to live by some kind of code, it functions a bit like a machine. Push this button, and that happens – probably.
The European polytheistic religions id also not have what we would call a piesthood – the Oriental ones were different though, but steeped much deeper in mysticism and probably frighteningly alien to a modernmindset. Priests were basically laymen, and one was not priest
of a certain god, but priest
at a certain temple*. How one became priest at this temple was a matter of local tradition. In some temples priesthood was passed on in a family, in others it was a civil service post rotated annually, in others it was by public election for life. Most priests were not full-time clerics but performed their duties in honoray kind of way, like some people today devote some of their time to work for the Red Cross.
And there was no over-regional authority. No priest at one temple was the superior of a priest at any other temple. There were merely differences of prestige. A priest of Apollo at
Delphi would have more prestige than a priest of Apollo at some rural shrine, but that was
absolutely not different from how being a professor at Oxford is more prestigious than being a professor at some tiny backwater university.
And priests would acknowledge the entire pantheon (and indeed foreign pantheons) and even regularly sacrifice to other members of this pantheon. There are even ample instances of Greek
priests on a tourist visit to Egypt erecting devotional inscriptions to
Egyptian gods – unlike mootheists, polytheists do after all acknowledge foreign gods, and they acknowledge that in Egypt, the Egyptian gods have more power than the Greek gods (probably because the Greek gods take little interest in these parts).
That’s a far call from how D&D and simliar games portray polytheism. Their lack of understanding of the basic tenets of polytheism leaves these settings’ religions feeling woooden and unreal – as indeed they would never work.
TRoS’ own Weyrth does a good job at lumping all polytheism together under “Paganism†– polytheism, even different brands of it, should indeed be viewed as
one faith, not unified, but certainly not at odds among itself. After all, being a professional historian of the ancient world I know of no instance where polytheistic societies warred with each other
on religious grounds; the entire concept of religious war is an outflow of monotheism and its need to ascertain one so-called “truth†over all others. The very worst poltheists do is viewing the adherents of other faiths as pitifully deluded and mistaken.
End of rant.
*EDIT: This goes so far that, more often than not, any given temple was dedicated to
several gods, with every priest there priest serving all of them. At another temple, the combination of gods would likely have been different, so that one temple’s priest might be priest to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva and at another’s priest to Jupiter, Mars and Vulcan. Generally speaking, any priest can conduct rites to all of the gods in his pantheon.
) opinon to keep in mind that TRoS is a passion play. Lukewarm believes and universal tolerance probably don’t serve it well. You’ll want to emphasize the effects faith has on the world, as opposed to the effect the gods have on the world. It’s a deeply human thing, all about how humans are quite ready to tear themselves and each other apart about questions of religion and world-view.
