A WicDiv Theory

So over the past couple of issues, especially once we got the Rules, something’s been bothering me about how the “children” work, specifically their identities. And this got me thinking…

See, we’ve had a few cases (1923 Set, 2014 Amaterasu and Morrigan, 2014 Ananke, I’m probably forgetting a bunch) where the "children” claim to remember things from previous incarnations, or who have a strong connection to their assigned god (2014 Sakhmet, for one). But then again, we’ve had other cases where the “children” either don’t know their god (Tara) or reject their god (Baphomet/Nergal), or who are lying about their identity (Baal, Baphomet, Woden). And Baal has manifested both electricity and fire, i.e both Hadad and Hammon. 

So does it matter who the specific god is? And this brought up some other doubts: if the Game/Story goes back 6,000 years, why are we calling the two women in #34 Ananke and Persephone, when those names wouldn’t exist for another thousand years at least? Why is Lucifer in the Pantheon, when Lucifer/Satan doesn’t go back nearly that far? And why the crazy mix of pantheons?

And this got me thinking about something from Volume II:

Robert Graves’ whole thing was about syncretism: his thesis in the White Goddess was that there were certain pan-cultural deities who span millenia and huge distances under different names, chiefly the Maiden/Mother/Crone Goddess he associated with the waxing/full/waning moon. And Graves was deeply influenced by James Frazer’s Golden Bough, which did much the same thing with the idea of the dying-and-rising god he associated with Osiris, Tammuz, Dionysus, Adonis, and Jesus Christ.

This could explain all of these issues: Ananke isn’t literally Ananke, nor is Minerva literally Minerva. Rather they are Crone and Maiden, just as Persephone isn’t actually Persephone but Mother. Baal isn’t either Baal, he’s all the Baals. It doesn’t matter who Cameron says he is, because all he needs to be is the underground king to Morrigan’s underground queen. (Which also explains why a Mesopotamian undeworld god is the “spouse” of an Irish war goddess.) Lucifer is in the Pantheon because there are trickster/tempter figures in a lot of religions – I imagine if we’d seen the Lucifer of the 8th or 9th century, they might have been calling themselves Loki instead of anything Christian. Tara is so confused because she’s trying to pin down a specific goddess when she’s actually a broad archetype.