Gods and Vampires?

[Lian]

A friend of mine had two theories on Set's death:

A:] Jesus killed him

B:] Set is Jesus

B would mean he's also the God Emperor of Mankind from Warhammer.

In warhammer the cross must have been huge.. seeing as the emperor was what 20 feet tall?


Seriously the mythological cycle has set lose, and Set seems to disappear from the game much earlier than Jesus showing up. One Might even notice how earlier depictions of Set in Mythology LESS readily match the Set of vampire vs more recent depictions. Do you really need to be an incarna to curse a whole tribe? I Mean... with enough blood mages it looks like you can do that or even break those sorts of curses.

OF course.. the problem with Set is also the problem with caine. He more readily matches up the concept of caine as produced by Post Babylonian captivity reforms to the Biblical canon than what was believed even a couple hundred years before...

Mind you those could just as easilly be laid at the feet of limitations of the author but I do think there's something interesting to point out you could easily give a "Time period" where the vampire has forced their way into the religion, Caine, Set, Mithras, the All Father, Baron Samedi etc you can get a pretty clear "before and current"

[AnubisXy]

In the Bible in Genesis there's a segment when God is throwing Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden and he stops to curse the Serpent who temped Eve. At the end of his curse God says, "he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." Many Christian denominations interpret that message as a metaphor for Jesus defeating Satan (basically Satan causes Jesus to die, striking his heel, but it's not a permanent defeat. In dying Jesus saves mankind's souls, metaphorically crushing Satan's head and defeating him forever).

Set has that heavy duty serpent theme going for him, plus the whole tempter thing, so I've always just kind of gone with a more literal interpretation of that Biblical passage and imagined that at some point Set and Jesus crossed paths and Jesus caved in Set's head. RIP Set.

[Ian Turner]

Of course that's not to say that Set is a "god" god, just that Set was really powerful, people worshiped him like a god, and his relationship with his brother, and nephew and others served as the origin for Egyptian mythology. So he's not an actual deity, but ancient Egypt's myths were about him.

I see some fun possibilities.

Perhaps, thousands of years ago, the worship of 'Set' led to the formation of a spirit similar to the Jupiter Celestine, and the actual vampire Set found a means to summon and absorb it, becoming both Antediluvian vampire *and* spirit-god, at the same time.

Perhaps the spirit came first, one of a dozen members of the Ennead, and upon being cast out by his fellow spirits, for the same reasons related in his mythology, came down to the material world and manifested in the body of a vampire who had a cult and was 'stealing' his name, fusing them into one being.

Either way, whether the spirit et the vampire, or the vampire et the spirit, they became one.

Bonus points if the Set-spirit-god-entity formed initially from the shorn free remnants of the Avatar that Sutekh lost when he became a vampire, and they were always two halves of a whole, and the whole thing was engineered by some older and even more mysterious third party as part of a thought-experiment...

[Penelope]

I always thought Set alone of the Antediluvians becomes an actual god. (Cappadocius didn’t wanna be a god, he wanted to be God Himself.) I also thought Set’s physical body was defeated and forced into Torpor by Jesus when he rose from the dead, but Set’s spirit remains active as a god in the High Umbra.

Just a thought

[Konigheim Horror]

Isn't "reborn /demigod/god" a legit character concept for a mage? If so, couldn't they actually have been godlings who later became a wraith, a vampire and so forth?

[Mister_Dunpeal]

As Pleiades notes, God is more a title than a thing. If you have the ability to enforce the declaration in some manner, you're a god and nobody can gainsay you until you no longer can enforce that. It's very perceptual as far as semantics goes.

[Orkar]

Depends on what is a "god" in your book cause in VTM gods can be very powerfull mages (Ascended to godhood at 8 Arete) or very old creautures that brought forth the exalted, or very powerfull spirits (Charon, Luna) and technicly youd have to count demons as gods as well (fallen angels bu immortal pwoerfull etc. at least the higher ones) which would mean that the only way vampires can become gods is ascension to demonhood which a few baalia actually achieved

"deities" like Odin, mithras etc. are either names of cultures the vampries took to impersonate go gain power or indeed the vampire may be the origin of the myth (after all waht ancient vampires can do must look like a gods power to humans)

[Gryffon15]

So people who have read my posts on this forum know that I’m a fan of a little something called MULTI-RESONANCE LAYERED REALITY.

This is a concept from DtF with aligning concepts throughout the World of Darkness that, in my opinion, does a good job of explaining how several distinct entities can claim to be the same entity/being.

A good example of this is gods.

So let’s take a god from Old Greek Religion, Poseidon.

Now, there may be any number of vampires who have invoked Poseidon and his titles to gather cults or create a sense of religious legitimacy for their predations. It’s likely I think that there were several vampires who roamed the islands of the Mediterranean in millenia past who dubbed themselves ‘Earth-Shaker’.

Similarly, from the perspective of WtA, there are certainly spirits who take on forms akin to Poseidon. There is assuredly an incarna called the Earth-Shaker who likely has a complex relationship with the Black Furies and the Incarna of Horse. There is also likely to be a number of representatives of Poseidon in the Far Realm of the Mythic Lands in the Umbra. I would also say it’s possible that jaggling and gafflings, as representatives or calling themselves ’Poseidon’ have formed both because of ritual worship and to embody aspects of the greater god.

In the old golden age that Mages recall/imagine, there may have been an Awakened who shook the earth and stirred the sea with a trident. Avatars in that figures image may still flow throughout the body of Awakened Souls while spiritual representatives of the gods appear in all layers of the umbra, particularly to those Awakened and Hedge Priests who follow the old Hellenic Rites.

From the Dark Ages of Greece, when many gods were praised as Cthonic entities, I would not be surprised that shades whisper of Poseidon passing in old and distant Far Shores in the deeper places of the Tempest.

There was definitively an ‘Archfey’ or ‘Firstborn’ who would have called themselves Poseidon as we have signs that every human religion had representation amongst Firstborn beings akin to the Tuatha de Danaan. The Inanimae and Satyrs would particularly remember such a great figure, now shrouded in mists, perhaps embodied in Living Legends and Chimera from time to time or waiting to be found in the Deep Dreaming.

There may have been a member of the fallen, likely a defiler of the fifth house, that dubbed themselves “Poseidon” and shepherded a faith before the Great Deluge; alongside all these other figures.

There may have been entirely human priests and spiritualists and storytellers who discovered Poseidon through ritual practices or invented stories to unite their communities and explain the seemingly arbitrary shaking of the earth and sea.

There may be a true god, a divinity beyond mechanical compartmentalization, a being that we cannot understand who watches over the World of Darkness alongside countless other divinities.

All of these things can be simultaneously true and valid and I think it creates a richer tapestry for the World of Darkness if they are.

[CTPhipps]

I do think Mithras was the son of a Sun God and a demigod who was Embraced.

Set and company also could have been gods who were Embraced.

[Mister_Dunpeal]

the idea of layers/levels of reality overlapping isn't a new one (indeed one of my favorite illustrative examples is the Dark Tower - which is seen as the axle upon which all realities turn) and its not terribly surprising to see it in WoD because it embraces the whole 'point of view' perceptual thing that will always be the ultimate excuse against arguments of contradiction. Like the Tower looks like a tower to human eyes but the fact the SK universe embraces worlds 'next door' to other worlds as well as levels 'above' and 'below' suggests that our perceptions are limited. Which you can borrow from an even earlier fictional story called 'Flatland' where a 2d 'person' visits a 1d and then 3d world and the resulting perceptions there in. To us a world with more than 3 (or 4 if we include time) dimensions would look as odd and incomprehensible as a 3d world to a 2d person. Probably even more complicated actually (as in not only number of dimensions, but visual wavelengths and audio ranges that the 'person' can perceive or not perceive. The end result is an incomplete picture where the humans miss out on a lot that 'higher' supernatural beings - such as Elohim/Fallen - have no trouble perceiving and comprehending. It's probably no wonder that Demon and Mage emphasize this so much more.) It's hard to call it a contradiction if you lack all the details needed to comprehend it, and it only looks contradictory because of those gaps (and because some people may not envision alternative ideas that would sound plausible to them. 'logic' is sometimes perceptual too.)



Ultimately it comes down to 'does this make personal sense to me and/or the groups I subscribe to, yes/no?' and as long as the answer is 'yes' (or enough 'yes' answers in a larger group) then it all works out. More or less.