Columbia and the U.S. pantheon?

[LordTom]

Hi all.

One of my players wants to play a rootin', tootin' Chosen of Columbia.
Are there any resources for her pantheon and purviews?
Thanks

[TheWanderingJewels]

Well,

There is The Republican Pantheon doc over on drive through, which is a American version of the Theoi. Or are you speaking of the Scion 1st edition Pantheon that had Columbia and Uncle Sam?

[Dataweaver]

Officially, no. She was scheduled for Mysteries of the World; and you'll even find her in the picture on page 64; but the write-up for her was deemed inadequate and was pulled from the book.

Unofficially, there's a Nexus product called the Republican Pantheon which is basically a Theoi “sub-Pantheon” tied intimately to the American Revolution and the Neoclassicism popular among the Founding Fathers.

The Republican Gods include Athena, Apollo, Juno, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Neptune, Persephone, Pluto, and Vulcan; with other important gods including Columbia, Fidelia, Fortuna, Justicia, Liber, and Pan.

[Muskrat]

Mysteries of the World still does have a section on being the Scion of a God with no Pantheon on p. 70. Columbia is still briefly mentioned there--presumably the full write up was meant to be an example of a independent God.

As I understand it, her write-up was pulled because it played down her connection to the ideology of manifest destiny--and therefore her connection to the conquest and genocide of Native Americans. The devs ultimately decided that they couldn't do justice to her in the space they had.

I think you can use what's there to do a Scion of Columbia. It's simply a matter of assigning what seem like appropriate Callings and Purviews.

The Republican Pantheon on DriveThru is well thought out and you could certainly use that if you wanted Columbia to be part of a Pantheon. However, it left me with the impression that the author didn't understand how the Virtue system worked, since they assigned each God one individual Virtue. You could go with the standard Theoi Virtues or work up something more appropriate for a contemporary republic Pantheon like Justice and Liberty.

[glamourweaver]

Yeah the thing with Columbia’s history as an icon is you can present her as having always been an abolitionist, an ally of the freedmen, a defender of immigrants, and champion of the expansion of suffrage…. But there is no getting around that she is drenched in blood when it comes to Manifest Destiny and the treatment of indigenous Americans. Her dream republic with liberty and justice for all required space to exist and entire civilizations were in the way.

To the OP, raw Scions of Columbia use the “solo deity Scion” rules in Mysteries of the World, complete with Virtues and Motif defined by whatever their starting Covenant community is.

[Mateus Luz]

I think the Theoi virtues fit perfectly for American pantheon.
Egotism is all about the self, the freedom to be what you want, the opportunities, liberty, freedom of speak, free market, etc.
Kinship is all about the social, the neighbors, the family, the security and the respect for the next.

You get the big Freedom X Safety, giving up freedom to be safer or giving up safety to be free. It’s a discussion running for a while now, but it goes deeper. The two parties are also a mix of this two virtues, Democrats want the society over all and freedom to be yourself, and Republicans want an homogeneous society with each individual taking care of themselves.

[No One of Consequence]

I sort of figured that the Atlantean virtues of Nostalgia and Vision would work for a theoretical American pantheon.

[Dataweaver]

I think the Theoi virtues fit perfectly for American pantheon.
Egotism is all about the self, the freedom to be what you want, the opportunities, liberty, freedom of speak, free market, etc.
Kinship is all about the social, the neighbors, the family, the security and the respect for the next.

You get the big Freedom X Safety, giving up freedom to be safer or giving up safety to be free. It’s a discussion running for a while now, but it goes deeper. The two parties are also a mix of this two virtues, Democrats want the society over all and freedom to be yourself, and Republicans want an homogeneous society with each individual taking care of themselves.

And if you like the God-specific Virtues found in the Republican Pantheon, you can use the Theoi Virtues as a baseline, and then optionally replace one or both with whichever Virtues that god is associated with. So a Scion of Columbus could have Ego and Kinship, Patriotism and Kinship, or Ego and Patriotism.

In particular, Saints of the Republican Pantheon would be an extremely diverse bunch — and likely would be extremely common compared to Saints of other Pantheons, as the neoclassical philosophy is the core of this Pantheon and the Gods are secondary. As such, “culture heroes” who embrace various aspects of said philosophy are very appropriate.

[Astromancer]

Zeus, Odin, Indra, the Morrigrue, and other deities have pasts that are highly problematic. Columbia, like the nation she patron of, has a mixed record. But perfect records don't exist. So I feel we should have an official Columbia.

[Muskrat]

I don't think the intention was to not have an official Columbia. I think the issue was they realized, rather late in the game, in response to feedback from readers of the Kickstarter draft, that they hadn't done justice to her and that couldn't do justice to her in the space they had allocated. She is still mentioned briefly in the text of Mysteries of the World and I imagine she could still get a full write-up somewhere else that makes sense.

Also, problematic in terms of being an ancient patriarchal god and problematic in being a symbol of the genocide of a group still deeply suffering from the consequences of that genocide are two different things. The latter requires a great deal more sensitivity.

[No One of Consequence]

I sometimes wonder if there should be some sort of separate category for national personifications, separate from Gods, Titans, or Primordials. Beings that derive more from the workings of The State than of individual worshipers and aren't really part of Pantheons per say. Columbia, Britannia, Mother Russia, Bharat Mata, Fjallkonan, Marianne/L'Belle France, and the like.

[Muskrat]

That's an interesting notion, though I find the political implications about the metaphysical standing of nation-states and national identities a little worrying.

On the flip side, social scientists going back to Emile Durkheim in the 1890s have written about "civil religion"--how politics has its own rituals, its own values, its own sacred symbols, like the Statue of Liberty. Hell, in the US, we have an extremely unhealthy tendency to treat the Constitution as if it was religious scripture, condemning things as "un-Constitutional" as if that inherently makes them bad. And countries certainly have their own national mythologies. So it makes sense to me that Gods would emerge out of that brew.

[Mateus Luz]

The Romans had a name for those: Lares. There were a Lar for every think and place, one of the famous Lares was Tiberius, the Lar of Tiber River, but Roma had a Lar that was different from the empire (that had its own Lar).
It work a lot like the Kami, with the lower ones working as spirits and the most powerful ones as minor gods, every house and family having their own Lar, as powerful as what it represents.

[Muskrat]

It's worth noting that some pantheons are already incorporate national heroes--Chinggis (Genghis) Khan is a member in good standing of the Tengri for instance.

[No One of Consequence]

Hmm. I have this odd idea for an (alternate) American pantheon. Although I can't quite work out suitable Over and Underworlds yet.🤔