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Old 11-13-2021, 10:01 AM   #23
Inky
 
Join Date: Sep 2019
Location: UK
Default Re: Pre-Enlightenment Horror, Urban Fantasy, et cetra

Quote:
Ah, now gods are something else altogether.
Are they, though? You can't always be sure. As I mentioned before, historians suspect a lot of the fairies etc. of Celtic legend to be descended from older Celtic myths about their gods. European legend has gone through a strange process of mangling and re-writing. For a lot of their history, the Christian church's policy was to preach that any supernatural forces that weren't theirs were demons and that was all there was to it. They saw any local belief in neutral or benevolent supernatural forces that weren't theirs as competition - and since those beliefs were partly about the old pagan religions that had gone before them, they were right in a way. So the legends about fairies having connections to Hell might themselves be a "bowdlerised" (or reverse-bowdlerised) version of whatever came even earlier.

Some of the myths survived by being adapted to Christianity. I mean, take St Bridget, who both is and is not St Bridget. There seems to have been a historical saint of that name, but a lot of her legends are suspected to not belong to her but to Brigid the Celtic goddess of spring and childbirth. Hence the legend of St Bridget having somehow been the midwife at the birth of Jesus.

People talk about how indigenous cultures in America and elsewhere have been distorted by the European settlers' attempts to teach their own culture and stamp the others out, leading to some old traditions surviving only as weird vaguely-Christianised hybrids - well, long before that, rather the same thing happened to Europe as far as religious beliefs go, and it may be impossible to "decolonise" them and identify what the originals were by now!

In a game, where being true to whatever the original beliefs might have been IRL needn't be necessary, it might be interesting to make all this an excuse for something to turn out to be nothing like how any version you're familiar with has ever portrayed it, and explain that "What you've always heard about these creatures is lies".

(Odd instance here, for instance, of a legend of benevolent werewolves! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiess_of_Kaltenbrun )
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