#panpantheon lore

[panpantheon]

Ok I'll touch the afterlife just this once to explain what happened to Niflhel/Helheim in PanPantheon considering the status of Hel (the character).

In PanPantheon, you go to the afterlife that your faith follows. Simple enough. However, if the surrounding religion/mythos is destroyed, then its associated afterlife(s) is also destroyed, and the remaining souls/deceased return to The Crossroads (name pending), presuming they were not already reincarnated or destroyed or whatever.

The Crossroads (name pending) is where all mortals go after death, before being redirected to wherever it is they need to go.

Despite there being Angels and Demons and such in PanPantheon, unless you are actively connected to death itself, you cannot access The Crossroads (name pending).

Because severed beings have some access to their former domain despite technically being sorta mortals, they can access The Crossroads (name pending), even though their domain was destroyed.

[missolaris]

Hey guys I made a sideblog for one of my lore projects, @panpantheon

[panpantheon]

The Gatherers

Sometime around the 20th century, Altair took a break from traveling, severing deities and beings who came to her/ who she approached, and recording information. At that point, she had spent around 600 years traveling, and the damage to her legs finally caught up to her. While she could heal, it would take a long time. Besides, religions by this point had mostly stabilized compared to, say, the era of the Crusades.

Thus, she started the Gatherers as an organization to keep track of folkloric figures and mythical creatures still in the world, messing with humans. The main mission is to prevent excessive human deaths and such while also documenting where mythology still exists.

For Altair, she's doing this to find the true link between mortals and mythology, and also figure out the inner workings of how and why exactly human faith is so powerful.

Currently, Advii, Eiyn, and Tomthy work under Altair as a sort of "mobile unit" to investigate suspicious circumstances and urban legends.

[panpantheon]

Mortal: was born, will die eventually, has no true connection to a pantheon. All humans, animals, and most mythological and folkloric creatures. (mythological/folkloric beings can be created by mythologies, but are able to survive past the death of their mythologies. Ex: there are still sirens even though greek mythology is canonically dead).

Ageless Mortal: A mortal that does not age. Enough said. Can still die to any other means. Mostly consists of mythological/folkloric creatures.

Immortal: Truely cannot die to any means (or sometimes one/two very specific means), but is otherwise indistinguishable from mortals. Is usually obtained by something like a ritual or elixir. Due to the idea of immortality being inherently unstable, these guys often turn into deities somehow within a thousand or two years.

Deity: A god/goddess that has gained great power specifically from human faith. Their existence is semi-tangible, because of their worship and stories changing over time. They can have epithets (or different domains/degrees of worship) and can splinter/split/merge into different deities. They are so tied to their mythos that the mythos dying is the only way for them to also die (with a couple exceptions).

Spirits (name pending): Currently only applies to angels and demons due to the specificity (remind me to do more research). Beings that are not true immortals, but are still connected to their mythos/religion that they would also vanish with their mythology/religion. Somewhere between Immortals and Deities

Severed Deities: If a mythos is dying and has no active followers, the deities start to gradually fade into nothingness. If these deities meet Altair who manages to sever them, they are turned into pseudo-ageless mortals. All of their epithets, branches, splinters, and faces of worship are squished together into one simple brain and one simple body, in a process that is as horrifying as it sounds. While they keep some power over their former domain, they are now functionally just mortals.

Severed Spirits/Minor Deities: Smaller-scale beings in a pantheon can be severed even if their mythos is still living. However, they have to either be extremely forgotten/abandoned (for most deities) or have to not be significant enough for their identity to be well known in the first place (for most spirits). They have an overall slightly higher chance of being injured by the severing process. Also, they are weakened less than outright severed deities, but that's because the power reduction is less noticeable when you are less powerful.

[panpantheon]

Acknowledging "dead religions" and religious revivals in PanPantheon

PanPantheon is a fictional OC project. It's based on real world mythology, but does not affect these real world topics.

In PanPantheon lore, if a religion is revived, that doesn't change the fact that the original mythology is dead. For example, modern Hellenism was likely created sometime in the 18th century based on some research I did, but the original ancient greek religion was suppressed around 300 to 500ish CE. I tried to do some research but I'm not good at it.

Specifically, in PanPantheon, a modern revival of a religion creates new interpretations of deities, instead of reviving a deity that has already been sheared or reassimilating a deity that has been severed. This is done more to prevent the lore of this series from getting too messy. Honestly the comparison is kinda like the philosophical debate of "if you upload your consciousness" or the "teleporter" debate, but I'm gonna say they're not the same person due to the reason I just said (lore mess).

Advii's storyline (the modern story) doesn't really have that much to do with religion specifically, more so about folklore and mythology that's assimilated into culture (like fairy tales and suspicions). It's gonna be explained in story, but as of the modern era, religion overall is relatively stable in comparison to something like the age of exploration (which I am treading on knives over due to lots of reasons involving... history)

[panpantheon]

DISCLAIMER ABOUT PANPANTHEON AS A WHOLE

PanPantheon is NOT a story about christianity, despite the fact that several of the characters are literal angels. It is a story about mythology, and how stories are rewritten, erased, reinterpreted, and rediscovered. It is a story about the life and death of belief systems and what happens to those stories afterwards.

It is PanPantheon. All Pantheons.

I don't want my plot to be confused with a story about heaven/hell or those overall themes. It's not about sin, or virtues, or really about morality. The main thing really utilized is faith. In fact, I've already decided that we are not going to touch the afterlife.

The premise of PanPantheon is specifically "All religions and mythologies are real, but all mythological figures will die once their religion is no longer practiced. What is the solution to that?" and there are two storylines going on at the moment...

Altair's story: starts when a certain angel severed herself to be able to save dying stories

Advii's story: in the present day, the story of the "gatherers" who are trying to keep track of lost stories and save people from fantastical and folkloric threats

I hope any of this makes sense despite how weird my rambling is.

[panpantheon]

Preemptively answering the question: If Altair left Christianity, how is she not a fallen angel?

My explanation is that Altair severed herself in order to be able to save (sever) dying mythologies to save stories from being erased entirely by... well the rest of Christianity.

She still follows Christianity, though she does not take 100% direct orders from other angels. The 10 commandments, the virtues, many of the actual lessons.... She's technically still obedient.

Because she doesn't actually oppose Christianity, just redirects the idea of killing other religions, she is not a fallen angel.

[panpantheon]

What is severing?

PanPantheon is a world that operates under the idea that mythologies are sustained by human faith. If a deity is no longer worshipped, they fade into obscurity, and if an entire religion is forgotten or forced out, the pantheon is killed off, or frayed.

A certain individual was able to discover that a way to circumvent severing is to essentially rewrite a deity's entire being by merging their splinters and epithets into one being, reforming their body to be constructed of flesh, and reforming their existence to being essentially a mortal.

This does not work on any living religion, it takes a relatively long time to work, diminishes the overall phenomenal cosmic power of the deity in question, and gives them a permanent sense of dread that comes with mortality. There are other possible side effects, including bodily harm, such as mutilation of one's legs (wonder who that might be?).

All in all, who would choose to do something like this?