Mythology: the many faiths of one world

A mythology was a people's collection of myths, the stories a culture told to explain nature, history, and custom. In most worlds such stories would be a matter of faith. In the World that Kratos walked, they were a matter of fact. Every mythology throughout human culture and history coexisted upon the same earth despite their contradictory cosmologies, each geographical region existing as a version of the universe with its own dimensions and its own earth, shaped by the prevalent mythology of the people who lived there. The pantheon of Zeus ruled Greece, the pantheon of Odin ruled the Norse lands, and neither account of creation cancelled the other, for each was true within its own borders.

Many truths upon one earth#

The central fact of the World was that its mythologies did not compete for truth. Greece and Scandinavia held entirely different conceptions of how the universe began and what shape it took, and yet both were correct simultaneously. Each region of the earth carried its own complete universe, with its own creation, its own monsters, its own magic, and its own afterlife, and the gods of each tradition held dominion over that universe and no other. What separated one mythology from the next was geography. A traveler who went far enough left the reach of one pantheon and entered the reach of another, the way an ordinary journey carried a man from one kingdom into the next.

This arrangement had a hard consequence that the Greek world learned in fire. When Kratos brought ruin upon Olympus and the lands beneath it, the destruction he wrought unmade the Greek world alone. The other mythologies endured untouched, their skies unbroken, their gods unaware or indifferent. No single tradition, however violently it ended, could drag the rest of the earth down with it.

The Greek tradition#

The Greek world was ruled by the Olympians, the gods of the heavens, under Zeus as their king. Its order of beings ran from the gods themselves through the Titans, the elder generation who had ruled Greece before the Olympians overthrew them, down to demigods born of unions between gods and mortals, and finally to the mortals who worshipped the gods largely out of fear. Its geography reached from Mount Olympus, seat of the pantheon, to mortal cities such as Sparta, and its dead passed into an underworld ruled by its own god.

This was the tradition into which Kratos was born, the tradition whose god of war he killed and replaced, and the tradition he finally tore down entirely. By the time he crossed into the north, the Greek mythology survived chiefly in his memory, in the Blades of Chaos he carried, and in the slow recovery of the land he left behind.

The Norse tradition#

Far to the north, an entirely different universe held sway. The Norse world was arranged as the Nine Realms upon the branches of the World Tree, Yggdrasil, and its gods were divided into two tribes, the Aesir of Asgard and the Vanir of Vanaheim. Odin, the Allfather, led the Aesir and through them ruled most of the realms. Where the Greek order had known Titans and demigods, the Norse order held dwarves gifted in forging, light elves and dark elves locked in their long war, the giants called Jotnar, and trolls, a once powerful people the Aesir had nearly exterminated. Its creation story began with the primordial being Ymir, from whose flesh the world was made, and its prophecies ran forward to Ragnarok, the doom of the gods.

None of this contradicted the Greek account in any way that mattered, because within the northern lands the Norse account was simply true. When Kratos settled in Midgard with Faye and raised Atreus there, he lived under Norse skies, subject to Norse fates, in a universe that had never been governed by Olympus.

Traditions beyond Greece and the north#

The record of the other mythologies was thinner, preserved mostly in the accounts of travelers and in relics. Egypt was home to an ancient and advanced civilization known as the River Empire, ruled by numerous gods who were half human and half animal and who were said to govern with wisdom and humility, a reputation unlike anything told of the Olympians or the Aesir. Mimir passed through such foreign lands in his long wanderings, and Egypt stood among the best attested of them.

Persia lay to the east of Greece and pressed against the Greek world directly, its armies attacking Attica in an attempted invasion. Its king owned an Efreet, a genie of fire, and after Kratos defeated the Persian King at Attica he took the power to summon the creature for himself. The Celtic tradition was attested by a triskelion woven into a tapestry that depicted the travels of Tyr, the Norse god of war who visited foreign pantheons as a peaceful ambassador. In the far Southern Lands lived the Mayan gods, said to possess unmatched wisdom and generosity; their king, called the ruler of the heavens, freely shared writing, farming, the calendar, and the sciences with humanity, though their god of death tormented the souls of the dead with fire and water. Of the Japanese and Babylonian traditions the record preserved little more than the knowledge that they, too, existed somewhere upon the same earth.

Walkers between mythologies#

Passage from one mythology into another was possible, though rare and poorly understood. Kratos made the crossing once and permanently, leaving the wreck of Greece for Midgard without ever telling how the journey was accomplished. Mimir made it gradually, drifting north from his island homeland through a succession of lands and masters until he ended in Odin's service. Tyr made it deliberately and repeatedly, traveling abroad to visit the pantheons of other lands and returning with tributes and treasures from worlds his kin never saw.

Their journeys proved that the mythologies, for all their separate skies and separate truths, shared one earth between them. The borders that divided Zeus's dominion from Odin's, and both from the gods of the River Empire or the ruler of the heavens in the south, were real but not absolute. A god could die in one world and walk into the next, and the stories mankind told would go on being true in every land at once.