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[phishface]

These are all ancient phrases. Some knowledge of their origins might help us understand what the writers are doing with them. It’s clear they’ve read a lot about ancient myth and religion. And it’s not surprising, given that they had to create a whole mythology for the game.

 

The Titans were the Greek ‘old gods’, the first and second generations after the primordial deities. They overthrew the primordial gods, but were overthrown in turn by a newer generation of gods (the Olympians) after a war in heaven. They were then imprisoned in the deepest depths of the underworld.

 

The same motifs existed in many other ancient cultures: Vedic Sanskrit (the Sadhya); the Hittites (Karuilies Siunes or ‘former gods’); Norse (the Æsir and Vanir); and the Celts (the Tuatha de Danaan and the Fomorians).

 

So the idea of old gods being overthrown and/or imprisoned in the depths of the earth is both common and very, very old. One theory is that this represents the displacement that comes from migration: as one group moves into the territory of another, they claim the others’ land and supress their gods. Then they create myths to explain what they’ve done and to comfort themselves. The old gods are buried, out of sight and (almost) out of mind.

 

The Pillars of the Earth is a biblical phrase: (1 Samuel 2:8) “He raises up the poor out of the dust, and lifts up the beggar from the rubbish, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory: for the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and he has set the world upon them.”

 

The Judaeo-Christian myth is interesting in the context of Dragon Age because of the parallels between the Old Gods and Satan. The DA Codex entry on the Old Gods says that the Chantry holds that “they are responsible for the original sin, that they turned humanity away from its true creator through deceit.” That’s about as Satanic as you can get. It also says that the Maker “trapped the Old Gods in eternal prisons beneath the earth as punishment”. Throw in a war in heaven and banishment to the depths of the earth/the underworld/hell, and you have a pretty close analogue to Lucifer.

[Hydwn]

A helpful term here is gigantomachia.  Indo-European myth - which is a root of the tree that branched out into Celtic, Germanic, and Greek myth - probably already had a fight between the gods and the giants/titans/fomorians.  It's an old idea.

 

So is the ambiguous place of the giants.  Giants were the antagonists in Norse myth...but they were also the first beings, predating the Norse gods.  Cronus was the cruel father who ate his children...but Greek myth also portrayed his era as a golden age.  Neither the Norse gods nor the Greek were moral paragons, at least in the versions we have handed down in sagas and eddas and theogynies (we now know enough to know that there were multiple and very often extremely different versions of this story).

 

So the elven "gods" threw down their titans, who were the first gods, and set themselves up as Olympians or Aesir.  

 

Also, those old myths shed some more light on Descent.  After all, when the Norse gods killed the first giant Ymir, the dwarves (according to the Poetic Edda) rose from the first giant's flesh and blood like maggots.  Maybe the shattered and defeated titans - defeated in war, or injured by the Veil - created the dwarves from their broken pieces.  

[phishface]

Also, those old myths shed some more light on Descent.  After all, when the Norse gods killed the first giant Ymir, the dwarves (according to the Poetic Edda) rose from the first giant's flesh and blood like maggots.  Maybe the shattered and defeated titans - defeated in war, or injured by the Veil - created the dwarves from their broken pieces.  

 

That's so insightful and consistent with the hints in DAI that it's virtually a spoiler for the next game! This must be where they're going.

[Hydwn]

That's so insightful and consistent with the hints in DAI that it's virtually a spoiler for the next game! This must be where they're going.

 

Hopefully!  Although they might save the big reveals for a further game down the road.  Mike Laidlaw is already talking about "future games," plural

 

I was thinking also about the equivalents of religion in Thedas to the real world.  Real-life Western religious history usually gets split into four eras:

 

• Stone Age: About which we know very little except a prevalence of nature and seasonal imagery, and plenty of goddess statues.  It's usually assumed to have been nature religion focused on goddesses, but since they were pre-literate we know almost nothing.
• Bronze/Iron Age: Warrior gods and gods of more abstracted cultural things like gods of knowledge.  This is the Norse and Celtic, and the Greek as well.  Borrowed from an earlier age, which is clear from the nature-worship elements and goddesses of the Celts, the Vanir of the Norse, and the way Zeus mates with dozens of goddesses-demoted-to-mortals.
• Christian age: Late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and early modern era.  Christianity also borrowed from earlier ages in both surface elements like holidays, as well as more doctrinal aspects (Mithra and Neo-Platonism had a say).
• Post-Christian/Secular: Depending on who you ask, now or not yet!

I used to think that the Thedas equivalents were Elves=Stone Age religion, Tevinter=Iron Age, and the Chantry=Christianity.  That's all been muddied for me post-DAI.  My assumption is it's more like this:

 

• Bronze-Iron Age = Elves and Avvar: Specifically, the Avvar are the Germanic gods, and the Elves are the Olympians who (as you pointed out) overthrew their own Titans.  Like the Olympians, they were a proud court who tended to act arbitrarily, and feared mortals (there are all kinds of stories of Zeus finding ways to make sure human beings didn't ascent to Olympus or godhood).
• Christian Age = Chantry:  This one still holds, though it's interesting that both codices in the Jaws of Hakkon and in World of Thedas 2 suggest it was influenced by the Avvar.

That leaves two who don't fit.  Here are my best guesses about them:

 

• Stone Age=Titans: We don't have enough information to be sure of it, but it's my best guess.  It would be interesting to find out if the Elves were originally Titan worshippers.  And if the Titans are the protectors of nature, maybe by making war on them, the Elven gods were actually on the verge of destroying nature and thus themselves.  solas did say they were a threat to the whole world.
• The Old Tevinter Gods have no Earth equivalent: I thought in Origins that the old gods were probably decent and just got a lot of bad press.  It's become more and more obvious they were exactly the monsters they're portrayed as.  There's nothing in the real world that quite matches them.  They resemble some propaganda of what some religions thought of other religions - Molech in the Bible comes to mind.  But no religion has ever quite resembled them.  It's helpful to remember that BioWare was doing Dungeons & Dragons games before Dragon Age, and in the Forgotten Realms world where their games were set, there are multiple religions that are, in fact, card-carrying evil.  Forgotten Realms has Ban, Bhaal, Myrkul, and Cyric, all of whom are evil for evil's sake, and I think those religions of evil are the inspiration for the Tevinter Gods.

 

This means that in this world, Rome (Tevinter) conquered Greece (the elves) but did not adopt their religion or culture - only their magical technology.  The elves did not gain the special place in their world that the Greeks had in the Roman one, and were just like any other slaves.  No interpetatio graeca for Tevinter.  They had their own gods who seemed nothing like the Elven ones.

 

 Or maybe I'm way off   

[Jandi]

That's so insightful and consistent with the hints in DAI that it's virtually a spoiler for the next game! This must be where they're going.

 

Much of the the world of DA is based, or directly "borrowed", from real world myths. If you just spend time to figure out where to look.