Why is ancestor worship so neglected in fantasy settings?

>those cultures have not had strong traditions of ancestor worship for man centuries if not millennia, due to the rise of Christianity
Halloween is a holiday that was founded on ancestor worship

>Who are the Saints?

>What is filthy Papist heresy?

Dawi are best

Go choke on a bratwurst

Yea, its so tribal.

Paganism is still a sky cult, not an ancestor cult

In most fantasy settings the gods are literal beings with highly visible power, this makes justifying why a culture wouldn't worship them a bit tricky. Of course, you could just explain how & why the ancestor spirits are able to function as well as the gods can, but it's not the norm.

> this makes justifying why a culture wouldn't worship them a bit tricky
Morrowind way: sacred necromancy

Because D&D doesn't have ancestor worship and the whole genre just apes D&D.

The dude in the middle looks like grade A character design

Houses of the Blooded includes ancestor worship as the default religion. The Ven being so inhuman that they cocoon themselves and dream instead of dying of old age makes it a little different from actual elements of reincarnation or afterlife found in actual worship. The fact that their voices can only be heard by descendants/devotees while their shrines are intact means that even in death there is the ruthless politics the setting is based around.

t. burger

Why is monotheism so neglected in fantasy settings? Of all the things fantasy writers have rip-off from Tolkien, this one is strangely absent in most of them.

Yeah but nobody aside from neopagans and history nerds know that, so it hardly counts.

You play the wrong games. Glorantha is all about Spirit worshiping, and ancestors are a big part.
I have a genologic line with my ancestors until a thousands years ago or something like that, from the nobles houses they funded (even when my family is mainly blue collars in USA parlance) to the last ones to die, in the family mausoleum. We aren't obsesed but our ancestors are revered at least one day at the year (the Night of Halloween? It's called the night of all the Saints) lots of little martyrs, saints etc are celebrated and each having a day, and they are mostly cultural or localized (Italians don't revere the same saints as Iberians, tough some overlaped Christian wide like Saint George), do you know Saint Fermin? Saint Tiago? The Virgen of Guadalupe?. All of those are cultural ancestors with another name, basically.

Most fantasy settings are inspired by what modern people assume paganism was.

They overemphasize the big gods which everyone knows instead of including lots of small gods and local spirits.

Because in most settings the gods have obvious power, so denying the existence of other deities doesn't make much sense. You could have only one deity in the setting, but that doesn't leave as much room for religious conflict and forces anyone who wants to play a cleric or similar to abide by one moral code instead of being able to choose.

I see you have studied the romans at least. People really don't get how superstitious ye olde folk was.
The Romans had little gods for everything, "Christian" europe too, what we could call fey.

But you still can. Just look at Tolkien's work. There's one god, but most of the conflict comes from its rebellious underlings while god himself is quite absent except in the shape of fate.

Because RPGs are unabashedly a creation of the modern world. If you're a westerner, featuring heavy ancestor worship creates troubling implications like appearing to endorse tribalistic mentalities or coming off as shallow cultural appropriation. For better or worse, the underpinnings of ancestor worship are no longer present in most western societies even on a conceptual level.

On the other hand, nature worship can be naturally shoehorned into a lot of ways to modern environmentalist movements (look at nature worshippers in any White Wolf game for example). And even outside of that, the existence of lesser spirits and deities that are not strictly human is entertained enough to have traction in the cultures that predominately play these games (something like half of Iceland believes in elves and even in the modern western powers, you find belief in things like ghosts and shadow people is still surprisingly commonplace).

So, if I want to have culture of people who worship their ancestors (for any reason, be it that they were founders of magic or prevailed against some danger) I am culturally appropriating Indians?
Are you really trying to say, that ancestor worship ins't present in RPGs because we could be hurting someone's feelings?
I would say that the reason behind is that the authors write what is known to them, as you have shown with nature/spirits belief systems.

I'm not saying it's cultural appropriation, I'm saying that's what it might be construed as.

And I agree with you - the grammar of ancestor worship is absent from western culture these days and there's no group that sees it as ideal. That was my main point.

>I would say that the reason behind is that the authors write what is known to them
I'd say it doesn't offer much mechanically to RPGs. All stuff offered by ancestor worship is better portrayed through roleplaying.

woahwoahwoah stop there a second, catogorizing fey and their ilk as a type of "god" is really wrong

Everything the other guys have said *plus*
Necromancy, and elves.

Why would necromancy be a problem?
Imagine ancestral worship lasting ten minutes when you could actually *talk* to them. Most people can't stand talking to their parents for twenty minutes, imagine trying to explain to your great-great-great-great grandmother that, yes, we were at war with the kingdom of Grell under the leadership of Dorgal the merciless, but he was murdered by a roving band of adventurers two centuries ago and they now have a very prestigious magic academy, which is why you are not going to, quote "flay every Grellian's skin from their stinking hides and salt the wounds".

On the other side of the coin, Elves. Those knife eared assholes.
"Is that a shrine to Ethlar the Blue? Heh. She and I used to go whoring together. One night I had gotten particularly snoggened and walked in on her - (graphic depiction of your 400-year deceased ancestor engaged in extramarital relations with a carrior crawler)".

Harder to worship people when you can learn about them firsthand.

It's not an unfair categorization. In other parts of the world, the fey would be absolutely recognized as gods (not trying to weeb out, but compare them with the kami of Japanese religion). Christians have taboos about the word 'god' itself and thus avoid categorizing things that would be considered to be minor gods as gods. Nymphs and the like were absolutely considered gods in the classical world and yet they're very rarely considered as such in the popular imagination.

weren't they divided by wealth?

Wut. The best fantasy setting of all time has plenty of ancestor worship with actual rules to both play the ancestor being worshipped and the worshipping. What are you babbling around, are you playing a suboptimal fantasy setting?

Romans divided people using a variety of categorizations simultaneously. You would often be distinguished by your social class (plebeian vs patrician), your family or clan, and your profession. Roman naming conventions reinforced this - your full name would give away your class, your family, your profession, and possibly even more.

>troubling implications like appearing to endorse tribalistic mentalities or coming off as shallow cultural appropriation
Literally only retards believe this.

>only retards believe this
user, have you seen most PnP players?

>Ancestor worship isn't what you think it is. It mostly revolves around worshipping some distant person like, say, the founder of the clan or tribe.

In my traditional culture you literally take on the name of a recently deceased relative and their soul becomes part of your soul until adulthood as a watchful guardian

Didn't Forgotten Realms have an "overgod" at some point, I think that counts as a monotheistic setting.

No I have not seen most PnP players. I have seen some PnP players and none of them would ever say anything as brainmeltingly stupid as what you just did.

It's more monistic than anything. In most D&D settings, there's a single unifying principle that organizes the world (that may or may not be intelligent) coupled with a single substance that comprises the world (the various planes are just different flavors of this single substance).

In one of the three voting councils you voted by tribe.
youtube.com/watch?v=trrqslUpfdw

Rome is calling bullshit right here bruh.

also saints etc. etc.

Goddamn, you really swallowed all that /pol/bait.

>can't masturbate until 20
>gramps might be watching
Shieeeeeeeet

>Paganism is a sky cult

What are you smoking?

I think he means it in the sense that the chief deities of Indo-European pantheons tend to be in one way or another be associated with the sky (Tengri the sky god, Zeus the lightning god, it gets a bit more vague with Odin).

The same reason you don't see it as much today.

>it gets a bit more vague with Odin
Primarily because Odin is a weird trickster deity who rised through the ranks somehow. Presumably the original chief deity was either Thor ot Tyr

I wasn't aware East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America stopped existing. Is it because I didn't watch the morning news today?

Man, fuck all the earth & culture deities huh?

Odin was likely a deified chief

Shit, many of the European saints were identified with esteemed ancestors or people of renown

>Is it because I didn't watch the morning news today?
It's because they don't create fantasy settings

>East Asia doesn’t make fantasy settings
>Africa doesn’t make fantasy settings
>Latin America doesn’t make fantasy settings

Pleb tier knowledge of world literature

Those are empty words unless you can prove otherwise and show anything worth time spent on it

Thor seems to have been the most popular god at the time that Christianity was introduced to the Norse world, but he was likely never the chief deity. Tyr probably was in ancient times, but his role had most likely been greatly diminished by the time that the Eddas were written (they barely feature him at all). Odin, on the other hand, was clearly a very important deity in the mythology but does not seem to have been very popular as far as worship goes. It's possible that he was a god for chieftains and kings more than the common men. Indeed, many of the stories that have been preserved seem to indicate that common men didn't like Odin at all and were worried about his role in the universe as the one who brings war and judges battles unfairly so that he can get better warriors to Valhalla.

We have no indication of this whatsoever. He could be, certainly, but it's just as likely that he's an old PIE deity, or a pre-PIE diety, or a combination of two or three of those.

It’s called Google

>ctrl+f animism
>0 matches
There is your answer, OP.

People around mongolia and eastern siberia still believe in shamanism on par with buddhism.

Halloween is the day you dress spooky and carve a pumpkin, few ever go and inquire farther than that

>cultural appropriation
what the fuck is this even
"Yo I like that thing of yours" - "REEEEEEE"

Just SJW insanity as usual

What is the Sigmarite cult?

Unlike some things that are missing from the traditional fantasy canon of tropes I feel it could be done pretty well.

I think the major concern would be that ancestor worship kind of leads to some implications about the afterlife that aren't traditional in fantasy cosmology. Normally it's pretty closed off from the material world outside of magic and divine beings (like angels). Ancestor worship would imply human spirits interact with the prime material all the time, and the gods in their various domains are okay with this. Possibly beholden to the phenomenon.

>I only like things from my culture
>NATIONALIST! NAZI! PATRIARCHAL PIG!

>I like [thing] from other culture
>OMG THEY HAVE A RICH AND DEEP CULTURE THAT'S MORE THAN JUST A COSTUME AND A CUISINE YOU RACIST PIG

>I like [thing] from [culture] so much I'll spend years studying it
>CULTURAL APPROPRIATION!

>The Japanese are wearing American jeans and drive German cars to Italian café's to eat French macarons
>Some of them with hair that's been dyed blonde and skin that has been baked brown
>[silence]

Irl, even Abrahamic religion in its earliest form didn't deny the existence of other gods, it just forbade their worship. Go back far enough and squint, and you can even read the Commandment "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" as meaning that though you can worship other deities, YHVH comes first. Which makes sense, since he started out as one of a pantheon of Semitic deities and gradually rose to prominence as their head deity before his worship took on monotheistic characteristics.

And even within a singular monotheistic religion, there's plenty of room for conflict, as history has amply demonstrated irl.

You're strawmanning, though yeah, there are people who don't know what the fuck they're talking about and go off at the slightest hint that a thing might superficially look like appropriation.
But the truth is, that third instance is exactly what appropriation isn't.
Hell, even the second thing isn't necessarily appropriation, depending on how you approach it.

Cultural appropriation is when you rip off the shallow trappings of a culture while paying no mind to the actual meaning or history behind those trappings, or when you take credit for something another group of people did. It's also not appropriation if people from that culture invite you to take part in it.

Like, the reason white people wearing Native American war bonnets as a costume is a form of appropriation is that each feather represents one of the wearer's accomplishments in battle. It's like the equivalent of a general with a chest covered in medals. Basically, they're taking credit for battlefield accomplishments that they never actually made. But they don't know that, because they don't care to look into it in the first place. But if a white person had actually fought by the side of one of those tribes, gained their trust, risen to a position of prominence among their ranks, and achieved things for their side in battle, and been awarded those feathers by the tribe, it historically wouldn't have been appropriation.

This analysis can be applied elsewhere. For example, yoga classes in the West are often cited as a form of cultural appropriation, and I guess in some contexts they can be, but the Indian government actually makes a deliberate point of promoting it worldwide. So yoga's a bit of an ambiguous case, which becomes considerably less ambiguous when you learn it as an authentic spiritual practice rooted in Hinduism.
Likewise, when it comes to anime, weeaboos are culturally appropriative, but someone who just likes anime isn't, especially if they take an interest in its history.

Put simply:
Cultural appropriation is the difference between a weeb and an otaku.

Because your ancestors were cunts.

they are both shameful

And yet one is far more annoying than the other.

Rude

I always liked the logic in african mythology for ancestor worship

>the Gods are not human, they cannot comprehend us anymore than we can comprehend them
>their concerns lie with the well being of nature at large and even cosmic happenings, humans are just part of a grand picture
>naturally your ancestors would be more concerned with the wellbeing of their descendants rather than an inhuman spirit

Take for instance Chiwara the Antelope spirit from Mandingo mythology. He taught humans how to farm and to this day they still praise him for it each year despite being muslims. And what he did was basically just a whim for the mortals.

His mother Musso-Koroni was an evil spirit who brought misery and disease into the world after defying the other Gods.

Get the fuck out.

Nobody on earth takes things from other cultures with a “full understanding” of the cultural context. People take what they like. Drop what they don’t. And keep a localized version for themselves.

Odin is not Wodan is not Wotanaz. Primitive Christians ended up divorced from Jewish custom. Trousers are not worn to prevent chafing on a horse. And the word for “Mermaid” in most Romance languages is derived from a Greek word for “Bird Monster with Women’s heads and beautiful voices”.

Not once did I use the words "full understanding." That's something you made up on your own. Quit projecting.

CA actually makes sense.

No, you'll probably not consider it important, and neither are supposed to. But.

Take the indian costumes shitstorm. The problem isn't certainly that people "like them", but I don't think it acutally even is "dumb whiteys just don't care" (tough, shit, at least with the squaw/glorified war slave idea they could. But I digress.)

The problem is that from their POV it means basically that (one of) their most sacred things is just a matter of laughs, for the world. That their culture might just leave a sign as a laughingstock.

There is no real "western" equivalent: people will make fun of the catholic church to hell and back, even hate it, but they will take it seriously and all in all will consider it generally something very serious and very, very rarely not one of the greatest cultural addition to mankind.

Cultural appropriation is not when your holy men are jokes and bad costumes, but when they're only that.

The issue with the injun costumes is that Hollywood has completely erased all of the dozens of unique and varied Native cultures and utterly replaced them with a single, fictitious monoculture.
The costume serves not to mock the culture, but to overwrite it.

There are grown adults today who just sort of assume all the injuns are long dead, and that "How. Smokum peace pipe." is the sum totality of what used to be millions of people.

Yeah. That's what cultural appropriation is. That's why people have a problem with it.

>using millennium in a plural

Exactly what year do you think Europe was fully Christianized?

In other words, you're too goddamn lazy to support your claims.

Disregarded.

Please, never speak ever again. Cultural appropriation is a way broader and more complex than your stupid brain clearly is able to handle. I'm assuming the reason you made up your own definition for the term was to give yourself a convenient explanation for why it's usually used in a negative context without having to think too hard about it. Cause, thinking is hard, right? I assume that so is reading? And googling a topic before opening your mouth about it?

Pit simply, cultural appropriation is simply when elements of one culture (often a marginalized one) are used by people from another (often not marginalized) culture regardless of context. A movie made by white people about native Americans that features their customs, history and culture in a nuanced and appropriate way is still a form of appropriation.

cultural appropriation in the 1800's:
stealing your national treasures by force and melting the down for scrap
Today:
liking anime

Tribalism is bad in societies of our scale, but ancestor worship has nothing to do with tribalism.
There's also no such thing as cultural appropriate. You're growing or you're shrinking, and culture wins when it spreads.

A common hypothesis is that the Aesir as a group are associated with the sky while the Vanir are more associated with earthly matters such as harvest and fertility (though note that it's not based on much anything that has actually been preserved in the mythology). Either way, Norse gods are not easily definable as gods of particular functions. It seems almost as if the Norse believed that all the gods were capable of doing all the things that all the other gods were capable of doing, only that some were slightly better at certain things.

To put it in simpler terms, hopefully; imagine that you know a guy with a PhD in Norse studies that you call "the man of the Norse." Now imagine that you meet someone who also has a friend that has a PhD in Norse studies and now you get into a fight with each other over which of them is the real "man of the Norse." And then a third person comes in and says that you're both stupid because there's no "man of the Norse" at all but rather their friend is "the woman of the Norse," and so on. It's ridicilous, of course. The truth of the matter is that they're all experts in the subject and while one of them may be more generally knowledgable than the others it doesn't mean that the other two lose their PhD's or that they don't have a much deeper understanding than him in specific areas. The Norse pantheon seems to have functioned in much the same way, where several gods can be associated with the same thing at the same time and where they aren't defined solely by what they are associated with.

What if, hypothetically, the movie was made by a more powerful but non-white people, and heavily featured the Native American customs, history, and culture in a nuanced and appropriate way?

Jews, just as an example.

>Jews
>Non-white
And that's still appropiation.

>Jews
>White
Carry on, then.

>Fuck, calling myself "Euro-descendant"
>physically hurts my American self
Eh, call yourself "Saxtino" or "Frankspanic" or something.

Well not quite - a lot of ancestor worship involves asking for dead immediate ancestors to intervene as intermediaries between bad spirits, as well as asking for tribal or culture heros to do the same.

What interesting is that in chinese folk practices, you basically have ancestors functioning as central european "house kobolds" or fairies were supposed to - basically bad luck, suddenly accidents or problems in a house or with nearby buildings were assumed to be the fault of angry house spirits, often thought to exist as little gnome fuckers, and you could get them on your good side, essentially helping to keep houses clean, free from vermin, rot etc... by leaving food for them in much the same way japanese or chinese folk practices do at shrines to dead family members.

Of course, like with dialects in europe, the precise lore and rules of these spirits would differ - in the tale of the little white feather, the "kobold" who is the main antagonist is invisible to people, but can move other objects, not least of which is the titular "white feather" in his cap that is the only thing the protagonist can see, so throughout the story the home owner gets more and more annoyed by the accidents and problems the kobold does to him as punishment for violating any number of minor taboos (depending on regions and variation of the story).
So the protagonist burns the house down and moves.
Only to see the white feather come flying out of the burning house, unscathed, run up to the cart the man is riding away from the house on with all his goods, and come to rest beside him.

Whereupon he hears the kobold speak to him the first time with a simple question:
"Where are we moving to?"

Thus in medieval europe all the structure, ritual actions exist for ancestor worship, but do so minus the ancestor worship.

What are saints, user?

jolly fat men in red and white clothing who hand out presents

>Western sensibilities
>Still regarded through the lens of Catholic sensibilities

I don't know how to tell you this, bro, but outside of St. Cuthbert, DnD style settings don't really bother with putting faux Catholicism window dressing in their settings very much any more.

I mean, unless you're talking about the Silver Flame in Eberron or the we-wish-we-were-real-Paladins order in the Dragonlance novels, but those are both fucking trainwrecks that no one really plays anymore.

>I mean, unless you're talking about the Silver Flame in Eberron or the we-wish-we-were-real-Paladins order in the Dragonlance novels, but those are both fucking trainwrecks that no one really plays anymore.

Ebberon is still pretty popular. It's big issue is that it doesn't really work with 5e too well (Since 5e is all about 'You don't need magic items/they are a bitch and a half to make' and Ebberon loved it some magic items for basically everything)

Right. Like I said, fucking trainwrecks and awful extensions of all the problems inherent in 3.x.

Landfills that took advantage of all the worst aspects of previous editions.

Steaming piles of garbage that were largely unnecessary and mostly the results of homebrew that gained too much momentum, endorsed by Wizards because of a simple contest for attention that were populated by if you dare believe it even worse ideas.

Greyhawk was a better setting, and it was more flavorless than water.

You know than more than half the West is Catholic right? Heret- I mean, Prostestants aren't older than the 16th century.
Also who's talking about DnD, that's an awful game only played be those than don't know better or they party doesn't want to learn anoteher system. Glorantha had ancestor/saint worshiping as a very early example.