Fr. Peter Heers and the Satanic Panic

A reader of my blog recently reached out to me. He shared a video of Fr. Peter Heers, an influential Orthodox Christian YouTuber, answering the question as to whether or not the Satanic Panic was actually correct. He ended up warning people: do not play Dungeons & Dragons.

This may come as a bit of a surprise, but I find myself agreeing with his basic premise. If I were to answer the same question I would have to point out that given the current state of the game, its ownership, the way that people are being taught how to play, and the space it occupies in popular culture, I must agree with Fr. Peter. Do not casually play D&D.

Those of you that have been reading my blog, however, will know that I have a very different opinion of the Satanic Panic. Not only did it damage the hobby and the game, is was and is utterly ignorant of how it drove the hobby and the game away from Christianity into the very state that Fr. Peter is so uncomfortable with.

Christianity is implied in 0e, Holmes, B/X, and 1e. The rules lend themselves beautifully to building out fantasy worlds where Christianity plays a major role. Pagan gods have stat blocks, with hit points. That means they are monsters that can be killed. Psalm 82 provides the framework from which to build out an entire D&D campaign based on the idea of hunting down fallen angels (pagan gods) and their progeny. An enthroned, pre-incarnate Christ declares:

You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.

In 0e and Holmes, there are no “Holy Symbols” in the equipment lists, only Wodden and Silver Crosses. Couple this with the description of the Vampire from the Holmes edition of Basic D&D and I have all I need to prove the early D&D was implicitely Christian:

All vampires, regardless of religious background, are affected by the cross which is sovereign against them. They will not flee these symbols, but it can keep them from their intended victim if interposed between the vampire and its prey.

The Satanic Panic pushed the game toward the demonic, not away from it. Starting with 2e, paganism is hard-wired into the game. It now requires a DM to do the hard work of converting all the various domains and the mechanics that surround them into a Christian context. This work was not necessary prior to the Panic. Today, you can play Warlocks who make pacts with devils, play bards who use their magic to be promiscuous with all kinds of creatures, and even play half devil tieflings (a status that would have God commanding your utter destruction by either flood or the sword of the Isrealite with no mercy). None of these were availlable in the early rules.

Do I think it is possible to bring Christ to the gaming table? This blog demonstrates that the answer is yes.

Do I think that the Satanic Panic has actually brought more people to atheism and worse than early D&D ever did? Absolutely.

Do I think that we can casually play any form of D&D without the hard work it takes to bring Christ to the table? No.

It is becoming increasingly clear that our culture has blinded itself to spiritual world and the daily battles that it brings. Properly done, D&D can allow us to enjoy each other’s company and this hobby while introducing us to that sturggle. Improperly done, we invite the demonic.

When God says to Cain, “sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, and you must rule over it” He is refering to a demon waiting to be let in. Don’t let them in.

Scripture & the Megadungeon Part 6: Becoming Immortal

As I have perused the OSR corner of the internet over the years, there seems to have been a significant number of folks who owned some version of BECMI back in the day. I was not one of them. I did buy a .pdf of the Rules Compendium for $4 before WotC panicked and pulled all their .pdfs offline during the internecine edition wars when 4th edition was first released. I bought it out of curiosity and have subsequently never used it. Although it does expand upon B/X (my favorite BTB edition of D&D), I find the three column layout to be an eyesore and I have never really been interested in playing much beyond 9th level anyway. So, I never saw the need. Until now.

As I have been delving into how Scripture would inform D&D, especially in the form of a megadungeon, I have been confronted with the distinct possibility of having immortality as an end goal. In St. John’s Apocalypse, the Evangelist describes a vision of the Heavenly Temple and the throne of God:

He who sat [on the throne] was like jasper and a sardis stone in appearance; and there was a rainbow around the throne, in appearance like an emerald. Around the throne were twenty-four thrones and on the thrones I saw twenty-four elders sitting, clothed in white robes; and they had crowns of gold on their heads.

The significance of the number twenty-four can be found in the tenth chapter of Genesis, Deuteronomy 32:8 and the account of the war in heaven from the twelfth chapter of Revelation. I won’t bore you with a quote from Genesis, since it is the genealogy of Noah and consists of a bunch of names — seventy-two of them. Each of these names correspond to one of the nations mentioned in Deuteronomy:

When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.

The term sons of God refers to the angelic and divine beings that sit on God’s council. Therefore, God’s council has 72 seats. In describing the two sides in the war in heaven, St. John notes that one third of this divine council fell with the devil;

…behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth.

Note that one third of seventy-two is twenty-four. These twenty-four elders are twelve patriarchs from the OT and the twelve apostles from the NT.

Given that numbers in Scripture are often more symbolic than concrete, that seven is an ideal number, and that larger numbers like seventy-two can be understood to mean simply a lot, the image here portrayed by St. John is that of Christ replacing the fallen angels on His divine council with saints from both the OT and NT eras.

In other words, Mentzer’s project to allow PCs to reach for immortality has its place in the game, at least from a Scriptural point of view. Unfortunately, the path that Mentzer lays out is extremely difficult at best. There are three Prerequisites: 1) Select a Sphere of Power that the PC wishes to serve 2) Find an Immortal sponsor and 3) Reach 30th level.

It is this last prerequisite that has always put a damper on things. I have never seen any PC is any campaign I have ever played reach higher than 9th level. To echo James over at Grognardia in a recent post about how 1e Dieties and Demigods handles the same idea: why bother?

Interestingly, DDG is much less dogmatic about the level necessary to reach immortality:

the character in question must have advanced to an experience level that is significantly above and beyond the average level of adventure-type characters in the general campaign. (This includes all such non-player types as military leaders, royal magic-users, etc.) For example, if the average level of characters in a campaign, both player and non-player, is around 5th level, then a candidate for ascension should be something like 9th or 10th level.

Given that monster stats of “adventurer-type humans” in B/X range from only 1 to 3 HD, this significantly lowers the XP threshold for PCs to aspire to the status of an immortal. It also makes sense narratively, given that 5th level M-Us get access to 3rd level spells and 6th level clerics get access to 3rd and 4th level spells. The introduction of spells like Dispel Magic, Fire Ball, Fly, Water Breathing, Cure Disease, Neutralize Poison, and Remove Curse have a significant effect on a campaign world. 

The other two prerequisites from Mentzer offer no real obstacle from a Scriptural POV. There is only One Power — God. In the Orthodox Church, nations, families, and individuals all have Patron Saints. Thus, every PC would practically start the game already having fulfilled two of the three prerequisites. This, then, only leaves us with how a PC attains what Mentzer calls immortality and what the Church calls sainthood. 

Fortunately, the history of the Church gives a very simple answer: the vast majority of canonized saints have all experienced death. Indeed, the category of saint that has more exemplars than any other is that of the martyr.

Saint Sebastian

Thus, the immortality that Scripture offers to the PC in a setting where much of action takes place inside a megadungeon is not the same immortality that Mentzer or the DDG talk about. Rather than trying to climb the heights of the heavens by sheer will (how else can I describe a campaign that lasts long enough for a PC to get to 30th level?), the player is given a viable option when faced with the possibility of death. Normally, (at least in an Old-School campaign where character deaths are a more common occurrence) a player who has played a PC to 5th level or higher has learned caution and to have a healthy instinct for self-preservation. While admirable in context, the end result is that the game disincentivizes heroic deaths — especially if spells like Reincarnate and Raise Dead are either unavailable or difficult to come by. While one of the most iconic scenes in fantasy is Gandalf telling the Fellowship, “Fly you fools!” and letting go, such acts of self-sacrifice are few and far between in FRPGs, at least in my decades of experience.

If, however, there was a mechanism by which a player might be rewarded by having their PC become a local saint in the campaign world, the choice to die gloriously in order for others to escape or live is something players might actually do. In long-term play, such choices would allow players to start building chapels to their fallen comrades, discover new spells associated with these new saints, celebrate feast days and thus have a character death have as much effect on a campaign world as PCs getting to 9th level and carving out a kingdom of their own.

The important factor here is player choice. One of the benefits of sandbox campaigns with tent-pole megadungeons is the fact that there is not only an abundance of player choice, but plenty of opportunities to encounter creatures well beyond the capability of PCs to defeat. Along with treasure (spent) being the primary means of gaining XP, a glorious death resulting in sainthood gives players another option about how their PC affects the campaign world.

Scripture and Deities & Demigods

For many years now, I have pointed out that D&D's explicit rendering of the various gods of pagan pantheons into creatures and monsters by giving them hit points and other stats in Supplement IV: Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes as well as the various editions of Deities and Demigods mirrors the Christian world-view. Up to this point, however, I have largely used inferences and implications based on the pre-suppositions of Orthodox Christianity. Recently, I have been reading The Religion of the Apostles: Orthodox Christianity in the First Century by Fr. Stephen De Young, a book I highly recommend to anyone, especially non-Orthodox and non-Christian. 

I can now express my opinion of Supplement IV: Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes and Deities and Demigods with Scripture.

Before we get to quoting the Good Book, however, we need to take a look at the opening lines of what is known as The Baal Cycle — an Ugaritic cycle of stories about the Canaanite god Baʿal that is approximately contemporaneous to events of the Old Testament:

Now Mighty Baal, son of Dagon, desired the kingship of the Gods. He contended with Prince Yam-Nahar, the Son of El. But Kindly El, Father Shunem, decided the case in favour of His son; He gave the kingship to Prince Yam. He gave the power to Judge Nahar.

Note that there are three characters here: Baal, who wants to be king over the gods, El (the Father), who has the power to grant this kingship, and his son Prince Yam-Nahar who is made king by El. 

Note also the meaning of the three names: 

• El is a generic term for god in the Semitic languages, including Hebrew. The root of Elohim is El- and the various angelic names, such as Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, etc., all end in -el because they are named after an attribute of god — Michael means "Who is like unto God," for example. 
• Yam-Nahar means "Judge of the River" and is an 'ilhm, or son of El or simply "god." It is the root of the second part of the name Elohim pluralized. In other words, the name Elohim can be translated as "God-gods" — one of the ways God has revealed Himself as a Trinity. 
• Baal means "lord" and is a title and honorific of local pagan gods, especially the fertility god Hadad. 

This all parallels with Deuteronomy:

When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. — 32:8

In other words, El — the Most High God — divided humanity into nations and set up 'ilhm to watch over each nation. These sons of God, however, rebelled and took upon themselves the worship due only to the Most High God:

God stood in the assembly of gods; He judges in the midst of gods saying, "How long will you judge unjustly, and favor the persons of sinners?" — Psalm 82 (81 LXX)

The one who is given kingship and who judges is El's Son:

The court was in session, and the books were opened...and behold, One like the Son of Man was coming with the clouds of heaven, until He came to the Ancient of Days and approached Him. Then dominion, honor, and the kingdom were given to Him — Daniel 7:10, 13-14.

The title Son of Man is the one Christ most often uses to refer to Himself. Thus, Scripture acknowledges the existence of these pagan gods who are part of a divine council overseen by Christ in a position granted by the Father. These pagan gods, however, are mere creatures who rebelled against God the Father and turned their back on their original mission of watching over the nations. 

Now we come to the crux of this whole argument. Psalm 82(81) declares to these gods their fate:

I say, "You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, you shall die like men, and fall like any prince."

There you have it. The pagan gods are not only creatures, but doomed to die like any man. Thus, in terms of D&D, they have hit points and stats like any other monster. To put it another way, PCs are free to try to be the instruments of Christ's judgement and kill the gods.

Orcs and the One and the Many

Over on BX Blackrazor, JB is meditating on the D&D trope of killing gods. In the comments, I pointed out that the game has been giving gods Hit Points since 1976 and the publication of Supplement IV: Gods, Demi-Gods, and Heroes. I also tried to explain why I (as a Christian) don’t really have a problem with giving gods Hit Points. 

This struck off a conversation that I think deserves its own post, because I make some hefty claims that need their own space to be meditated on and discussed. The most important (and probably controversial) claim is that reality as we experience cannot be fully explained by anything other than the Christianity of the Early Church (by which I roughly mean the first millennia or so). At the core of my argument is a problem that has confounded philosophers since the ancients first tried to understand reality. It is called the Problem of the One and Many. To illustrate this, I present to you this illustration of an orc:

But, Padre, you say, that is not an orc, it’s an owlbear! To which I respond: how do you know?

This may seem an idle question, because it should be obvious that the above illustration is, in fact, an owlbear and not an orc. Even so, in order for us to be able to make that distinction two things need to be very real: owlbears and orcs.

As we all know, however, owlbears and orcs are not real — outside of our imagination. Yet, there exists something that allows us to not only imagine these non-existent creatures but to recognize something we have never before encountered as one of these imaginary creatures. To say that “something” is “the brain,” or “chemicals,” or “an electrical current in our nervous system” side-steps the real issue:

You have very likely never seen the above illustration. I know, because I am the one who drew it and this is the first time I have ever shared it. This new empirical experience that you have just had of seeing this illustration for the first time has triggered an interaction with an interpretive framework that not only allows you to understand that you are looking at an owlbear, but also allows everybody else to see an owlbear despite being potentially thousands of miles apart and growing up in completely different circumstances in terms of language, culture, and beliefs. If we didn’t have this nigh-universal interpretive framework, this brand new experience of seeing my illustration could not result in you seeing an owlbear. It would just be light.

And finally, we come to the crux of the problem:

This illustration is unique. It is its own particular illustration by yours truly. At the same time, it is also an owlbear — it shares the nature of owlbear-ness that all owlbears do. In other words, it is one and it is many. Ancient philosophers wrestled to explain how it is that everything is both one and many at the same time. We must wrestle with it because it is part of reality. I am Fr. Dave and I am a human being. Without the one and the many we would not be able to function in the world. We would have no idea how to interpret the data coming in through our senses.

Materialism does not do an adequate job of explaining the reality of the one and the many, because it cannot merely come down to physical, material things. Owlbears aren’t material, physical things, after all. Yet they are real.

In contrast, it logically follows that a God that is both one and three, who created humanity according to His image and likeness, and, as Paul says in Romans 1:20, reveals his eternal power and divine nature in the things that have been made, would create a world where everything would demonstrate both His oneness and his multiplicity.

In other words, our modern, secular, materialist explanation of the world as we know it, really doesn’t explain the world as we know it; however, ancient Christianity does.

St. Justin the Philosopher and Deities & Demi-Gods

It has been quite some time since I’ve regularly blogged about the saints and RPGs. Today is the Feast of St. Justin the Philosopher and he let me know that I should get back into the habit, at least once in awhile.

As his moniker suggests, St. Justin was a philosopher, but he was unsatisfied with all of the various attempts by secular thinkers to explain life, the universe and everything. He kept trying this and that until he encountered an old man that told him he would find Truth in the Gospel. In Christianity, St. Justin found the philosophy he had always longed for.

He opened a school in Rome, wrote two Apologetic Letters to the Roman Emperor defending Christianity among other works and was eventually martyred with several of his students in A.D. 165.

Before I get into the meat of this post, I do want to share a hymn sung on this feast that names St. Justin’s fellow martyrs:

Godly Justin great before the Lord, Peon the brave athlete, Valerion, and Chariton the wise, Charito, Evelpistus, and Hierax great of fame now have dyed in their very blood a bright and divine robe for the Sov'reign Lord of all; and being clad therewith, they all stand together rejoicing with the Angels’ hosts in the Heavens at the throne of Christ, the mighty King of all.

My RPG mind reads this and envisions a verse from a bard’s tale about a mighty group of adventurers to inspire and embolden a group of mud-drenched soldiers or to entertain a tavern full of people drinking mead. And talk about some great names! Peon the Athlete, Valerian the Wise, Hierax the Great. Surely these inspire at least an NPC or two.

Back in 2010, I wrote a post on Deities & Demi-Gods, which irked some folks because I took the position that it is good and right that the various pantheons of pagans gods and goddesses should have stats like monsters. I even have a Saintly Saturday post on St. Justin re-iterating that POV using St. Justin’s own words.

Well, here I am again drawn in by the words I find in the hymns of the Orthodox Church which support the view that pagan gods are really just demons dressed up as deities in order to pull the wool over humanity’s collective eyes:

When the chill of ignorance held sway over all creation because of the wanton spite of the foe, and the hoards of demons were adored and served as gods, then with willing and eager heart, O glorious Martyrs, you made chill deception cease through the most fervent heat of your burning zeal and divine faith, when you poured your blood out in longing for Him that poured out His Blood upon the Cross.

Again, in my RPG mind this screams dark fantasy where city states ruled by demons and their cultists dominate the world and the PC heroes must grind away in hopes of bringing some dim light of hope to a world of shadows . . . I sense another bout of Gamer ADD coming on.

Saintly Saturday: St. Justin the Philosopher

Today is the feast day of a saint with whom I feel a very deep connection, because we both came to faith in Christ from a similar place. St. Justin the Philosopher and Martyr was born in Palestine to Greek parents. He travelled the world learning the great philosophies of his age, seeking the philosophy of philosophies. After witnessing the martyrdom of some Christians, he was moved to find out about what would fill someone with so much faith, strength and resolve.

When he encountered the teaching of the Church, he found what he was looking for. He donned (or continued to don) the philosopher’s robe and became a teacher of what he understood to be the philosophy of philosophies. He would go on to write several very important works, the most famous of which are his First and Second Apologies as well as the Dialogue with Trypho. All three were written in the middle of the second century A.D. and are therefore witnesses to how the ancient Church interpreted Scripture and what the liturgy of the ancient Church looked like.

Ironically, his martyrdom came at the hands of two philosophers. He had a professional rivalry with Crescens the Cynic, who the martyr predicted would use Christianity as an excuse to have the saint killed. When this prediction came to fruition, St. Justin was turned over to the forces of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 161-180) — a Stoic philosopher who argued that the ideal society should be lead by philosopher kings such as himself.

St. Justin was martyred in Rome.

One of the arguments that St. Justin makes in his First Apology is relevant to a way of marrying the Christian world view with the Sword & Sorcery pulp roots of D&D:

For the truth shall be spoken; since of old these evil demons, effecting apparitions of themselves, both defiled women and corrupted boys, and showed such fearful sights to men, that those who did not use their reason in judging of the actions that were done, were struck with terror; and being carried away by fear, and not knowing that these were demons, they called them gods, and gave to each the name which each of the demons chose for himself.

St. Justin is playing with the Greek word δαίμων which, to the pagan mind, means god and to the Christian mind refers to fallen angels, aka demons. St. Justin later demonstrates the irony of seeing it a good thing to be an imitator of a δαίμων:

But far be such a thought concerning the gods from every well-conditioned soul, as to believe that Jupiter himself, the governor and creator of all things, was both a parricide and the son of a parricide, and that being overcome by the love of base and shameful pleasures, he came in to Ganymede and those many women whom he had violated and that his sons did like actions. But, as we said above, wicked demons perpetrated these things.

Thus, all the pagan gods one might find in a typical S&S-inspired D&D campaign are, from the view-point of St. Justin, demons. Ironically, given the history of the game and the Satanist-scare of the eighties, Supplement IV: Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes and Deities and Demigods (especially in its original edition with the Cthuhu Mythos) actually support St. Justin’s view.

Demons and Devils have stats — Hit Dice, Armor Class, etc. This makes them monsters that PCs can hunt down and defeat. Both Supplement IV: Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes and Deities and Demigods give various pantheons of pagan gods stats — Hit Dice, Armor Class, etc. equating them with demons and devils — monsters that PCs can hunt down and destroy.

In terms of arcane vs. divine magic and clerics of various pagan cults, ACKS actually gives a very potent answer. In the ACKS Players Companion, it is possible to trade out Turning for other custom powers. Thus, it is possible to create a plethora of different classes to reflect various pagan cults with their own spell lists. For those who take issue with the idea of these various classes having effective spells, remember that the Egyptian priests from Exodus were able to duplicate some of the miracles performed through Moses. This suggests that while there is some cross-over, there are powers that should belong to Christians (or Pseudo-Christians) alone.

The easiest is the aforementioned Turning. Thus, the original cleric class gets to be what it originally was: Christian or Pseudo-Christian. It also gives homage to Holmes who stated:

All vampires, regardless of religious background, are affected by the cross which is sovereign against them.

The cool part (at least for those of us who play older rulesets) is that since ACKS is based upon B/X, any class created with ACKS Players Companion can be easily ported to any other older ruleset with little to no conversion.

Thus, one can maintain the S&S pulp feel that inspired D&D with all of its mysterious cults, magic and (to pay homage to St. Justin) δαίμων worship, while still leaving room for a Christian (or anyone else who wants to come along) to hunt down and defeat all those demons and devils.

Saintly Saturday: The Saturday before Epiphany

Today is the Saturday before Epiphany, which in Orthodox Christian practice has its own assigned hymns, readings and prayers in anticipation of the celebration of Christ’s baptism. In some ways, Epiphany is actually a bigger feast in Orthodox Christianity than is Christmas (which originated in the West). In the East, the Nativity was commemorated as part of the feast of Epiphany and wasn’t celebrated as a separate feast until the end of the 4th century in most places, and not until the 6th century in others.

The reason for this import can be seen in another term Orthodox Christianity uses for the feast — Theophany. The word epiphany means revelation. The word theophany means a revelation about God. The revelation implied by the term is articulated in the Apolytikia (a type of hymn for a feast):

When You were baptized in the Jordan, O Lord, the worship of the Trinity was made manifest.

The baptism of Christ is the first time in Scripture where God explicitly reveals Himself to be Trinity — the voice of the Father, the Son in the Jordan being baptized and the Holy Spirit descending as a dove.

I am intrigued how these two words might apply to RPGs.

Epiphany, of course, is easier to apply since any kind of revelation is applicable. Revealing the true identity of an NPC nemesis, a continuing backstory of a dungeon or any other mystery of a campaign world would be fitting. For my own purposes and interests, this is particularly useful in designing and running megadungeons. One thing that keeps bringing players back is a continuous trickle of information about the history and use of the dungeon.

Personally, I try to make sure this backstory has multiple levels. I prefer to use three: 1) original builders/occupants, 2) those that either conquered the original occupants or took over after they disappeared, and 3) those that currently occupy the dungeon. I usually seed this information not just throughout the dungeon itself, but throughout the campaign world. Indeed, my player’s recent excursion across dimensions had a major reveal about the megadungeon (of course, it is still to be determined as to whether or not the players put all the pieces together…)

Theophany is a more difficult proposition, but is really the one I am more interested in. Since the advent of Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes in 1978, divine beings have been at the very least peripherally part of the game. The question is how much and in what form? When I first encountered Deities & Demigods, my friends and I merely saw it as an interesting extension of the Monster Manual and set about seeing which entry would be the easiest/most entertaining to take on in combat. Indeed, the first (brief) campaign I ever ran using Deities & Demigods had as its goal a final confrontation with our choice (one of the babylonian/sumerian entries if I remember right).

As offensive or entertaining such an encounter might be, I would argue it would not be a theophany — given the way we used Deities & Demigods it was merely another (albeit really powerful) monster encounter (a use, by the way, that as a Christian I am very comfortable with).

Though I make liberal use of angels and saints in my own games, I am not really sure that I have made use of any kind of theophany — I really haven’t revealed anything about God or God Himself. Of course, I run a campaign with a Christian analog where much of the nature of God is already implied and the players (being at least familiar with Christianity) understand the basic assumptions. If I were ever to run a campaign based on my meditations on prophets as clerics, theophanies might play a larger role in the campaign. It might also be interesting to see how theophanies would play out in a far distant future campaign where Christianity only survives in tiny remnants.

So, I am curious: How often to you use theophanies in your campaigns?

Deities & Demigods: A Christian Perspective

Here is a scenario that seems to happen quite often: James over at Grognardia writes something that makes me reconsider some aspect of our hobby and look at it again from a different perspective. He's done it again with his retrospective on Deities & Demigods. I despise this book, because of the damage it did to the game — the systemization of a pagan world-view, the power creep, the awkward cosmology, the narrowing and solidification of the nine alignment system, etc. However, the one thing that bothered me most when I first picked up the DDG and what apparently still bothers James — the quantification of everything — is the one thing about the DDG that I now truly do appreciate.

Whether intended or not, giving stats to all these pagan gods as if they were monsters expresses a fundamental truth about the pagan world-view. These gods are quantifiable because they are part of creation. Ancient creation stories repeat over and over again how all the various bits and pieces of the world are made from some part of the gods themselves. Creation always happens from some kind of pre-existant matter — everything is quantifiable.

When St. Athanasius the Great expressed Christian dogma in On the Incarnation at the beginning of the fourth century:

(the universe) was not made from pre-existant matter, but out of nothing and out of non-existance absolute and utter God brought it into being through the Word

he expressed an idea utterly alien to his audience — the pagan Greek mind.

Thus, the DDG, in its own way, reinforces this reality. It leaves alone the Judeo-Christian mythos, passively acknowledging that God cannot be quantified, while correctly reducing the pagan gods to a series of entries in what amounts to an elaborate version of the Monster Manual.