Bestiary

For all his ferocity, Wolf’s also a noble teacher and protective guardian. Like his little cousin Dog, Wolf (known too as Fenris, Brother Wolf, Mama Wolf, and the Big Bad Wolf, among other names) shares close ties to humanity even in his most primal state. Few archetypes, in human symbolism, hold as ambiguous and ambiv­ alent an identity as Wolf. Loyal yet predatory, bestial but majestic, he’s among the most powerful totem spirits known to man.

“It does me no injury,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Mages tend to keep a similar view of things. Even if they worship a particular god to the exclusion of all others (perhaps while believing other gods to be, in fact, demons), Awakened folks who deal in such matters recognize that many god-forms exist even if they don’t accept such “gods” as the one true divinity. Atheistic mages generally accept the

existence of such beings, too, if only because those god-forms tend to show up with annoying regularity. (Are they aliens? I guess they’re aliens…)

Because human beings stick labels all over everything, philosophical belief in gods tends to break down into five general categories:

• Atheism: There are no such thing as gods.

• Polytheism: Many gods exist, with distinct identities and divine provinces.

• Monotheism: There’s only one God; other “gods” are lesser beings… and probably evil, too.

• Pantheism: All things are God, all gods are aspects of a singular Divine Force, or both.

• Agnosticism: Hell if I know!

And because human belief is seriously bizarre, these cat­ egories are not always mutually exclusive. A Buddhist atheist might revere the gods as abstract symbols standing in for a greater sublime Reality in which there are no “gods” per se; his monotheistic Christian friend asserts a single God while acknowledging other godlike entities like Mary, Satan, and the saints. Their animist buddy knows that everything has a living spiritual essence, yet feels like calling those entities “gods” would be insulting to the spirits. The cabal’s resident

materialist thinks the other folks are full of shit… but she’s seen enough weird stuff to admit that something exists out there, and it’s not human, exactly… but she won’t refer to such things as “gods” because that’s, you know, silly. All of them concede there’s more to Creation than meets the eye but disagree about specifics regarding what it is and what that means to them.

Depending on which way you tilt the World of Darkness, its cosmology could be considered polytheist, monotheist, pantheist, or maltheist (divinity exists, and it hates your guts). Tons of godlike entities exist, but are they “real” gods or just really potent alien-spirit-beings operating in a cosmos ruled by some far greater Divine Principle? Mage does not presume to answer that question one way or the other. Ultimately, the nature of divinity within your chronicle is whatever you want it to be.

A small handful of Mage-centric god-forms includes: