Pokémon World Myth Encyclopedia

[Persephone]

Landorus – Unova

Look! Look what the children of men have wrought upon the earth! The scars of sand and blood! Were they to perish for their folly it would be a fitting end. Yet, by my mercy, seeds shall grow in the sandy soil, watered by the blood of kings and heroes. You shall be given a new earth.

May this one be treated with more care.

-The Journey of Ohserase



Overview

Landorus was the primary fertility goddess in Unovan mythology and folklore. She was known as the Driver of Storms, Savior of Unova, Guardian of the Fields, and The Earth Incarnate. For centuries she was the most commonly worshipped goddess in the Unovan pantheon. Even today, long after the pantheon fell out of favor, she still retains a strong base of devoted worshippers.

Kingdom-era Unova was a strange mixture of indigenous peoples, Scandanavian colonists, and, later on, merchants and explorers sent from the Kingdom of Mali. Landorus was shaped from by this blend of different cultures earth god myths into a rather unique figure.

Appearance

Landorus is most often depicted as a humanoid figure with red, orange, or brown skin. A cloud or sandstorm usually obscures the legs. Before the Kingdom, the legs were usually depicted unobscured in art and idols. More often than not the legs ended in cat-like paws instead of proper feet. Sometimes the legs were coated in fur. The goddess usually has white hair. In more recent depictions landorus is almost always depicted with a scythe made of roots slung over the shoulder.

Before 500 A.D. landorus was usually depicted as male with white facial hair. This perception gradually began to shift until, by the time of the kingdom’s founding (1107 A.D.), landorus was almost exclusively known as a goddess. A brief resurgence in male depictions came after Africans arrived in the kingdom (c. 1350 A.D.) but this trend had died out by the seventeenth century.

Theria, The Panther, is usually depicted as a stout quadruped with reddish skin, a root-like tail, and a mane of white hair

In Unovan Mythology

Landorus was the eldest of the three storm gods. Her brothers, toranadus and thundurus, loved to play games. However, as weather gods their playfulness was extremely destructive. After one lacrosse match nearly destroyed the people under them, landorus became fed up. She began to chase her brothers across the sky so that they would never settle in one place for too long. She left fertile earth in her wake as an apology for her brothers’ behavior.

She is sometimes seen as a goddess of healing and medicine, in addition to fertility. In another myth a malevolent ghost poisoned the earth, air, and water of the world in order to punish the chieftain who ordered her execution. Landorus personally gathered and drank all the poison herself and became very sick. The phantom, horrified by the suffering of The Storm Driver, forfeited her own soul to heal the goddess. In another version of the story, Theria the Panther dies after ingesting the poison and is resurrected by The Starchild as Landorus, The Earth Incarnate and Driver of Storms.

The most famous work of literature devoted to Landorus is The Journey of Ohserase, codified into its most recognizable version in 1632 A.D. The story begins after The War of Kings, where two brothers split The Starchild in two and clashed until the entire Kingdom was a barren wasteland no longer worth fighting for.

Landorus appeared before a young child, Ohserase, and entrusted her with a task. She was to obtain a flask of blood from the kings and the surviving generals of both armies. The blood was to be mixed and one drop placed in every field in Unova. Only then could the region be restored.

Rather than assassinate the King of Ideals, Ohserase simply told him her story and showed him the ruined world outside his palace. The king became ashamed of what he had brought about and ordered his own execution by strangulation so no blood would be wasted. His generals and advisors followed suit.

The King of Truth refused to yield. In his rage he stabbed Ohserase for daring to suggest he should die. While his blade entered the girl’s body, she was unharmed. Instead, he keeled over from a stab wound that magically appeared in his chest. his blood was collected.

After a second conflict where the remaining forces of the late King of Ideals rounded up and killed the generals and heroes of the Army of Truth, the blood was collected and mixed. With the remaining nobles and priests watching a single drop was placed on a field.

Nothing happened.

The crowd became increasingly discontent. They even contemplating killing Ohserase for her part in the death of two monarchs. Just as the debate reached a fever pitch, landorus appeared. She scolded the masses for turning against her own priestess. She took the cask in her hands and shattered it. Only sand fell out. She then told the assembled leaders that the blood of warriors and kings would do nothing for the land’s prosperity. Revival could only come from gentle love and hard work. Landorus personally restored the fields of Unova before vanishing. The story ends by stating that landorus still waits in an old stone temple, holding out hope that she will never again have to heal a dying world.

Landorus is often depicted as goddess of rebirth and rebuilding. When disasters strike, she follows and attempts to make things whole. The disaster myth has long been central to her worship and perception, although the most popular version has varied with time. Before contact with Scandanavia, the most common myth of Theria the Panther revolved around the cat chasing their siblings across the earth.

Post-contact the story of the poisoned earth became more common. Anthropologists believe that there was a series of pandemics in the New World following the arrival of the first Old World colonists (c. 850 A.D.) and the diseases they brough with them. By the time that more extensive colonization efforts began, the indigenous population had mostly rebounded to its pre-pandemic level. This story was probably an attempt to explain the plagues.

The Journey of Ohserase did not become popular until well after The War of Kings (c. 1200 A.D.). There are no contemporary accounts of either king dying in the fashion described in the story. Indeed. there is substantial evidence that neither survived the war. The story’s popularity largely came about as the European and African population in Unova began to outnumber the natives in the area and as Iberian, Kalosian, and Galarian colonists established footholds in other parts of North America.

Around the same time as The Journey of Ohserase was put to the printing press for the first time, there was a revival in War of Kings stories among the indigenous inhabitants. The colonists, and especially the Europeans, were implicitly compared to selfish men who had torn a god and the world apart rather than make peace. In the period of Galarian rule, a governor tried to ban the book. In turn it only became more and more popular until the ban was rescinded. The incident fueled resentment among the Five Nations of the region and helped precipitate The War of Unovan Independence.

Worship

Landorus was a common household god. Worship was near-universal, especially in rural areas.

Unusually for her significance, Landorus had no grand temples in Unova. The people of Miros Island claim that Landorus herself sometimes stopped by their humble shrine. This belief was widespread enough that at least some pilgrims went to the island as far back as The War of Kings.

The Mississippians did build grand mounds honoring their gods. All of these temples were seen as also honoring The Panther in her role as patron of mound-building. Recent excavations in Cahokia and the Ohio River Valley have found credible evidence that some Unovans took pilgrimages to these sites.

Most worship of Landorus was done in the home. Small figurines of either Theria the Panther or Landorus the Incarnate (or both) were common in Landorus-worshipping households. Small offerings of grain were presented to the figurine before being burned or buried in her honor. The idol was kept in a place of prominence near the entry of the home. When people entered the building they would acknowledge the goddess’s presence.

The harvest festival was devoted to landorus. She also received offerings in the planting festival, alongside the two rain gods. In times of crisis, Unovan kings made pilgrimages to The Earth’s Scar and The True King’s Castle to present offerings. Keeping with the goddess’s words, no blood was offered. Instead the king would prostrate himself in the sand and beg, sometimes for days on end, for The Storm Driver’s help.

Origins

Landorus is a synthesis of different North American and African myths.

Her most direct inspiration is Theria the Panther. A big cat god was common in North American mythologies, especially in what is now the eastern portions of the United States and Canada. This god, referred to as Theria by the Turtle Island Nations, was almost always a storm god. The secondary attributes varied. Her role as a fertility goddess in the Five Nations is uncommon. She was the goddess of the hunt to the Huron. The Mississippians saw her as the goddess of mound-building and, by extension, civilization itself.

The Scandanavian gods were more human-shaped than those of most of the North American pantheons. The transition to Landorus as a human-shaped goddess probably stems from these influences. She also resembles a djinn common in stories of the desert nomads, such as those that frequented the trade cities of Mali. In one legend from the region, a djinn grew concerned over a massive war. In a bid to bring peace he challenged all the armies to battle him. They did so and were soundly defeated. After extensive coordination to design new weapons and strategies, the combined armies came back and overpowered the djinn. In the process their leadership had grown accustomed to dealing with common challenges together and the war was settled.

Landorus also draws inspirations from The Flayed One, a common figure in Mesoamerican pantheons. The Flayed One is the god of maize and fertility. He peeled off his own skin to help fertilize the earth. Landorus’ red or orange color may have been influenced by these stories. Mesoamerican idols dating centuries before the Kingdom’s founding have been discovered in Unova, showing that direction religious influences were possible.

Today

There is no proof that either Landorus or Theria exist.

Worship of The Guardian of the Fields remains common among the remaining members of The Five Nations. The Panther is still well-regarded among the moundbuilders, Huron, Cherokee and other nations of the eastern United States and southeastern Canada. Many white and black farmers still keep figurines of landorus in their homes for luck. Outside of these communities, belief in landorus and all polytheistic gods has declined in favor of The Church of Life and other monotheistic faiths.

The Oscar-nominated film The Storm Driver recently led to a revival of interest in landorus. The movie takes place in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by climate change and nuclear fallout. A young woman seems to receive a prophetic vision while severely dehydrated. In it landorus tells her how to save Unova. The girl fails to get the leaders of post-apocalyptic Unova to come with her. She sets out to The True King’s Castle on her own to beg for more guidance. At the end of the film she dies alone in the radioactive sands near the castle. Then an old hermit with a cane made of roots emerges from the ruins and buries the body.

 

[Persephone]

Diancie – Alola

“Hopoe wept before Hi’iaka, just as the goddess had wept before her. Pele looked on from her canoe, and she could contain her grief no longer. The earth-eating woman strode back up the shore and placed a hand on her sister’s shoulder. Flames roared in Hi’iaka’s heart, softening the stone and turning coarse rock to beautiful gemstone.”

-The Gods of Alola

Overview

Diancie were once viewed as a mere legend, albeit a peculiarly widespread one. The confirmation of corundum diancie in Europe and Africa has led to a reevaluation of the myths’ veracity. Peridot diancie have yet to be sighted, but they also have their share of legends.

In Alola, two peridot (or green) diancie were seen as servants or relatives of Pele. They were revered as patron gods of miners, jewelers, and metallurgists. Priestesses often appealed to them to intercede with Pele during large volcanic eruptions or other crises.

Appearance

European folklore for the corundum diancie mentions two forms: a greater and lesser. Only the lesser has been confirmed, but descriptions of the greater diancie or something like it are too widespread to dismiss. The two diancie of Alolan mythology roughly match up to these descriptions. The lesser diancie analogue is the goddess Hopoe, usually depicted as having a roughly humanoid head made of stone, hair made of peridot crystals, a thin waist, and a bottom half that looks like rough, grey rock. Some depictions show a peridot crystal poking through the rocky half, sometimes in a way that resembles a leg viewed through a slit in a dress.

Early depictions of Hopoe tended to be rougher, with legends describing the non-gemstone portions as unpleasant to look at. She had noticeably inhuman, and even inorganic, anatomy and little to no non-stone skin. Her clothing was a thick white robe that vaguely resembled a carbink’s fungal rim. Later depictions tended to depict Hopoe as mostly human, or even entirely human with rough skin, peridot jewelry, and green hair. Many artists of the Early Kingdom Era (1471-1778), most famously Yil’ks, depicted Hopoe as nude or wearing only a very thin robe or dress with little resemblance to a carbink’s rim.

Hi’iaka, the greater diancie, was traditionally described as having a head and arms that looked human from a distance, but were revealed as dark, smooth stone up close. Her hair was replaced by long, pure peridot. The bottom half of her body was either entirely hidden or fully replaced by a “dress” made up of dozens of giant peridot crystals. An elegant white robe completed her outfit. Unlike Hopoe, Hi’iaka’s depictions remained rather stable through the kingdom period, although a few later artists depicted her as having actual legs beneath the dress or downplayed her rocky appearance, especially when drawn with a more human-like Hopoe.

In Alolan Mythology

Almost all of Hi’iaka’s myths are tied to Hopoe. One of the better known is recorded in Gods of Alola, a written compilation of myths commissioned by the king in 1791.

In this version, Pele was presented with a stone egg by her mother before she was banished from her home island. At first Pele was very lonely. Then her sister hatched. The fire goddess was instantly fond of the newborn Hi’iaka and doted on her incessantly while they were on the seas.

Eventually the two came to shore on an inhabited island. Hi’iaka very quickly made a friend in a human girl named Hopoe. In the Gods of Alola version of the myth, Pele takes a human form to keep an eye on her sister and falls for the mortal man Lohi’au. Other tellings, before and after, say that Lohi’au and Hi’iaka fell in love, or that both goddesses did. As time wore on, Hi’iaka became rather different than she had been on the canoe. Her sister confronted her about this, and Hi’iaka rebuked the lava goddess and kissed Lohi’au in front of her.

Pele did not take this well; she summoned a wave of lava to destroy those who had corrupted her sister. Lohi’au died in the eruption, and Hopoe found herself in the disaster’s path. Hi’iaka intervened, pushing her friend back before being coated in lava herself. When it cooled, a rough statue of the goddess was all that remained. Pele’s rage dissipated upon seeing the deaths of her sister and lover. She silently walked back to her canoe in shame and prepared to wander the seas, as alone as she was when she was first banished.

But Hopoe’s sobs moved her again. She came back to shore and heated up the stone form of her sister, refining it into beautiful crystal and igniting a molten heart within. Hi’iaka was still too afraid of Pele’s wrath to go with the fire goddess, but knowing that her sister was alive and with a dear friend kept Pele going for the next arc of her travels.

The Gods of Alola does not specify if Hopoe was later turned into a diancie. Oral traditions predating the kingdom era tell that the sisters reunited decades after Hi'iaka's transformation. In these stories, Hopoe had grown either very old or was already dead and the healing and magic gods had either refused to help or were unable to do so. Therefore, in desperation, Hi'iaka sought out her sister. While unable to restore Hopoe to the way she was, Pele could at least turn her to stone and revive her as she had done with Hi’iaka. The transformation worked and the two friends were as inseparable in the centuries after as they had been in the years before.

Pele was never able to refuse a request from her sister out of a combination of love and guilt.

Worship

Hi’iaka was seldom worshipped in her own right. She was instead invoked as an interceder between humanity and the sometimes-wrathful Pele. Many of Pele’s priests were also members of the peridot order sworn to Hi’iaka. All members of the order were female. They wore peridot jewelry and plain white robes. The priestesses also swore off marriage. Instead of appealing to Pele to stop volcanoes from erupting, which was futile, they prayed for warnings in advance and restoration of life afterwards.

The temples to Hi’iaka tended to be relatively simple stone homes for her priestesses. An altar and hearth were used for worship. At least one carbink was kept in each temple as well. These carbink were kept well-polished and were treated as emissaries of Hi’iaka and Hopoe themselves. They were prone to wander into nearby communities where, with great deference, an elder would coax them back to the temple.

Origins

Peridot diancie also appear in Egyptian mythology, where the green diancie were gifts from the sky goddess to the earth god. The diancie regularly sent messages between the earth and sky, as well as between the pharaohs and the other gods. Peridot is common in meteorites. The Egyptian myth has fueled some speculation that peridot diancie might have an extraterrestrial origin.

As peridot diancie have never been documented, it is difficult to tell what aspects of the myths are based on truth and which were made wholesale. Anthropologists generally agreed that green diancie myths in the Pacific were a way of contextualizing the life-ending and life-giving powers of volcanic eruptions and, perhaps, to provide a measure of hope. It is possible that the myths are somewhat more literal and that diancie are actually brought to life by volcanic eruptions.

The Pacific diancie myths are unusual in that there are two diancie that socialize with each other, but not with carbink. Corundum diancie myths tend to describe greater diancie as either an evolved form of or an ancient progenitor of the lesser diancie.

Continental diancie myths tend to describe them as rulers of hidden underground kingdoms of carbink. There was no equivalent to this myth in Alola prior to contact with Europeans. This is perhaps explainable by the relative lack of mining in Pre-Kingdom and Early Kingdom Alola. Travel into the caves was rare for anyone but priests or royally approved expeditions. Peridot carbink are also relatively less abundant in Alola than corundum carbink are in Europe and Africa. Outside of mines, peridot carbink often congregate in the caldera of Ten Carat Hill and the bottom of Vast Poni Canyon. The Alolans probably did not think of carbink as a subterranean species.

Today

The Order of Hi’iaka was dissolved in 1823 as the kingdom began to modernize. Several priestesses refused to relinquish their positions and were arrested or killed. The order was briefly revived in the 1950s before being shut down after they attacked tourists, park rangers, and the military. One aspect of the Second Order of Hi’iaka remains in a prominent folktale: if rocks are stolen from Pele’s islands, she will dispatch her sister to retrieve them. Hi’iaka is seldom content to merely steal the rock back and will instead lay curses of increasing severity on the thief until they voluntarily return the stones. Wela National Park and Poni National Park and Preserve each receive rocks from hundreds of former tourists every year.

Gay rights activists in Alola have often used Hi’iaka and Hopoe as examples of lesbians or bisexuals in Alolan culture. Some Alolan elders and activists push back on this interpretation as imposing modern, Western views of sexuality onto ancient goddesses and priestesses. Others accept it.

There is also scholarly debate as to whether the Order of Hi’iaka was an early haven for lesbians. Scholars are divided on the matter. There are letters between individual priestesses that seem romantic, but the Order did formally ban sexual relationships of all kinds. The Second Order of Hi’iaka did have many lesbian members, including its founder.

Corundum diancie were first documented in 2013. The first specimen was captured two years later. Early research revealed that diancie are telepathic. They are also prone to powerful mood swings, going from exuberant to despondent in a matter of minutes. The one captive specimen, named West, was captured in Botswana before being purchased by Dr. Gregory Rhodes, a world-renowned geologist and patron of the sciences. (Full Disclosure: While Dr. Rhodes owns Wyndon press, he has no influence over the content of our publications.) In 2018, a radical leftist organization attempted to steal West after releasing doctored photos of a disheveled, cracked pokémon. Several of Galar's finest geologists have since inspected West and found no health problems. Dr. Rhodes is currently suing the terrorists for the besmirching of his character and the emotional distress he endured during the incident.

 

[Persephone]

Darkrai – Sinnoh

You may kill my body. I care naught. Darkrai drove me. Darkrai will drive another and another after that. Someday we will be victorious and you will fall.

-Last words of Sachio Ueda

Overview

Darkrai, The Wicked One, Lord of The New Moon, is an ancient god, possibly dating back to 11,000 BCE. He began as a merciless monster lurking in the shadows. Over the millennia he became an antagonist to the gods themselves, and then a proper god in his own right. Darkrai continued to be a nightmare for the nobility and clergy even as a god through his temple’s affiliation with revolutionaries, heretics, and hedonists.

Appearance

Darkrai’s earliest depictions come from cave art. The Yume Cave Darkrai was an indistinct mass of shadow with blood dripping from its mouth. A wisp of smoke rose from its head. Other early artists slightly anthropomorphized Darkrai into having arms and a skirt. Most did not have legs.

Some later myths and art depicted Darkrai as a roughly human figure in a long dark cloak and black skirt. The wisp of smoke tended to be turned into white hair and the dripping blood was turned into either face paint or a scarf. Depictions of the more monstrous form remained alongside the humanshape one. Darkrai cultists, some Cresselia cultists, and the counterculture preferred the human Darkrai, while the ruling class preferred to commission images of Darkrai as a nightmare come to life.

The people of the Nomose Delta believed that Darkrai lived deep within the swamps. The Nomose Darkrai had long, thin legs like a wading bird. Some artists and storytellers borrowed this description and portrayed Darkrai and Cresselia as birds, the former wading through the sea of dreams while the latter swam on the surface. The bird Darkrai was never as popular in art and folklore as the humanoid and monstrous versions, but it persisted to modernity.

In Sinnohan Mythology

Darkrai was first seen as a monster of the underworld. It would put victims to sleep and then rip out their soul with its teeth. Young people who died of unknown causes in their sleep were said to be killed by Darkrai. The monster could be warded off by hanging a noctowl feather from the door of a home. It was believed that noctowl did not sleep, so even the hint of their presence would drive away the dream eater.

Darkrai became a proper god during the Classical Era of Japan. He became the counterpart of Creselia shortly after. In some stories, Darkrai was a fearsome god of death and despair who tormented humans for fun. It was only the constant effort of Cresselia that kept him at bay. In another Darkrai and Cresselia were both dream gods, but Cresselia could gracefully float on the surface of the dreamscape while Darkrai had to wade through it, digging his feet into the minds below.

In a more sympathetic portrayal, a king wracked by nightmares sent his daughter, Cresselia, to Darkrai’s island to appease the god. Darkrai was furious that the king not only believed that Darkrai accepted human sacrifices, but that he would offer one over bad dreams. Darkrai’s mere presence terrified the girl, so he took to leaving her alone. He still watched from the shadows to make sure she was alright. He even made a small home for her. He commanded edible plants to grow near her home and culled the poisonous ones. When she shivered on a cold winter night, he stole a blanket from the king’s bed. And when she grew lonely, Darkrai appeared to her as a human boy who had been cursed by the nightmare god. He could keep Cresselia company, but on the night of the new moon he would go into the heart of the grove and become a mindless beast. She must avoid him during this time.

Months passed. Cresselia obeyed, but she knew that the boy was eaten up by guilt and shame after every new moon. She resolved to keep him company during his crisis, as he had during hers. Cresselia secretly followed her companion as he went to the grove. There she saw him shed his mortal body and become a beast of shadow. She screamed. Darkrai finally noticed her and immediately fled into the dreamscape in shame. He stayed away for weeks, but eventually Cresselia came to accept that Darkrai had cared for her and that she greatly missed his presence.

She went to the heart of the island and begged Darkrai to return. He did, eventually, and explained everything. When lots were drawn and roles were assigned he became the god of dreams. He was not good at this job and unintentionally caused night terrors and earned the fear of humanity. As he became more and more hated, he became increasingly bitter and unable to make happy dreams Cresselia, in turn, told him why she had followed him to the grove. She said that the same desire held true: she wanted to comfort Darkrai however she could.

They became even closer and eventually married. Under the laws of the creator, the mortal wife of a god was allowed to ascend to godhood herself. Cresselia the goddess asked Arceus to be another goddess of dreams. Arceus granted the request. She proved better at bringing good dreams than her husband, and her company helped him learn to bring good dreams as well. Humans learned to welcome sleep rather than fear it, for even if Darkrai made them face their fears on one night they could be rewarded the next.

Later stories reinterpreted Darkrai’s role as the god of nightmares. He became the god of obsessive dreams. He would tempt an artist with a fleeting vision of a magnum opus, and then drive them to pursue it above all else for years. Others would be shown hard truths about the world. When they did, it would feel as if nothing else mattered and they would either become consumed by a drive to change society or to leave it entirely. Drug users were given glorious highs, but then would be destroyed as they pursued more. Some cynics also called him a god of love. Religious leaders warned against the single-minded zeal of those driven by Darkrai to misanthropy, addiction, and political violence. Revolutionaries and cultists alike were painted as the victims and disciples of The Wicked One.

Worship

For most of Japanese history, Darkrai was a being to ward off rather than a benevolent god to worship. Priests held up Darkrai as an evil spirit or enemy of Cresselia that the Lady of the Full Moon needed prayer and material sacrifice to defeat.

As Cresselia’s cult fell out of favor, the remaining sects began to soften their stance on Darkrai. The Lord of The New Moon was either a lover, friend, or rival to Cresselia. This helped counter the increasingly popular narrative of Cresselia as a heartless extremist. Pilgrims to Full Moon Isle would often stop at New Moon Isle as well, although there were no proper shrines. Worshippers would simply walk to the edge of the forest, bow, and then leave.

Darkrai did have cults of his own. His dark colors made him popular among counter-cultures in almost every age. Darkrai’s temples were often just places for the youth to gather and explore desires that the dominant political and religious structures condemned. They became havens of homosexuality, drug use, subversive art, foreign culture, and revolutionary philosophy. The leaders of these temples traditionally specialized in the care of ghost-types. Whenever the local king or emperor tried to shut down the temple, the ghosts would infiltrate and haunt their household until the fear of Darkrai led them to back off.

The decline of Cresselia’s cult in favor of those of Arceus, Ho-oh, and Xerneas made Darkrai a less obvious rallying point for the counterculture. Instead Giratina and Yveltal cults came to occupy the niche that Darkrai temples had carved out.

Nomose always had a strange relationship with Darkrai. The people of the delta have long claimed that Darkrai lives deep in the swamps. On nights of heavy fog he will walk out and visit the cities. If a lone oracle is sent out into the fog, she can intercept Darkrai and talk with him. This will stop him from reaching the city and giving the resident’s nightmares. In exchange for the oracle’s company, Darkrai would give her insights into the future.

The nightmares and visions of Nomose likely have a more mundane explanation than a midnight rendezvous between an oracle and The Wicked One. Nearby swamps have areas where a mixture of psychoactive gasses leak from the ground. Multiple hallucinogenic plants can also be found within. Still, Nomose’s Darkrai cult has persisted to modernity. He is a respected messenger of the future and many tourists are drawn to Nomose Swamps National Park in the hopes of glimpsing the elusive Nightmare Lord.

Origins

The first appearance of Darkrai is a painting in Yume Cave dated to 11,000 BCE. Some scholars contend that this was simply a very amateurish painting of a honchkrow, possibly made by a child simply marking the walls with the multicolored clays found near the caves. There are other crude drawings on the walls such as a flattened togekiss and a mass of blue spikes with eyes in the middle. A Darkrai-like creature has also been found on cave walls in the Kurogane Valley. The Kurogane Darkrai lacks the red found in the Yume Darkrai. Forest fires are common in the valley, and the smoke inhalation deaths they cause often lead to the creation of gengar. Scholars have suggested that the Kurogane Darkrai is not a Darkrai at all, but simply a gengar.

The earliest stories of Darkrai the monster began to circulate in the Yayoi period. Again, these stories—a mass of dark mist appears in the night and terrifies humans—sound similar to gengar encounters. Some gengar even sneak into homes at night to feed on dreams. The more humanoid appearance of Darkrai as a tall figure in a cloak and skirt roughly matches that of mismagius, another ghost-type that feeds on the fear of humans.

As the kingdoms became larger and more sophisticated, they needed to codify their religions for the masses. This is where Darkrai, a creature of legend and fear, was elevated above its old status as a simple monster to become a worthy opponent for the gods. In turn, devotion to the state-sanctioned priests could keep the demon at bay. The more sympathetic portrayals of Darkrai tended to be made by writers critical of the state.

A playwright now known only as “Nara” wrote Darkrai and Cresselia as a criticism of the state, where the king was petty enough to sacrifice his daughter for a good night’s sleep. The priests who derived much of their power from their supposed ability to ward of monsters were mocked by the twist that a feared monster was no monster at all. Legend has it that the king was extremely displeased by the play and found a pretext for banishing Nara to Darkrai’s island as punishment. Supposedly Nara reacted with horror rather than joy, which the clergy used to discredit his play. Contemporary records simply show that Nara left the city shortly after the play debuted. The story of Nara’s renunciation of Darkrai is likely a fabrication made by the king’s descendants.

The association of Darkrai with madness began shortly after the codification of Darkrai as the god of nightmares. There are stories of a writer who saw a vision in a dream and then devoted his life to writing an epic poem. After years or decades of work he still was not finished. On his death bed he ordered his daughter to burn what he had written as it was still imperfect. The details change in every iteration and there is seldom a particular writer this story is attributed to. In the oldest known telling there was no mention of Darkrai, just a dream.

The connection seems to have been established after a republican revolt in the 13th Century. The nobles needed a reason why the peasants would attempt to overthrow them, and a court poet decided that it must have been the work of Darkrai twisting their dreams until they could no longer understand reality. This explanation served to explain away a great deal of criminal and otherwise unpleasant behaviors. In later centuries it became a useful tool for dissuading the citizens from using newly imported drugs.

Today

Darkrai still has some appeal in the counterculture. Some gay nightclubs still have an emblem of Darkrai on the door as a callback to the Wicked One’s old temples. New Moon Press is Japan’s largest publisher of horror stories. There have been attempts to revive the old temples of Darkrai as a pretext for criminal behavior, but the authorities close them down almost as soon as they open.

Mental health clinics have traditionally raised funds from the religious by claiming their patient’s obsessions are provoked by Darkrai. Communities of the mentally ill denounce these claims as carrying an unfair stigma.

Some political radicals have embraced their alleged connection to Darkrai to claim they were divinely inspired. Sachio Ueda, assassin of Japan’s crown princess, claimed as much during his public execution.

The professional trainer Takuto Nakamura claims that he had a vivid dream in which he won a tournament, only to be faced by a mirror image of himself using a Darkrai. He tried and failed to bring the mysterious opponent down. The dream ended when he lost. He claims that there was a black feather and a silver medal on his bed when he woke up.

Archaeologists attempting to dig for ruins on New Moon Island often report a feeling of being watched. Sometimes they are overcome by an unshakeable belief that something bad will imminently happen if they do not leave. Expeditions to the island tend to be short. Whether these reports are due to native ghost-types, superstitious paranoia, or the presence of Darkrai himself remains unclear.

Darkrai’s existence is not confirmed and there are plausible explanations for almost all of his supposed appearances. There are still just enough stories that serious scholars believe that Darkrai is out there lurking in the shadows. Whether he is a primeval monster or a misunderstood loner is anyone’s guess.

 

[Persephone]

Yveltal (Kalos)

“Proud Yveltal roars and the world is consumed. All that remains is a cocoon of flames. Those who have fallen from Xerneas’s grace are doomed to burn forever within. But those who embrace the creator, who embrace life, for them there will be a new creation free from the pains of the old.”

-The Book of Death, 15:11-13

Overview

Yveltal is the primary antagonist of Xerneas and, according to the Church of Life, the embodiment of all that is evil. While she may have once been a more complicated goddess, many of those myths were lost or edited to be more in line with the Church of Life’s doctrine. Almost as old as the Church of Life are attempts to humanize Yveltal, either out of a fascination with the forbidden or a desire to criticize the church. There are still a handful of worshippers of Yveltal, but for the most part she remains as an antagonist – someone to be warded against than prayed to directly.

Appearance

Yveltal has long been associated with a Y-shaped rune. This was probably meant to signify a bird in flight rather than an actual body shape. Nevertheless, the church has run with it and portrayed Yveltal as being shaped like a y with two long wings and an equally long tail. A small head with a train of feathers is set between the wings. Yveltal has traditionally been depicted without legs to signify that Xerneas will not allow her to find rest on the earth.

Some artists have drawn Yveltal as being pure black. Others depict her as being without skin or feathers with blood oozing from her body with nothing to hold it back. Some artists mix the two or depict her as having black feathers on her back and red feathers on the front. It has become common to depict spindly black ‘fingers’ emerging from her wings and even tail. These symbolize her desire to drag everyone and everything into her cocoon.

Yveltal has also been depicted as a human woman. These depictions usually have black or red wings extending behind her to show who the artist is depicting. Sometimes Yveltal is drawn as deathly pale with deep black hair and eyes. Medieval artists often drew her as a living shadow of pure darkness. During the colonial era she was usually drawn as being of Amerindian or African descent instead of having literally black skin.

There is not a great deal of evidence as to what Yveltal was depicted as before the Church of Life came to power. The Church purged most records of Imperial and pre-Imperial theology, Yveltal included. The most prominent surviving poem describes her as “she of the bloody feathers.” This may have been meant as a metaphor or epithet rather than a literal description.

In Kalosian Mythology

The Church of Life’s main scripture, Decalibres, establishes the basics of Yveltal’s character and story. She appeared before all of creation to trick them into cursing Xerneas’s name. The pokémon readily did and it only took a few minutes to convince the first woman, Sel, to as well. Only the first man, Nau, held out. For this reason pokémon and women were put under the authority of men so that they may be led out of evil. Later on her name is occasionally used as a synonym of sin or death, especially in more poetic portions of the scripture.

She is only a prominent figure in the tenth book, The Book of Endings. There it is revealed that she made a bet with Xerneas. If the world was more sinful than good in ten thousand years, it would go to her. If it was more good than sinful, then Yveltal would be exiled from creation. At the end of the ten thousandth year Yveltal wins and begins to rain terrors down on the earth. Xerneas intervenes to keep His people safe. In rage Yveltal swallows the entirety of creation into a cocoon to seal it away from Xerneas’s light. Xerneas takes his followers away from the cocoon and makes a new creation that Yveltal may not enter, one that is perfect. There His followers will worship him forever in eternal bliss.

While not in the Decalibres, there is a prominent apocryphal legend regarding Yveltal. Around 1000 BCE, centuries before the Imperial Era, a prominent chieftain enthusiastically embraced the teachings of Xerneas. At least, until his beloved companion died. Furious at Xerneas for letting such a thing happen the chieftain turned to Yvetal. The death goddess offered to return the companion to life and let her live forever with the chieftain. In exchange she asked for the lives of one out of every ten people in his lands. He agreed and Yveltal took her bloody tithe. The chieftain’s companion immediately fled away in disgust. Years passed but neither aged. Neither could die. When the chieftain asked Yveltal why this was she responded that she was honoring the terms of their agreement: the two could live together forever. If they did not actually want to be together that was not her problem.

The florges tell a slightly different story. In their version there was a bloody war that wiped out most of Kalos’s population. As the two armies prepared for a final confrontation near the modern village of Cromlac’h, one army’s general employed an assassin to kill the enemy king. The assassin failed because the man’s floette took a blade for her friend. This proved to be the straw that broke the camerupt’s back. The king had seen too many friends die and his sanity was shattered. In despair he begged Yveltal to end the war by annihilating both armies. If there was no one left to fight at least the civilians could live in peace. Yveltal agreed and said she could free from death’s reach any two individuals, one in exchange for each army. The king chose himself and his floette. Yveltal kept her bargain, but the fairy fled from her former friend in disgust.

Yveltal is a force to be prayed against in The Church of Life. She is far more powerful than any individual person, but much, much weaker than Xerneas. Without The Lifegiver’s help humans would inevitably fall to wickedness and bring about their own destruction. But Xerneas gives humans the power to shrug off Yveltal’s temptations and walk a righteous path.

In the tales of the saints Yveltal often appears as a temptress that the holy figure holds out against. This temptation is often sexual in nature as she tries to get holy men and women to have sex outside the bounds of marriage. In at least one popular story, the tale of Saint Rosaline, she appears as another woman and tries to lure her into a homosexual tryst.

Later writers would write stories humanizing Yveltal. The most popular of these stories was the eleventh century epic The Damned Sword. In it Yveltal is depicted as the destroyer of the wicked. She fights a supernatural war against evil spirits set on harming humanity. But Yveltal grew jealous of the first two humans, the perfect creation of Xerneas. The Lifegiver would speak fondly of humanity for days on end without giving a word of thanks to Yveltal for her work. One day she approaches Sel and tempts her into offering a sacrifice to her instead of Xerneas. The latter is furious and humiliates Yveltal in front of all of creation for suggesting she should be worshipped over Him. Yveltal then resigns from the heavenly armies and lets plagues, temptation, and old age freely ravage humanity. Yveltal is too proud to defend humanity without worship of her own and Xerneas is too proud to allow it. All of mankind continues to suffer while the creator and destroyer sulk in opposite corners of the universe.

These stories were often thinly veiled criticisms of the church. Giving Yveltal a rational reason to rebel usually entailed making Xerneas look less than perfect. The writer could always deny he was trying to criticize Xerneas by claiming that the book was from the perspective of The Mother of Lies and should not be taken literally. This is where the concept of the imperfect narrator comes from.

Church-aligned writers would later try to exploit the popularity of these stories. The End of Grace, published in 1351, initially seems similar to The Damned Sword through its focus on Yveltal before the fall. However, it quickly becomes clear that Xerneas actually is perfect and Yveltal falls from grace because of her own sinful nature. These stories were invariably less popular than more straightforward fall stories.

Worship

Yveltal is traditionally seen as a being that the pious must pray for protection from. Most of her modern ‘worshippers’ are in secular society groups that launch lawsuits arguing that their ‘religion’ deserves the same government accommodations as those given to the Church of Life. Many governments decide to adopt secular rules rather than allow for public prayers to Yveltal.

Because Yveltal is often depicted in folklore as being able to petrify sinners the Church of Life does not usually make statues of holy figures. In Medieval Kalos nobles would often commission statues of rivals and prominently display them to suggest that they were impious. Most of the remaining statutes we have from the Medieval era are of reviled political leaders and prominent heretics.

In the Decalibres Yveltal is often associated with witchcraft. Modern witches have embraced her as a patron deity. These sects are divided on exactly which texts are ‘canon.’ The Damned Sword is occasionally treated as the true account of Yveltal divinely gifted to her prophet. Others rely on The Black Account, a sort of handbook for witches allegedly written in 13th Century Italy by a daughter of Yveltal. There are no historical records of the book before the transcript of a 17th Century witch trial. The oldest known copy of the book was published in 1781. This edition may have been intended as a satire making fun of both the Church and Lumiose’s growing population of self-identified witches. Some sects ditch both and use a more modern novel as the ‘true’ account of the death goddess.

Yveltal worship typically entails defying social norms, embracing womanhood, and the occasional sacrifice of a small mammal. The exact rituals vary from sect to sect.

There are no temples devoted to Yveltal. The closest is a graveyard to the south of Cromlac’h in Kalos. Massive stone pillars with Old Kalosian writing are arranged in rows. This is allegedly where Kalos’s king bargained with Yveltal for the life of his friend. A monument was later erected for the dead. The pillars themselves contain nothing but weathered names. The area is sometimes referred to as Yveltal’s Nest. Locals have long avoided the area. When they must visit, they do so without making a sound. If they do then Yveltal might notice them and reap their souls as well.

Origins

After the Imperium embraced monotheism they began to systematically eliminate accounts of other gods in their lands. Most records of these deities were destroyed. Those that remained were altered to depict the former god as a king, priest, or common pokémon. It can be hard to read imperial histories and distinguish genuine records of events from converted legends.

After the Imperium’s fall the Church of Life did the same to the imperial religion as the Imperium had done to so many local cults. Xerenas and Yveltal were probably altered to help ease followers of the imperial religion into the new faith. The former god of the Imperium was converted into a priest of Xerneas in the Decalibres. He was a dutiful priest of Xerneas in a fallen city. The imperial leaders had him killed, but Xerneas resurrected him in exchange for his piousness. There is some indication that in the original myths the imperial god personally met and defeated a death deity. This deity may have been replaced with the existing goddess Yveltal.

The Church’s missionaries ultimately reached farther than the Imperium’s armies. Most North European cultures of the time did not keep written records of their myths. Those that did exist were often burned by missionaries. As such it is difficult to say much about Yveltal’s pre-Church depictions with certainty, as the Kalosian records were burned by the Imperium and the records in the rest of Europe were burned by the Church.

It does not help that Yveltal was probably only spoken of in hushed tones and referenced by epithet rather than name. In the remote reaches of Scandanavia there are still those who practice a version of the traditional faith. They refuse to speak of the goddess of death, claiming it would invite terrible fortune to do so. There is a remaining Scandanavian poem that briefly describes a bird whose death heralds the end of the world. This is because her body is the world. Someday she will lay an egg and die. This is how our world will end. When the egg hatches the new bird will become a new world with its own peoples. Someday the new bird will die and lay an egg of her own.

One of the few Celtic gods that survived the Church and the Imperium is Deargbean, a ruthless warrior who takes a more active hand in reaping the dead than most psychopomps. She was often associated with corviknight and took the form of one in at least one legend. Whether this is an example of a proto-Yveltal or a separate goddess entirely is a subject of scholarly debate.

Recently scholars have begun to ask long-lived and intelligent pokémon about pre-imperial mythology and history as they may only be a few generations removed from the Imperium. The results from this method are of questionable value: most pokémon don’t pay much attention to human religious beliefs, and those that do rarely recount human stories in perfect detail to their children.

A study of aegislash, gardevoir, and florges pieced together a version of the early Kalosian views on Yveltal and Xerneas. The two may have once been seen as partners. Yveltal would kill the wicked and the old so that the righteous and young may take their place in the world. Everyone went to Yveltal’s realm upon death. There they would undergo a series of trials. The length and severity of these trials would depend on how righteous the person was in life. After finally reaching the end of their penance they would emerge from the trials as a liberated spirit. This was compared to a butterfree emerging from a metapod’s shell and is potentially where the idea of Yveltal living in a cocoon comes from. Allegedly priests and kings were seen as inherently perfect and were allowed to skip the trials entirely. They would then sit at the right hand of Yveltal and help choose which souls to reap.

There is no proof of Yveltal’s existence. It seems as if there was a mass death event approximately 3,000 years ago in Kalos. Whether this was the workings of ancient technology, Xerneas smiting the wicked, Yveltal killing two armies, or even a simple plague is disputed. Accounts of a bird of death throughout Europe could simply be due to some common death goddess myth that was borrowed and molded by different cultures. It is possible that these accounts are based on corviknight, dark-colored carrion eaters who are often seen with blood and entrails around them. These would be large black-and-red birds that frequently appeared on battlefields to eat the dead. Early man may have seen these powerful, intelligent beings as supernatural forces of death. Embellishments over the centuries could have turned a simple corvid into the enemy of all that is good.

Today

The trend of Yveltal rehabilitation died down over the centuries. It was brought back stronger than ever the next time the Church of Life was seriously challenged: The Enlightenment. Newly relaxed blasphemy laws allowed for ever more radical depictions of Xerneas and Yveltal. A prominent café in Lumiose was themed after Yveltal’s Cocoon. Y-shaped paintings and graffiti also became somewhat common as a means of pushing the envelope or flaunting defiance of the Church.

Yveltal was a prominent figure in the literature of the era. Some works were more about political views than religious ones. Feminist writers in particular grappled with the female embodiment of evil. Some proposed that Xerneas was the fertile creator. Yveltal, the spirit of avarice and greed, was most strongly tied to the world of men. The sexes of Xerneas and Yveltal should thus be flipped from their classical interpretations.

Other feminist writers embraced Yveltal rather than trying to dismiss her as not truly female. Yveltal’s corruption of the first woman and her own feminine nature had long been used by the Church against female empowerment. Elizabeth River’s Unto The End depicted Xerneas as an inventor obsessed with creating bold new innovations. The old models were of no interest to Him once He had come up with something better. Over time the old things would break down and begin to suffer as Xerneas no longer cared to maintain them. It was Yveltal who gently flew down from the heavens to pick up the beings neglected by Xerneas and make sure they received proper care. This interpretation embraced Yveltal’s femininity and praised Yveltal for having “the caring nature” of “the fairer sex.”

The most famous of the modern Yveltal-centric novels is Dr. Octavia Zeiger’s 1971 novel Our Mother who art in Hell. The story begins with the creation of humanity. The Lifegiver saw no value in being praised by beings too simplistic to understand what they were saying. He made two intelligent beings. He put one of his most trusted servants, Yveltal, in charge of their instruction for He had no desire to teach them Himself. Yveltal appeared before the humans and took on a motherly role, teaching them about their emotions and thoughts. As time went on she taught them music, art, and science. Xerneas was delighted by the art the humans made praising His glory. Eventually Yveltal taught Sel and Nau the one thing she had been forbidden from teaching them: choice and morality. After the lesson the woman, Sel, decided that she wanted to make art for herself rather than for Xereneas. The creator grew enraged and exiled them from his garden. He then created plagues and old age to break down humanity until they came back to Him to beg for mercy. If they were sufficiently grateful, He would grant some leniency. Yveltal, for her role in Sel’s defiance, was exiled to the darkest place in the universe. She saw that as humans died Xerneas would only grant entrance to His garden to those who would endlessly sing His praises. Those who would not were left outside as bodyless shades, unable to interact with anyone and anything. Yveltal rounded them up and invited them into her home. It was gloomy in her cocoon, but Yveltal did her best to share what comforts she had with the souls who ended up there. The author posits in the epilogue that this makes the cocoon a livelier and friendlier place than Xerneas’s “gorgeous garden of terrified sycophants.”

 

[Persephone]

Mewtwo – Kanto

“We set out to make a weapon. We made a god instead.”
-Dr. Genjirō Fuji

Overview

Mythology is the study of the stories humans have told about their gods and ancestors. These stories are useful for understanding cultures in a way that simple historical records cannot convey. How did a people think of themselves: Mighty warriors descended from the heavens? Impure and sinful beings wholly indebted to their creator? Tiny and insignificant beasts at the mercy of forces far outside their control?

In the late 20th Century humanity may have created a being capable of going toe-to-toe with the strongest of pokémon. The evidence for Mewtwo’s existence always has some sort of weakness. It is possible that all of it is incorrect and the being either does not exist or is much different than is commonly believed. It is also possible that Mewtwo is real. That humanity created a godlike pokémon, and most of us only realized what had been done well after the fact.

Mewtwo is more than a mere conspiracy theory or cryptid. Its existence has the potential to radically alter how humanity sees its place in the order of things. It is still too early to definitively say much of anything about The Child of Guren Island and how humanity will react to it. Still, it would be a disservice to leave Mewtwo out of this guide. If Mewtwo is real, and perhaps even if it is not, it has the potential to shake the spiritual foundations of human society to their core.

Appearance

Accounts of Mewtwo’s appearance vary. The most widely accepted descriptions and photos portray Mewtwo as a humanoid creature with very pale skin. It appears to have small breasts in the Kogane Daily photo. Alleged eyewitness accounts have claimed that it appeared to be incredibly thin with every one of its ribs visible. Mewtwo is usually described as having three fingers and three toes. Its head is vaguely humanoid with a slight muzzle and two bony ridges extending from the sides of the scalp. Some accounts describe a second neck stretching between the nape of the neck to the back of the shoulder blades. The second neck has been described as vaguely resembling an IV tube made of flesh. Mewtwo is almost always depicted with a long purple tail with a bulbous growth at the end.

There are two alternative depictions that are radically divergent enough that it is unlikely someone would have come up with them for clout. The first, and most suspect, described Mewtwo as being incredibly well muscled with a relatively short tail. Witnesses described set of bony purple growths extended from the shoulders. The second, and better documented, description did not describe Mewtwo as having a conventional tail. Instead, a long purple tentacle somewhere between hair and a tail grew out from the back of Mewtwo’s neck. This sighting, sometimes described as the Jersey Mewtwo, is usually described as being only three feet tall. Other sources usually describe Mewtwo as being between six and seven feet tall.

The Story

It is difficult to compile a ‘complete’ version of a conspiracy theory. The following is an attempt to piece together the most widely accepted version of events among those who believe in Mewtwo.

In the 1980s a series of genetic engineering experiments were conducted in Japan. Most of these experiments were performed on a privately owned facility on Guren Island. Accounts differ as to who funded and supervised these experiments. A local Yakuza clan is the most widely agreed upon source. Others attribute the Guren Island experiments to the Yamabuki Institute of Technology, Sylph Inc., the Japanese government, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Japanese Professional Battling Association, The Church of Life, the ghost of Genghis Khan, John F. Kennedy Jr., aliens, time travelers, the molemen, and Elvis Presly.

The Guren Island facility’s biggest project was a genetically modified clone of a mew. A team of researchers in Guyana managed to find a live mew, a cryptid and local fertility goddess. The expedition ended disastrously. Either a live specimen or a tissue sample was retrieved, depending upon the source. At this point a heavily modified embryo was created and inserted into the mew or the tissue sample was used to create an entirely new creature from scratch. The former theory is more popular, well-supported, and plausible. In any event, the creature, Mewtwo, eventually was born or otherwise awoken on February 6th, 1989.

The Yakuza clan controlled Mewtwo for a period of sixteen months. During this time one of its high-ranking members, then a gym leader, used it during several battles. It may have also been involved in a series of raids on rival gangs that consolidated the Rocket faction’s dominance over Honshu’s criminal underworld. On June 11th, 1990, Mewtwo rebelled against its masters and destroyed the Guren Island facility. It fled to the Philippines where it created its own biotech lab. A group of trainers was invited to the Simula Island facility. On November 6th, 1991, a Category 4 hurricane encompassing most of the Philippines was created over the course of five hours. Mewtwo clashed with a being of similar power at the height of the storm. It then quelled the hurricane and fled the area, leaving behind an abandoned island laboratory and nine humans with short-term amnesia.

Mewtwo sightings have occurred sporadically over the next three decades. Sometimes surveillance cameras have captured Mewtwo standing on the roof of a skyscraper. Most eyewitness accounts and rumored sightings occur during the destruction of biotech or pokémon trafficking facilities. The most notable occurred in October 2013 when a Plasma Liberation Front facility in New Jersey was destroyed. Witnesses reported seeing a creature resembling Mewtwo battling augmented bugs. Strangely, eyewitnesses to this encounter documented Mewtwo having a feminine telepathic voice as opposed to a masculine or neutral one.

In early 2014 a massive explosion was documented in Kalos. There were a series of Mewtwo sightings in the area in the months before and after the blast, leading some to speculate that Mewtwo was responsible. The Kalosian sightings contain the majority of reports describing Mewtwo as being muscular.

The Evidence

There was a research expedition to Guyana in 1987 that ended disastrously. Part of the trip’s funding was provided by a front organization for the Rocket Clan. Following the partial collapse of the Rocket Clan in 1996 and 1997 a variety of documents pertaining to the expedition were recovered. There were several photographs of an ancient temple depicting a cat-like deity. A debriefing of the youngest survivor was also found. Rocket Clan members pretending to be police officers interviewed the girl. Few notable answers were recovered, but she did claim to have encountered a strange pokémon that wanted to be her friend.

Few members of the rival Yakuza clans or confirmed members of the Rocket Clan have been willing to testify about the gang wars of 1990. It is difficult to determine if Mewtwo held any role in those battles. Recovered internal memos from the Rocket clan refer to ‘GI1,’ potentially ‘Guren Island 1’ several times when discussing individual battles.

Sakaki Iwasaki, a high-ranking member of the Rocket Clan and former gym leader, may have used Mewtwo in a handful of gym battles in 1990. Challengers reported entering a dark room and facing a single pokémon shrouded in shadows. This pokémon was allegedly capable of telekinetic and telepathic attacks capable of one-shotting every pokémon sent out against it. The trainers report blacking out and waking up in front of the gym about an hour later with the badge in hand and their team fully healed. These accounts are all similar enough to be plausible. It is also possible that the pokémon was an exceptionally powerful alakazam. Sakaki is a known psychic and owns an alakazam. He also has a well-documented love of theatrics. League records of those battles record the gym leader as only using a single alakazam. All of these matches are recorded in league records as ‘Challenger Defeat, Badge Distributed’ with no further information provided.

Investigative reporting has uncovered financial links between a Rocket shell company and the Guren Island facility. It was known for employing or consulting with a number of high-profile geneticists and biologists. Officially the facility conducted research on treatments for pediatric cancer. A handful of papers on the subject were published by some of the facility’s scientists.

The facility was destroyed by a series of explosions and the resulting fires on June 11th, 1990. Most of the staff were inside the facility at the time of its destruction. The survey of the building was conducted by a Rocket front company and all media inquiries were rejected during the process. Contemporary reports note that the wreckage was fenced off and heavily guarded, officially to prevent members of the public from being exposed to asbestos or otherwise injuring themselves. The official report on the facility’s destruction attributed it to a gas leak that later ignited other improperly stored vats of flammable materials.

The most widely cited source for Mewtwo’s existence is the memoirs of Dr. Genjirō Fuji, the ranking scientist who survived the Guren Island facility’s destruction. On his deathbed he dictated a lengthy confession. His confession described the Guyana mission and the creation of Mewtwo, leading up to the destruction of the facility. According to Dr. Fuji, Mewtwo was capable of exerting billions of tons of psychic force, traveling at speeds of up to Mach 6, and formulating sophisticated plans within a fraction of a second. While heavily encumbered Mewtwo could telekinetically defeat a trained alakazam within one second. Dr. Fuji described his creation, perhaps rightfully, as a god. The doctor would pass hours later. The confession’s accuracy is suspect as Dr. Fuji died of brain cancer and had been experiencing confusion and cognitive decline in the months before his death.

On November 6th, 1991, a hurricane rapidly materialized and then dissipated in the Philippines. The eye stayed stationary over Simula Island, an uninhabited rocky outcropping 15 kilometers offshore of Mindanao. Declassified documents from the U.S. military describe flashes of light being witnessed in the center of the storm shortly before its dissipation. In the aftermath nine humans were found on the island. Eight had short term amnesia and could not remember how or why they went to the island. The ninth had longer term amnesia stretching back several months.

Simula Island has been sealed off from the public after the incident. Leaked photographs have shown highly sophisticated organic technology. The Filipino government’s official stance on Simula Island is that a large laboratory containing unknown technology was found after the storm. Many conspiracy theorists believe that the storm, technology, and mindwipes can all be attributed to Mewtwo.

The other leading theory is that Simula was an early testing site in The Cipher Organization’s XD001 projects to enhance and tame Lugia. The storm and mindwipes are consistent with Lugia’s documented abilities. However, the technology on Simula Island bares little to no resemblance to the technology found in Cipher Organization laboratories. The XD001 project would also not be field tested for fourteen years after the incident on Simula Island. The incident also occurred nearly a decade before Cipher captured Lugia. No records of a facility in the Philippines have been unearthed in the court proceedings against Cipher and its executives.

The next major incident involving Mewtwo was the New Jersey incident of 2013. A Plasma Liberation Front Facility was destroyed and a number of insectoid creatures were sighted and photographed in the aftermath. There are blurry photographs of something resembling Mewtwo fighting against the insectoid pokémon. While the creatures, later named ‘genesect,’ were well documented, Mewtwo’s involvement is limited to a handful of eyewitness accounts. All cameras that were pointed at the Mewtwo were batted aside at the last moment so the shot ended up blurry or were summarily destroyed. Multiple eyewitnesses report speaking to the creature for brief periods of time. One, a PLF scientist, reports having a long conversation with Mewtwo about why she deserved mercy. The scientist noted that Mewtwo expressed extremely negative opinions about biological engineering. All other scientists were executed during or after the incident. She was left alive as a warning.

There are a handful of photographs of Mewtwo from Kalos circa 2014. Allegedly Mewtwo, described by witnesses as oddly muscular, broke up a human trafficking ring. After executing all the traffickers he then freed and even comforted the victims. All cameras in the facility were destroyed and first responders found no sign of Mewtwo. There are no solid links between the Cromlec’h explosion and Mewtwo, aside from the sightings of the creature in the region around the time of the incident.

There are a variety of alleged photographs and eyewitness encounters with Mewtwo. Some were later discovered to be hoaxes. Others are suspect, such as a story about a man who, while in an altered state of mind from an illegal substance, allegedly shared a cigarette with Mewtwo and talked about the nature of memory.

The most credible photograph of Mewtwo comes from security camera footage on the rooftop of the Kogane Daily News building in Kogane City. The video was taken in September 1991, before the Mewtwo conspiracy theory was widespread. The video’s source, the paper of record for metropolitan Kogane, makes it credible. Even then the video is grainy and in black and white. Something humanoid with a large tail and a somewhat misshapen head floats into view, stares off the edge of the building for several minutes, and then disappears between frames.

In Popular Culture

The most well-known depiction of Mewtwo comes from the American film Evolution. The movie depicts Mewtwo waking up in a test tube, not being born from a live Mew. In this version Mewtwo immediately destroys Guren Island and flies to the Philippines. Multiple trainers are invited to the island so Mewtwo can evaluate whether or not humans should be allowed to exist. After deeming all of the trainers a burden to their pokémon, Mewtwo summons a storm to destroy the world. He states his intentions to use the laboratory to then clone every pokémon species that goes extinct during the storm and release them in a world without the humans who hurt him. A mew arrives and fights Mewtwo. Their battle is inconclusive. During the fight one of the trainers sacrifices his life for his pokémon, moving Mewtwo to abandon his plans and dissipate the storm. The film was released in 2011 during the height of the Plasma Liberation Front’s popularity. It was also primarily an action film, with the villain bringing up a philosophical point only to adopt the most extreme version possible and ultimately decide it is not worth it. The ideas of clone identity and human-pokémon relations are not seriously explored.

Spontaneous Generation, a Japanese novel, is more faithful to the most plausible set of facts. It depicts Mewtwo growing up under the watchful eye of his creators, only to eventually decide that he has outgrown them. He goes to the Philippines and builds a lab capable of making new creatures. He invites some of the strongest trainers in the nation to face his ‘children.’ When their pokémon are unable to defeat his creations in any metric, Mewtwo decides that naturally occurring life is imperfect as it was created by the random processes of evolution rather than the guiding hand of a brilliant creator. He then resolves to destroy all life in the Philippines, populate it with his own creations, and then set out to cleanse the rest of the world of its imperfect life. In the end his mother, here depicted as the goddess of evolution and chaos, appears and challenges him. Mewtwo is stronger and has more developed strategies, but Mew simply has too many tricks for him to overcome them all. After the end of a lengthy battle and philosophical debate, Mewtwo changes his mind and agrees to spare existing life. He ventures off to parts unknown to take care of his creations. Spontaneous Generation is known for its extensive exploration of the relationship between parent and child as well as the meaning of life in a random, godless universe.

Mewtwo vs Genesect, a 2018 film by American director Michael Bay, dramatizes the events of 2013. It is an action film primarily focused on the U.S. military battling a swarm of Genesect for the overwhelming majority of its 210-minute runtime. Mewtwo appears at the 155-minute mark. The film has been panned for its poor cinematography, bad dialogue, lack of Mewtwo, excessive runtime, and adding the U.S. military into an event in which they did not play a major role.

Hunting for Mewtwo, a History Channel series, extensively documented both the more plausible elements of Mewtwo’s story and the most fringe elements. Season One is widely regarded as an excellent summary of the evidence for Mewtwo’s existences. Seasons Two spends most of its runtime exploring the possibility that Mewtwo is a time traveling alien who built the pyramids.

Worship

If Mewtwo is capable of the feats listed by Dr. Fuji in his confession and created the storm in the Philippines, it is one of the strongest pokémon confirmed to exist. It is also far and away the strongest pokémon ever created by humans. What are we to make of an artificial pokémon more powerful than many of the gods humanity worships? Philosophers and theologians are divided.

There are a handful of religious movements that worship Mewtwo. The largest is The Church of Science, a ‘religion’ that believes all gods should be cast aside and instead scientists and their inventions should be held in the highest esteem. Invention is morally correct. It is through innovation, and not faith, that the obstacles facing humanity will be overcome. Mewtwo is not worshipped per se, but is regarded as the pinnacle of scientific creation and a herald of what is to come in The Fourth Scientific Revolution.

The Church of Life, among other established religions, has issued official statements claiming that Mewtwo does not exist. Even if it did, it could not have been responsible for the Simula Island. Even if it was, it is an incarnation of Yveltal making sick, perverted creations to spite the true creator, Xereneas. If Mewtwo’s existence and power were ever concerned, church theology is that it would be a sign of the end times.

Here it must be asked: what is the point of gods? To pray to for blessings or to ward off curses? In a strict sense Mewtwo may be able to offer humanity many blessings or bring down suffering upon us. If Mewtwo made its existence public and demanded tribute, would granting it be akin to giving offerings to a god? Does there have to be some supernatural and spiritual element to a god, or is it enough that they are an incredibly strong being humanity conducts transactions with? The questions are not yet ripe. If Mewtwo wants something from humanity it has not deigned to ask us.

For now, we must wait and see what the future of theology holds.

 

[Persephone]

Ho-Oh — Johto

“The Youngest Daughter of Creation had fully grown in The World Below. When she emerged her body was coated in ash, blood, and molten iron. All who saw her professed that she was the most terrible and beautiful of all goddesses. ‘Take me to my father,’ she said. ‘For I must speak with him.’”

-Sōzō no Rekishi

Overview

Ho-Oh, Rightful Empress of the Heavens, Purifier of Souls, Creator of the Sun, and Guardian of the The World Below, is one of the most powerful deities in Japanese state religion. As the traditional ancestor of the Emperor she is closely tied to the legitimacy of the state and concepts of politics, priesthood, and governance.

Ho-Oh’s overall popularity has been in decline since Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. The clash of gods in Hoenn only accelerated the decline. Ho-Oh is still looked upon favorably by most citizens of Japan.

Appearance

In the earliest known records and artifacts Ho-Oh is described as a male serpent with rainbow feathers.

Incarnations after 200 BCE shift to describing Ho-Oh as either a bird with rainbow feathers or a beautiful human woman wreathed in flames. In either form Ho-Oh was described as the most beautiful of goddesses.

Ho-Oh has been extensively documented by modern photography. She is a very large bird with a wingspan of nearly thirty feet. Most of her plumage is blood red and always smoldering with small fires breaking out and dying down across her body. The back of her wings is green and her tail feathers are a dark orange like leaves in autumn. Ho-oh has a long, flexible neck. The top of her head is adorned with more orange plumage. The feathers around her eyes are black and her beak is orange.

Ho-Oh is always distorting the light around her, creating rainbow patterns and partially masking her true form. It is only through piecing many photographs together that a complete picture can be created. Sometimes in the distorted light the image of a woman of apparent East Asian descent will appear. Ho-Oh is capable of speaking with or without this avatar, but she seldom does.

In Johtonian Mythology

Unlike most deities in this book, Ho-Oh has an official religious lore and text, Sōzō no Rekishi. This is maintained and occasionally edited by the emperors of Japan. Relatively few alternative myths exist. Stories not from the Sōzo no Rekishi will be noted.

In the beginning there were two beings, one male and one female. Together they created the earth, the seas, the skies, and the first life. Of all of the life they created, only a few were conceived and birthed by the first beings themselves. The exact list varies across time and space. Lugia is always on the list. Celebi, Jirachi, and Rayquazza often were as well. Palkia and Dialga were added during the Meiji Era.

The Youngest Daughter of Creation was Ho-Oh. The flames around her burned her mother badly during childbirth and she perished shortly after as a result. The Father of Creation went into The World Below to find his wife’s soul, but only found a badly burned and disfigured corpse. He fled in terror. As a result of her rejection The Mother of Creation swore to create a new breed of creatures and maladies and unleash them upon the Earth.

Young Ho-Oh took up the role of Defender of the Living and Guardian of The World Below. She used her awesome flames to destroy any who dared crawl out of The World Below. While fighting beneath the earth she noticed how her flames could melt and distort metal. The metal would harden again when it cooled. She used this knowledge to forge the first weapons and armor, and ultimately to build a series of traps and gates that could contain her mother’s creations. Ho-Oh still had to venture down to fight and repair the defenses from time to time, but she was now free to spend more time above the surface.

Upon her return she persuaded her father to attempt to make peace with her mother. She guided him down to The World Below and helped them reconcile their differences. To atone for his rejection, The Father of Creation stays in The World Below to keep his wife company.

With no one left to rule the heavens, Ho-Oh reluctantly accepted the position of Empress of the Heavens. Even as ruler of all, she still took a great deal of time to herself to invent things. Her first great invention was the sun, a source of light for the world. Her brother, Lugia, grew jealous of the praise her sister earned and made his own light, but it was not as bright as his sister’s.

Depictions of Ho-Oh, with the notable exception of Alph’s Houa, never have Ho-Oh take a husband. Various myths describe her as being fascinated by her own reflection in shiny metal and growing close to a ninetales who took the form of a human woman. With one potential exception, Ho-Oh never engages in conventional procreation. All of her children are created from fire, clay, ash, and departed souls. Her main creative partner, Jirachi, is usually depicted as female. One Hoennese folk tale describes Ho-Oh being devastated and retreating underground in grief when Jirachi departed back to the stars. There are scholars who argue for a queer reading of Ho-Oh. Her priestesses strongly reject this interpretation.

Next Ho-Oh invented her own race of beings. They did not have the sheer power of her parent’s creations, but they were clever and ambitious. Out of respect for the creator of these creatures, humans, the rest of creation agreed to serve them to make up for their physical weakness.

Finally, Ho-Oh realized that when creation died their souls had nowhere to go, for she had barricaded The World Below to prevent her mother’s creation from escaping. Ho-Oh decided to fix this mistake by reincarnating the souls of the dead. First, she tore away the memories and body with her flames. This process is longer and more painful for those who think highly of themselves at the expense of others. Then she forges a new body and puts the soul within. It is said that the noblest souls are put into human bodies, and the noblest of those are put into the body of the direct descendants of her first and most favored human.

When she was not busy governing or tinkering with her inventions, Ho-Oh loved to descend to the mortal world, perch on a tower, and watch the humans live their lives. Her favorite perch of all was located in Chōji.

Lugia had grown jealous of the attention his youngest sister earned. While she had been tasked with fighting in The World Below, he had been safeguarding the earth from evildoers. After defeating one particularly large sea dragon he began to party so furiously that a hurricane swept the land. In the resulting storm many lightning bolts struck Chōji and the wooden city burned.

Ho-Oh had been in The World Below visiting her parents and reincarnating souls and had not noticed the storm as it happened. When she returned, she saw her favorite city burned to the ground. Three pokémon had taken refuge in her temple, believing even as the flames engulfed it that Ho-Oh would notice and save them. Moved by guilt and the devotion of her followers, Ho-Oh resurrected them into godly forms.

The goddess was consumed with fury, but feared that a clash between her and her brother would destroy creation itself. She returned to heaven and faced her brother in front of the gods. As calmly as she could she handed Lugia her crown and walked away in silence. She dove down from the heavens, took the form of a bird, and flew away. She will not speak to her brother even to this day out of fear that her rage would overwhelm her. Even her sun is not kept in the same sky as his moon.

There is another version of the myth asserted by xatu, ninetales, and a few other extremely long lived pokémon. In the alternative version, a human army burned down Chōji and set about killing all of the city’s inhabitants. Soldiers set her tower ablaze with civilians in it. Ho-Oh elevated three pokémon to godhood, reincarnated the rest, and flew away. Despite many temples built to her in the intervening centuries, Ho-Oh has never once roosted in any of them. She does not want grand temples: she wants humanity to make peace with itself and the world around them.

Sometimes Ho-Oh will answer the call of a worthy human, usually of the Imperial Line. She will either appear before them to offer advice or, on occasion, provide her flames to help forge legendary weapon or armors. Weapons made by Ho-Oh herself hold mystical properties. Most are now owned by the Imperial Family and held in her shrine in Chōji.

One of Ho-Oh’s most valuable gifts are her feathers. Ho-Oh feathers can cure fatal wounds and terminal cancer when applied directly to the skin of the afflicted. Anyone who carries one with the intent to use it selfishly will be badly burned and the feather will be reduced to ash. Ho-Oh was not usually regarded as the goddess of healing, but sometimes people will pray to her when their situation is truly desperate. On occasion she rewards a pious worshipper with a feather.

The clans of Hisui have a legend about a giant bird wreathed in flames roosting on Firespit Island. She laid an egg, which later hatched into a froglike creature that dwelled in the volcano. The pokémon, Heatran, was venerated as the god of fire in the area before the conquest of the region and its renaming.

During the Meiji Era, Japanese religion was heavily altered to focus upon two near omnipotent gods: Ho-Oh and Lugia. Ho-Oh was cast as the ruler and inspirer of the Japanese people, helping them grow and flourish. Lugia protected them and would help them assert their dominance over foreign skies and waters. Ho-Oh worship increased in prominence. The goddess was also syncretized with Groudon and Heatran.

Worship

Ho-Oh was never the most worshipped deity in Japan. The Japanese state religion assigns domains to each god and major spirit. Prayers should be sent to the deity whose domain is most applicable. Ho-Oh’s domains of nobility, governance, priesthood, metallurgy, the sun, combat, beauty, and reincarnation made her very important to the Imperial family, priesthood, and samurai. To the average person she was venerated, but not often prayed to.

The main rituals for Ho-Oh occurred around the planting and harvest, where she was prayed to alongside Lugia for help in regulating the weather. Funerary pyres, where the remains of the deceased were burned, were also dedicated to Ho-Oh. Offerings would be given over the next seven days to ensure the soul’s quick reincarnation ad favorable next life.

Girls on the cusp of puberty, especially in the nobility, often had ashes smeared over their body and were prayed over by a priest so that they may gain a tiny fraction of Ho-Oh’s beauty.

A close female relative of the emperor traditionally served as the high priestess to Ho-Oh. She safeguarded the goddess’s sacred relics, brought new art and inventions into The Burning Tower, and prayed for her assistance in restoring clear, warm skies during storms and during the tail end of winter. Births of potential heirs to the throne were accompanied by festivals dedicated to Ho-Oh.

Craftsmen, smiths, and inventors also regularly provided offerings to Ho-Oh and typically worshipped her above all other gods. To this day The Yamabuki Academy of Engineering, one of the most prestigious engineering schools in the world, has a large statue of Ho-Oh and altar to her at the center of campus. Her festivals are treated as school holidays. Most factories also contain shrines to Ho-Oh and will sometimes begin shifts with prayers to her.

Temples to Ho-Oh take the form of large towers with a nearly flat top for her to roost upon. Her main temple is the Burning Tower in Chōji. The tower is believed to have been burning continuously for nearly 2,000 years. Sometimes flames will consume nearly the entire tower only to dwindle to smoldering embers in the basement. The rest of the tower will emerge charred but structurally sound. The tower is also a sacred site for Entei, Raikou, and Suicune who were reborn there.

Prayers to Ho-Oh are traditionally written down on parchment and then burned. It is said that messages burned in the Burning Tower have the greatest chance of reaching Ho-Oh.

Origins

Ho-Oh is undoubtedly real. She has been photographed many times and is usually being tracked by satellite. Humans witnessing Ho-Oh should have been able to accurately describe her. This makes it all the stranger that her depiction has varied over time.

The Alph Civilization worshipped many gods, including Houa, god of fire. Houa is depicted as a serpent with rainbow feathers wreathed in flames. The rainbow flying serpent has been documented in Anahuac, Australia, China, and several other cultures. Rayquazza, their probable inspiration, does not have rainbow feathers and rarely visits the surface. As such there are still those who maintain that a separate godlike dragon is behind Houa, Quetzlcoatl, and Nüwa.

Houa was always described in masculine terms. He was the god of fire, weapons, and death. Some of this undoubtedly inspired Ho-Oh’s early characterization as Guardian of the Underworld.

After the collapse of Alph the remaining people of Japan changed Ho-Oh’s characterization to a mostly peaceful bird, one who fought demons but ultimately reconciled her parents and backed down from a fight with her brother rather than starting a war.

The transition was gradual and accompanied by several revisions of the Sōzō no Rekishi. It also mirrored the transition of the emperor from ruler of Honshu to a spiritual figurehead of a fractured nation. Ho-Oh’s transition back into a war goddess upon the Meiji Restoration mirrors this trend.

Still, it isn’t clear how Alph regarded the definitely-real Ho-Oh as a serpent. Did Ho-Oh not come to Japan before the civilization’s collapse? Were they confused by the lights around the bird? Or was Ho-Oh, perhaps, born after the death of the original rainbow serpent. Scholars are still divided on the subject.

Today

During the Meiji Restoration Ho-Oh was rebranded as a goddess of agriculture, the protector of Japan, and the syncretized goddess of fire. She was closely tied to the emperors. When the war ended with Japan’s defeat and the limiting of the Imperial Family, Ho-Oh’s worship began to rapidly decline. Engineers still worship her and she is still often invoked during funerary rites and coming of age festivals, especially in rural areas. Her role in agricultural festivals has been limited.

The rampage of Groudon has further reduced her popularity in urban areas and Japanese communities outside the islands.

The 1986 graphic novel Dust to Dust and its prequel and sequels has led to a slight resurgence in Ho-Oh worship. The comic depicts the world’s gods reduced to human form and banished to a strange world without humans or pokémon. Ho-Oh is depicted as a shy engineer who ignores most of the other gods’ drama and works on finding ways to survive. She expresses guilt for the actions committed during her name in the Second World War and it weighs heavily upon her throughout the comic. Portions of the fanbase came to see Ho-Oh as their favorite character. She got her own prequel comic and was the protagonist of the movie of the same name. Partially in response to Dust to Dust, Neo-Pagan communities outside of Japan have adopted Ho-Oh as a peaceful goddess of engineering and fire. To what extent their rituals matches traditional Ho-Oh worship varies by community.

Ho-Oh continues to fly around the world at an average altitude of 10,000 feet above ground. She prefers to fly over continents, especially Asia. On rare occasion she will venture closer to earth to speak with someone she deems important or to distribute a feather. She rarely, if ever, answers questions about herself or other gods.

In 2004 Ho-Oh appeared in Orre and killed four employees of the Cipher Organization, leading the arrest of its CEO. She did not state her reasons for violently interfering. It is speculated she did so as retaliation for the group’s experiments upon Lugia.

Two years later on August 1st, 2006, Ho-Oh returned to the Burning Tower. She flew within ten feet of the top but did not land. After speaking briefly with some of the priestesses on site she flew away once more. Exactly what she said remains unknown.

The queer rights movement has adopted the symbol of the rainbow as a symbol for queerness. This is particularly controversial in Japan where Ho-Oh is the goddess of moral purity and the rainbow. The Japanese government asserts that Ho-Oh is either asexual or straight and the association of her symbol with “perversion” is a misdemeanor offense. Ho-Oh herself has never given a statement on the matter.

 

[Persephone]

This entry was commissioned by bronzonghittransplant on Thousand Roads.



Manaphy - Sinnoh

“It’s always the same,” The Prince said. “It’s always different. The same stories across centuries, across nations, across class divides. Everyone is the same at heart. Yet everyone brings something different. A choir singing in oblivious harmony, all insisting the others are singing the wrong song.”

-Atsuo, Ultramarine



Overview

Manaphy, Prince of the Seas, The Ambassador, Sage of the Grotto, is a deity that has historically been popular in the coastal areas bordering the Sea of Okhotsk. They are most famous for their temples and folk stories in Sinnoh, most notably the Taishi no Dōkutsu.

Manaphy is known for being a wise philosopher and sorcerer who sometimes comes to the spiritual or physical aid of those who appeal to him. He is notable for the ability to swap the bodies of anyone who comes before him.

Manaphy worship has weakened in Russia and strengthened in Japan over the last century.. The Soviet Union cracked down on the religions of the Far East. Officially, Japanese State Religion syncretized Manaphy with Lugia and Kyogre. In practice many in Sinnoh rejected the idea that peaceful Manaphy was a war god or a primal force of nature like Lugia and Kyogre. His church was mostly unaffected by the decline in religiosity in Japan following the Second World War. Both Lugia and Kyogre falling into disfavor in recent times has also made Manaphy one of the most popular sea gods in Japan.

Appearance

Manaphy’s appearance in art and literature is highly variable. Almost all stories about him agree that he is a shapeshifter prone to changing his sex and even species on a whim. While male pronouns are traditionally used for him, the official Temple of Manaphy believes that Manaphy is both male and female. The Prince of the Sea is always in flux like the water itself.

Nonetheless, a few things are mostly consistent about manaphy’s descriptions. As a pokémon he is translucent or pale blue with a large head with big eyes and a comparatively small body hanging beneath it. One or two long blue appendages variously described as hair or tentacles extend from the head. The surface of his body is said to ripple when he moves.

As a human manaphy consistently has long dark blue or black hair, mid-back length at minimum, regardless of sex. He is also almost universally described as being physically attractive, although the exact details vary by depiction. As manaphy is attributed the abilities to change shape and reader and alter minds, many worshippers believe Manaphy chooses to present himself as whatever his audience finds most desirable.

Manaphy’s most famous symbol is a translucent blue egg containing a red nucleus suspended inside. A ‘crown’ of motes of yellow light hovers above the nucleus.

In Sinnish Mythology

The clans of Hisui regarded Manaphy as a powerful sorcerer and a wise sage, but not necessarily a god. In the oldest beliefs Manaphy was the prince of the underwater kingdom of Samiya and the kingdom’s ambassador to the surface world. He is most common epithet was Manaphy Taishi, The Ambassador. The Japanese colonists preferred the epithet Manaphy Ōji, The Prince.

As an ambassador Manaphy would stay close to the coasts and greet the leaders of the clans and the Celestica. He would offer them counsel, mediate problems, and sometimes sire a child with a local human or pokémon. Manaphy’s wisdom and beauty were renowned in equal measure.

Manaphy’s philosophy centered on compassion for all things, for the circumstances of birth were mere chance. Your hated enemy or prey could have been you had the universe made a different choice. There is more than one story of Manaphy preventing a war between the clans by swapping the souls of their leaders, or swapping a particularly bigoted leader into the kind of body they most despised. This has always made Manaphy popular with the downtrodden.

Manaphy’s temples have long been seen as an inviolable sanctuary for the persecuted, including the final leaders of the independent clans of Hisui when Japanese dominion over the island became absolute. When the occupying general went to the Taishi no Dōkutsu to slay them and end the war it is said that he emerged successful, but forever changed into a figure far more sympathetic of the clans. It was widely believed at the time that Manaphy had swapped his soul with one of the clan leaders before their death. No one has attempted to perform an arrest inside the temple ever since.

One of the most popular stories involving Manaphy is that of Pasekur, the son of the Pearl Clan’s leader and presumptive heir to the clan’s leadership. He went to Manaphy and asked to experience every walk of life so he might become a wise ruler. Manaphy obliged and shifted him into a number of forms, male and female, old and young, rich and poor, and even into a pokémon. At every step of the way Manaphy took up a body beside him and they discussed their views on virtuous living and righteous rule. At the end Pasekur returned to his original body and Manaphy became his wife, having grown romantically attached during the course of the story.

Pasekur is hardly the only human Manaphy is alleged to have sired a child with. There are at least a dozen folk tales of such unions in Sinnoh and nine more in the Russian Far East. There are many more stories of Manaphy having a child with another pokémon. If Manaphy had a child with a man, he was said to leave them an egg out of which the baby would hatch. Children with a woman were born the more traditional way.

Manaphy’s children with humans were said to be powerful water, psychic, or fairy bloodliners. This could also explain the relatively high frequency of those bloodlines in Sinnoh compared to the rest of the world. It became a standard origin for the great heroes of Hisuian folklore to have been born of a union between Manaphy and a human. Manaphy’s pokémon children were said to resemble a smaller, less grandiose Manaphy with traits of the other parent mixed in.

The most common version of these stories involves Manaphy approaching their partner disguised as a traveling merchant, a sailor, or one of his own priests. He would court his chosen partner for several weeks before finally revealing his true nature and, if his partner desired it, siring a child. There is at least one story of a woman who wished to avoid the attention of the gods and rulers of the area and declined his advances. Manaphy remained in the town as a close confidant until the woman died, childless, of old age.

Worship

Manaphy’s primary temple is the Taishi no Dōkutsu in Sinnoh. The temple is built inside of a grotto that is only accessible at low tide. It contains various shrines for Manaphy as well as small residences for priests and a large, ceremonial chamber for Manaphy to live in. It is said that those who make the trek to the temple and earnestly seek Manaphy’s guidance may receive an audience, even if the supplicant does not realize they are speaking to him.

Traditional worship of Manaphy involves the recitation of daily prayers or hymns based on his teachings. Charity is another key component of this worship, although most donations should be given to organizations other than the temple. The Temple of Manaphy has a set budget each year, enough to cover upkeep of the Taishi no Dōkutsu and the smaller temples as well as the pay of its priests. Once the annual quota for the year is met the temple refuses further donations. Gifts of art are still accepted and often displayed in the temples.

Manaphy is rarely the primary god that a household worships. He is instead a secondary figure that can offer wisdom and serenity but not the sort of general purpose protection people often seek from a deity.

Historically the priests in residence at the Taishi no Dōkutsu were a man and woman of similar age. It is said that Manaphy swaps their bodies at the start of their tenure so they may fully understand both sexes when advising worshippers. This has, understandably, drawn a number of transgender priests throughout the years. Many transgender people also find the temple’s teaching that bodies are irrelevant compared to the soul to be very appealing. Historically many people who felt uncomfortable in their bodies went to the Ultramarine Coast in hopes of catching Manaphy’s attention. Whether they succeeded at catching his attention or not, they built a small but thriving community that lasted until the fall of the clans and the Meiji Era crackdown on perceived deviants.

Origins

There are stories around the world about a visitor from the sea, usually a woman, who partners with a man before having to return. Manaphy roughly fits into these narratives.

There are a few unique elements to Manaphy, however. The first is the city of Samiya. The idea of an undersea city is not restricted to the Okhotsk region. A little further to the south the Chinese believed in four grand undersea dragon courts. However, the pronunciation of Samiya both Manaphy are remarkably consistent across time and cultures. Even nomadic tribes who have had very little contact with the outside word seem to know a variant of the story using remarkably similar pronunciation. This could be explained by China radiating the beliefs out with its merchants and soldiers, but Manaphy and Samiya have never featured prominently in Chinese folklore. They were even almost entirely unknown on Honshu before the colonization of Hisui.

All of this suggests a common origin centered along the sea itself. It is possible that sailors from Hisui reached the Russian coast and exchanged ideas, but there have not been enough Hisuian goods found in the area to support the theory. Hisuian shipbuilding was also restricted to fishing vessels that operated within two to five kilometers of the coast.

The Celestica seemed to believe in Manaphy. Various seaside temples from the Celestica era have been found, including what appears to be a vase depicting a Manaphy egg and two people connected by a string of blood. Cave art depicting a woman with blue hair and two faces has been found on Mt. Tengan.

Today

Manaphy remains relatively popular in Sinnoh. His main temple, the Taishi no Dōkutsu, is still in danger. Allied bombing during the Second World War destroyed the Ocean’s Gate, a prominent sea arch near the temple. Sea level rise has threatened to render the grotto inaccessible, even at low tide.

Manaphy’s existent is widely suspected but unconfirmed. Photographic evidence of a shapeshifter is highly unlikely to materialize. Manaphy himself seems to enjoy his privacy.

The most well documented modern encounter with Manaphy occurred when a Galaxy Corporation delegation asked local priests to take them to the Taishi no Dōkutsu. There they were allegedly greeted by the god, although their camera was destroyed when their boat capsized during the return voyage. The official report from the Galaxy Corporation was that Manaphy supported the continued cooperation between the clans and corporation. The Temple’s statement said that Manaphy was displeased by the corporation’s presence in Hisui and warned them that as the clans replaced the Celestica and they sought to replace the clans, they too would be replaced. The Galaxy Corporation denied their intention to replace the clans. Eleven years later the Japanese government would claim full dominion over the lands, arrest or kill the clan leaders, sterilize the remaining adults, and send the clan children to Kanto for reeducation. The Japanese government has yet to issue a formal apology for the genocide, although the current emperor has called it “unfortunate.”

A popular children’s book in Japan depicts the water-types of Hisui guiding a member of the Galaxy Corporation to Manaphy, where they have a tea party and celebrate their friendship.

There have been a handful of popular adaptations of the legend of Pasekur made in and outside of Japan. In 2003 a controversial novel, Ultramarine, was published. The novel switches between three story arcs: a homeless trans woman wandering the streets of Kotobuki City, a pair of childhood friends traveling across Hisui in the hopes of having Manaphy swap their bodies, and a conversation between Pasekur and Manaphy about whether the world was fundamentally good or evil. In the end the trans woman becomes a prostitute to survive but is able to get on estrogen, the couple have their bodies swapped only to see a Galaxy Corporation ship arriving over the horizon, and Manaphy and Pasekur cannot come to an agreement. The novel was widely banned from schools and libraries for its profanity and scenes depicting intercourse. It nevertheless received a number of literary awards and a Hollywood adaptation is in the works. The adaptation has already proven controversial for its entirely cisgender cast.

The current head of The Temple of Manaphy, Kimura Hekima, claims to be a daughter of Manaphy. She is a water elemental with the abilities to breathe underwater and create illusions in mist. This power had never been documented before. Novel bloodlines have been known to appear before due to random mutations or the intervention of powerful pokémon. It is possible that Ms. Kimura is a daughter of Manaphy or a random mutant.

In 2004 the Japanese high court heard a case where a couple wished to switch their educational transcripts and professional licenses and have it legally recognized that they had their bodies switched by Manaphy. The Temple of Manaphy supported their claim and anecdotal evidence suggested it may have been true. The high court nonetheless ruled against the couple, writing that they did not wish to set a precedent that could have far-reaching implications over one rare and unproven incident.

A number of explorers have attempted to find Samiya. The most famous attempt was made by Aqua-Dan before their leader turned his sights to another god resting on the seafloor. The city has never been located.

 

[Persephone]

This entry was commissioned by bronzonghittransplant on Thousand Roads.



Shaymin - Sinnoh

Overview

Shaymin are an extinct species of pokémon alleged to still live in Sinnoh. The Hisuian clans described them as being the spirits of gracidea trees and the heralds of spring. Shaymin were also psychopomps that could ferry the souls of the dead to the afterlife and then bring them back for reincarnation. While shaymin were not gods, they were still treated with reverence. The largest religious festival in Hisui was dedicated to them.

Early colonists occasionally reported seeing a Shaymin, although none were ever photographed. Over time sightings decreased in frequency before coming to an almost total halt. The scientific consensus is that shaymin were a real species that went extinct due to habitat loss shortly after the colonization of Sinnoh. Sightings have occasionally been reported in the last century. Shaymin have had a long history in the folklore of Sinnoh, first as harbingers of life and death and then as a cryptid rumored to still lurk somewhere in Sinnoh. Even if they are not necessarily gods, their folklore is interesting enough to warrant inclusion in this book.

Appearance

There are two variations on shaymin’s appearance. The first is a rodent-like pokémon that resembles togedemaru. A mat of grass grows from the back instead of quills. Other depictions describe these shaymin with pine needles growing from their back instead of grass, furthering the comparisons to togedemaru. A gracidea flower grows from somewhere on the head. The fur on the underside is usually described as being white.

The second variation more closely resembles a deer than a rodent. Their legs are thin and long. A mane of red gracideas rings the neck. These descriptions alternatively feature long white ears that are used for flight or actual wings on the back. These shaymin are usually not depicted as having moss on their back, although some artists include it. Mossy legs or grass-stained paws are more common instead.

These two forms are remarkably consistent. The same general shapes and colors are used from Celestica cave art to Galaxy Team field sketches. The names of the forms varies. The Hisuians preferred ‘night and day,’ or ‘dormant and awakened,’ for the rodent and deer forms, respectively. Galaxy Team biologists referred to them as ‘land and sky’ forms instead.

In Sinnish Mythology

Shaymin were the favored children of The Dread One, ruler of the Hisuian underworld. They were the only living beings he allowed to leave his domain. Despite being cute in appearance, shaymin were reapers of the dead and could be vicious if threatened. A shaymin’s attacks were described as actively corroding everything they touched. Buildings would be consumed by vines and torn down, metal armor would rust away to nothing, and even natural defenses would fracture and crumble. The life force they stole in these attacks would be transferred into the shaymin, making them all the more vibrant.

Shaymin were said to sleep inside of gracidea trees. Some legends even claim that shaymin’s spirit infused the trees and destroying one could kill the shaymin. However, doing so would ensure the shaymin would reap not only the person who felled it but their entire family and potentially their entire clan. The only way to halt the spread of the sin was to kill and bury the offender and his direct ancestors and descendants. A gracidea seed would be planted in the graveyard, fertilized by those who offended the shaymin. If the felling occurred unintentionally only the offender would need to be killed and buried. This is the only known clan ritual involving human sacrifice.

On warm, sunny days the shaymin would grow wings and play. Witnessing them playing was said to be a sign of good fortune so long as the shaymin did not notice you in turn. Drawing the attention of a shaymin was an omen of impending death. Offerings to the shaymin were not presented directly. Instead, they were left in Soonoo Flower Field at night when the shaymin were sleeping. The dormant form was what shaymin used in poor weather or when they were still resting after absorbing a soul.

At the end of the autumn, shaymin would gorge themselves on souls, especially those of plants. After they had consumed all they could they would return to the underworld to deposit the souls and greet their father. In the spring they would return with cleansed souls to be reincarnated, leading to a surge of life. Shaymin were feared, but their return was met with celebration as it meant that those who were lost had returned and the earth was about to become more hospitable to the hunter-gatherers of Hisui. Dying in winter, with the shaymin absent, was said to doom a soul to wandering the earth forever as a lingering ghost. Their return also meant that those who died were not lost to the cycle of rebirth.

Having a shaymin settle near a village in the early spring was seen as an omen of fertility. Conceiving a child near a newly returned shaymin was said to ensure success, as the newly returned soul needed a body to reincarnate into. Getting too close, however, could still risk the shaymin’s wrath.

Origins

Shaymin date back to the earliest Celestica art. Most of the information about the Celestica religion has been lost. What evidence we do have suggests that the Celestica heavily associated shaymin with the most ancient of gods, Arceus, Sinnoh, and Giratina. Shaymin depicted between humans and the high gods or shaymin performing rituals are common motifs. Shaymin were also frequently drawn over doorways leading into holy sites. It is believed that shaymin were threshold guardians that linked together the mortal world with the world of the gods. Very little in the way of actual mythology exists. Almost no evidence of Celestica settlement has been found in the far northeastern reaches of Sinnoh or in the Sonoo Flower Fields. These may have been sacred places that no one dared to enter.

The clans were also reluctant to settle in the areas. The odd priest would live there. Common people, and even clan leaders, rarely ventured out. They were considered among the holiest sites in Hisui alongside the peak of Mt. Tengan, Returning Cave, the Temples of Mind, and the Taishi no Dōkutsu.

The early Galaxy Team colonists occasionally reported encountering shaymin of both forms. They theorized that sky shaymin was the evolution of land shaymin, although the clans insisted that an individual shaymin could move freely between the two. They were documented as being common north of Jubilife in the Sonoo Flower Fields and along the northern reaches of Ultramarine Sound. Explorers constantly lamented the shaymin’s shyness as they would flee or hide the moment a camera appeared. One claimed to have captured a photograph only for the shaymin not to appear when the film was developed. Shaymin mostly avoided the colonists. As the Sonoo area was turned into farmland they reportedly abandoned the site altogether. The last credible sighting of shaymin was in 1889.

Worship

In the days of the Celestica and the clans, dedicated priests went to live with the shaymin. They resided alone in makeshift shelters and did their best not to have any permanent impacts on the environments. Shaymin’s priests tended to be highly eccentric hermits and mystics who claimed to hear the souls of the dead and speak with Sinnoh, Arceus, and Giratina. Even other priests gave the followers of shaymin a wide berth when they entered their settlements. Giratina had no priests. Religious matters related to the dead were handled by shaymin’s church. Every winter the priests would return to the clans and perform a ritual honoring that year’s dead. At the end of the winter the priests would perform an exorcism to help the winter dead move on. They would then gather offerings from the clans and bring them back to the meadow to present to the shaymin. Clan leaders were buried in the Sonoo Flower Fields so their bodies would fertilize the flowers and provide food to the shaymin.

The winter exorcism and gathering of offerings were modified by the Japanese colonists into the modern Gracidea Festival. The festival consists of two phases. The first is an evening festival consisting of speeches from government and religious officials, plays reenacting scenes from Japanese mythology, and a nighttime procession honoring the year’s dead. The next morning a street festival is held. Brightly colored pastries are commonly eaten, gracidea crowns are worn, and people are expected to express thanks to those they are grateful for. This is both a celebration of family and of young love, as teenagers and young adults will often use the festival to express their feelings towards a current or prospective partner.

The Gracidea Festival has become popular among the Japanese diaspora, as well as in areas containing a large number of Japanese people. In these areas the religious implications and the evening portion of the ceremony are sometimes omitted in favor of a more jubilant, secular festival. This version has become popular among all ethnicities in Alola and California, although people of Japanese descent usually still observe some variation of the evening rituals.

Shaymin’s last priest along the Ultramarine Sound died in 1905. The last priest in Sonoo died in 1926. Most Hisuian priests were persecuted by the Japanese government. The priests of shaymin were mostly left alone. What threat did a priest pose when everyone could see their gods were dead and gone? The clans did not replace the final priests due to a weakening of their religious and political power and the lack of shaymin to appease.

Today

Following the collapse of formal shaymin worship in 1926 and the rise in popularity of the Gracidea Festival throughout Japan, interest in the extinct species began to increase. Over the decades there have been many reported sightings of shaymin, including at least one blurry photograph. In 1934 the military governor of Sinnoh reported seeing a group of sky shaymin in the place now known as Flower Paradise. The emperor quickly declared it a national park. The land is still protected and entry is heavily restricted. The governor would later admit they made up the shaymin sighting to convince the government to establish a park there. Cryptozoologists and botanists still make pilgrimages to Sonoo and Flower Paradise in hopes of seeing a shaymin. Even if they do not glimpse a shaymin, they will still see some of the prettiest wildflowers in the world.

Researchers have attempted to replicate shaymin’s legendary decay attacks with ghost-types. They have had some success in having ghost types attack the concept of armor rather than a physical object. This actually led to the discovery of the offensive applications of the move curse. These researchers also made the first TMs for spite and perish song, further increasing their popularity. Researchers of grass-types have yet to have the same success. Frenzy plant can collapse some structures by rapidly burrowing into them, but it cannot produce the sort of conceptual decay that shaymin could allegedly cause. Whether shaymin were actually capable of crumbling walls, rotting wood, corroding armor, and shattering bone plates with a single attack remains disputed. It is a common motif in their folklore. However, this could simply be a metaphor for their role as a psychopomp. The colonists never documented these effects, but they also almost never saw shaymin fight. They were also unable to hold a captive specimen. Pokéballs failed to capture them. This was a common problem for powerful grass-types at the time and one that would not be easily solved until the popularization of metal and plastic pokéballs. These only became common after shaymin were already extinct.

Shaymin have become a popular symbol and plants in Asia. Multiple grass gyms have one as a mascot. Garden statues of shaymin are also popular, especially around gracidea trees. Gracidea trees have also become popular decorations in graveyards and other memorials due to their lingering connection to the psychopomps of Hisui.

In 2017 researchers at Kurogane University announced that they had uncovered multiple fossilized skeletons similar to togedemaru during a dig near Sonoo. They plan to attempt revival of the species, with a target dates of 2023 for the first partial revival and 2028 for the first fully organic specimen. The project has proven controversial, both for the usual reasons fossil revivals are controversial and because some members of the public insist that shaymin are not actually extinct. If shaymin are still around introducing genes from surrogates and populations long-gone could functionally end the species as it exists today.

 

[Persephone]

Miraidon - Paldea

And I saw the Lord of the Dead Earth floating above the barren ground. “What must we do to stop this?” I asked.

When the Iron Serpent turned and beheld me I was transfixed in sadness. “Can you outrun the land? Can the fish outswim the sea? The birds outfly the heavens? No. No more can you leave time.”

-Iter Aevum

Overview

Miraidon, The Iron Serpent, Automaton King, The End of All, was an ancient deity sporadically worshipped in the Paldean Empire. They were supposedly encountered in the Gran Caldera of Paldea during ritual pilgrimages. He and his brother, Koraidon, were the primary gods of the early empire, before being supplanted by The Levantine God in its later years. The details of both faiths were mostly lost to history with the rise of the Kalosian Empire and the Church of Life.

Books about the Caldera faith made their way to libraries in India and China, and a few eventually made their way back to Europe. Renaissance art sometimes depicted Miraidon or Koraidon. A handful of stories featuring the dragons would enter into the pop culture before gradually falling out of favor. Their popularity was revived once more following a nineteenth century expedition that purported to see Miraidon in the Gran Caldera.

Miraidon lies somewhere between the realm of a god and a cryptid. He has no active church, although he once did, and his existence is disputed. Whether he truly is a forgotten god, a sighting of Rayquaza, an extraordinarily rare and powerful pokémon, or just a hallucination given life by the public’s imagination may never be known.

Appearance

Miraidon was described in antiquity as a floating dragon. Iter Aevum, the main surviving text on Miraidon, describes him as having ‘royal’ scales, which likely meant purple, and being about ten feet in length. On his neck was a translucent pouch with a storm cloud inside. Lightning flowed from his head and body, striking anything that came close. His claws and tail were metallic. His eyes were like a sheet of metal with irises made of glowing ink. The irises appeared to be move around like ink flowing on a page or oil moving on top of water, forming new patterns as the creature emoted. His body apparently bore some resemblance to cyclizar.

Most depictions of Miraidon are based off of that in the Iter Aevum. In more rural areas the drawings that still remain, mostly on account of being drawn on cave walls too deep beneath the surface for priests of Xerneas to find them, vary a little more. Some are yellow and appear to be over one hundred feet long. Others walk on the ground. This is to be expected: Miraidon allegedly never left the Gran Caldera, and in rural areas where literacy was low the official accounts were bound to become distorted.

Renaissance art depictions, and most subsequent drawings, were heavily based on the Iter Aevum description.

In Paldean Mythology

The Gran Caldera of Paldea is constantly mired in storm clouds and only accessible through a handful of tunnels and narrow passes. In pre-imperial times it was regarded as either a cursed or holy place and avoided.

The Paldean emperors decided to send exploratory teams inside to see what was there. Different teams recorded drastically different visions of the local wildlife, their rulers, and even the lay of the land. Some reported that it was filled with monstrous creatures that resembled normal pokémon, just larger and more vicious. Their leader was Koraidon, The Winged King. Sometimes explorers would encounter a world that seemed to be made of automatons resembling normal pokémon. Their leader was Miraidon, The Iron Serpent.

Over time the legends were codified and a proper religious framework developed around them. At the center of Paldea was a portal to another world, the world of gods, spirits, and monsters. That world was constantly at war between the Winged King’s beasts and the Iron Serpent’s automatons. Time also moved differently so that every year outside could be centuries on the inside. Every time explorers entered the area under the Caldera the battle lines could have changed so that another faction ruled.

Neither dragon was viewed as good or evil. They were simply forces beyond human understanding or control. Both were sacrificed to in order to avoid their wrath as much as to court their blessings.

The main text on Miraidon, Iter Aevum, is the account of a priest who entered into the Gran Caldera and had a series of increasingly strange visions, culminating in seeing Miraidon and the end of the world.

Miraidon, in this account, comes from a world where humans cut down the forests, poisoned the waters, and made the land burn like a volcanic landscape. The remaining pokémon banded together to save the natural world from collapse at human hands. In retaliation the humans deployed their strongest spells and annihilated almost all of the world’s pokémon. Miraidon then called down a lightning storm that lasted seventy days and only ended when everything on the planet was dead. Miraidon then rebuilt the pokémon in the form of automatons.

The unnamed author of Iter Aevum believed that the Gran Caldera was a vast world where everything that had, is, could, and will occur was happening simultaneously. Time and causality had no meaning. The universe ebbed and flowed like the sea.

Koraidon rose from nothing and fell. Humans rose and fell. Eventually Miraidon, too, would fall and leave behind a barren earth. Koraidon and Miraidon ruled at the high and low tides of time, the ends of the universe. Whichever way time flowed, one would be the beginning of the world and the other it’s end.

Scholars are divided on what the meaning of the Iter Aevum means. It may have been a criticism of imperial ambition and a call for a more naturalistic lifestyle. The purple scales and iron hide of Miraidon may have been a metaphor for the emperors with their purple capes and steel armor. However, Miraidon is not the destroyer of the pokémon in the story. Some scholars have argued that Iter Aevum is fundamentally a conservative tale praising the need of a strong emperor to keep the masses in check, enforce divine law and prevent the world from coming to ruin. His war with Miraidon was really about the ongoing fight with nomadic tribes that relied on their raw strength and bonds with local pokémon to fight the Paldeans superior tactics and technology.

The book may have simply been the visions of a man losing his sanity in a place that was hostile to human life. Later explorers would describe similar experiences of creeping madness.

From 1500 CE to 1650 CE Miraidon featured in a number of chivalric romances. In these accounts he was simply a strange and powerful dragon guarding the realm of the fairies under the Gran Caldera. Knights wishing to gain the favor of the fairy courts or even take one as a wife would have to defeat the iron dragon. This made a measure of sense as a dragon made of cold iron could realistically oppress an entire kingdom of fairies and would be a worthy foe for a legendary hero. In most versions of the tale the dragon was insurmountable by strength alone and required trickery to down. The victorious knight would pretend to surrender and give Miraidon an offering of food. The food was either poisoned or contained a sharp spike that killed the dragon when eaten.

Worship

Both dragons were regularly sacrificed to through offerings of livestock and precious gems. Koraidon’s offerings were metal and were collected by the empire from across the land to be taken to the Gran Caldera. There history of emperors skimming from these offerings as old as the offerings themselves.

It was believed that savage Koraidon could bring strength in the hunt and war while clever Miraidon could help smiths and mages. Miraidon, because of his domains and coloration, became associated with the wealthy and the nobility. Koraidon was associated with the commoners and military. The choice of red or blue robes became political in the Imperial Court, as populists and generals would set themselves apart from the old, often corrupt noble families through their attire. On at least three occasions slave revolts or popular uprisings ended in the Temple of Miraidon being looted or burned.

The Temple of Miraidon was destroyed for the final time in 214 AD when a devout follower of the Levantine God ascended to the throne and ordered all remaining pagan structures destroyed. A new temple dedicated to the Levantine God was erected on the site. It, too, would be destroyed when the Kalosians arrived and destroyed all monuments that offended their faith.

While many of the grand temples of the day were made of marble, The Temple of Miraidon was made of gilded concrete. The largest building in the complex was filled with fountains and eternally burning torches. The engineering methods used for both have been lost to time. This was the public temple where nobility came to pay their respects to the god. Commoners were usually banned from the temple under the belief that only Miraidon’s chosen could enter his sanctum.

At the back of the site were more functional structures, a hearth and forge. The empire’s greatest mages, mathematicians, and smiths lived and worked at the site to create new spells, inventions, and weapons. They had a second gate so that they would never be seen by the nobility. Practitioners of the arts sacred to Miraidon would often offer their own offerings of wine, coal, or food directly into the flames of hearths or forges.

Origins

The Gran Caldera has long been a source of mystery. It is extremely difficult to access and many expeditions into it never return. Those that do return are often insane. It should not be surprising that legends about the caldera would take hold.

Depictions of Miraidon are somewhat consistent, but this is not proof of their existence. Explorers would be aware of the reports of those who came before them. In the throes of insanity they may have hallucinated about what they expected to see. Indeed, almost all of those who claimed to have met Miraidon emphasized they did so in visions and not face-to-face.

Some scholars have suggested that Miraidon was inspired by Rayquaza. The Sky Dragon is often associated with weather and is a serpentine, flying creature. Miraidon’s original description as having ‘royal’ scales could have referred more to Rayquaza’s presence than their color. Several ancient civilizations regarded Rayquaza as a sky god at the heart of their pantheon. The only particularly unusual attributes that separate Miraidon from Rayquaza are the size and description of the eyes. Rayquaza is far larger than Miraidon has been described as. They also possess fairly normal eyes. These discrepancies could still be attributed to a hallucinating writer. Perhaps the first explorer’s ‘vision’ was inspired by Rayquaza and later descriptions were inspired by the ones who came before, each slightly embellishing or altering the story until a distinct creature emerged.

Some theorists have speculated that Miraidon is from another dimension. Some places that were held in ancient myths to be gateways to other worlds have since been discovered to contain portals to Ultra Space. The Lake of the Sunne and Altar of the Moone are sacred places in Alola where the dimensional veil is particularly thin. The strange pokémon sometimes described could be Ultra Beasts. If so they would be far more similar to terrestrial life than most ultra beasts are, simply being larger or mechanical versions of existing pokémon.

Today

In 1870 a government-sponsored expedition entered the Gran Caldera for the first time in centuries. The Church of Life had long forbidden entry as it was a potential resting place of Yveltal, or at least a place warped by her. More cynical historians have suggested that Church leadership was aware of the legends of Koraidon and Miraidon and did not want to risk explorers bringing back their own tales of other gods.

The weakening of the Church’s power and the closure of all other colonial frontiers led to a change in policy. The Paldeans hoped to discover new worlds to conquer, or at least resources to harvest, in order to facilitate a new golden age. Instead the research team came back describing a misty hollow filled with aggressive mineral pokémon that resembled extant species. One explorer even drew a sketch of Miraidon and a fragmented account of a conversation, although he could not remember doing so the next day.

The Violet Book, as the expedition’s preliminarily report came to be known, became a best seller and helped inspire the science fiction of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. The Paldean government was disappointed there were no human inhabitants or apparent mineral wealth to be found. Whatever was in the caldera was guarded by exceptionally strong pokémon. Formal expeditions were discontinued, although a number of explorers would attempt to enter themselves. They usually did not return.

The Gran Caldera remains a popular subject among conspiracy theorists, cryptid hunters, and tabloid writers. The rampant, and often entirely unfounded, speculation has intensified following a series of preliminary investigations into the site in 2002 by the Naranja School for Girls and Uva School For Boys that led to the discovery of terrastalization. However, mounting deaths and mental breakdowns among the researchers led to the discontinuation of the exploratory missions in 2005.

Whether Miraidon truly exists remains unknown. The Naranja-Uva explorers never mentioned seeing either Koraidon or Miraidon, just strong and unfamiliar organic, spectral and mineral pokémon. No living specimens were ever retrieved.

 

[Persephone]

Celebi – Johto
Elle, em, ey, oh.
—Celebi, 988 A.D.

Overview

Celebi, Voice of the Forest, Fatemaker, Oracle of Ubame, is a goddess of fertility, forests, seasons, time, and fate popular in the Ubame region of Johto. She is the primary goddess of the region and a relatively popular goddess throughout Johto, although she was more or less unknown outside of it.

Celebi is notable for her outsized role in Johtonian philosophy. She is the Fatemaker, capable of traversing time like humans do space, altering or observing events as she sees fit. There has been a centuries-long debate among Johtonian theologists as to whether or not there is a point to praying to Celebi for relief or blessings, as any intervention she is inclined to make would have already happened. Should, instead, the comfortable pray that their comforts are not taken away? Is there any justice in a goddess who can punish people for transgressions or reward them for actions that subsequently are made to have never happened at all?

The average worshipper’s views on Celebi mostly avoid this complexity. People make offerings to her or go on pilgrimages to her shrine if they value her domains or seek her counsel. She, in turn, will act as she pleases. Celebi is known for her fickle nature and odd sense of humor, with some of her jokes only making sense decades or even centuries after the fact.

In the 19th Century, Celebi made the jump from Johtonian theology and philosophy to European science fiction. As the concept of time travel became more popular in literature, interest in Celebi naturally increased.

Appearance

Celebi is usually depicted as a small winged humanoid with a proportionally large head, green skin and hair, two green antennae, large blue eyes, and gossamer wings. She is most commonly described as being between one and two feet tall. On occasion she has been described as possessing purple skin and hair instead of green. This Celebi has supposedly claimed to be an entirely different entity than the green Celebi, although they both share the name Celebi. It is unclear whether or not this is a joke.

Different artists vary in how humanoid they depict Celebi. In the Alph era Celebi was drawn as almost entirely inhuman, having more resemblance to a beedrill than a human woman. These early depictions were also far more likely to depict Celebi as being red or purple. In the Enju Era Celebi worship reached its peak. The goddess was depicted as being almost entirely humanoid, just with faintly green skin, large wings, and a somewhat above average stature. Modern accounts typically land in the middle, typically describing Celebi as a fairy that somewhere between a plant, insect, and person.

In Johtonian Mythology

Most Celebi stories center on her role as the Oracle of Ubame. In this capacity Celebi is said to have frequently appeared before her worshippers to listen to their pleas and provide assistance of variable quality. She was always noted to have a bizarre sense of humor and a certain detachment from humanity. When the last king of Alph appeared before Celebi to offer advice on saving the kingdom, all the goddess would tell him is that the ruins he left behind would be a tourist attraction centuries in the future. She once gave the solemn Prophecy of the Bastard King. Shoguns and emperors fought a war over it that lasted forty years, ended several polities, and left the land in the throes of famine. Centuries later the prophecy would be revealed to be the plot summary of a popular American television series. The showrunners had been entirely unaware of the prophecy they were fulfilling. In the seventh century she made a series of statements about someone with a ‘galaxy brain.’ It was believed this prophecy had been fulfilled by the Galaxy Corporation until the term became popular Galarian internet slang. It remains unclear who she was talking about.

Celebi is also known for her unusual anachronistic gifts to her worshippers, including providing one hero with what was probably a six-shot revolver. The smithing technology of the time was unable to produce more bullets and after the ammunition was exhausted her gift was rendered useless. She is also believed to have provided ancient priests and warriors with a motorcycle and a laptop, both of which were also useless once they ran out of fuel and charge. None of her gifts, no matter how futuristic, have ever inspired meaningful technological progress. These gifts have also led to a theory in astrobiology, The Celebi Gifts conjecture, that we have not been approached by benevolent extraterrestrial civilizations because there is nothing they could give us from their current technology that we could support with our current scientific knowledge and supply chains.

Celebi has made it clear to multiple supplicants that she does not care much for humanity. She sees herself primarily as a goddess of forests and the broader ecosystem. Humans tend to destroy the things she actually cares about. This has not stopped humans from trying to earn her favor, or at least avoid her wrath. On occasion she obliges. Once every few decades she is even unambiguously helpful. Her priests have noted that she is sympathetic to the congenitally sick, gardeners, hermits, scholars, and storytellers. She is said to be particularly fond of comedians. In one imperial-era story she offered immortality to anyone who could make her laugh. One court jester succeeded with a joke that has been lost to history. Celebi kept her word. It is said that the man lived for centuries without aging before disappearing after the fall of the empire.

The association between her time travel and knowledge of the future and association with the forest naturally led to Celebi being regarded as a goddess of seasons and agriculture. In Alph and Old Enju it was believed that Celebi personally moved time with her flight, progressing the world through eras of decay and renewal. It was said that at the end of the universe Celebi would die and sprout anew to usher in a new cycle. This was long believed to have been revealed by Celebi herself. In 1922 she allegedly told a state-sponsored priest of Ho-Oh that she did not have the power to move time, only move through it. This was part of the justification used to remove many of Celebi’s festivals from the official imperial calendar and dramatically scale back her priesthood, which had long been based around rebellious Ubame. Many of her worshippers doubt the validity of this revelation, although Celebi herself has never denied it, with the possible exception of the first revelation thousands of years ago.

Celebi has also given conflicting answers as to how much control she has over the timeline. She has given different answers to different philosophers, and for a time one of the most heated debates in theology regarded the influence of Celebi over time and its philosophical ramifications. One scholar was told that Celebi had absolute control over the timeline and had already changed everything to the state that maximized happiness for all life over the run of the universe. She would not change anything because that would only introduce more suffering to the world. A king was told that she could alter time on a whim, changing events so that empires never existed and great men were never born. Sometimes she let one person remember everything. They would then have to keep quiet about the upheaval of their world lest they be seen as a lunatic. A priest was told that there were as many branches of time as there were stories and that all were equally true. She had already made the choices that led to the past, but she could be persuaded to change the future. In 1821 she allegedly told a worshipper that she intentionally gave conflicting accounts because she found the resulting theological debates to be hilarious, and that she hadn’t even told any of them the right answer.

Celebi has occasionally gifted the power of foresight to her followers, usually at a great cost or with heavy limitations. One oracle gained powerful precognition at the cost of her language abilities, making her unable to understand others or communicate with them beyond simple pictograms and art. The shogun Masaru was granted precognition for half of a year. Upon losing the ability he went mad and tried to burn down Sprout Tower in vengeance. Celebi threatened to alter the timeline so that humanity never figured out how to harness fire. The shogun was undeterred and his guards killed him before Celebi made good on her threat.

As a goddess of time Celebi has demonstrated the ability to rewind mental, physical, and spiritual afflictions. Credible sources have claimed she fixed the children of Ho-Oh when they were corrupted into shadow pokémon. One of her most popular legends is the story of Asagao, a child born with a degenerative disease who pled to Celebi for a longer lifespan. All the goddess could do was rewind her illness, making her healthier for a time. The girl continued to sicken, going back to Celebi every few years to repeat the process. Celebi agreed to restore her health and youth indefinitely as long as she never ate from the of a cheri tree. She wandered the earth for centuries, never progressing past childhood, before returning to Ubame for the final time. Asagao lamented to Celebi that the world had lost its wonder, that humans never seemed to change, only play out the same stories on grander scales, and that there were only so many forests, only so many waterfalls, only so many mountains she could see before they lost their grandeur. She had eaten every fruit so many times that the flavor ceased to mean anything. She had been a queen and a pauper, a saint and a murderess, a soldier, a priest, a scholar, a merchant, a philosopher, and a storyteller. She had been everything, done everything, experienced everything there was. She was lonely, tired of watching the people she loved die over and over again, and she wanted her monotonous existence to stop. Celebi went silent for a long time before apologizing to the woman for inflicting this upon her. That she knew this would happen and healed her anyway, just because she wanted someone to finally understand her own existence. Asagao experienced the flavor of a fruit that was entirely new to her before passing on. Celebi remains.

Worship

There are two major temples devoted to Celebi in Japan and a third in Orre. Each have their own order of priests. Her main temple is the Ubame Shrine, deep in the heart of the forest she calls home. The shrine is open to the public but somewhat difficult to access, limiting the number of pilgrims who visit. Pilgrims are expected to either pass by in silence or song, respecting the goddess or trying to entertain her. Offerings of metal or stone are traditionally buried near her offer or thrown into the pond behind it. Offerings of food are usually given to nearby pokémon, with some left in a small box on the alter. Drawings or writings on paper are typically given to a priest to display on the perimeter fence. The alter itself is several centuries old and fairly modest, only being a two-story wooden structure. Her priests say that Celebi has repeatedly declined offers to expand it.

Her more prominent alter in Japan is Madatsubomi Tower in Kikyo City. The tower is built around a colossal bellsprout whose roots stretch beneath most of the modern city. The bellsprout is said to have been a friend of Asagao offered immortality by Celebi. The grass-type continues to grow taller and the tower is expanded around it as it grows. The center of the tower lacks a roof so that light and water can reach the plant inside. The rest is a wooden and brick structure containing over two hundred statues, murals, and other works of art that have been donated to the goddess over the years. The priests at Madatsubomi are known for their permissive attitude towards battling in certain areas of the tower. They believe it is their duty to help the next generation of warriors grow. These fights take place in rooms with brick walls and floors and strong attacks are prohibited.

Celebi’s third most prominent temple is located in Agate Village in Orre. Celebi is said to have made many appearances around the mission in the 18th Century. It is said that she healed the sick, gave youth to the elderly, and allowed plants to flourish in the middle of the desert. In exchange she asked the residents to maintain her story and shrine as they would be important in years to come. This paid off in the 21st Century when she assisted in restoring the region’s shadow pokémon. Her priesthood remains active in case the shrine will still be needed in the future.

Celebi’s main festivals are the Festival of the Bright Lotus in the spring and the Festival of Seasons in the autumn. The Festival of the Bright Lotus is marked by the nobles of the region providing offerings to Celebi. During the winter they commission artists to come up with visual art and poetry written in calligraphy to present to the goddess. At the end of winter the nobles and a few performers make a voyage to Ubame or Madatsubomi to present the artwork and calligraphy to Celebi and read poems aloud before departing. It is believed that particularly fine artwork will bribe Celebi into ending the winter sooner than she otherwise would have. The peasants typically celebrated when the first edible plants sprouted in the forest by having a small feast with soups and salads made from the plants. Festivals would be held in the town square complete with poetry readings and plays.

The Festival of Seasons is held in the autumn to express gratitude to Celebi. It is characterized by large feasts, canning competitions, and parades. The parade ends at the local shrine to Celebi where offerings of fruit would be presented to the goddess. Any forest pokémon not scared away by the parade would be allowed to eat the offerings.

The Festival of the Bright Lotus has largely been replaced by the Gracidea Festival. It is still celebrated in parts of Johto, but it was intentionally suppressed by the Imperial government to weaken the Ubame region politically. If Celebi cared she made no grand statement saying so. Her priesthood was largely controlled by the imperial government at the time and revelations supposedly made to her priests must be viewed with some skepticism.

The Festival of Seasons remains popular in Johto and was never as heavily restricted. There were attempts to link it to Ho-Oh in the Meiji Era, but the public never really embraced the effort. Ho-Oh was always tied more closely to craftsmen and urban areas than farmers and the countryside. Attempting to supplant Celebi with Ho-Oh were seen as being politically charged and a symbol of the central government’s tyranny. The imperial government found that the syncretization inflamed resistant rather than stifling it and the attempt was gradually abandoned. As a mostly secular harvest festival the Festival of Seasons was useful for showcasing the country’s abundance and keeping the masses entertained.

Origins

Different scriptures describe different origins for Celebi. It is possible that she did say all of them herself. The goddess has never cared particularly much about consistency, especially when discussing herself. In the most popular account she was a child of Ho-Oh and Lugia destined to inherit rulership of the heavens. She avoids this prophecy by dying and resetting the universe whenever it would be fulfilled. In another account she sprouted from the seeds of the first plant and will wither and die with the last. She is the collective will of the flora manifested into a corporeal form. Finally, Celebi has claimed that she simply became aware at the end of the universe and has spent the rest of her life moving forwards and backwards, trying to figure out where she came from and why time came to an end. She stated that she still does not know the answer to either question.

Celebi is first mentioned in hieroglyphs and artwork from the 4th Century BC. Her popularity rose and fell with Alph. In the centuries between the fall of Alph and rise of the Enju Shogunate she was rarely depicted in art or mentioned in surviving records outside of the Ubame region. When she was referenced it was often as the goddess of an ancient cult based in the forest. Most of Celebi’s scriptures and her oracles come from the Enju era as she made many appearances at her shrines and held dozens of recorded dialogues with the priests, politicians, and philosophers of the era. When the shogunate collapsed and war raged across the land, the goddess largely disappeared. Decades would pass between sightings of her.

The consistency of Celebi’s depictions across time and space as well as the sheer number of alleged encounters suggests that she is almost certainly real. She has appeared to crowds of up to thirty people at a time in the modern era, although no recordings exist. People who attempted to record her have reported that their phone disappeared and the entire model seems to have been wiped from the timeline. Whether this is an elaborate prank or a sign of divine power is impossible to tell without extensive psychic testing. None of the alleged witnesses have consented to this.

Today

H.G. Wells allegedly met Celebi on a trip to Ubame. She reportedly spent most of the conversation talking about an artist who had not yet been born who adapted his work into a medium that did not yet exist and concluded by saying that he would die on March 24, 1905. Wells did not die on this date — Jules Verne did. In hindsight it appears as if Celebi was discussing Orson Welles’ infamous radio play adaptation of the novel.

Over the following decades Celebi was a recurring character in science fiction literature, often facilitating time travel plots or showing up as a deux ex machina to resolve them. One of her most well-known depiction in the west was in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, a book where a war veteran hallucinates an encounter with the goddess during a psychotic break. She takes him through time, slowly convincing him that nothing can be changed and there is no point in trying. He returns to earth to preach her gospel before being assassinated, something he does nothing to stop as there would be no point. The book is in part a satire of those who claim it is impossible to stop wars or other tragedies and that no single person could make a difference.

Another famous depiction is in Victor Raymond’s And Babel Fell, a postmodernist work heavily featuring Celebi. The story’s setting and the characters in it randomly and repeatedly change throughout the novel, apparently through Celebi’s tinkering. They are unable to remember their past lives and spend the novel stumbling through new configurations, often acting in ways entirely contrary to their past selves because of a small change in their past. The point of the novel is that we are all creatures of circumstance. The only thing separating us from our most hated enemies is our body, the world around us, and the largely random events that occur as a result of their interplay.

Celebi remains popular in Johto. She was never particularly popular in the rest of Japan but what little worship she had was heavily suppressed over the last two centuries. She is now more well known as a literary character than a goddess with her own worshippers and a religious tradition stretching back over two thousand years. Her interventions in Orre have given her a small following in the United States, although the Church of Life’s dominance in Orre and the surrounding regions have prevented the cult from growing too large. Some young ex-members have embraced Celebi worship as a form of rebellion. Their religious traditions are often eclectic and have little resemblance to those practiced in Johto.

 

[Persephone]

This entry was commissioned by @bronzonghittransplant

Heavily, heavily inspired by Seven After by @kintsugi


Kyurem (Unova)

“If you seek kindness, if you seek warmth, then find Truth and her Hero.

If you seek justice, if you seek power, then find Ideals and his Hero.

There is nothing here but memory and oblivion. If you seek these, enter.”

-Engraved on the gates of Full Court

Overview

Kyurem, The Holy Corpse, The Null Dragon, The Wise One, rested for centuries at the bottom of the Giant Chasm. They emerged in 2012 in an apparent attempt to end the world before being defeated and forced to rest. Now they rest again in their old temple. Kyurem’s rampage was not nearly as destructive as that of Kyogre and Groudon just weeks prior. It still was part of a marked shift in theology worldwide. Modern religion often emphasized the inherent goodness of the gods. If their power was mentioned at all it was to assure worshippers that their prayers could be answered. Kyurem answered one man’s prayers and killed thousands. The gods of Hoenn left hundreds of thousands dead in their wake.

After the invention of electricity, modern medicine, and the mass-produced pokéball, humanity had nothing to fear but themselves. With the conclusion of the Cold War most people stopped fearing even that. In the 2010s humans had to contend once more with the reality that there were beings with both the power to wipe countries off the map in a matter of days and the inclination to do so. In the decade since there have been a number of reactions to this. Some have drifted away from polytheistic faiths towards the Church of Life or other general purpose gods, suddenly afraid of what was once a source of comfort and inspiration. Others have worshipped the local gods with more fervor than before in an attempt to gain their favor, or at least stave off their wrath. Governments have brought back or increased state-sponsored offerings to local gods in public while plotting ways to defeat or contain them in private.

Kyurem has become the subject of considerable theological and public policy debate in recent years. How does a society react when one of their gods tries to destroy them? Can beings that powerful be meaningfully punished or imprisoned? Would it be wise to do so? Should a secular state be involved in the appeasement of any gods? Should the worship of gods that turn on humanity be prohibited or encouraged? In many ways these questions skirt around the main problem that Kyurem raised: there are forces in the world more powerful than any government. Most of humanity had forgotten this. The United States government had become accustomed to being the world’s sole superpower, capable of exerting their power anywhere on the planet without meaningful opposition. Now that same government must reckon with a force sleeping less than thirty miles from their largest city that they cannot control.

It is not our place to answer the questions Kyurem’s rampage raised. Instead, we shall present our readers with the folklore and history behind the dragon and let them come to their own conclusions.

Appearance

Kyurem is a bipedal dragon roughly ten feet tall at the shoulder. The arms are comparatively small on the body and their body shape is remarkably similar to that of a tyrantrum. Their body is primarily slate gray. Ice encases most of the head and tail. Wings that appear to be made entirely of ice extend from the back, although Kyurem has not demonstrated the ability to fly like their siblings. During the later stages of Kyurem’s rampage they appeared to shift to a more upright posture. Their arms grew longer and one turned black. The wings grew smaller and one turned black as well while the other still appeared to be made of ice. Kyurem’s tail extended, turned black, and shifted to a shape more similar to that of their siblings’ tails. It has been rumored that this occurred after Kyurem consumed Zekrom and began returning to the form of The Starchild. Neither the government nor the league have ever confirmed these rumors.

In Unovan drawings Kyurem was often drawn as far larger than they actually are. The details are also heavily stylized. This makes sense as the only people who viewed Kyurem would have seen them distorted by thick layers of ice.

Most powerful deities inevitably end up depicted in human form. This has historically not been the case with The Starchild and her successors. Zekrom and Reshiram typically appeared at least once every century and Kyurem could be viewed by anyone who dared to trek through the Giant Chasm and enter Full Court.

There is some debate over Kyurem’s proper gender. Most scholars and priests contend that Kyurem should be addressed in a gender-neutral fashion, as The Starchild’s femininity and masculinity were poured into Reshiram and Zekrom, respectively, leaving nothing behind for Kyurem. Others use female pronouns as The Starchild was typically seen as female and Reshiram and Zekrom are supposedly equal, meaning the balance would be female. Kawisenhawe has used both. An Iroquois account of a conversation between the Clan Mothers and Kawisenhawe has the latter calling Kyurem female, but also saying that the dragon did not particularly care one way or another.

In Unovan Mythology

In ancient times a meteorite crashed approximately two dozen miles northeast of what is now downtown Castelia. The meteorite began to crack like an egg and from it a mighty dragon emerged. She grew quickly in size and power until she had defeated even the mightiest of tribes. Dragons are not prone to worship, but even they began to worship the fallen dragon, referred to as The Starchild. The Five Nations and the Dragon Clans followed suit. Even the Norse and Malian immigrants acknowledged The Starchild’s preeminence. The Starchild preferred to stay near the place where she had landed. Over time she worked to fully undo the damage caused by her arrival. She was seen as a wise and benevolent figure. She accepted sacrifices of livestock but did not take kindly to human sacrifice. The hydreigon would also bring her some of their kills. In exchange The Starchild would provide advice to anyone who sought her out and mediate disputes.

The Starchild intervened to help The Harbor Queen unify the Five Nations, the dragon tribes, and the Norse and bring peace to a wartorn nation. One legend says that she gave The Harbor Queen her gift of translation so that there would be one person who could understand everyone and rule justly. However, this legend arose centuries after The Harbor Queen’s Death. Temples from the early kingdom prominently feature Meloetta, the other goddess believed to have blessed the royal line. It is also possible, and perhaps even probable, that The Harbor Queen was simply a psychic bloodliner as the result of a mutation. If The Starchild’s children have commented on the subject their answer has not been recorded.

There was a crisis of succession roughly two centuries after The Harbor Queen’s ascension. The Heromani Queen was assassinated alongside her eldest daughter, Skanawati. At the time there was an ongoing civil war between an ever-shifting set of alliances between the five nations, the dragon tribes, the Norse, and even a few pokémon species. The assassins were members of the dragon tribes who were temporarily allied with the kingdom. Their leader decided to switch sides and use her troops’ access to the imperial palace to strike while the royal guard felt secure, far from the front lines. Their mother’s death unexpectedly left the younger siblings, twins, to take the throne. The Heronami Queen had refused to clarify which one would inherit the throne in the event their elder sister could not as she was afraid the loser would assassinate the other. Her lady in waiting was the only survivor of the assassination that knew her decision. Her dislike of the elder twin was also well known.

The younger twin ascended the throne and immediately became controversial for offering to parlay with the dragon tribes and other factions in an effort to broker a more permanent peace. The ongoing civil war had lasted nearly thirty years and stemmed from growing resentments towards the crown as the kings and queens of Unova were accused of favoritism towards their parents tribes. The new king argued that the only way to avoid the problem was to transition away from a monarchy and towards a grand council composed of representatives from self-governing tribes who came together to solve common issues.

The older twin was furious. War had raged for thirty years. The dragon tribes had killed his mother and sister and were about to be given everything they wanted as a result. Behind closed doors he argued that the only way to end the war was to crush all of the factions beneath a single centralized government so that none had the power to rebel whenever they had a petty grievance. In the end he was sent by his brother to the front lines when the dragon tribes main force marched on the castle. He ended up repelling the assault and earning the respect of the soldiers. He then turned around and marched on his brother, whom he accused of being an illegitimate king only coronated because of a servant’s grudge.

Before blood could be spilled, The Starchild arrived. She heard both sides and came to a judgment. What exactly her judgment was has been lost to time. Regardless, neither of the siblings found it acceptable and they instead challenged each other to single combat in front of her. This caused The Starchild a great deal of distress, so much so, in fact, that it literally tore her in two. Her ambition, dominance, and the disposition of a ruler split into Reshiram; her yearning for peace and fairness as well as her kindness and empathy split into Zekrom.

The Starchild’s mind and spirit left the body and emerged as fully formed dragons. The body still remained, empty, devoid of the warmth and energy that once powered it. Instead, there was only a great emptiness and her caution and indecision, traits that neither of the warrior dragons were birthed from. The remnant, now calling themself Kyurem, quickly began to freeze over everything near them. They were an incomplete, soulless being incapable of regulating their own divine power.

The youngest daughter of The Heronami Queen, Kawisenhawe, had been too young to be considered eligible for the throne at the time. As the war continued and more of Unova was charred by her brothers and their dragons or frozen by the soulless Kyurem, she grew determined to end the conflict. First she approached her brothers, separately and together, and pleaded for them to stop. Neither listened. Kawisenhawe came to believe that she was incapable of changing their minds and stopping the war as she was. What was a girl against the power of the dragons’ gods? She made up her mind and went to claim a dragon of her own.

Kawisenhawe went to Kyurem with only her stoutland at her side. In time even the pokémon froze to death in the extreme cold and she continued alone, on foot, with increasingly severe frostbite. She was on death’s door when she finally met The Starchild’s corpse. The dying girl and the soulless dragon spoke for a time. In the end the girl moved Kyurem and the two made a bargain. Kawisenhawe agreed to be fused to Kyurem and lend the dragon her soul. In exchange, she would be the voice of Kyurem and live an unending life. Kyurem fused themselves with Kawisenhawe and the girl ceased to die, for now she shared the blood and body of an ice dragon. Her soul allowed Kyurem to fully control their own divinity and stop the snowstorm engulfing Unova. The two retreated to Full Court, a chamber where The Starchild received representatives of every tribe of human and pokémon, and barricaded themselves inside. Kyurem was better able to control themself, but their nature as a god of ice and void led them to freeze the canyon around Full Court.

Kyurem technically upheld their end of the bargain to Kawisenhawe, although not in a way that she would have appreciated. Her body still continued to age until even Kyurem’s ice and divine blood could not preserve her any longer. The dragon, through Kawisenhawe, commanded that another girl be brought before him, the wisest and worthiest child of the clans. When the clans presented them with their choice, Kyurem cast aside Kawisenhawe and merged with the new girl. She inherited the memories and name of Kawisenhawe, and every girl after her inherited the combined memories of every Kawisenhawe before her. Kyurem’s voice is still named Kawisenhawe and will not answer to any name she held before she merged with the dragon. The unbroken lineage of Kawisenhawe continued until 2012. Kyurem’s new priestess has claimed not to have the memories of Kawisenhawe.

Kyurem has a long memory, the wisdom of an ancient goddess, and a human soul. They can also see visions of the future. This made Kyurem, and by extension Kawisenhawe, the favored oracle of Unova. Clan leaders and anyone able to brave the treacherous weather and strong pokémon of Full Court went to seek the guidance of Kawisenhawe, oracle of Kyurem, in the frozen chamber. For their part, Kyurem froze themself under a block of ice so thick even they would struggle to break it. This served as a symbol of their vow of neutrality and ultimate prophecy and promise. If humans and pokémon could come together and set aside their differences, if peace reigned for one thousand years and the world was in harmony, then Kyurem would reemerge and reunite with their siblings, forming the complete Starchild once more. However, if the world proved to be beyond hope and neither truth nor ideals persisted, if the seas themselves turned to poison and spiderwebs cracked the earth, Kyurem would reemerge to freeze the world in judgment so that something better would emerge from the thawing ice.

Historically, the guards of Full Court have been the Swords of Justice. The Swords are a quartet of pokémon said to have been elevated to godhood by Kyurem in exchange for proving their bravery by challenging the dragon to single combat and emerging alive. The four survivors were assigned the task of protecting Kawisenhawe and escorting pilgrims out of the Chasm if they had been injured on the way in.

Worship

The main form of sacrifice to Kyurem was in the form of new Kawisenhawes. Once every century another young girl from the Five Nations or the dragon tribes would need to be sacrificed to the dragon. It is unknown whether the ethnicity requirement was imposed by Kawisenhawe or Kyurem, or even where it came from in the first place, but it has been adhered to for centuries nonetheless. Kawisenhawe served as Kyurem’s voice and chief priestess. She was always locked into place by ice and scaly tendrils, unable to move at all. Kyurem, distorted by a thick layer of ice, loomed beneath her. Kawisenhawe was consulted for everything from romantic advice to military strategies and visions of the future. Anyone who could survive the trek down the chasm was entitled to an audience with Kawisenhawe, and Kawisenhawe always provided an answer. Whether this was out of loneliness or religious obligation remains unclear. At least one Kawisenhawe was asked but never provided a direct answer. This is true for almost all questions of a personal nature asked to Kawisenhawe. Perhaps Kawisenhawe answered these questions when her replacement asked, but these moments were always private. We can only speculate as to what the girls said to each other.

Kyurem was officially neutral in all political matters. However, Kawisenhawe often tacitly spoke against the Galarian colonizers and in favor of the Five Nations, dragon tribes, and pokémon. These messages were usually couched in vague, metaphorical language that gave her plausible deniability. Some scholars have argued that Kawisenhawe retained a level of independence from Kyurem and these messages were ways to test the limits of the commands she had been given without breaking them outright.

Aside from the centennial human sacrifice, Kyurem did not request offerings of any kind. Sometimes hydreigon have been observed hauling particularly impressive kills into the Giant Chasm. This may be the result of an arrangement between the species and Kyurem. How the dragon, sealed away beneath the ice, would even eat the offerings is another question entirely. No evidence of the kills has ever been documented in Full Court. One scholar has suggested that the hydreigon eat the kill in front of Kyurem, either as a means of showing their hunting prowess or of taunting the dragon in hopes of luring them out and heralding the end of human civilization.

Origins

Kyurem’s origins are far better documented than that of almost any other deity in this book. There is a layer of debris in the soil of Unova believed to correspond with The Starchild’s arrival. Carbon dating suggests she arrived in approximately 300 BCE.

The historiography of The War of Kings is fraught. Some events may be mere legend but tax records and archeological evidence suggests that there were many civil wars in Unova around the time, that The Heronami Queen reigned until approximately 1215 CE, and that the civil war ultimately came to center on a conflict between two kings. The war ended in the collapse of The Kingdom of Unova, the destruction of most of central Unova, including the old capitol, and a century of lawlessness. Records from this time are scarce as literacy rates plummeted in the era of collapse. The Malians arrived just as Unova was beginning to pull itself back together. By this point Reshiram and Zekrom were already dormant once more, Kyurem rested in Full Court, and the original Kawisenhawe had died.

Most of the legends regarding Kyurem were also well established and documented by the Malians. These included the prophecy regarding Kyurem’s emergence.

Today

Kyurem worship had declined dramatically after the subjugation of the Five Nations and their removal from modern Unova. The final Kawisenhawe was illegally smuggled into Full Court in 2011 as the Unovan legislature had banned voluntary human sacrifice for any purpose in 1994. Her father and three others were subsequently sentenced to life in prison for conspiracy to commit child abuse and human sacrifice.

Fewer people than ever were consulting Kawisenhawe as well. The Unovan government had posted armed guards at the gates of Full Court since 1891 in order to prevent indigenous people from using the oracle to obtain information damaging to the United States or trying to awaken Kyurem. All visitors were prohibited following the installation of the final Kawisenhawe in hopes of deterring future generations from sacrificing another girl. The Swords of Justice strongly opposed this decision and dispersed the guard before being defeated by Chris Foster, a then-rising trainer who would go on to be recognized as the world’s strongest.

On August 17, 2012, Ghetsis Gropius and the Plasma Liberation Front stormed Giant Chasm, killed the guards, and persuaded Kyurem to emerge and destroy Unova. Kawisenhawe was killed in the process, apparently by Ghetsis. For the next eight days Kyurem battled the Swords of Justice and Reshiram and Zekrom in Giant Chasm. A blizzard engulfed most of the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions, stretching west to Ohio, south to Virginia, and north to Ontario and Quebec. Thousands died across the region, although the storm’s slow spread meant that most of the area could be evacuated before the blizzard arrived. Almost all crops growing in the region were killed by the unseasonal blizzard.

Kyurem was eventually defeated and sealed themself away in Full Court once again. By the end of the year the Swords escorted a new child down to become Kawisenhawe, although she claims not to have the memories of her predecessors. She further claims that Kyurem is not speaking to her and only agreed to merge in order to use her soul to stabilize their power. Travel to see her has been legal since 2016, although with no ancestral memory and Kyurem not providing visions of the future there is little reason to do so.

State-sponsored offerings of meat were brough to Full Court for a short period in 2015, before Kyurem’s priestess asked that the practice be discontinued. The offerings were enormously controversial as the families of the dead often saw them as the dragon being rewarded for their rampage. Some politicians and activists have called for the strongest trainers in the world to be brought together to kill or capture Kyurem, something that neither Reshiram nor Zekrom allowed in 2012. Chris Foster has expressed interest in the idea, but says he will not do so without the approval of the Unovan government. Both Unova and the United States have been reluctant to provoke the dragon and ensure another blizzard.

For now Kyurem simply waits. Perhaps they will emerge again to judge the world or reform The Starchild. They have not revealed whether that prophecy has been fulfilled or merely delayed. They have said almost nothing at all since their defeat.

Ghetsis Gropius and most of the leadership of the Plasma Liberation Front have subsequently been captured and executed. Thousands of Plasma Liberation Front foot soldiers have been arrested and imprisoned, although most have subsequently been released.

 

[Persephone]

Latias and Latios - Hoenn

“All dreams are but another reality. Carve this in your heart so you might not forget.”
-The First Prophet, Yume to Yogen

Overview

Latias and latios, Lords and Ladies of the Mist, The Eon Dragons, The Grasping, The Restraining, The Emanations of the Great Dreamer, are one or more species of dragons native to the islands southeast of Japan. They have fantastical abilities, even by the standards of dragon. Light manipulation and supersonic flight have been confirmed. Sensory and memory bonding are often alleged by those who claim to have encountered one. It is highly probable they are telekinetic. Other abilities such as hydrokinesis, advanced engineering knowledge, dream reading, and soul manipulation have been alleged infrequently and may be more rooted in mysticism and tall tales than reality. There is very little information on the species as they are nervous dragons and unwilling to appear before researchers, much less cooperate with their studies.

There has long been a religion or cult centered around worship of the dragons known as The Dreaming. Its adherents briefly gained control of all of Hoenn and most of Honshu before collapsing. Today the faith is mostly confined to minor islands such as the autonomous prefecture of Altomare.

Appearance

Satellite imagery has managed to confirm that latias and latios are streamlined dragons with arms and a set of wings, but no apparent legs. They are believed to spend almost all of their lives airborne. Latios have blue or purple feathers covering almost their entire body save the neck and face, while latias have red or purple feathers. Recovered feathers have a very high silica content and are nearly translucent. They are also sharp to the touch. The origin of the apparent blue, red, or purple coloration is unknown. There may be colored scales under the translucent wings. Individuals may also add on the apparent coloring through photokinesis is even when no one is watching. There is every indication that latias and latios have human comparable intelligence. The behaviors of highly intelligent species are often difficult to explain or predict.

The satellite imagery more or less matches early descriptions of the species, although The Third Prophet was adamant that a slightly different design be used, one with ridges in the middle of the wings and legs instead of arms. He also believed that there were no visual differences between the sexes.

The Dreaming believe that latias often take the form of human women to associate with mankind. Latios occasionally follow them in human guise. These forms are often drawn as having braids styled in such a way that they appear as ridges. Details vary beyond this. The Yume to Yogen is light on visual description of the dragons human guises, only describing a latias as taking on a slight form with light hair. A latios is described appearing as a large and stern human. Art tends to depict latias as having brown hair and red, pink, or amber eyes and latios as having very dark hair and blue or grey eyes. This is more a form of artistic shorthand more than an accurate depiction of all possible forms the dragons could take.

The Sixth Prophet was an artist who often drew latias or latios as the hands or tongues of an incomprehensible being looming beneath the sea or behind a cloud, marked primarily by the paint running together. The hidden, unnamed controller was only properly drawn once as a vaguely avian figure covered in eyes with blood and water streaming off of it. The latias and latios, stylized like body parts, are connected by golden or black chains to the figure.

In Hoennese Mythology

The old surviving traditions about latias and latios come from the dragon tribes of Hoenn, particularly the inland clans. In Dr. Simon Ruthkay’s groundbreaking text, Anthropology of the Dragon Tribes, he describes their views of latias and latios.

Long ago the beasts of water and flame were sealed away by The Guardian of the Skies and Queen of the Dragons, Rayquaza. She knew that simply locking them away would cause their anger and resentment to grow and make their next clash all the more destructive. As a compromise she let them insert their dreaming consciousness into the bodies of dragons. They are forbidden from entering their old domains and must now float above the earth and sea, never landing upon it.

They describe the dragons as being kind, by dragon standards, and willing to help doomed sailors find their way to shore. They are associated with the mist, although the clansmen were unsure whether they created it or simply hid inside of it. The inland tribes believe that a stranger met in the most should be treated with the utmost respect lest they be one of the dragons in disguise. Anyone who ventured to the island in the heart of the mist was condemned to death, either by the dragons themselves or by the tribe for upsetting such ancient forces. There are relatively few myths surrounding either, but especially latios. The dragons have always been secretive and difficult to detect due to their photokinesis and affinity for mist. The inland dragon tribes described latias as being strange women who would ask riddles and questions. Should their questions be properly answered, they might convey a boon. Latios were described as enforcers of hospitality. Breaches of decorum and sacred hospitality could be punished by a swift end.

The coastal dragon tribes of Hoenn may have held the same beliefs. Regardless, there was a schism around 700 C.E. after the arrival of The First Prophet. He was a psychic bloodliner who claimed to be the child of a latias and a human woman. The First Prophet outlined the principles of a religion centered more around latias, latios, and The Great Dreamer behind them rather than Rayquaza. The dragon tribes ultimately split over the question of who to worship.

According to The First Prophet, all of the universe is the dream of a being of unimaginable power and sophistication. Humans are unaware of this. The pokémon are living lucid dreams capable of altering the fabric of reality in any way they wished. Latias and latios are manifestations of the unconscious mind of The Great Dreamer. Latias are the childish, irresponsible impulses reaching deeper into the dream. Latios are the firm hand of reason trying to pull The Great Dreamer back to the waking world to fulfill their duties. It is then the goal of humanity to spread tranquility and virtue through the world to help The Great Dreamer awakens. When this occurs all of the scattered fragments of their mind will reunite and every human, pokémon, plant, and animal will be unified as one being with a singular purpose, perfectly in harmony. The First Prophet urged pacifism, vegetarianism, and a constant evaluation of oneself and the world around them.

The religion would dramatically depart from its roots within two centuries. There were nine subsequent prophets, all of whom claimed to be the child of a latias. Each added deeper revelations to the previous prophet’s words, claiming that humanity was not yet ready to hear the truth at the time the previous prophet lived. The nine revelations are compiled in the Yume to Yogen, the sacred text of The Dreaming. The Third Prophet brought the most direct change to the view of latias and latios themselves. In his words the great dream is the unconscious desire of the universe trying to assess whether it is good or evil and if it should continue its existence. Latias, and women in general, are manifestations of the naive, curious, and inherently impure desires of The Great Dreamer. Latios, and men in general, exist to guide their mates back to reason and virtue.

Latias having a child with humans is the polluting of divinity with incarnations of sin and ignorance. The resulting child was simultaneously the most aware of humans and a sign of terrible sin in the universe. Such a child could only be born when the universe’s vices far outweighed its virtues and even the latias lost sight of their true nature. The resulting child was a way to balance the dream by becoming a great moral leader and guiding humanity back towards moral purity.

Worship

The inland dragon tribes of Hoenn do not offer tribute to The Eon Dragons. They simply treat anyone met in the mist or at sea with the utmost respect and avoid the islands the dragons call home.

The Dreaming has seven prophets, each of whom added a revelation to the Yume to Yogen.

The First Prophet emphasized the importance of written language, libraries, introspection, education, and meditation. He wished to advance humanity to a higher state of being through religious and academic enlightenment, as well as by making peace with the natural world. Many of Hoenn’s oldest cities were founded during or shortly after his lifetime. Tokusane is still home to some of Japan’s finest universities, one of which claims The First Prophet as their founder. Mysticism, while important to priests, was largely deemphasized for the masses in this period. Latias and latios were worshipped during festivals at the changing of the seasons. Their temples were still only small shrines at a village’s school or libraries at holy sites.

The Second Prophet lived about fifty years after the death of The First Prophet. She added an evangelical bent to the religion, arguing that harmony could be spread fastest by actively converting adjacent peoples to the enlightened practices of The Dreaming. While the church’s first army was established in her life, the prophet herself cared more for healing than battle and is known to have traveled across Hoenn alone and on foot while curing and cataloguing to diseases. She is still a widely beloved figure in Hoenn. Even at the faith’s nadir there are still often statues of her or small shrines to latias in hospitals and graveyards.

The Third Prophet was born in 982 C.E. during a period of decline in Tokusane. He began to emphasize mysticism and the primacy of the faith. Outsiders were no longer allowed to study at church-operated schools or even to be admitted at church-operated hospitals. The text of his revelation was long limited to a new, insular order of priests who were in charge of legal and spiritual matters in the increasingly theocratic Holy State of Tokusane. Taxes were paid directly to the church and were used to build lavish temples in which sacrifices of livestock were performed.

The Fourth Prophet was born during the life of The Third Prophet but only rose to prominence after his predecessor’s death. The Fourth Prophet reversed some of the harsher changes of his predecessor, likely to ease the threat of popular revolt at a time when the remaining nations of Hoenn were testing the frontier. The Fourth Prophet’s revelation is about dealing with physical and spiritual adversity. He conquered the remainder of Hoenn and even invaded Honshu, although his forces were ultimately forced to retreat. They would go on to establish a naval base at Altomare. The site was officially chosen because it was there The Fourth Prophet had protected two children from heathen attackers. The children then revealed themselves to be a latias and latios and vowed to protect the city built there. The island’s natural defenses, deep harbor, and strategic location also provided reasons to build a naval fortress there. The navy he built to invade Honshu would turn into a merchant marine fleet that established with China, Korea, Indonesia, India, and even East Africa.

Another century would pass without a prophet. The naval supremacy of the theocracy would allow them to dominate trade with Honshu and even let them establish trading ties across the Pacific to the Incan Empire. The trade of spices and silver let Minamo become a fantastically wealthy state capable of funding bigger and more sophisticated navies, furthering trade and increasing wealth even further. The Dreaming had also become closely linked to the guilds. The most extravagant of projects were built on Altomare, now a major fortress and trading center. Altomare was emphasized both to taunt Kanto and Johto with the wealth of The Dreaming and encourage conversion and to keep up an elaborate ruse. The Holy State maintained that all of their silver and gold and exotic pokémon came from Honshu. They constantly patrolled the seas around Honshu to keep other nations from entering. A handful of vassal states even had fake mines constructed and opulent palaces and temples full of silver and gold ornamentation constructed to keep up the illusion for the few ambassadors and adventurers who set foot on Honshu. The path to The Americas, and even their existence, was a closely guarded secret. Only the most devout sailors would be permitted to make the trip across the Pacific. This was designed to protect the source of their wealth and prevent foreign competition. The Holy State’s contact with the Inca were kept as minimal as possible while still facilitating trade. No colonies or even permanent trading towns were constructed. The scarce interactions and excellent doctors of The Holy State also reduced the flow of disease between the continents.

The Fifth Prophet was born 1164 C.E. She declared that it was time to convert the entire world to the faith of The Dreaming. She ultimately conquered Honshu, Korea, Taiwan, and portions of China in a span of six years. Her reign, and revelation, are the shortest. Her revelation emphasizes discipline and self-denial. She was also the only Prophet married to another Prophet, born in 1197. After his wife’s assignation in 1206, The Sixth Prophet’s sanity may have begun to deteriorate. He killed every inhabitant of every city his wife’s assassin had ever lived in. He then declared that the only true way to bring peace to The Great Dreamer was to wake him through bloodshed. Almost every crime was punishable by death and basic freedoms were deprived of everyone other than soldiers and their wives. Human sacrifice was briefly practiced. The trade of spices and silver were banned to prevent debauchery and all sailors with knowledge of the Americas were killed. The Sixth Prophet’s descent into madness meant that most of his kingdom, even Hoenn, was in open rebellion by the time the Mongols swept in. By the time of his death The Dreaming only held on to Altomare, a heavily fortified fortress city on an island. The faith continued to be practiced in much of coastal Hoenn, just without any ties to the elders in Altomare.

The Seventh Prophet lived from 1470 C.E. to 1564 C.E. and spent most of her life improving the engineering of the isolated island state, further improving its fortifications, repairing and improving temples to The Eon Dragons, converting the marshlands into arable fields, improving fishing vessels, and making hydroponic gardens to feed the people. Her revelation is essentially an almanac outlining farming and building practices and advice for running a household or business. She is believed to have had very little involvement with the faith she was nominally at the head of.

The Eighth Prophet was born in 1691 C.E. He spent most of his life trying to simplify the doctrine of the faith and writing an epic novel about The Fourth Prophet, whose memories he claimed to have inherited. In 1723 he departed on a ship towards an unknown destination far to the north of Altomare. He was never heard from again.

Today

The Ninth Prophet was a recluse who was only acknowledged after her death. Her revelation emphasizes the wickedness of humanity and the need to purge the entire species, or at least the vast majority of them, to bring peace to The Great Dreamer’s soul. Her works were publicized by The Tenth Prophet, born in 1901 C.E., and with a similar disposition to his bloodier predecessors. He proved himself a distinguished mercenary abroad before returning to Altomare, convincing the church elders of his parentage, and training an elite squad of soldiers and commanders. He saw the Japanese emperor’s war as a good way to bring about mass death and allied with him. Church soldiers were responsible for many of the greatest atrocities in the war. The Tenth Prophet ordered his troops to routinely provoke fights with other nations in hopes of dragging as many countries into the war as possible and maximizing carnage. The Japanese army itself eventually stormed Altomare and executed The Tenth Prophet to keep him from making the war more difficult for them than it had to be. Altomare has since been a secular, semiautonomous prefecture patrolled by Japanese and American soldiers.

In Hoenn latias and latios are still popular among craftsmen, doctors, and scholars. It is common for them to have small statues of the eon dragons in their home and recite brief prayers to them at the start of a work day. Before The Tenth Prophet there were even several well-attended and well-funded temples throughout the islands where people would come to meditate when they were stuck with a problem they could not find their way out of. The Eon Dragons were seen as the clever guides of last resort, the kind of parents that would produce brilliant educators, doctors, generals, artists, engineers, and novelists. The faith’s popularity has dramatically declined after its repression in the early Meiji Era and being associated with an omnicidal war criminal. It is now more common to see edited versions of the Yume to Yogen than the full ten volume collection. Most editions keep the revelations of the First, Second, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Prophets while excluding the more mystical and militaristic ones. The Nanpō Islands and the waters around them are a protected wildlife preserve. Entry is illegal.

Origins

Western scientists long believed that latios and latias did not exist. Latias were dismissed as blaziken seen at an odd angle or from a distance. Latios were believed to be gyarados, another blue (pseudo) dragon that can float and change the weather. The depictions in Hoennese art were dismissed as the sightings of the mad or the tall tales of sailors. During the American occupation of Japan naval ships routinely sailed by the Nanpō islands without seeing anything.

In 1953 a spy plane flying over the islands was assailed by an invisible creature flying faster than the aircraft at high altitudes. Satellite images later revealed an island full of blue and red dragons similar to the traditional descriptions. As a test a drone was flown around the island while a satellite watched overhead. The dragons seemed to disappear as the drone approached before one destroyed it. The dragons’ invisibility was almost immediately dropped. Scientific expeditions to the island are prohibited by the Japanese government. The few explorers who have attempted to set foot on the island have seen nothing, experienced horrific hallucinations, or never returned.

In 1979 a layer of fog blanketed the entire island. It has not lifted since. Scientists speculate that a latias or latios disguised as a human or rendering itself invisible may have found out about the satellite monitoring. There is some debate as to whether the dragons constitute one or two species as they have never been observed mating. It has also not been proven that latias can have children with humans. Cremation has been traditional within The Dreaming since the days of The First Prophet. The Tenth Prophet’s body was broken out of the morgue and destroyed before a proper autopsy could be performed.

 

[Persephone]

This entry was commissioned by Tapirs10.

Groudon (Hoenn)

“We have always molded the world to our will. Agriculture, deforestation, urbanization: what else can you call these? My proposal is simple. Our species will continue doing what it has always done. Our innovation, our drive to conquer the limits nature has imposed upon us, these are not to be feared. They will carry us into an era of prosperity the likes of which has never been seen before.”
-Dr. Seiji Matsubusa, Geoengineering in the Third Millenium

Overview

Groudon, The Flesh of The Earth, The Unceasing Flame, The End of Our Age, was a fairly minor god in Hoennian folklore and mythology. He was most notable as an agricultural god in the mountainous regions of Hoenn and as an example of The Slain Earth-Giant. Cultures on five of the six inhabited continents spoke of the chief god, usually a sky god, slaying a primordial giant and using its corpse to build the world. Groudon was not the most famous of this archetype. He was not even the primary god of fire and magma in Japan. Most of his notoriety came from a very loose adaptation of his myths in mid-century Japanese cinema.

On February 15th, 2012, Groudon and his counterpart, The Blood of The Seas, Kyogre, met in Rune City, Hoenn. Groudon summoned earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and heat waves in an attempt to defeat his rival. The two killed over 180,000 people and leveled much of Hoenn’s infrastructure before Rayquaza intervened and drove the two back into slumber. They still wait beneath the surface, very much alive, waiting for someone to awaken them again. The two may not even be aware of the destruction caused as it was not their primary goal: every high-level analysis of the incident has concluded that the two titans were far more concerned with killing each other than anything else.

Interest in mythology soared after the attack as a fearful world sought to learn what obscure myths might kill them next. Aqua-dan and The Magma Organization have had scores of imitators, some of whom did successfully capture or at least provoke an extraordinarily powerful pokémon. Legendary pokémon were increasingly regarded as major security threats to be treated with more fear than reverence. Governments the world over have repeatedly assured the public that they are developing countermeasures for extremely powerful pokémon.

Perhaps this stems from the same arrogance as Matsubusa and his ilk, that we can defeat or control even the embodiment of the world we live on.

Appearance

Groudon’s depictions in early temple mosaics show a mountain-sized beast with brown or black skin. These are his smaller depictions. Other artists depicted him as being the rough size and shape of Hoenn itself, with the Mishiru peninsula being his legs and the eastern peninsulas being either his head and arm or just his head with open jaws. Sometimes Hoenn was only his head and the rest of his body was submerged beneath the waves.

In post-war Japanese cinema Groudon was reimagined as a giant, bipedal, black lizard that controlled heat, fire, and radiation. The level of realism depended on the budget for the stuntman’s costume in the film.

Groudon is bipedal with an arched back and a wide tail resting behind him on the ground. The core of his body seems to be white-hot magma with plates of red and black scales cooling on the surface. In time a fully solid body may have developed. Some have posited that the groudon observed was a mere avatar of a much larger being, potentially one that is the size of Hoenn or even larger. The physical form was more of an illusion akin to substitute. This is supported by Groudon’s apparent ability to restore up to 40% of his body in moments after it was blasted off by a particularly powerful attack. Kyogre, in turn, demonstrated an ability to dissolve into water and reform from it without lasting damage.

In Hoennese Mythology

Religious sects in Hoenn have always been split over one fundamental question: is our collective existence actually real or simply an illusion? The side that rejected a physical, permanent reality has always been dismissive of Groudon’s existence. He has been far more important in the physical reality sects.

These sects believe that at the beginning of creation Groudon and Kyogre warred endlessly. Their fight was put to an end by Rayquaza slaying both. She formed Groudon’s flesh into the land and Kyogre’s blood into the seas. She herself provided the breath of the world and allowed life to flourish. In time, however, the souls of Groudon and Kyogre stirred and waged war once more. Kyogre won the battle before being slain by Rayquaza once more. Almost all life perished during the brief struggle. In the new age there was far more water than land. Life rebounded and civilization rose once more. Then the primordial gods woke and clashed, tearing civilization apart once more. Groudon won this fight and there was more land than water in the third era. The cycle continued hundreds of times as worlds of water alternated with worlds of earth. The current era, the 984th, began with Kyogre’s victory. It would end when the titans reemerged and ended human civilization. Groudon would expand the land and be slain. Civilization would someday reemerge only to be destroyed by Kyogre.

Groudon does not appear in any stories outside of the Hoennese origin myth. He was not a particularly prominent or important god. He was not a character in the myths of Hoenn so much as a force of nature that simply was. There was no stopping him. He would someday end the current era and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Some scholars theorized that Groudon and Kyogre were representations of the inevitability of death or the wanton destruction of a natural disaster.

Worship

Groudon was not widely worshipped in Hoenn. He still had regional cults. These cults mostly agreed that he would someday awaken and kill almost all humans, but in the meantime his sleeping soul could be appealed to in order to end droughts, improve crop yields, and stave off volcanic eruptions. Ritual sacrifices of livestock were thrown into Hell’s Chimney to feed the god. Human sacrifices may have occurred but were very rare, likely limited to the terminally ill and convicts sentenced to death. They may not have occurred at all. In any event there is no reliable evidence of any occurring in the last three centuries. Most alleged sacrifices either have no evidence to support them or were probably suicides.

There were two holy sites to Groudon. Hell’s Chimney was considered to be the resting place of his body. This is where most sacrifices were made and the place where his cults were the strongest. Gurandopaya was said to be where Kyogre and Groudon fought at the end of the last age. It was believed that the souls of the titans rested on the mountain. A temple and graveyard was constructed there to honor all those who perished at the end of the 983rd age. The temple was maintained by the priests of Rayquaza but was also seen as a sacred place by the cults of Groudon and Kyogre.

Today

Groudon has always been a symbol of a fiery apocalypse. This took on new symbolic importance in postwar Japan. A series of films centered around Groudon being awakened by nuclear testing and attempting to end the world. The first film had a decidedly somber tone and focused on mankind’s path towards self-destruction, an end as inevitable as Groudon’s rise. The film even posited that Groudon was not a physical entity so much as an ancient prophecy of nuclear annihilation wiping out civilization. The prophets had no context for what they saw and attributed it to the work of an external monster rather than the true horrors of manmade weapons. The film ends with humanity descending into infighting rather than uniting to ward off Groudon. The titan stops to watch in confusion before venturing back under the earth’s surface. In the film’s final lines a character played by the director posits that Groudon realized that he was not needed: humanity would end the current age without him having to lift a finger.

Future installments would center on Groudon returning and playing a more heroic role in fights with various other gods and monsters. The films were increasingly lighthearted. The change in tone was explained by Groudon befriending human children and fighting for him as he waited on Kyogre to awaken. Until then he saw no need to destroy humanity and would instead fight to protect them.

The Magma Organization emerged in 2002 as a collective of scientists interested in the possibility of using controlled volcanic eruptions to expand the available land in the densest metropolitan areas in Japan. Another proposed application was to use the volcanic ash harvested from remote eruptions to fertilize soils and increase the food independence of Japan. Internationally ash redistribution could allow for revitalizing depleted soils and potentially growing crops in the desert. Down the line volcanic eruptions could create new landmasses for refugee resettlement or dim sunlight to reduce the effects of industrial greenhouse gas pollution.

The organization was widely written off as deeply unserious in both popular and scientific media. Still, they retained some relevance through the extensive funding from their founder’s own personal fortune and a hedge fund manager interested in using the organization’s research to inspire more practical inventions. They later gained positive media attention by hiring mercenaries and forming their own security corps to fight Aqua-dan, the yakuza, and petty criminals.

The Magma Organization ultimately shifted research towards awakening and controlling Groudon for use as a terraforming engine, and to negate Aqua-dan’s pursuit of Kyogre. Under the guise of countering Aqua-dan’s assault, The Magma Organization stole an artifact tied to Groudon from Gurandopaya and moved something from Hell’s Chimney to Rune City, where they awakened Groudon and set him on the newly awakened Kyogre. Few details about what Aqua-dan and The Magma Organization stole or where those artifacts currently are have been released.

This escalated Kyogre’s behavior from torrential rain across Hoenn to the cataclysm that would nearly destroy the region. Rune City was lost to the waves when the caldera it was built upon collapsed, nearby cities built on coral reefs or mangrove swamps were washed away, and the eruption of Hell’s Chimney nearly destroyed the communities around it. Earthquakes, heat waves, and flooding damaged every city in the region. The clash ended when Rayquaza descended to the ruins of Rune City and drove the beasts back underground. The Japanese government claims to know their locations based on sonar and seismic readings but has refused to disclose any more information.

Dr. Matsubusa insisted on his innocence and fought his conviction through years of appeals. His attempts were unsuccessful. Japan unbanned the death penalty until Magma’s founder had been executed and then promptly prohibited it once more. Even years after the disaster Magma has its defenders. The remaining proponents of geoengineering insist that they could have controlled Groudon if Kyogre had not also been awakened. Others defend the spirit of the organization but not their exact methods. Modern geoengineering advocates prefer purely technological solutions to ones involving powerful pokémon. Some far-right activists contend that Dr. Matsubusa’s more extreme actions were justified by his fight against anarchists and criminals. Had he not awakened Groudon then Aqua-dan would have drowned the world unopposed, just as they had intended. Most of Magma’s defenders live outside of Japan. Polling after the disaster consistently shows that Magma has a 0 to 3% favorability rating.

Groudon still sleeps. He could still be reawakened. His location is unknown, but his presence still looms large: one recent study showed that anxiety spikes tremendously in Japan following even minor earthquakes, a phenomenon not observed elsewhere in the world.

Origins

Groudon is real. That much is no longer disputed. What is less clear is how humans learned about him. Now that scientists know what a clash between Kyogre and Groudon looks like, they have attempted to find evidence of past events. Geological records show that the most recent clash likely occurred around 14 million years ago. Homo sapiens had not yet evolved. How, then, did humans learn about something so ancient with so much accuracy? Moreover, how did cultures as far flung as the Norse and the Mexica end up with similar stories? Are Ymir and Cipactli just other names of Groudon? Or are there separate monsters of similar power resting beneath other continents? The majority view among anthropologists is that at least Cipactli is another name for Groudon given the Mexica’s insistence that Rayquaza was the one to slay him. However, the Mexica have no equivalent for Kyogre.

The leading theory at present is that the pokémon of Hoenn, and potentially the rest of the planet, remembered the clash. Its effects would have been felt on a planetary scale. The event may even have separated Japan from mainland Asia. Psychic-types or human elementals may have then relayed these stories to the newly settled humans. These humans, in turn, passed the legends down to their children. The accuracy with which the story was preserved is still very odd for a myth based on events from over ten million years in the past. Even the longest lived of rock-type pokémon were unlikely to have been around long enough to tell humans. This means that either long-lived pokémon have their own oral traditions repeated with minimal deviation across many generations or that there are pokémon far older than previously imagined. Either outcome would revolutionize the field of pokémon studies.

 

[Persephone]

Jirachi (Hoenn)

“In the ancient days Jirachi had to admire the stars from afar. The heavens had to reach down to him. Now, with his inspiration and guidance, man shall reach up to the heavens.”
-Mikoto Inoue, Director of the Japanese Space Agency

Overview

Jirachi, The Grand Dreamer, Wish Maker, and Protector of Fauns, is a minor deity revered under different names throughout East Asia.

They are largely separate from the main gods of the Asian pantheons and can be easily slotted into the fringes. Comet festivals honoring Jirachi are remain popular in China, and Korea, Japan, even as the worship of other gods has declined. This is in part because they are tied more to a specific festival than to religious dogma. Some scholars have argued that Jirachi is better viewed as the mascot of a largely secular holiday than a religious figure.

Appearance

Jirachi is most commonly depicted as a short figure wearing golden robes. He has black or gold eyes with a third eye on the torso. Jirachi’s headdress consists of three golden points, each holding a blue ribbon at the end. These ribbons, known as wish tags, are at the heart of many Jirachi stories.

In older depictions Jirachi was a beautiful male human with delicate features and elaborate robes. The third eye was placed on the head, chest, and abdomen seemingly at random. The headdress was made of silk and gold.

Modern depictions emphasize Jirachi as more of a pokémon, or even a cutesy mascot. The head is wide with unnaturally large black eyes. The headdress is fused to the head and consists of golden points like those on a stylized star. The torso is often smaller than the head with a closed third eye. A golden cape hangs behind the pokémon. Full robes would hide the third eye.

This depiction aligns better with the other fey-like deities of Japan such as Celebi, Manaphy, and Mew. It may also be influenced by Victini, an American god with the ability to issue prophecies and grant some wishes, albeit with more of an emphasis on war and sports.

In Hoennese Mythology

Thousands of years ago in the Valley of Fauns, an artisan was born by the name of Jirachi. He was incredibly skilled with the loom and made brilliant tapestries depicting the night sky. The clothes he wove were the finest in Japan and he was moved into the home of the local king to be his household’s personal tailor. Many women tried to win his heart, but he never paid them any mind. Every night he could be found staring up at the star, looking for inspiration.

Traveling those same stars was a goddess of immense power and radiant light. She roams the entire universe to share her light and solve the problems of those she encounters, but the universe is vast. In her efforts to help everyone she cannot help anyone for very long. Earth is allotted seven days in her presence every thousand years.

When the goddess arrived in the skies of Earth, she saw Jirachi weaving a tapestry and was taken by the beauty of both his art and his person. She instantly formed a human disguise and went down to meet with him. Jirachi was also instantly smitten with the goddess’s kindness and radiant beauty.



For six days the two courted each other. Then the goddess revealed her true self and offered to take Jirachi with him into the heavens. Jirachi declined for he loved the Earth and the humans he had met. Instead, he requested a wish from the goddess. He asked that he be allowed to greet her every time she returned. In the meantime he would collect the hopes and dreams of humanity and present them to her when she returned. The goddess agreed and granted the man immortality. However, her power wanes when she is far away and Jirachi turns to stone and falls into a deep sleep to preserve his life. During this time he travels the world of dreams, helping people where he can and gathering wishes to present to the goddess upon her return.

The name of the goddess varies by region. On Honshu she was syncretized with Ho-Oh. The Hisuians knew her as Almighty Sinnoh. The Chinese as Nüwa. In Hoenn she is unnamed, as her true name is in a language from twenty-six thousand stars away.

In other depictions, Jirachi appears to have their own ability to grant wishes. In the story of Masoko a young woman from what is now Kanazumi ventures across the entirety of Hoenn to plead to Jirachi to end a drought. She sings to him a tale of her sorrow and the will of her people to survive. She receives no reaction from the stone Jirachi is sleeping in. However, she returns home to find her town had a miraculous harvest despite the drought.

After stories of Darkrai spread across Japan following the conquest of Hisui, Jirachi was intentionally syncretized with Cresselia as his archenemy who kept dreams happy and free from his corrupting influence.

This is a rather novel interpretation. In the past Jirachi had been viewed as an oracle who revealed possibilities in dreams and daydreams. Good visions were a reminder that the world could be improved by concerted action. Bad visions were warnings of what would come if wickedness was allowed to prevail.

In most stories Jirachi is merely a plot device that gives a prophecy or grants a wish, setting the story in motion. Most of his prophecies were given in the form of dreams, although some stories involve the protagonist meeting Jirachi while he is awake and receiving advice directly from him.

Stories of Jirachi as the Wish Maker have been common for centuries as it provides either a goal for a hero to reach for or a way to allow for a story’s premise without much narrative justification. Wishes granted range from mastery of the arts to wealth, love, and power to mystical powers. It is a common narrative convention that those who encounter Jirachi while he is awake and treat him with kindness shall be allowed to write one wish on each wish tag. Those wishes shall be granted.

One epic hero, Masaharu of Kotoki, wished for and received a blade capable of killing even the gods themselves. After killing a dark god that had demanded his sister as a sacrifice, Masahuru was granted godhood by the dark god’s brother. He started as a benevolent deity, until the day Masahuru found his sword stolen. Suddenly paranoid of being killed, Masahuru began demanding town leaders sacrifice their daughters to him until they could find the thief. In time a boy who has lost his sister found the blade resting in a river, disguised himself as a sacrifice sent to Masahuru, and used his own blade to kill him.

There is another tale of a boy who met Jirachi. He thought about wishing to be the greatest swordsman in the land. Then he realized he could achieve this himself if only he trained hard enough. However, he did not have enough money for a sword. Then he remembered that Jirachi himself had once won his fortune making beautiful art. He considered wishing to be a skilled artist before realizing that with practice he could do that too. He left having made no wishes as there was nothing Jirachi could grant him that he could not grant himself.

Unlike Hoopa, Jirachi almost never distorts a wish in the stories about him. People often find that their wishes do not bring them happiness. But he did give them exactly what they thought they wanted.

Jirachi is often used as a way to explain a villain’s extraordinary powers, as it allows a villain to be established without making a major god their patron or suggesting they rose to power through their own virtues.

Worship

Jirachi’s main temple is in Hoenn’s Valley of Fauns. Most Japanese sources agree that Jirachi sleeps within the valley. The valley itself is a national preserve with access severely limited. At the center of the valley is a shrine to Jirachi where the pokémon sleeps. Photographs of the shrine surfaced in 2003. The photographer claimed to have snuck into the valley and taken the pictures there. The images show a large white stone with a stylized eye drawn on it surrounded by massive spires of quarts. Stairs lead up to an altar before the stone. The authenticity of the images is disputed. The Japanese government claims they are forgeries but also arrested and tried two people for trespassing in a national preserve.

There are smaller shrines in most major cities. These are often placed around parks, art museums, or science centers. Jirachi shrines typically consist of a large slab of white marble with an altar for placing offerings. There are few priests dedicated specifically to Jirachi. Most shrines are looked after by the priests to other gods or even just volunteers from the community.

For most of the year Jirachi’s worship is limited to the creative and the desperate. In addition to being the Wish Maker, Jirachi is also a deity linked to space, science, the arts, dreams, and madness. Jirachi is said to bring forth ideas from the collective human unconsciousness and help humans make them real. This can take the form of strokes of inspiration, newfound resolve, visions, or wishes.

Jirachi is the principal deity of comet festivals. Every year in East Asia, thousands of festivals are held in Jirachi’s honor. Wishes are written on pieces of rice paper and burned at Jirachi’s altar alongside offerings of fruit and fabric. Anything can be wished for, but it is traditional to wish for improvement in the arts or academics. The festival lasts for seven days. Aside from wish making, there are displays from local artisans, parades, and fireworks shows. Every 1,000 years, a millennium festival is held. These are the most important and extravagant of comet festivals and mark the return of the Millenium Comet and Jirachi’s awakening. It is believed that wishes granted during this festival, however outlandish, may be granted. In the year leading up to the festival it is common for public services to receive increased funding in the hopes of persuading citizens to earnestly wish for the emperor’s continued reign.

Origins

Jirachi myths are fairly consistent across East Asia but limited outside of the region. Research in the Valley of Fauns is limited by the Japanese government. Jirachi supposedly lived over four thousand years ago in a civilization advanced enough to have textile work and multicity states. This is plausible in Hoenn. Ceramics dating back to 2,500 BCE have been found in Hoenn. The Hoennese dragon tribes placed particular importance on meteors, comets, and the stars. The tribes never developed written language until it was introduced from China. Oral folklore from the tribes often contains outlandish stories mixed in with detailed recounting of lineages. It is of little value in determining Jirachi’s historicity. There is no evidence that textiles had been developed by the time of Jirachi’s supposed existence.

The Millenium Comet is real and is visible every 1,000 years. Until quite recently it was rare for civilizations to have accurate astronomical records dating back ten centuries. The Chinese knew of it by 300 BCE. Scholars described the comet and its unusual return period in Mesoamerica and Constantinople after its appearance in 681 CE.

It is plausible that the Hoennese dragon tribes, with their reverence for the cosmos, were able to match the comet with ancient oral stories. Even then it strains credulity that a tribe with no written language to be able to describe its return interval so accurately. It is more likely that the Millenium Comet was first described in China and then later used as the basis of a myth in Hoenn that spread throughout the East Asian world. The dragon tribes would have been quick to ascribe cosmological importance to the comet and, perhaps, link it to a strange geological site they had found.

Today

The Millenium Comet is due to return in 2681 CE. In the meantime, millions of people participate in comet festivals every year. The festivals are largely secular events dedicated to art and imagination.

Stories revolving around Jirachi’s role as the Wish Maker remain popular in fantasy stories, particularly those aimed at children, both as an inciting incident for the plot or as a justification for individual episodes or characters.

The Japanese space program’s asteroid and comet exploration program is named Jirachi. There is a prominent shrine to the god just outside of the agency’s headquarters in Hoenn.