ELDER ELEMENTAL GOD
EEG = Elder Elemental God, the one that appears in the G3 module. It might or might not (Gygax says not) the same as the Elder Elemental Eye or Tharizdun. But the author of the blog says he thinks they are the same.
The Gygax quote from 2003 that says:
There is far less written about the Elder Elemental God than there is the Elder Elemental Eye (Tharizdun), presumably because Gary Gygax had not developed the idea until later, when writing WG4 The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun.
The question need be asked: If the Elder Elemental Eye was Tharizdun, was the Elder Elemental God Tharizdun?
"No, the Elder Elemental God I envisaged as an entity of vaguely Chronos-like sort, a deity of great power but of chaotic sort, and not always highly clever in thought and action. Big T on the other hand is the epitome of pure, reasoning and scheming evil. Eclavdra, being more of the mold of Tharizdun, would prefer to have as "master" a powerful deity she might hope to influence, thus the EGG."
Gary Gygax ("Col_Pladoh"), 10th January, 2003, Q&A with Gary Gygax Part I, Enworld.
BTW, I love his quote, Byron always had good stuff:
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”
― Lord Byron
Not the EEG, but I can stomach this picture. From here.
MY ANALYSIS / EXPLANATION
So the confusion is that the symbol, the triangle with the point down with the inverted Y in it (through it?) is mentioned in G3, with the EEG, but also later they mention that same symbol in some other situations not precisely the EEG. Wikipedia I think had it listed under the Elder Elemental Eye and somewhere about Tharizdun. So some authors are saying they are the same, Gygax is saying not the same. So, how do we deal with this? Maybe:
- OPTION 1 - we say that the followers of such a mysterious evil entity ... entities... don't really ever know which one they are following. They get the symbols confused just like we do today.
- similar to real religions, sometimes they absorb pieces of other religions. They tie things together to get more worshippers.
- Kinda like "Oh, you want to keep doing Halloween... yeah we are totally OK with that. And (later) here's All Souls Day and All Saints Day, by the way".
- Except, whoops, that whole thing might be wrong, according to this scholar. Halloween might be Christian first. Maybe. See here.
- Michael says: “This is a really interesting question. Is it a pre-Christian festival as some scholars maintain or is it just, as the name implies, the eve of all hallows or all saints” “Now, our sources for this are all late, they all come from Ireland and they all come from when the Irish had been Christians for 500 years. So, I think enormous pinches of salt are needed when asserting if Halloween is a pre-Christian festival that was co-opted by the Christian Church.”
- Or in Japan, the sort of mix of Buddhism and Shintoism... I mean I guess they are separate, but it seems like a lot of people do both. Bad example maybe, a better example is the way Buddhism has Hell scenes... but so does Christianity and Judaism and etc.. Somebody borrowed from somebody else way back when, I would bet a lot on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naraka_(Buddhism).
- I've also read that older deities become demons when referenced in other religions or later religions. Easy to see why, in some cases, with the child sacrifices and other utterly horrible things that actually happened (with archeological evidence) in the past. See here and here.
- As in, the symbol got mixed up and shared amongst many cults.
- OPTION 2 - Or maybe they are all aspects of the same God-being-thing. It certainly doesn't need to be neat, and it's more interesting if it is mysterious and messy, IMO.
- A simple real life comparison is the holy trinity in Christianity, I think.
OTHER STUFF
I better read all of this: https://davidleonard-greyhawkmusings.blogspot.com/2020/10/history-of-south-east-part-10-uncertain.html
- So I'm looking for Elder Evil God part 1 (found it, link above). But when I found that History of South East ... the black Ziggurat art got my attention:
OTHER BLOGS
GreyhawkGrognard's https://www.greyhawkgrognard.com/2019/10/18/connecting-the-temple-of-elemental-evil-with-the-vault-of-the-drow-part-5/
- Related but not precisely the same thing.
- It's the Temple of Elemental Evil (T1-4) published in 1985 [yes Gygax was still w/ TSR] and Vault of the Drow (D3) published in 1978.
- I think they are going with the EEG = the Elder Elemental Eye = Rentaq
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