Tale as Old as Time: Pentiment, Mythology, and Syncretism

First posted June 2023.

One of the things I love most about the world of folklore — what’s led me to spend over half my life studying it and rambling about it on the internet endlessly — is how it evidences human connection. Throughout time, across countries, bridging all kinds of social gaps and distances between us, the thread that weaves us all together is our storytelling tradition. Usually, this has positive connotations: community, love, togetherness, relationship-building, acceptance, understanding. But what happens when that unity of humanity evidenced in our folkloric and mythological stories becomes a threat?

The stunning indie game Pentiment by Obsidian Entertainment is set in 16th century Bavaria, in a small fictional town called Tassing. The player character, Andreas Maler, is a journeyman artist from Nuremberg, working in the abbey’s scriptorium until he’s finished his masterpiece. While he’s there, a shocking murder rattles the small community and his mentor, Brother Piero, is accused of the crime. In order to save Piero, Andreas investigates the town and its inhabitants to find out who really committed the crime. His investigations reveal more intrigue and mysterious secrets hidden by various people in the town and the abbey.

From here on out, please be advised of spoilers for the entire plot, including the final act’s big reveal. It’s a mystery game, so if you want to go in and solve it for yourself, skip this for now and come back to it when you’re done.

Over the course of the game, Andreas and Magdalene Druckeryn, the protagonist of Act 3, listen to a lot of stories. Ill Peter, while being the stereotypical old man yelling at clouds, is happy to tell anyone who’ll listen about the pagan traditions of the town that he perceives as slipping away. The young folks just don’t worship Perchta like they used to. Others from the fringes of the town, including Til and Smokey, share mythological stories — remnants of the Romans who once settled the land. With the presence of the church in town and the double monastery up at the abbey, there’s no shortage of information to be had about the Christian history of the town, including its two patron saints.

I love video games as a storytelling medium, engaging listeners in a direct way and encouraging creative interaction with the narrative. Folklore has always served this purpose — the idea of fairytale retellings isn’t a modern one. Recorded variants of stories like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast are dotted throughout history, where someone listened to a story that was told to them and said, ‘That’s great, but what if this happened instead,’ and went on to tell their own variant that then got recorded and inspired another listener somewhere down the line to tell their own version. Even the reboots and remakes that flood our current media landscape are a form of folklore: a retelling of a story you’ve heard before, with changes made to reflect the creator’s priorities, values, and imagination. (It can also be a cash grab. I don’t mean to say these aren’t cash grabs. Things can be two things.)

Pentiment isn’t the only video game to ground its narrative in folklore, but it highlights a really interesting phenomenon in the world of mythology. It’s probably useful here to define our terms. Folklore, in the story sense, is the collection of stories that belong to a cultural tradition. This broad term includes mythology under its umbrella, and mythology is the specific subset of those stories that are considered sacred within their originating culture.

It’s a very frustrating thing as a folklorist that ‘myth’ has become synonymous with ‘lie.’ When I talk about myths, I’m not talking about things that aren’t true — in fact, it’s better understood to be the complete opposite. Which is not to say that people always believe that myths are factually true — this is more a hallmark of Christian mythology than anything else. But what is true of most if not all mythologies is that people believe in them spiritually. They believe in the message the story conveys, and they believe that the story reflects something true about the nature of the universe and the divine force in it. People tend to think when you refer to the stories of their religion as ‘mythology’ that you’re implying a disrespect to their belief, rather than using terminology that validates the importance of those stories.

Linguistic evolution is a thing, neither inherently good nor bad. Most of the time I’m for the way we express ourselves changing to better reflect us in our moment in time, to become more useful to us as we are now. But the myth thing really bugs me. My whole job is words, and it makes my job harder, and I’m allowed to be annoyed by it. But it’s worth noting that this linguistic shift in the definition of the word ‘myth’ isn’t a new phenomenon. It is, in fact, going to take us right back into Pentiment, and the mystery underlying all the other mysteries in the game.

So now that we’re clear on what mythology is, we can see that, in fact, all these stories in all these traditions that the characters in Pentiment talk to us about are mythological stories: the goddess Perchta and her Wild Hunt, the Roman gods, and the town’s patrons, Saints Moritz and Satia — these are all divine beings, held sacred in the cultural tradition of their adherents.

Let’s look more closely at these stories and see what pops out at us. We’ll start with one of Tassing’s patron saints, Saint Moritz. His hand is a relic held at the abbey’s shrine, and his time in Tassing is an important piece of the town’s history. In the story as told to Andreas by Brother Mathieu, Moritz was a Roman military leader who, with his legion, was snowed into the pass. Because they were Christians, the pagan townsfolk refused to provide them help in any way. But Satia, the daughter of the town’s leader, was ‘moved in spirit,’ and met Moritz and his men at the town’s spring so that she could be baptised. Once she was, the snow melted to reveal a bounty of fruits. Thus fed and restored, Moritz and his men managed to drive the rebels from the town and everyone was converted, although tragically the rebels managed to martyr Satia on their way out.

Til provides us a similar story about Tassing’s history. He talks of a Roman knight named Gaius Metellus, who drove the rebel Raetii tribe out of Tassing. Metellus found himself snowed into the pass and surrounded by enemies. Luckily, the god Mars sent a wolf to guide Metellus to a magical spring, surrounded by a bounty of fruits. Fed and restored, Metellus and his troops were able to drive the rebels from the pass, and when Metellus founded the town of Tassing, he honoured Mars for his guidance. Sound familiar?

Later, in Act 3, Ill Peter tells Magdalene a story about the pre-Roman days, and how their ancestors were led by a chieftain named Raetus. He wasn’t the best of chieftains, and his neglect of Perchta and the other old gods led divine favour to fall with his enemies. Raetus and his people were unable to win any battles for land to settle, and so wandered through the mountains and valleys, barely able to scrape up enough food to survive. One day, while in the pass, Raetus found a wolf caught in a trap and set it free. The wolf, of course, belonged to Perchta, the leader of the Wild Hunt. To repay Raetus’s kindness, Perchta had the wolf lead him to her sacred spring, around which Raetus founded the town.

Smokey also has a story for Magdalene about the town spring, and this one is saucy. In this version, the god Mars was hunting in the woods of Tassing when he saw a boar. He was just about to kill it when a woman’s scream scared off his prey. Furious, Mars searched the forest for the culprit, and found the nymph Tassia at the spring being harassed by a satyr. Mars transformed into a wolf and killed the satyr, and as thanks, Tassia, um, bathed Mars. As he emerged from the spring, the water dripping off him caused flowers and fruits to grow, and made the farmlands in the pass particularly fertile. I will allow you to fill in the explanatory details there. Anyway, the good farmland naturally attracted people to settle here, and when they did, they named the town for the nymph.

So, you may have noticed something is happening here, and that something is called syncretism. Broadly speaking, syncretism is the blending of elements from different religions or mythologies. This happens in a number of different ways and for a number of different reasons. Sometimes it happens more or less organically, with gods representing similar realms and subject matter popping up in various world mythologies: for example, goddesses of love and beauty, such as Aphrodite for the Greeks, Freyja for the Norse, Ishtar/Inanna/Astarte for various Mesopotamian factions. When gods are syncretised, we often see stories about them become attributed to each other. For example, a birth story of the goddess Astarte pops up in Greek sources as a birth story of the goddess Aphrodite. We know it’s a product of syncretism because the story specifically references Aphrodite’s birth on the river Euphrates, which is where Astarte and this story come from. The goddess of love and beauty is a very common deity in lots of mythologies, and we consider all of them sort of different manifestations of the same basic idea.

To look at it another way, a great example is the Greco-Egyptian god Hermanubis. Most syncretised gods don’t literally get their names mashed up, but, well. Tricksters are gonna be tricksters. This blend of mythologies – the Greek Hermes with the Egyptian Anubis – came from the close association of Greek and Egyptian people; this combination of communities also gave us such syncretic deities as Dionysus-Osiris, Persephone-Isis, and Hades-Serapis. People share stories, people share customs, and people notice that they have similarities. In this particular case, both Hermes and Anubis are psychopomps, or beings involved with the guiding of souls from the land of the living to the land of the dead. Hermes is also a trickster, and the jackal from which Anubis gets his head is a trickster in African folklore. These are the kinds of things that syncretism deals with: similarities that lead to combining.

Another way syncretism happens is on purpose, usually with a political motive. The Romans essentially built their empire on syncretism. In each place to which they spread, they used deliberate syncretism with local indigenous religions to form bonds and establish themselves within the community. Coming in and simply imposing their gods on the population was likely to meet with resistance; people remained devoted to their own gods and their own customs in opposition to the culture of the interlopers. It proved much more effective for the Romans to search for similarities with local deities and equate those deities to their own, establishing a commonality with the people under their rule. Britain is just lousy with examples of this happening: the springs of Bath were associated with the goddess Sulis, whom the Romans syncretised with Minerva, and up in the north, local hunting god Cocidius was syncretised with Mars. The effectiveness of this approach is evident in that we still refer to those gods in a manner that reflects the syncretism; Sulis Minerva is considered an aspect of Minerva, depicted all over touristy baubles in Bath, but crucially, it’s not Minerva as an aspect of Sulis. Though Sulis was allowed to continue to exist and be worshipped to a degree, Roman dominance still bore out. Eventually, the Romans exerted their authority in prioritising their religion, their culture, and their rule, and they were successful in this because they established that foundation with syncretism first, by combining with rather than eradicating the local beliefs.

Back in Pentiment, the fictional town of Tassing reflects actual historical reality. In this version, the Romans moved into Tassing just as they did anywhere else, identifying the local deities and syncretising with their own. Stories of Perchta and Raetus became stories of Tassia and Mars. As an oral tradition, folklore is essentially a game of telephone being played with all of human history, so the stories get a little jumbled along the way. Raetus somehow becomes a tribe called the Raetii. The people in the stories change from pagans to Romans, and as the need for a Roman protagonist emerges, Mars gets separated into Mars and Metellus. Eventually, the authority in the region changes from Romans to Christians, and as the dominant culture, we see the Christians syncretise again, changing Tassia to Saint Satia and Mars/Metellus to Saint Moritz.

But while the Romans didn’t exactly make a secret of their syncretism, the Christians in Tassing embarked on a mission of concealment. As in real life, it seems the Romans were tolerant of the persisting pagan traditions as long as it wasn’t perceived as a challenge to authority; the fact that Ill Peter and Ottilia are still so openly devoted to Perchta evidences a parallel tradition of Roman religion and pagan religion in Tassing. Christianity, both in the game and in history, was less tolerant of parallel traditions. The game makes a delightfully blatant symbol of the Tassing church, Our Lady of the Labyrinth, being built upon the ruins of a Mithraeum, which was a temple of the Cult of Mithras. The Christians worked to bury everything that came before them; it’s only through the persistence of people like Ill Peter and the forbidden reading done by Til before the abbot outlawed it that the stories still exist in Tassing’s circulation.

In Act 2, the big point of contention between Kiersau Abbey and the town of Tassing is the celebration of St. John’s Eve. This feast day coincides with Midsummer, an important pagan celebration and, in Tassing, a celebration of Perchta and the Wild Hunt. Often, Christian holy days were established at the same time as pagan festivities in an act of deliberate syncretism; in fact, the Christian celebration of All Hallows’ Day, which you may know as Halloween, was celebrated in May in Rome, where the festival of the dead, Lemuria, took place at that time of year, and in October around the pagan Samhain celebration in the British Isles. Thinking with syncretism, the Christians thought if they were able to establish a connection between one celebration and another, the logic was that one should eventually be able to supersede the other. As we can see from Tassing’s celebration of St. John’s Eve, this wasn’t totally successful.

Though Tassing’s townsfolk capitulate to calling their celebration St. John’s Eve, nothing about the celebration itself seems Christian, neither to the observer outsider Andreas nor to the abbot, Father Gernot. The people of Tassing make no secret of following the pagan traditions of creating masks and going to the forest to gather herbs. They’re even burning a big ol’ wicker man in the town commons (without someone inside, as far as we know). Tensions rise between the abbot and the town, and he threatens to excommunicate anyone caught celebrating in the forest. There’s very little outrage at this; a few people say they’ll be going to bed early, but the people dedicated to celebrating their own way are unfazed by Father Gernot’s threats and their plans don’t change, much to the abbot’s dismay.

This is a great example of why Romans approached deliberate syncretism the way they did. If they allowed the pagan traditions to exist alongside their own, there would be less pushback when they prioritised their beliefs. They didn’t completely eradicate the pagans – Ill Peter and Ottilia are still there, and even those who don’t talk about Perchta are still celebrating her at St. John’s Eve – but they still established a firm foothold for their own religion and considered it dominant.

Broadly speaking, Christianity has not historically approached syncretism the same way. Missionaries, conquistadors, crusaders: regardless of the carrier, the goal has been complete eradication of local religion. When I defined ‘mythology’ earlier, I noted there’s a kneejerk rejection that people tend to have when it’s applied to their own mythology; in truth, this is mostly a Christian reaction, and it’s because their approach to syncretism is less accepting and less focused on building commonality. Christian syncretism is one of exclusion and subsumption. Everyone else’s sacred stories are mythology; theirs are ‘truth.’

However, you’ll notice I said ‘broadly speaking.’ There are exceptions; indeed, Christian syncretism wasn’t always like this. A story from Iceland tells of their patron saint, Gudmundur the Good, blessing each face of a dangerous cliff in order to prevent more accidents from happening there. As he reached the last spot, a demonic hand grabbed him and asked him to leave a space for the spirits of the old faith. He agreed. In practice, this is a story telling people not to go hunting puffin eggs on the most dangerous side of this cliff, but it’s also telling that this story shows a Christian leaving space for pagans. That’s a much more common experience of syncretism through the ages — the authority in the region would of course prioritise and promote their own religion, but acknowledged the need for the old traditions to continue in their own way. So why is it different for Tassing?

Syncretism is a thing that happens naturally, as I mentioned before with cases like the goddesses of beauty and combination gods like Hermanubis. It’s also a deliberate tool, particularly evident in the histories of the Roman Empire and Christianity. Even when utilised in less direct and aggressive ways, when syncretism is used as a tool, it is in service of control.

It was a favoured tool of Catholic conquistadors and colonisers in the Americas, used to eradicate local religions in order to establish dominance over the people they came to conquer. One of the most well-known examples of this is the Mexican Catholic saint, Our Lady of Guadalupe. The original story, as best we know it, is that a Nahua man named Juan Diego saw an apparition of a woman who identified herself to him as the Virgin Mary and asked that he build a church there in her honour. Advised by the Archbishop, Juan Diego asked for proof of her identity, which she provided in creating roses not native to Mexico on the summit of a nearby hill. (In most versions it’s Castilian roses, but I’ve also heard it said to be blue roses — I suspect the blue may have come from the blue cloak the woman wore, which was used to colour-match her to the Virgin Mary, essentially.) The Lady appeared to Juan Diego’s uncle to inform him she wished to be known by the moniker Guadalupe.

This account, of course, comes to us from Catholic missionaries, and is, as such, hotly contested. The main point on which debate hinges is who the Lady was — most non-Catholic belief is that she was a manifestation of a local goddess whom the missionaries pointed to as syncretic with Mary. Some people have put forward the Aztec goddess of love and fertility, Coatlícue, who was known by the honorific ‘Tonantzin,’ or ‘Our Lady.’ Another theory is that the blue signals Tōnacācihuātl, as that colour was uniquely sacred to her and her consort. Whoever she was, most agree that she was a product of syncretism — an appearance of a local deity co-opted by the colonisers into a manifestation of their own deity. In this case, it was effective. We can’t say for sure who the local deity was before she became the Lady of Guadalupe, because the Catholics did not want her identity or the religion from which she came to exist alongside theirs. We don’t have a case like Sulis Minerva, where the local deity becomes an aspect of the authoritative culture’s god. The local deity becoming an aspect of Our Lady of Guadalupe wouldn’t have served their needs; where the Romans didn’t feel threatened by the people under their rule (a confidence that wouldn’t always serve them well, it should be said), the conquistadors and colonisers met with aggressive and violent resistance from native populations, and needed obliteration of everything in the local cultural imagination that challenged them. They specifically wanted to dominate and eradicate the local deities, and thus needed to replace rather than combine.

Our Lady of Guadalupe endures, but it’s worth noting that she has become a symbol not only in Mexican Catholicism but of Mexico itself — deeply important culturally, not just religiously. Mexican revolutionaries have carried flags bearing her image in multiple uprisings, and she’s invoked as a symbol of national unity. In a sense it’s an example of wildly successful use of syncretism as a weapon of colonialism, but it’s also an example of the reclamation of a symbol used against the colonised by the people it was meant to keep in line.

We can also see evidence of the eradication method of syncretism in the Christianisation of Scandinavia. Though there are stories like the Icelandic one mentioned earlier, more broadly speaking folklore tells a different story. One of the most common recurring folkloric motifs is the story of a troll, representing Nordic paganism, being turned to stone by an overtly Christian representative, such as church bells, or a child professing belief in the Christian God. It’s telling that these stories proliferate in later centuries; Gudmundur was a 12th century saint, and recorded variants of these troll stories don’t come along until the 19th century (though may have been circulating in that version as early as the 17th). If we look at the history of the Christianisation of Scandinavia, we can see it was actually a fairly slow process, interrupted by military and political upheaval, tied to the control various kings were able to exert, as well as hampered by the sheer size of the geographical area. More remote areas of Sweden and Norway remained heavily pagan until roughly the 16th and 17th centuries. But what these stories tell us, in an indirect way, is how that Christianisation took place. When Christian kings took power, part of the exertion of their control was in Christianising the nation. For a period of history, pagan and Christian kings traded power frequently, but once Christianity took hold — well, the pagan trolls were turned to stone, never to move again.

Turning back to Pentiment, what does this mean for the syncretism in play here? Father Thomas goes to extreme lengths to keep the fact of the syncretism in Tassing’s history secret; why? Because once again, syncretism has been used here as a tool of control. The faction in power here has changed multiple times, and when we see uncertainty like that, like we did in Scandinavia, it takes a firm hand to ensure that control stays where it currently sits. The Christians in Tassing needed not only to establish themselves in authority, but eradicate what came before to prevent any potential uprising, like the Catholics in the Americas. But Father Thomas also knows they’ve already failed on that front, as Perchta and the Roman gods still have a hold on the people of Tassing. He knows how tenuous his hold on control is; he says he doesn’t trust in the townspeople’s faith — that if they knew the full truth of the religions that came before, they would abandon Christianity.

What specifically happened in Tassing is that the early Christian settlers misinterpreted the Roman ruins as legacies left by saints they already knew. The statue to Mars in the meadow was interpreted to be Saint Moritz, a saint from their own background, and eventually the story came to be of Saint Moritz’s physical presence in the town being commemorated by this statue. Pilgrimages drive a lot of income for the town; coming back to the point that Christians are an anomaly in their literal belief in their mythological stories, there is an emphasis in Tassing and in real-life sites of pilgrimage that the story factually happened, that the saints and figures in the story were physically present in the exact place in question. For many in this time period and even to some extent today, Christian faith is tied to a literal belief in the historical truth of their stories, as opposed to the more common religious faith in the spirit of a story and what it represents about the nature of the divine. If Saint Moritz was never in Tassing — if that statue was always of Mars — Tassing could lose its pilgrimage income, and, Father Thomas fears, even their faith in God.

The name of the game comes from the term pentimento, which is defined as ‘the presence or emergence of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over.’ Syncretism is, quite literally, the name of the game. Though syncretism is not always a painting over of what came before, it can be, and in this case, crucially, it is. Because of the way Father Thomas uses and hides the syncretism that has taken place, the uncovering of those earlier images is a direct threat to the church’s control over the town.

Pentiment is an exploration of the power that stories have, and in particular, the power that mythological stories have. One of the best ways the game illustrates this is in Act 2, when Andreas purchases a book from the abbey’s library to give to baby Magdalene. I chose to give her Parzival — a folkloric story that, it just so happens, I also had a copy of when I was a child. You can give her other books, but the end result of whichever book you choose is that the book influences Magdalene’s knowledge, and gives your version of her a background related to that book when she takes over as the player character in Act 3.

My Magda, like me, grew up with a love of mythology and folklore, which influences how she interprets the events of the game, how she makes sense of the world around her, and what she understands of the puzzle pieces as they fit together. I like this background for Magda especially because of the crucial role mythology plays in the game’s climax. It emphasises the theme of the impact mythology has on those who read and study and believe in it. It shows exactly what Father Thomas is afraid of: that people who know other stories will be less influenced by the authority and dominance of his own.

The power of mythological stories remains, even in present-day politics. In Britain, the myth of King Arthur looms so large that the Plantagenets and the Tudors claimed descendance from him to legitimise their own rules. Though such bold claims are no longer made explicitly, it’s telling that Arthur is a common name to the Windsors, as a middle name for both William and his son Louis, as well as a rumoured considered regnal name for Charles. No stranger to using mythology to legitimise his rule, Charles also came under fire recently for using imagery of the Green Man in his coronation accoutrements. An attempt to connect oneself to the folkloric culture of a region in order to strengthen the bond between the people and their ruler is an appeal to the power of that culture’s mythology.

This isn’t a uniquely British thing, either. In Hawaii, the fight between native activists and the American government continues to rage over Mauna Kea and the Thirty Meter Telescope. Mauna Kea holds immense sacred importance to the Hawaiian people; in Hawaiian mythology, there is a connection and an identification between the people and the land. Hawaiian gods not only live in the land, but they are the land itself; Mauna Kea is a mountain, but she is also a goddess, and in being a goddess, she is also one of the Hawaiian people, and the people are in turn connected to her. As activist Kealoha Pisciotta stated, “You can’t get rid of us. Hawaiians come with the territory, literally...From a cultural perspective there is no difference for us. Culturally, the land lives. And we’re related to it. We’re all connected, even if there’s no science that can prove that.” What she alludes to in that last sentence is the disbelief and disrespect their opposition shows in denying the importance of their mythology. It’s, again, why it upsets me that ‘myth’ has become synonymous to ‘lie.’ These are real beliefs, sacred, important, and you don’t have to believe in them yourself to respect them. What the ongoing debate hinges on here is a rejection of the legitimacy of mythology, and it’s a testament to the power of that mythology that the fight continues despite the opposition’s attempt to dismiss it.

What Pentiment illustrates beautifully is how stories connect us to our past and to each other, and the immense power that stories have, both as a tool to be used and as an unstoppable force you can’t fight. It shows why it’s important to know where your stories come from, to be knowledgeable about your past and about the stories you tell, both to yourself and to others. It shows the impact of stories on the people around us, on our communities, and on our futures.

What Tassing does with the truth is unknown, but the power of mythology has been demonstrated to devastating effect. These stories cannot be buried, even when Father Thomas buries himself alive destroying the Mithraeum in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the truth from being discovered. In Pentiment, mythology has a body count. Syncretism is a really cool phenomenon in the history of human storytelling, but it, too, has been the weapon of choice for those who would use the power of mythology against others rather than as a tool of connection. What 16th century Tassing tells us about the world we live in is that stories have a power of which we should be conscious. It matters what stories you tell; it matters what stories you hide.