Ninanna

Goddess of Civilizing, Agriculture, Cities, Language, Inequality, Politics, War, Taxes, Slavery, Crime, and Trade

So Passes Earthly Glory.

Queen of Heaven, Patron of Revolutions, Destroyer of Glories, Scourge of the Faithless, Goddess of Cities, the Wall-Builder, Collector of Things Lost, Sovereign of Sins, the Necessary Evil, Daughter of Civilization, Guide of Heroes, Goddess of War, Who Holds the Box of Woe, Personification of Youthful Vitality and Violence, She of the Wind and of the Hoe, Lady of Tyrants, Slayer of Kings

Ninanna, the Queen of Heaven, is the motherless daughter of Pantokra. Unlike her father, lord of civilization, preserver of peoples, defender of cultures, keeper of oaths and laws, Ninanna is the bringer of civilization: a destroyer of cultures, a tyrant over peoples, one who beats back the darkness with a sword and the casualties of kindness, mercy, and decency be damned. She is the conqueror to her father’s king, the necessary means to her father’s great ends, the youthful vigour that in time gives rise to wisdom. Her power is to expand the reach of her father by any means necessary, to any result possible. Her clergy and champions wear the panoply of war, for the sake of a day when at last the weapons they have spent a lifetime mastering are no longer needed.

Ninanna brings agriculture, art, writing, wealth, and the beginnings of law and traditions, but also crime, inequality, and war. Her tenets, outlined in The Ordering of Creation, state that all of those are problems which can be solved in time — and so, their introduction is not, itself, a problem. In fact, it is a moral imperative — The Ordering of Creation is not a history, nor a philosophical treatise, so much as a guidebook and a promise that tomorrow will be better than the day before yesterday. It is also a promise that cannot be fulfilled, an endless journey rather than a single step: for when civilization has been brought to all the world, then all the world shall be uncivilised again, and once again Ninanna will bring civilization to those who have never heard of civility.

Few places ever truly achieve her father’s vision of a Civilised Society, so Ninanna is ever present on the fringes of civilization: in the squalid alleyways forgotten by the masses, in the shadows of gilded halls, in the rotted foundations of castles and kingdoms, fighting to bring light to the places which have once again fallen into shadow. Ninanna is, according to priests and by all conventional theology, a fundamentally benevolent, if heavy-handed, deity; however, her strong association with those places where civilization has failed its subjects makes her rather mistrusted in the great cities and the heartlands of any empire, where the memories of times before her coming have long since been forgotten. On the other hand, she remains popular and respected in places where her arrival remains within living memory, and on the fringes of civilization, where the shadows beneath the forest always threaten to reclaim the fledgling cities and farmlands.

Ninanna does not normally condone the construction of temples dedicated to herself instead of to her father; while she usually has at least a shrine in all but the smallest temples, it is considered misguided at best to create a permanent site of worship for the Queen of Heaven. The bringing of civilization and the purging of the uncivilised is a process which is never finished, but it is paradoxically one which should never be prolonged. The sword must be sheathed, the tyrant overthrown, and the impoverished made rich in order to bring about an age of true civilisation. Even should that day be yet many years away, necessary evils are never deserving of worship. Ninanna knows better than anyone that some crimes have a way of worming their way into the very soul of a society, where they resist all attempts to be cured — and once again require excision by the sword.

Clerics

Ninanna has no organised church like her father Pantokra. Instead she has a loose priesthood, much more similar to most of the other gods if slightly more structured. While Ninanna’s champions may switch freely between her patronage and that of her father, her priests and clergy cannot. Her priesthood is far too different from Pantokra’s in both goal and organisation for that to be permitted. While her champions serve as examples of what to strive towards, her priests must take steps to actualize her vision on a grander scale than what can be achieved by one person alone. The priests of Pantokra must build and develop upwards — her priests must push and expand outwards. They are fundamentally incompatible, though synergistic, and while the Priesthood does not truly see eye-to-eye with the Cuatanian Church, they reckon each other as stalwart allies.