I tried looking for a group for this and couldn't find one that fit, so I'm posting this here. Essentially, I'm looking for discussion on whatever fictional beings ponies might worship in alternate universes. I say "AUs" because in Friendship is Magic itself it's not discussed for obvious reasons, so it's difficult to know what their concepts of divinity are, or if they revere the princesses on that level.

Of course, since I don't know how common pony AUs with deities are, this may be a rather small discussion, but given I'm in the process of working on such a pony AU in high fantasy style, I was wondering if there was any discussion to be had on that topic...

5477479

Being a monotheist, I have them pray to Faust. I want to make up a religion where they follow the teachings of St. Sophia the Grumpy and her six-point virtue-based morality system, but I've yet to write a story where I had room to unpack that.

5477479
Pony society has always seemed rather paganistic, with a strong connection to nature (albeit controlled nature) and certain virtues. An AU with gods would probably be the same. They'd have multiple gods as representations of things in nature and important traits within ponies.

5477479 I'm not sure how into religion they'd be.
'
I mean, I definitely get them having loads of respect for Celly and Lulu (living for 1K+ years will do that, I guess) but I don't see them worshipping the pair. When I see them stay stuff like 'by Celestia' I see it more as a 'by her Majesty's hairy knickers' sort of expression.

Then, looking at our religions (particularly the older pantheons, like the Egypt one and the Greek one) gods seemed to be brought in to explain natural phenomenons. Except ponies are fully in control of those.

I'm not sure ponies would say 'Rainbow Dash is sure going all out on that thunderstorm today' in the same way as you might say 'Zeus be throwing thunderbolts from Olympus' or 'Thor is truly angry this day' (or whatever Vikings said. I wouldn't know, I wasn't there).

And... I'm not certain how much respect they'd have for gods when arguably the most 'god-ish' creature I've seen so far in the show gets tricked into being turned into stone twice and now has tea-parties with the pony who looks after the squirrels. Ooh, truly, Discord is a wrathful god.

That's just me, though, but if they were to 'worship' anything, I reckon it'd be some spiritual energy or magic itself (I guess kinda similar to the Force, except less space-wizard and more magic-that-lets-the-winged-ones-walk-on-clouds) or the nature that they work with every day (think 'be nice to the trees, they worked real hard to make those apples y'know, might as well show them some respect').

And of course, I don't subscribe to them worshipping Faust, in the same way that I don't really see the elves from Lord of the Rings worship Tolkein or Poirot worshipping Agatha Christie. At best, it's a rather silly concept, and at worst, I kinda think it transitions to stupid.

5477517
Oh… Poirot should totally worship Agatha Christie. I am literally crying with laughter here. There are tears.

5477523 I feel like the Queen of Crime would be a rather fickle goddess.

I mean, look what happened to Poirot. Didn't worship hard enough, I guess.

5477479 Probably gods would be beings like this (^). Of course, other races would have their own versions of gods. Celestia and Luna would most likely be demigods if they spend so much of their time among mortals. Twilight and Cadance would be demigods not by birth, but by elevation to said status by divine beings (most likely more powerful than Celestia). Every major city would have temples and shrines to the own favorite or patron gods/goddesses. The gods would have granted gifts to some races over others, so in that AU, that would be why Earth ponies are good at growing, Pegasus control the weather and Unicorns are generally the best at using broad categories of magic. Maybe some of the gods could even be 'higher versions' of Earth ponies, Pegasus and Unicorns. There may even be a god for the Pyrippus ponies.

5477479 I sort of feel like Tartarus would be a source of god-esque beings, since this is a universe where the supernatural is a tangible and prevalent part of life. Powerful demon comes to some duchy or confederation of tribes, then demands to be worshiped as a god. Bam. A diety. In that same vein, I imagine Equestria to be fairly areligious, as any sort of creature that could make the aforementioned demands are kept at bay by Princess Celestia, who most certainly could make those same demands, but chooses not to.

5477479
Lots of discussion to be had here.

You could use modern or ancient religions we have here as templates.
You can't go wrong with making the gods resemble the pony worshipers.

In some of my stories, I've been using Oonte, the Just and Merciful.
She lives in the plains of Paradise. Messengers (Ponies that look like the angels from diablo 3) serve her.
Shiolnar the Dark and Despicable is always opposing her.

In another story, I have ponies who worship the Princesses Luna and Celestia.
There is the ascended Twilight Sparkle. Some ponies pray to her. They are more like the new wave worshipers.
I don't go into much detail because the story isn't about religion but I do mention it.
One char wears gold jewelry that shows a purple alicorn on a wheel.

I could imagine a story where through an accident, Twilight Sparkle shows up in a world where she is worshiped.

I did have one story where Lauren Faust was an anthro alicorn.
She was the First Prophet of the Way of Harmony and Friendship.
I used anthros here because I wanted less disruption for people on Earth.
People can still go about their lives if they were anthros instead of four legged ponies.

Since you are doing an AU, you have freedom to make your universe as close to canon as you wish.

5477665

You could use modern or ancient religions we have here as templates.

Or you could take multiple religions/mythologies and put them in a blender. I did exactly that; the results were actually pretty decent. In fact, mixing things up a little instead of flat-out exporting real world things to your universe will give it the illusion of originality. Plus, it has the added bonus of ensuring you don't make any unfortunate implications about real life cultures and religions by putting in multiple cultures and religions at once, so you can make your evil empire of Judeo-Islamic Nazi Vikings as vile and obscene as you want, and it probably won't be construed as an attack on a real-world culture.

5477513
5477517
Japanese shinto, which is focused on the worship of nature, and has gods/goddesses as representations of same. Not so sure how this would translate in the pony universe however!

5477706
Good idea.

Thanks.

5477479
I think 5477517's got it figured out when it comes to modern Equestria. Worshiping deities doesn't really makes sense when they control the weather and could arrange to met those responsible for the passage of time.

However, alternate times in Equestria are a different matter. I could easily see ponies worshiping a pantheon of deities in the times before or after Celestia and Luna. A lot of the interpretations of Olden Equestria I've seen have ponies unable to manipulate the enviroment to the degree that they do in the show and things go about on their own. As a result, preying to gods makes sense. It also applies to the future, specifically unpleasant futures. In Fallout: Equestria many ponies worship Celestia and Luna simply for something to have faith in as they suffer in the bleak wasteland.

One thing I've also noticed is that pegasi (when living in their own societies) seem to lack religion in many portrayals, even where it would make sense. In FO:E the Grand Pegasus Enclave is purely atheistic, ponies directing faith their at the government and the cloud layer that seperates the race from the "barren hostile" wastes below. A lot of their historical portrayals paint them as more interested in glorifying their ancestors then any deity. Of course pegasi are the most god like of the ponies (they the process that gods usually explain: the weather) so them needing to believe in anything else other then themselves and a connection with the forces of nature is point less. Additionally, they're often a warrior race that has no claws, sharp teeth, or any other natrual advantage over monsters and griffons but still rule the roost on their own strengths, they spit in the faces of the powers that be.

Just my thoughts on the matter. Cool topic

5477665
5477574
Something I was actually considering doing was to take the Celtic gods and turn them into pony gods. I like what I've seen of Celtic myth and I felt it would be interesting. Of course, the main reason I thought about doing that was the "logic" of: "Ponyfinder has its own pantheon. In Ponyfinder, ponies are fey. In Celtic myth, some of the gods are fey. I should make the gods of ponykind the Celtic gods!" [/nonlinearthinking]

The main problem, of course, was that I'd already decided on part of the setting's lore - that the benevolent creator/patron goddess of ponykind and a malevolent "invader" god duked it out and the evil god "won." However, I've just had an idea:

5477706
In the initial Hearth's Warming Eve episode, each of the three tribes had their own aesthetic. Unicorns had a High Middle Ages vibe, pegasi were Greco-Roman, and earth ponies were a different sort of Middle Ages aesthetic. Perhaps in keeping with that, a pony pantheon might consist of, say... Greek (pegasus), Celtic (earth pony), and Egyptian (unicorn... maybe? Whatever, i like Egyptian myth anyway) sources, possibly blending two sources together for some gods. Hmm... might need another third source instead of Egyptians, though. Could do a lesser-known mythology, like Persian, Slavic, or Lusitanian (Western part of the Iberian Peninsula) lore... so many options!

5477892 It just feels like the Greco-Roman pantheon works best because every monster presented so far has been from Greek Mythology (or perhaps something original in it's own right). Jus sayin.

5477517 In many ways, the religion (and its associated dogma) was also the basis of law. The leader proclaimed that gods invested them with the power to rule and to establish order. In a society where Celestia and Luna are demigods, their authority would be seen as having a divine basis since they themselves are possessing of divine power and divine right. In Egypt, for example, the moment someone was crowned Pharaoh, they were treated like a god upon the Earth.

5477479

I see no problems with Ponies worshipping different forms of Magics, in their own Balthazars.

Like for this upcoming story I'm planning, I planning on There being a sec of ponies, mostly earth ones, who worship a Energy, that goes by the name of "Earthpulse". An energy that runs contradiction to magic itself, in that its natural.

Then you can have different practices of magics each having their own form of Gods, and deities. I'd go so far, as saying you can add more supernaturalness to this world of pastel ponies, by making Spirits a thing. Making different practices that don't rely on magic, and that clash with the aforementioned magic ones.

Then we have demons, and the like. We could even have ponies who worship TIREK, Katrina, Discord (Or screwball if you want, it's your story), Grogar and even OTHER Alicorns.

Then there's the concept of gods for different races, which has been mentioned before.

Wild Gods, traitorous ones that fell from power, Newborn ones. ARTIFICIAL Gods, beings who have been elevated to divine status, and so on.

The Patheons are, by and large, an unlimited resource you can pick from. Just takes some creativity, and good placement, in the Pony world, to make them work and come to life.

5478101 Well, Tartarus is a thing in Friendship is Magic, so you do have a point. But they've also, apparently, drawn a few things from Dungeons & Dragons, which is also owned by Hasbro in some way. Well, sometimes their interpretations are rather interesting, like the Bugbear, but the Bugbear name is from D&D. Of course, I won't be using D&D gods because the ones I've looked into are, in my opinion, kind of poorly done, and also rely on a god-versus-god cosmology that I don't think would be true of ponies, who are about harmony. Even human pantheons generally cooperate with each other and are allied, with exceptions (Kronos, Set).

5478138 Actually bugbears are from English folklore. That's where D&D got it from. They were generally lumped together in a group called 'hobgoblins', and they were more scary than dangerous. They terrified those who wandered too far into the woods at night, and most of them were only heard instead of being seen, so there's many many interpretations of what a bugbear really looked like.

5478366 Huh, The More You Know. I'm sure FiM's interpretation is one of the more unique ones, though. Similarly, I know that a Tatzlwurm is a name from folklore as well, though again FiM puts its own delightful spin on it.

While It still might be fun to try and incorporate some D&D lore into a pony world... that's something I'd save for another setting, methinks. Or perhaps leave to the others who have done so. Still, I've encountered people who headcanon that the entire D&D Monster Manual can be found in the world of MLP.

5477892 Copying High Middle Ages England is pretty cliched as far as fantasy goes. Not just for mlp fanfics, but for the entire genre as a whole. It's probably best to branch out a bit.

5478101 The show and a great deal of fanfic both take far too much from the Greeks, in my honest opinion. A blatant example would be from The Immortal Game, where the main villains are Titan and Terra, the mother and father to the Olympian gods' predecessors in Greek myth. It's become a cliche. Not that you shouldn't do it at all, but I'd at least refrain from borrowing names from the Greek pantheon, most notably Nyx, which is claimed by both Nihilus (again from The Immortal Game) and PenStroke's ridiculous black-and purple alicorn OC.

5478819 Never intended to - by the High Middle Ages, England was Christian, after all. Of course, I would agree that MLP uses enough Greek myth as it is, though I disagree with your Immortal Game example - Titan is a category of being, Terra is Roman, and if I recall correctly, Nihlus' middle name was "Nix" which has a completely different meaning. That, and looking at the other gods in that fic I don't think the author was going for a Greco-Roman theme. Of course the villains were, in my opinion, the worst part of an otherwise amazing fic. But I digress.

I got an idea earlier - what if the pony gods (after the creator, in this case) where inventor ponies of a sort? Children of the creator whose special talents involved discovering/creating the knowledge and skills ponies now use, such as farming, smithing, weathercrafting, and more? When they got their Cutie Marks was when they began to discover these crafts, and they then passed these skills down to their mortal kin? An idea I'm still working on, but one which I think could be interesting...

5478962

Titan is a category of being, Terra is Roman

Terra is the Latin word for Gaia, much like Hercules is the Latin for Heracles, or Neptune is the Latin for Poseidon. Though, the father was Uranus, so my memory on that part was wrong. But we're sort of getting into pedantry here -- Titan and Uranus are both from Greek myth and are related to the Titans.

Nihlus' middle name was "Nix" which has a completely different meaning.

You have a point, but I'd still avoid anything resembling "Nyx" or "Nix" regardless. It was one of many reasons why I just plain did not like Nihilus.

I got an idea earlier

Sounds interesting, I guess.

5478819 Well I've tried branching out into Hindi and Norse mythology, and both were downvoted into the toilet before the story even developed. Yet the mythology is about the only thing that changed. It seems that Greco-Roman myth is about the only ones readily accepted. There seems to be few stories that can use mythology other than accepted and still have a high up to down ratio.

5479355 I can't say anything for certain without reading those stories, but I will say that people are more familiar with the Greco-Roman mythos than any other, both because most of us were raised in a western background and because anything not Greco-Roman tends to be dismissed as "unrefined" or some other derogative thing in our modern culture. With that in mind, it's a lot harder to just throw in something from Norse or Indian myth without having to familiarize the audience with it first than it is to throw in something from Greek myth.

Plus, there's the whole "alien element" thing. A lot of people out there will downvote a story for deviating too much from the source material; dispensing with the proclivity toward copying Greek myth is one such deviation. Stories with a lot of OC's and stories with less-than-idealistic messages are solid downvote bait for the same reason. Not that this is an excuse, mind you. It just means you have to work harder to make the story appealing in other aspects, so that you still maintain a positive ratio. Hell, I have a story here that not only has an exclusively OC cast, but the protagonist is a complete dick, and the setting is a crapsack world with influences from A Song of Fire and Ice, Warhammer 40,000, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and some of the darkest parts of real-world history; it got a fairly positive reception. And I'm a complete nobody. You can certainly do it.

5479394 Hmm, I should probably seek advice (in a separate thread, of course) on writing a story with all OCs, given that the story for which I'm doing this deity plotting is such a story. And also an AU.

Granted, given Fallout: Equestria's popularity, it's doable, but FO:E is also a crossover, which I suspect helped it...