Could Saint Patrick still be running around?

[groinkick]

Jim mentioned that Saints were Wizards using faith based magic.  Well wizards are very long lived.  Would be interesting if Jim let us meet the wizard who cast the werewolf curse and why.  Legend is he did it to people who mocked Christianity, and I read somewhere it was done to a royal family.  Read somewhere else it was done to Pegan's. 

[jonas]

I'm going to have to look in my actually book collection because I have forthwith been unable to find reference to in on the E-web. But I have read a pretty good comparison of St. Patrick and Odin/Fenrir. Something to do with how both stories have the same... metaphorical tones? Idk, basically it said they both depicted royalty being subsumed by a beast they'd previously contained or some such... really need to find it. It's the only proof I can think on connecting the Loup as Fenrir outside of the possibly ill said prophecy on the end of days and the dying out of the cursed line. But it also gives heavy implications on the idea Patrick cursed himself to contain the beast, which then figuratively consumed him.
*could maybe be in one of the histories of the multiple St. Patrick's somewhere...

[groinkick]

I'm going to have to look in my actually book collection because I have forthwith been unable to find reference to in on the E-web. But I have read a pretty good comparison of St. Patrick and Odin/Fenrir. Something to do with how both stories have the same... metaphorical tones? Idk, basically it said they both depicted royalty being subsumed by a beast they'd previously contained or some such... really need to find it. It's the only proof I can think on connecting the Loup as Fenrir outside of the possibly ill said prophecy on the end of days and the dying out of the cursed line. But it also gives heavy implications on the idea Patrick cursed himself to contain the beast, which then figuratively consumed him.
*could maybe be in one of the histories of the multiple St. Patrick's somewhere...

Interesting.  I could see Odin doing something like that.

[Quantus]

fwiw, we have WOJ confirming that Vadderung is indeed St Nicholas on top of his Odin and Santa identities.  So that's one Saint in the mix.  Though can you be a Saint and an actual Deity at the same time?  I feel like those should be cognitively incompatible. 

[peregrine]

Though if it's Odin, then he's not a Saint as described by Jim.

Actually related to the Dresden Files though, it's possible, especially if he's a Wizard+Faith Saint and not just a Canonized by the Church Saint, but there's no real evidence to support it.  St Patrick was active around three centuries before Rashid whacked Alhazred which means he'd most likely have to be using the same (or similar) temporal shenanigans to still be around.

[Paviel]

There is something odd about St. Patrick. Bob said that it took the power of "a major heavy-weight sorcerer or a demon lord or one of the faerie queens" to cast the loup-garou curse on even one person, let alone an entire bloodline.

I would assume that St. Patrick's "addenda" to the loup-garou curse on MacFinn (i.e. his entire bloodline is cursed, and it'll never go extinct) would require that much more power besides. But I would think only TWG would have that much power.

Granted, St. Patrick was in league with TWG...

[Arjan]

fwiw, we have WOJ confirming that Vadderung is indeed St Nicholas on top of his Odin and Santa identities.  So that's one Saint in the mix.  Though can you be a Saint and an actual Deity at the same time?  I feel like those should be cognitively incompatible.

Not at all. Some saints are just continuations of old pagan deities and their festivals are continuations of their worship. Christianisation at some places would have met too much resistance otherwise.

[Quantus]

Not at all. Some saints are just continuations of old pagan deities and their festivals are continuations of their worship. Christianisation at some places would have met too much resistance otherwise.

That's a good point.  I was more thinking of it from the magical energy side: if the hallmark of a Saint is magic that is heavily mixed with Faith, but you yourself are the actual Object of that faith, can you manifest that Faith the same way?  Does that mean that fanatic self-confidence could, if taken to an extreme, grant Faith energy?  Does it only work if you first manage to con(vert) enough followers into buy off on your divinity?  Or does it work because the Entity formerly known as Odin just now also has a deep respect for the Abrahamic team that he can Channel /their/ power some of the time, keeping it separate from his own other deific status

[Fcrate]

Or does it work because the Entity formerly known as Odin just now also has a deep respect for the Abrahamic team that he can Channel /their/ power some of the time, keeping it separate from his own other deific status

That would be major league cheating. I like it

[Arjan]

That's a good point.  I was more thinking of it from the magical energy side: if the hallmark of a Saint is magic that is heavily mixed with Faith, but you yourself are the actual Object of that faith, can you manifest that Faith the same way?  Does that mean that fanatic self-confidence could, if taken to an extreme, grant Faith energy?  Does it only work if you first manage to con(vert) enough followers into buy off on your divinity?  Or does it work because the Entity formerly known as Odin just now also has a deep respect for the Abrahamic team that he can Channel /their/ power some of the time, keeping it separate from his own other deific status

I think there is a difference between a human that is still alive and might be declared a saint later and the actual entity that is venerated.

That can be just a pagan god with a new career. And as the story changes he will change.

Uriel wouldn’t mind, he is very flexible in those things.

[groinkick]

There is something odd about St. Patrick. Bob said that it took the power of "a major heavy-weight sorcerer or a demon lord or one of the faerie queens" to cast the loup-garou curse on even one person, let alone an entire bloodline.

I would assume that St. Patrick's "addenda" to the loup-garou curse on MacFinn (i.e. his entire bloodline is cursed, and it'll never go extinct) would require that much more power besides. But I would think only TWG would have that much power.

Granted, St. Patrick was in league with TWG...

Maybe it was a combination of Faith based magic + Soulfire, or the wizard in question tapped into another power source?

[vultur]

Though can you be a Saint and an actual Deity at the same time?  I feel like those should be cognitively incompatible.

Well, Odin is "mostly retired", whatever that means... He may not actively seek worship or present himself as a deity any longer. Maybe that's why his public persona is Donar Vadderung, CEO of Monoc Securities rather than Odin, All-Father of the Aesir?

[groinkick]

rather than Odin, All-Father of the Aesir?

He'd be more limited that way...  Vadderung is probably as close as he can get to mortal, giving him much more freedom.

[toodeep]

Jim's comment about what makes a saint was a deep disappointment to me, because it smashed my theory on what makes a saint.  But it doesn't rule out a saint doing what I hypothesized.  My theory was thus:

1.  We have seen that mortals can make deals with beings from the NeverNever for power. At times this involves a connection between souls like that which makes a white court vampire.  The human gains power from the NeverNever creature and that creature gains an ability to effect its host and the mortal world (i.e. feed in the Hunger's case).

2.  Angels can be treated as beings from the NeverNever.

What happens when a human soul makes a symbiotic relationship with an angel?  I think this is very, very rare, since obviously angels would be very nervous about bequeathing their power to a mortal who can misuse it.  On the flip side, there is a huge advantage to doing it as well - the same thing the Denarians gain - the ability to give their power to someone with free will to use in the mortal world.

So obviously, this would only happen with the most "good" of people, and the angels might be inclined to do it with people who weren't likely to live very long (might be part of the deal, might be a side effect of channeling that much power) in order to reduce the likelihood of abuse.  That would explain the rarity of Saints and their tendency to usually be martyrs.

But oh, the power they would have when they had access to (some of) an angel's power.

[vultur]

1.  We have seen that mortals can make deals with beings from the NeverNever for power. At times this involves a connection between souls like that which makes a white court vampire.  The human gains power from the NeverNever creature and that creature gains an ability to effect its host and the mortal world (i.e. feed in the Hunger's case).

Well... deals for power don't generally seem to create that kind of close connection. Sharing a body with some kind of Nevernever entity seems to either be "natural" (I don't think there's any evidence that White Court vampires or lycanthropes were created by mortal spellcasters) or the result of something really, really powerful (Denarian Coins, Faerie Knights' Mantles).

The hexenwolf belts might be a counter-example, but they're really not that powerful in the grand scheme of things, and IIRC Jim has hinted that the theory that they came from the Erlking is correct, in which case that's another case of something really, really powerful setting up the situation.

Maaaaybe the Archive was something like this, but if so that's probably a case of "way, way beyond what modern wizards can do" like Merlin's creation of Demonreach. Bob is a Seriously Big Deal to the White Council and he's not nearly on the Archive's level.

If setting up this sort of thing was within the power of a standard wizard, I think a ton of crazy warlocks would have awesome physical powers to add to their spellcasting ability.

What happens when a human soul makes a symbiotic relationship with an angel?  I think this is very, very rare, since obviously angels would be very nervous about bequeathing their power to a mortal who can misuse it. 

I think that the "normal" way of bequeathing angel power to a mortal is granting Soulfire. Harry presumably isn't the only mortal spellcaster to have gotten this, since
the skinwalker in Turn Coat comments that it's strange that he can use it without faith.  Perhaps it's something that a lot of Saints have gotten in the past.

And on a much higher level, there's Uriel lending his Grace to Michael in Skin Game...