Pharika
God of Afflictions Pharika
Pharika, mother of Gorgons, has no sway over the plight of man. Her deadly concoctions and plagues can no longer blaze through villages and towns of those she deemed her test subjects. Now, her healing pools offer no respite to those who seek to cure their ailments as her oracle Gorgons and seers of the pools wither and die.
Pharika, the god worshipped mostly in Setessa's Winter Nexus, is associated with grief and old age. Deadly poison can be healing medicine in small amounts, and this dichotomy is reflected in the god whose province is such tinctures. Pharika is the keeper of apothecary knowledge and the source of dark magic, potions and poison. She is also the mother of all Gorgons, who are said to have hidden many cures within their blood. Pharika herself is thought to take the form of a Gorgon. Prayers to her are usually letters rolled up in ceramics and dumped in bogs. Stories say that the secretive god has hidden medicinal knowledge within the natural world, such as in basilisk blood, although most die trying to learn them.
MYTHS AND LEGENDS
Divine Domains
Death, Knowledge, Life.
Associated with death, old age, tinticures & poisons.
In her oversight of life and death, Pharika acts as a patron of alchemists. Pharmacists offer prayers to her while crafting potions, as do the ill or infirm before imbibing a supposed remedy. Likewise, a body's slow transformation is sacred to her, whether it be the inevitable effects of aging or the petrification of her medusa children's victims.
Artifacts
Pharika's Kylix
Divine Symbols & Sigils
Snakes
Tenets of Faith
The diseased and the dying alike often make written entreaties to Pharika for a remedy. Prayers are written on scraps of paper or shards of pottery, sealed in small pots, and buried in bogs, leaving them as secrets for others to exhume years later. Many people pray to her before undergoing a medical procedure, picking herbs, or confronting a venomous animal. Nights of a waxing crescent moon (roughly the first week of each month, when a sliver of moon lingers in the early evening) are sacred to Pharika and are thought to be an auspicious time to harvest medicinal plants.
Pharika's followers include members of several small mystery cults, which embrace varying aspects of her divine nature. The most infamous of these is the Cult of Frozen Faith, led by a medusa. Initiates receive a lethal dose of poison, become petrified, and then are restored to flesh one year later. Petitioners who have Pharika's favor emerge alive and healthy; those she doesn't care for fail to survive the transformation.
Divine Goals & Aspirations
It isn't altruism that drives her; she studies the innovation and suffering of mortals, deciphering in them ever greater mysteries as she treats Theros as her personal laboratory.
To Pharika, Theros is an ongoing experiment and mortals are her agents in carrying it out. Rather than limit her knowledge to what her own insights yield, she revels in watching mortals decipher the world's wisdom and unearth its hidden knowledge, and she delights in seeing each sage interpret their findings in novel ways. She is willing to do anything to perpetuate experimentation and discovery, even at the cost of turning her less devout followers into specimens.
Physical Description
Body Features
Pharika typically takes the form of a green-skinned Human woman with the lower body of a snake. Her hands are thickly scaled and a pair of bronze-scaled vipers seamlessly emerge from her chest.
When her aims require subtlety, Pharika often takes the form of a serpent or a medusa, or sometimes an aged Human.
Apparel & Accessories
She is never without her kylix, a drinking cup within which she can produce virtually any medicine or toxin.
Mental characteristics
Intellectual Characteristics
Deceptive, malicious.
Morality & Philosophy
Pharika cares little for mortal kind, and sees their existence simply as a tool for her to use.
Personality Characteristics
Motivation
What drives Pharika is her never ending thirst for new poisons and the pursuit for knowledge.
Social
Contacts & Relations
Pharika has a long ongoing gripe with Kruphix due to his wealth of knowledge. While Pharika does not necessarily wish to know everything about her percieved reality, she still seeks to have power and recognition for her secrets.
Despite her venomous reputation, Pharika has provided nearly every god with a cure or an otherwise essential tonic at a crucial moment. As a result, she's rarely in outright conflict with her fellow gods, yet she's always willing to jeopardize peace with her peers if it means indulging some audacious new experiment.
The gods of the Underworld have cordial relations with Pharika. She and Athreos enjoy each other's silent company, and Erebos appreciates her agenda, which ultimately bolsters his realm. Pharika rankles somewhat at the attention Erebos gets from dying mortals, chafing at their tendency to appeal to him when they could beg her for healing or for a painless death.
Pharika and the gods of civilization cautiously maneuver around one another's territory, with Ephara and Karametra recognizing Pharika's medicinal virtues, and she is always seeking subtle ways to use city-states in her experiments without provoking her peers. She disdains Ephara's and Karametra's desire to tame the world rather than understand it.
Family Ties
Social Aptitude
Little escapes Pharika's cool gaze. Even when outwardly friendly, she is cunning and calculating, watching for the slightest sign of weakness or desire that she can exploit later. Those who offend her rarely recognize their misstep until she strikes.
God of Afflictions.
Pharika can speak Common, and Gorgon, as well as Undercommon