Is the Nephilim cosmology too Westernized?

Back in the day when the US fandom discussed Chinese Nephilim on the mailing list, the idea that each culture would have different elements and so on often came up. The idea was that the cosmology given in the rulebook was too Eurocentric and not inclusive of other cultures, mixed with the general exoticism and poor understanding of other cultures because it was the 90s.

Firstly, I think it's okay for Nephilim to have a unified cosmology regardless of what a given Immortal's culture is. Trying to invent a new cosmology for every culture and then have them all play well together is infeasible.

Secondly, I don't think the cosmology is too westernized. It's actually a mix of multiple Eurasian astrology traditions. The idea of a pentacle of five elements, and associating the planets with specific elements, doesn't come from Greek philosophers but from Chinese astrology. The idea of five elements composing reality rather than four comes from Vedic philosophy.

Indeed, the simple pentacle scheme used by Nephilim is reflective of a lot of beliefs across different cultures. By placing Moon between Earth and Water, you're not just mimicking the Wu Xing, Earth and Water become opposing elements. This reflects an intuitive conflict between land and sea.

Also, it doesn't make much sense to use the Wu Xing as the composition of matter. It's about relationships, not composition.

If you want to explain why the occult literature isn't consistent, then that's because in real life it was made up. In the fictional world, you can explain it away as a mix of ignorance, misunderstanding, deliberate misinformation, and encrypted messages. Actual magic is very rare, so most occultists would actually be mere mortals without access to real magic. Since they couldn't verify their practice empirically, this allows errors to creep in. That isn't even accounting for deliberate misinformation campaigns and encrypted messages. Much of the seemingly fake literature might make perfect sense after applying the proper ciphers. 

The internet makes it trivially easy to spread misinformation and the noise to signal ratio is so high, so I imagine that Nephilim would discount the internet as research material and still trawl through physical occult libraries. Also, players saying "we Google the occult book" is boring af and takes away the actual adventuring part. But I digress...

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