There's a concept I've been sitting with for a few months now, because I like the idea of Saints but I'm not nor ever have been Catholic. At the same time, I do feel that there are people who, though they were specifically originally *real people*, end up becoming much More postmortem than they were alive via their story becoming elevated in local/regional/national folklore. Critically, this has to occur almost/entirely postmortem I think - people who go around creating their own legend while they live are a completely different kind of thing, vs. individuals communally apotheosized by their people After poking around at different thoughts/terms for a while, the term I've landed on for this is Ascendants. They've become more than they once were, beyond a realm of peak humanity that terms like "Hero" tend to imply, birthed status that "Demi-god" alone tends to imply, or explicit religious ties that Saints or similar tend to imply. I think one of the most obvious applications of this, to me, would be John Henry. For those not familiar, he's a Black folkloric figure in the US commonly sang about in blues songs, who was a man of herculean strength and skill with a hammer, who challenges a railroad rock drilling machine to a race through a mountain to try and save the jobs of him and his team. He won, only for his heart to give out from the stress of overwork, his victory marking his death.
The real John Henry was most likely a young man born in the 1800s who had been arrested and imprisoned to work as "leased labor" (part of how the US replaced slave labor) on the C&O railway, and likely died of silicosis and was buried in an unmarked grave, similarly to untold hundreds of similar leased labor prisoners who died similarly. I believe that as an Ascendant, he would be representative of both free workers and prisoners. Common variants of his songs, especially work songs, speak about how "this hammer killed John Henry, but it won't kill me" as a worker's commitment to guarding your life more than the labor you'd give whoever you're working for. Proving your strength, value, and skill to your employer isn't worth giving your life for, especially if you're being coerced into that labor for survival. I think some of the traits he would embody or be sought for would be safety (especially in workplaces), strength, community solidarity, and perseverance. He would probably also be a patron of Abolitionists. Another possible Ascendant from US folklore I can think of off the top of my head would be John Brown and Crispus Attucks? But a lot of people from US history/folklore actually wouldn't qualify because either they had a big part in propagating their own legends (See: most early white men like the founding fathers, who functionally have their own religion via Americanism) or weren't real people in the first place (see: Paul Bunyan) If y'all have ideas of other folkloric people who might fit the bill as Ascendants (not just US folklore, I just know US folklore best), you should bring em up in reblogs im curious. If I write more about this I'll probably use the tags Ascendants/The Ascendants.
