Poll about the gods

[mrissa]

Context for this poll: this is asking about deliberately fictional entities, in which you have no literal belief whatever. Fantasy novel gods, not beings you personally worship, although if you have things to say about the appearance of novel characters with the same names and allegedly the same attributes as beings you personally worship, please do tell (in the comments). I just don't know how much I'm outside the norm here for cutting my teeth on D'Aulaire's.

[Poll #703617]

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Sorry, this isn't amusing: If one chooses the first option to the first question, one cannot choose any of the first five options to the second question, can one?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Indeed not, but you don't have to answer every question in a poll to answer some questions in the poll.

For a minute, I misparsed the "Sorry, this isn't amusing" as "This speculation offends me."

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I thought it would throw off your stats if I didn't answer both. (I think I'm taking this way too seriously.)

Yes, I can see the reading of what I wrote; glad you figured out it wasn't what I meant!

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Gods have to be mortal in some sense. This is what makes their stories beautiful. Even if they are immortal like "resurrection" kind of immortal, the Passion is important.

I mean, what would Baldur mean if he didn't die?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's what I mean about D'Aulaire's: my first and most frequent contact with the idea of gods apart from the Christian trinity was with the Aesir and Vanir, who age if they don't have Idunn's apples, and -- "men die, cattle die, even the gods themselves must one day die...."

But a few months ago I ran into someone being startled and confused at mortal gods in a book, and it popped back into my head, so I thought I'd ask.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, hey, I grew up with D'Aulaire's, too. Greek /and/ Norse.

I need a copy of the Greek one, I think.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We didn't have the Greek one at our library, or if we did, I didn't care. I fell in love with the Norse one and practically memorized it. I really need a copy.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

I need a copy of both. The one I had at home was paperback, and was the Greek one. The one at the library was hardback, and Norse. The Greek one fell apart; the Norse one didn't just because I didn't have it all the time.

(I would have to get The Right Copies of both, mind you. Sense memories are important.)

[sensational.livejournal.com]

Gods always exist in some incarnation, but each incarnation can die.

(Not amusing, but!)

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

What happens to a dead god?
A. How are you going to find out?
B. Better hope you never find out.

I like your zombie gods, but that wouldn't happen to all gods. I'd suppose different things would happen to different ones. Some might 'ascend' to a higher plane that would be beyond manifesting even as what we call 'gods.'

[katharine-b.livejournal.com]

For the second question, I think it depends on how much the gods were "mixed in with humans" while alive. Distant gods might have a separate afterlife, or be annihilated; gods who liked to get all up in human business might go to the same afterlife as humans, or live among humans, diminished. Or! Vice versa, and distant gods die and then end up in the mortal afterlife, etc. I rather like that idea -- it reminds me of the Achilles speeches in Sheri Tepper's faux-Greek play in The Gate to Women's Country.

[redbird]

I picked "total annihilation," but "still exist in potentia and can be revived/recreated" also seems plausible.

Meta: it really depends on your definition of "gods".

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

I bumped into the word "ought" in the last part.

(smile, and then I was thinking about what icon to use and thought of my mermaid, and smiled at they get rewritten by the next generation.)

[zunger.livejournal.com]

I think it depends on just what happens to them. Are we talking about gods that die by having some other god or mortal stick a pointy object through whatever passes for their head? Or do they die through a gradual attrition of their believers? (Assuming that that influences them, which it may or may not) In the latter case, the "zombie gods" scenario sounds good to me. In the former, I suspect that the gods themselves would have no idea, but murmur about it in hushed and fearful tones. If there is a land of dead gods, going there would be one hell of an adventure.

Erm. That was unintentional.

[dreadmouse.livejournal.com]

In a tongue-in-cheek fantasy novel, I would love to see a dead God remanded back to "God School" after they have the misfortune to die, especially if they were slain by a mortal. How embarassing! Back to Divinity Ed for you!

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Divinity school.

Hee.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

Oops. I chose "some other answer" as a way to finish the poll... I, too, didn't realize there was a way out the poll with a question unanswered.

Anyway. Divine comedies aren't particularly comedic if you don't have mortal gods, eh?

[blythe025.livejournal.com]

I read a lot of Neil Gaiman, so I don't have a problem with Gods dying. Though, I don't think I had that problem anyway. If the world is set up well, I am willing to believe it.

As far as the way they die, I markd total annialation, simply because to me Gods are ideas and I think they do not exist after people stop believing in them. (but then Morpheus/Dream got himself a processional funeral and then was reborn as something else, which is a human belief.) Again, though, if the world is set up well, then anything can happen accordig to the rules of that world. They could have last rites, they could have an after life, they could be reborn as a mortal, they could still exist, but as the exact opposite of what they were before, or whatever a writer can come up with. If it's good writing I'll believe it.

[jmeadows.livejournal.com]

I dunno about the second one. I picked total annihilation because it's fun, but really I can just believe what the author tells me if they're convincing enough.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I think killing a god would create an anti-god. So if you have a fertility god and you kill them, they would wander around being a barrenness god. You kill the god of knowledge, they would wander around making people get confused and forgetful. That kind of thing. I guess I would say that if you kill a god, you are in some sense killing that portion of the universe that the god in question is responsible for, or at least rendering it *very* disorganized. I'm not sure how that would work for gods that have very limited or very poorly defined responsibilities.

[windcedar.livejournal.com]

That would be interesting. So...if you kill a god twice, do they go back to where they started? :)

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Uh...my first reaction is that you couldn't kill anti-gods, because how can you destroy destruction? You could only re-enliven them as the gods they were, undoing destruction through creation. If you wanted them out of the way, you'd have to contain them--or better yet, contain separate little bits and pieces of them--somewhere until the universe itself ended. And if a being were dismembered and maybe thereby unconscious, that's functionally pretty close to being dead, I guess.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But if the god you initially killed was a god of destruction....

I think that the double-killing thing would be interesting because the opposite of my opposite is not necessarily myself.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Oh. That would be _awesome._

Someone write that, please.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I don't suppose you're an editor? :)

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Hee. Alas.

[lynnal.livejournal.com]

Turning into a mountain and blocking traffic is always good. Continuing in an afterlife is too much like being immortal.

[rosefox]

I was going to say! Dead gods turn into mountains, of course. Everyone knows that.

[talltree6.livejournal.com]

What should happen to a dead god: Burial at sea, of course! That is, if it was a water god. A fiery god should go away on a funeral pyre, and an earth god should just be buried deep, very deep. [Reminds me of a joke: Did you hear the one about the three holes in the ground? Well, well, well.]

An airy god should just be allowed to blow....

[wychwood]

In a monotheistic framework, I tend to assume that the god is less up close and personal and more transcendent, and genuinely immortal beyond all possibilities of death. For polytheistic, more like elves, you know, immortal unless killed. Or a mixture of that with Pratchett's take on gods, where they are sustained by mortal belief, and become something like your zombie gods if they lose all their followers (which is the option I selected). I'd certainly have no trouble with killable gods in a fantasy novel.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

My answer to #1 is interstitial, sort of (ooh, look, I'm all, like, interstitial and stuff...ahem, sorry). I would think that the Gods don't have to be immortal, but they should only be able to be killed in extraordinary ways. No reports that Thor was accidentally shot to death in a drive-by shooting--Thor would never go out like that.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

My take on it is that the answer should be "any or all of the above, depending on the individual gods", with modifiers for whether the cosmos in question has any value of Fate setting parameters which even the gods are bound by.

When I think about this I do tend to think in terms of the Sandman/Lucifer/The Broken Sword type of setting with multiple co-existing pantheons from different cultures.

more than you ever wanted to hear.

[greykev.livejournal.com]

The first question for me depends on whether the god is entirely contained in its body, or if it dwells somewhere else and uses its material body like a puppet. If it is body-limited (even if it takes the body to some mystic realm/afterlife from time to time) then I'd say it could be killed, though probably not without some effort. The puppeteer gods would be harder to kill "for real" though the puppet body could probably be killed like the first type of god. The time until puppet "respawn" would depend on the power of the god. Real killing would need to be done wherever the god actually dwells. (this is basically the D&D god-type, though it fits actual religious traditions as well. I think Lovecraft's gods/powers function a bit like this too.) A variation would be an either/or god which could get trapped either in its body, or away wherever it otherwise dwells, and could be killed in either place. Lastly would be the "manifestation of nature" gods, where no matter how many times you kill the storm god another springs into being the next time the weather turns bad. Human nature would work for this too, so killing the god of betrayal doesn't get rid of him. Though perhaps some other human inherits the mantle of "god of betrayal" and is a body-bound god until someone offs him or her. Which brings us full circle.

As a reader I accept the setting as-is, even with unreliable narrators and authorial voice. I would have no problem with an author choosing one explanation, or choosing whichever best fits the deity in question: perhaps the storm, sea, and forest gods are manifested, while the gods of magic and law are puppeteers and the crafts, music, and battle gods were normal humans once. So many different routes to immortality…

I think dead gods ought to be dispersed to component parts. Not like, a spleen here, a toe there, but a conservation of skill/ability/wisdom. So maybe the musical ability dumps into one mortal, and the giant-fighting-tactics takes up residence in another, and the wittiness manifests in a third, etc etc Sort-of seeding mortals to possibly grow into more gods.

Hmm, if the god-bits went to the most talented mortal for each bit, and the resulting demi-gods (demi-mortals?) could still receive bits from other dead gods, I could see where there'd be a lot of deicide going on. Perhaps the bits go to devoted worshipers of the god? Then theoretically they could all get together and resurrect the god by combining all the bits into one person. It wouldn't be exactly the same god, but it'd be close. Or maybe the bits go to whoever is near the god's death-site, so you'd really want to sacrifice a god with your cabal so you'd retain the most benefits.

And I suppose some physical bits of a god might retain niftiness after it's dead; a bard-god's tongue or crafts-god's hands. Or perhaps it's more general: god-skin leather armor would be repulsive more effective than regular leather armor I'd assume. Or you could weave the hair into rope or a bridle or something.

Hmm, I'm going to copy this to my journal so I can keep track of and add to it from time to time.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

I believe I enter a story with an assumption that gods do not expire in the way that humans do. That doesn't mean they are necessarily immortal, although that may be the default choice; it means I assume they play by different rules (being gods and all). I also don't assume that when a god expires, it is necessarily permanent.

It's the author's job to delineate the house rules, ideally in a non-infodump way, before they are used in play. Fiction is like poker in this respect; the dealer cannot declare house rules after the game starts.

I've always kind of favored the idea that the existence/tangibility/strength of a god is a direct factor of how many believers he/she/it has among the meat creatures. Under this theory, gods never actually die, they just get nearly nonexistent as their cults fade, but they could revive suddenly if there was a sudden fad for, say, worshipping Ahriman again.

c.v. Dirk Gently's Detective Agency and especially The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, the two best books Douglas Adams ever wrote; also Expecting Someone Taller and quite a bit more of the oeuvre of Tom Holt. And, come to think of it, quite a bit of Tim Powers.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

I don't know how I managed to type c.v. when I meant cf.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

They are very close to each other on the keyboard.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

For values of 'ought to' that weight 'what I would like' more heavily than 'what likely makes sense in context.'

True Gods or False Gods?

[mackatlaw.livejournal.com]

For "False Gods," I used gods who were immortal until slain, as long as they maintained their body integrity. I'd also opt that the life-urge and will required to turn a human into a god was so strong that gods wouldn't kill themselves, even if suicidal. They'd have to be slain and the body destroyed beyond regeneration.

False Gods was the universe where a mutant genome gave certain humans abilities that let them set themselves up as the gods of Egypt, the Mayan people, etc. "Highlander" would be in the same vein. Well, if Highlanders could shape-change, body shape depended on personality, and they were solar-fueled.

But you get the idea. Essentially they were imitation deities -- only they were the rulers whose names inspired all the myths and legends. The god Osiris was a human born in 6000 B.C., took over the Two Lands of what we know now as Egypt with his father Ra and siblings Set, Isis, and Horus. He was eventually killed once by his brother Set (knocked into a coma by body trauma and locked in a coffin). Isis brought him back from metabolic suspension with her own abilities, making him briefly the God of Resurrection, before Set destroyed Osiris beyond his ability to regenerate. From that point on, Isis kept his name alive under the state religion, but he was really, really dead.

Where did he go when he died? Same place where the rest of the humans go, if any, wherever that is. Official religious answer is "beyond the Western sunset, in the land of the dead, where he rules and judges you now." Actually speaking, none of the other gods know and they're quite afraid of death.

Okay, I need to start writing this again. The point I liked was that these people fulfilled major criteria for gods. They answered prayers when they were told about them, had larger than life powers, feuded like soap opera characters, could live forever unless another god -- or human -- killed them. But they weren't gods in a way the two main characters found personally satisfying. "You've been deceiving us about the afterlife? You can't hear our prayers? How dare you betray us!"

Mack

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Belated comment - it is my assumption that gods do die. That's one of the ways they create the world.

I created a storytelling-story on the premise that the gods had taken mortality back from humanity. ("Sometimes I wonder why they waited as long as they did before they took it back - because it was theirs first, you know. If you look at the creation stories, they're dying and being born all over the place. But then they gave it to us. I think they just couldn't wrap their heads around the way we weren't getting it. I think to them it was obvious. You know? Like, Hello! Can't create the world without dying! Wake up and smell the compost! But for us, it was always more complicated than that. And, I don't know...I mean, it's not complicated, any more...")

And I think gods dwindle, too, a la Small Gods. And kill each other, and die in battle, and all sorts of things like that.

I do think very few gods ever die of, say, pneumonia.