How do gods make themselves known?

I'd like to examine this question from two perspectives -- the real world one, and the fantasy world one. As this involves religion, the subject might be touchy, which is why my examples will be drawn from mostly defunct religions.

You are one of the first sentient beings, and the world besets you with dangers every day. You look for some greater meaning, for a reason that you can actually grasp your own existence. You don't feel that powerful, though you can imagine a future where you would be. You can also imagine that there might be something more powerful than you, something like a god.

In the real world, how did Sumerians come up with Nergal, Ereshkigal, and the rest of the Annuna? When did the Egyptians realize Osiris was floating around in the stars? How did the first Greek priests decide to start worshipping Zeus and company?

In fantasy settings, such as Dragonlance, we sometimes get a story of how people re-encounter lost gods, but aside from a vague recollection of the prehistory of the elvish deities in Forgotten Realms's "Evermeet," I can't think of any stories about initial first contact between mortal and divinity.

I bring this all up because my next game is going to take place at the cusp of prehistory. Mortals exist, and some indeed worship gods, but more in the real-world sense of holding beliefs, than in the D&D sense of casting spells. But the world will come to need true gods, and the PCs will run across a few potential candidates. Some will be powerful mortals, others will be demons who want to rule, and some might be even stranger entities.

The question is, what makes a god? Is it your own power, or is it the belief of others? If the former, how do you reveal your power to potential followers. If the latter, what sort of legendary person would be revered enough in life that his followers would proclaim him a god?

RangerWickett said:

The question is, what makes a god? Is it your own power, or is it the belief of others? If the former, how do you reveal your power to potential followers. If the latter, what sort of legendary person would be revered enough in life that his followers would proclaim him a god?

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Well, some of this needs to be dictated by how you want your world to run. Do you want to go the route of godly power being solely determined by an individual's magical and/or physical power? Do you want them to derive power from worshippers, with more worshippers equalling ever growing power? Or does an Overpower dole out godly powers as the world grows older and more complex?

My current campaign is based in the Scarred Lands setting, and godly power is determined by the power of the beings that are gods. However, I'm doing a twist on that and the powers of the gods are being diminished over time. The gods have discovered that having more worshippers seems to fix this situation, so they are actively trying to recruit more and more followers to maintain their powers. Unbeknownst to the gods, and hopefully to be soon uncovered by my players, there is more at work. The Titans that were overthrown by the gods were the basis of reality, and with them gone, the multiverse is falling apart. A foreign Power is also taking advantage of this to try to take over the multiverse for their own, and my PCs must find a way to stave off the invasion and restore the balance to their multiverse.

A bit long-winded, but as you can see, the basis for my entire campaign revolves around your question. Hopefully it will help inspire you.

RangerWickett said:

The question is, what makes a god? Is it your own power, or is it the belief of others? If the former, how do you reveal your power to potential followers. If the latter, what sort of legendary person would be revered enough in life that his followers would proclaim him a god?

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It depends on if you view deities as pre-existant beings that create a race and then expect worship, or if you see them as gestalt entities of mortal worship, defined, sustained and created by faith. If the former, contact will be pretty early, possibly handholding style, or possibly bullying depending on the ethos of the deity. If the latter, then mortals and their beliefs will predate the deity, and over time they'll start getting divine spells, then more, then more as the deity emerges out of the raw stuff of its worshippers/creators pooled faith. Deity on demand, just add prayers and it's ready in a few thousand years.

If a person manages to die and then have a cult emerge to worship them post death (such as Vecna) they're doing much the same as that latter example, they're making themselves a deity by their faith in that person/entity being a deity, reworking reality to make it so, except in this case there's a real person to model the religion on rather than a loose concept that evolves over time with its worshipper base and priesthood before ultimately being spawned from a critical threshold of faith.

These are good questions, RW, and I think the answers Do depend entirely on how you want your campaign to develop. The concept of blind faith, of believing without proof in a greater power, is fairly new. Shamen had to convince the people they spoke for a god, and indeed that that god had power worthy of being worshipped. Oracles had to convince people that they weren’t just conmen. In this kind of environment, power makes a god. Any entity that has power enough to give aid or boon is a god, although generally this status (I don’t think) wasn’t open to an obvious mortal. I think that’s what the concept of a demi-god was introduced for.
As far as how do gods make first contact, I’d say you have two basic options (there are other less basic ones of course, and scads of permutations). First, you could say that the gods created man (‘man’ here standing for whatever given mortal race in question at the time; human, dwarf, orc, whatever) directly. That is, came down from wherever and physically crafted man. At that time these first people met the gods as they awoke for the first time.
Second, you could say the gods created man remotely, and man and god will have to make contact for themselves. Maybe someone, in a fit of desperation and pique, screams to the heavens for reason and help over the river that is washing his meager primitive crops away, or over the beasts who have been attacking the tribe and stealing their children. Maybe this person gets an answer. Or maybe a god just decides to appear in someone’s dream and establish contact for themselves.

I think the Greeks and Norse fall into the physically crafted, and thus met the gods when they awoke paradigm.

For the 'how did people arrive at their gods' thing: from what I remember of anthropology (and fusangite is probably way better equipped to answer this), most cultures had no problem with multiple gods. They meet culture X, then they add some of Culture X's gods to the gods they worship. Culture X does the same. Now, how do they come up with the gods in the first place?

Probably through observation of natural phenomenon and the brain's ability to fill in patterns by itself from incomplete data. There's a blurb in the first edition of Mage, where the writer talks about looking up at the moon and briefly seeing a face instead of the moon. A trick of the light, the brain's hasty construction of a pattern that makes sense out of a nonsensical pattern and boom, you have Ada the proto-city-builder who thinks that there is a lady in the moon. Same with the stars; once you start to see patterns in the sky, patterns that always return, you're going to think they are something special. A rock that happens to look just like the fierce cheiftain two valleys over...

So you tell tales of the fierce cheiftain. You take people out to the rock. You die, but your son continues to tell the tales only now he changes some stuff. Things snowball over a few generations and suddenly somehow that rock has become the feirce cheiftain who was turned to stone because he didn't obey the local magic man. More generations pass and the tale grows in the telling.

Then you have a woman who gets a reputation as a good healer. The babies she delivers thrive and grow strong. She sets a broken leg and through chance it doesn't get infected and wither. She finds that chewing a certain plant makes her gums stop hurting, so she thinks.. if I mash the plant and mix a little water with it.. it'll create a paste like the grain does. If I put that on a cut.. it will stop hurting. She's invented medicine. People are freaking amazed. They tell tales about 'good old Buta' long after her death.

Soon the tribal tale teller is Wise Old Mara, who is not so wise anymore because she fell last year and hasn't been right since then. She tells the kids about Buta, but she mixes it up with some tales about the fiece warlord. You get fifty kids who grow up with these tales and pass them on. Now they tell tales about Butan, who came from the north with a great army but seeing the destruction that was wrought, turned his hand to being a healer. He raised the dead with a touch. He promised to come back to us from beyond the sky when things got really bad. What? Things are bad now? No they are not; if they were really bad, Butan would be here, would he not?

It's not so much how a person would be revered in life, but what their life becomes after it passes through five or six incomplete tellings and gets mixed up with other tales. Also: people remember the hits and forget the misses. This is how magic and prophecy work. Combine the two....

That's how you get gods.

In a fantasy world where the gods are likely to come down and interact, it can become a lot easier. The god shows up and does things: he parts a river, tears down a mountain, heals the sick, brings the dead back to life, etc. He probably has an aura that can command obedience. He shows up and suddenly the elders and strongest warriors are bowing to him... the rest fall in line.

RangerWickett said:

If the latter, what sort of legendary person would be revered enough in life that his followers would proclaim him a god?

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Political and religious leaders: the Pharaohs, the Caesars etc. (and since this is fantasy, powerful creatures like dragons are even more poised to cultivate worshippers and assume godhood).

The oldest form of religion in our world was animism, that is attributing human characteristics to non-human animals, plants, events, weather patterns, astronomical bodies and landscape features; in other words, believing that everything has a spirit in it. It is quite logical: as WayneLigon has already said, humans tend to see patterns everywhere, and to use known concepts (e.g. interactions with other humans) to unknown phenomena (e.g. rain, thunder, animal behaviour). So the humasn thinks: "if I have thoughts and dreams and a will, so does the mammoth I hunt". That "conciousness" or "self" is very hard for a technologically-primitive human to explain to himself, so the concept of a "spirit" is born - "something" that resides in the living and goes away when the living dies; it is then a very useful concept to explain death (and usually birth too) with. As death is very difficult to accept, the concept of afterlife, of incarnations of the soul, or, for the very least, of ghosts is born. Now, lets get back to that mammoth: if someone hits you, you'd get angry, right? Now, imagine how the mammoth has fealt when you've killed it - it would be VERY angry! Now, the tribal huntsman would eventually attribute alot of the random misfortunes of stoneage life to the revenge by the angry spirit of the mammoth, and, eventually, the tribe will develop rituals to "appease the spirit". Thus spiritualism is born; eventually, the tribe will develop a belief that, if they appease the spirit of the animal beforehand, or, alternatively, weaken it with rituals, hunting would be easier.

Eventually, the tendency of humans to generalise the details into a whole would, in some cases, lead them to believe not in the spirit of each individual mammoth, but in a common spirit of ALL mammoths, of the mammoth kind - a totem-animal. Now, instead of appeasing the spirit of the mammoth you've killed, you'd develop a relationship with the mammoth totem-spirit, and she'll "allow you" to hunt some of her kind if you're nice to her; if you "offend" her, she will "take revenge" at you by bringing a bad hunt. As WayneLigon has also said, humans remember the hits and forget the misses. From here the road to a more personalized concept of a god is quite short.

Now, imagine how much stronger the development of these beliefs will be in a world were there ARE clearly-detectable spirits, there ARE visible ghosts, there IS magic, there ARE totem-animals who directly respond to your attempts to converse with them.

IMC (Renya), gods are (in most cases) essentially VERY powerful outsiders (called "spirits" by most people in my world). However, the more powerful an outsider is, the more "diffuse" and less "focused" it is; while the lesser outsiders (such as demons, celestials, nature-spirits, elementals and so on) can easily manifest in our world in a localised and "personalized" form - that is, appear as a "creature" - the stronger outsiders cannot manifest on our world in complete form, but can affect it directly (for example, cast spells on a specific place on our worlds). Those other-plane giants who are usually refered to as gods can rarely manifest directly or interfere directly in mortal lives; they might send messangers (i.e. lesser outsiders), dreams, affect very long-term processes such as evolution or geological processes... And, ofcourse, pass dim visions of their vast glories to mortal minds, and grant magical powers (divine magic and abilities) to those mortals who have affinity with them. These vast beings rarely think in the way mortals do; they are more... diffuse... more... nonlocalised. Mosrtals interept the foggy visions, the signs and protents received from these beings, according to the capacity of their tiny, localised mortal; minds; they grant names and agendas to their interpretation, and as long as they follow a conceptual and behavioural road which is, in general, in affinity of that great being, they continue to recieve its "gifts".

Why am I keeping my gods non-involved in my world? To keep the focus on mortals; to allow religious schisms and sects who worship the same god (they may vary greatly in details, but have enough common ground to continue to travel in the road of that god), to allow multiple pantheons (they vary by region and culture); and to make belief far more a personal and emotional thing (as it is in our world) than the "political" reverence of a being which everyone could clearly percieve as all-powerful and present.

An example: the One Mother/Great Mother/Tree Mother (name varies with geographical region), a quasi-monotheistic goddess of nature, death, rebirth and fertility worshipped by the non-tribal parts of the Celirans (as well as by Human druids who call her "Nature" or "Mother Nature); tribal Celirans follow a more shamanistic road and deal with a vast multitude of smaller spirits, though they do pay tribute to the One Mother as well. The One Mother has several aspects which could be worshipped seperately (and treated as different goddesses, even though they are very closely related): the Green Mother (usually called just "The One Mother"), a Neutral Good goddess of nature, life, fertility and agriculture; the Dark Mother (or Dark Womb or Dark Moon, depending on cult), a Neutral Evil goddess of death, predators and erosion (and rot); Mother Swamp (or Mother Tree), a True Neutral goddess of nature and the cycle of life-death-rebirth; and the Wild One, a Chaotic Neutral goddess of wilderness, ferality, love and war (who somewhat tends towards evil; my concept of her is based on Anat, the ancient Cnaanite goddess of love and war, which was described as "bathing in blood up to her waist").

RangerWickett said:

The question is, what makes a god? Is it your own power, or is it the belief of others?

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There's already a lot of great stuff in this thread. And God knows I'm a sucker for discussion on the nature of Divinity. But as others have mentioned, there really is no answer to this question, neither real world nor in-game.

From the in-game angle, it can be either, depending on what you want to do with it.

You mentioned that at some point real gods are going to be needed. So the crux of things is that you want gods who can be discovered or created. In this sense, I'd think gods based on the belief of others might serve your purpose well. The goal of the campaign, then, could be to create enough worship in an icon, idea, or even person (will a PC have the will, the ambition, to suggest himself as the One?) to create a Deus ex Machina.

It's a neat idea.

If the former, how do you reveal your power to potential followers.

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Solving their problems. Bringing rain to end the drought. Bringing a flood to wash away enemy ships. Bringing animals back to a barren land.

If the latter, what sort of legendary person would be revered enough in life that his followers would proclaim him a god?

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A ruler so magnificent that he seems more than human.

IRL I am a 24th generation descendant of a real Volcano god (and through him the major gods of our pantheon).

The beleif system of my culture was/is a form of advanced animism with a strong tendency to ancestor worship. In this structure the gods tend to be founding ancestors and in most cases founding acestors themselves become deified.

As such the ancestor who is said to have first explored our homelands (which is a volcanic region) has himself become a volcano god with a clear geneology linking him to the personifications of Lava and Groundwater (although they might be elementals rather than outsiders).

In fact some say that my ancestor was a brother to Pelehonuamea (of Hawaii) although the geneology I have shows her as his 7th generation great grandmother....

Anyway the gods really don't need introduction when they come visiting their own grandchildren...

freebfrost said:

My current campaign is based in the Scarred Lands setting...

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Nightfall would be proud