Creating a God
In some ways, writing a story is like creating your own world. You can generate various settings, develop characters, and even devise your own natural laws. Its godlike power from an imaginative standpoint. Speaking of gods, writers have the ability to birth them too. Whether they are beings with just enough power to separate them from the mortals they lord over or cosmic forces capable of destroying whole universes, if a writer can conceive it, he/she can give a kind of life to it.
What’s the point of a deity in a story? In many of the world’s mythologies, gods were used to explained things that people did not understand. For many ancient peoples who didn’t understand thunder and lightning, it seemed to help them to perceive those natural forces as tools wielded by powerful sentient beings.
For many belief systems, gods hold a deeper meaning. I’m a Christian. For us Yahweh is the creator of everything. He is God. Yeshuah (better known as Jesus) is also God, just in human form. Even those that don’t believe in Christianity should be able to appreciate the story of Jesus. The Father, believing that his beloved creation needed to be saved from itself, sent his Son, an aspect of himself, down to the Earth to live as one of those creations. The omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent being who did not know things like weakness, pain, or death willingly submitted himself to all three as a sacrifice for the salvation of those who choose to believe in him. Spreading the gospel is the primary task for Christians. At our core, we are just storytellers.
Gods make good devices to use in humanity’s stories. We imagine them to be powerful and beyond us, but isn’t it funny how much of ourselves we tend to put in them. Look at Greek gods like Zeus. He was the most powerful god, far above humanity in stature. Yet, he was guilty of all the most base behaviors we see in humanity. That’s a trait common among most of the mythological pantheons. As imaginative as we are, why do we have such a pervasive tendency to envision divine beings that reflect us?
I’m guilty of that in my writing too. In fact, I kind of embrace it. The Vespers are the gods of my fictional world. They have nearly unlimited power to manipulate the universe around them. When I conceived of them, I asked the question, “Why do we assume great power would come with great knowledge?” The Vespers are gods in terms of their power, but they are children in terms of their understand of the world around them. Like human children, it took them time to develop knowledge and understanding. Also, like children, they had to figure things out through trial and error, sometimes making mistakes. Just how bad can things get when gods make mistakes? The answer shown in The Book of Zeal is - Very Bad.
To err is human though right? It always comes back to us. We see ourselves in the gods. Maybe we also a see a little god in us. Gods tend to have power to create. Humanity does that. Gods can shape and mold the world around them. We do that too. Gods have frightening capacities for destruction. Unfortunately, so do we. Many gods have unparalleled knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. Many might say that’s where we fail. Is that true though? Ants are industrious creatures. They can build and cooperate and do a lot of the things we see in our society. Can they comprehend the concepts of logic or mathematics? Our ways are as far beyond their understanding as any god is beyond us. If an ant could ever conceive of something like a god, surely the colossal giants that are capable of bringing apocalypses to whole colonies of ants would fit the bill.
In stories, gods are given great power. I like when stories show what happens when that power being is irresponsibly. There are consequences. I think we can learn a lot from stories that feature gods. Humanity isn’t actually a god, but relatively speaking, we do have a lot of power. Maybe if we learn the lessons the gods have to show us, we can wield that power responsibly, both for our own well-being and for that of the world around us.
