Demons, Demigods and Gods The Nature of Divinity in the ASH Universe An ASH Universe Information File copyright 2010 by Dave Van Domelen ============================================================================= One of the many problems with poorly-understood phenomena is that it's hard to have a consistent terminology for discussing it. If only a handful of people know about a certain distinction, then whatever terms they use to describe it are unlikely to come into common usage. And so it is with the menagerie of nigh-omnipotent entities in the ASH Universe. The terms used to describe them are often wildly inconsistent simply because too few mortals know what's going on and don't realize that they're incorrectly labeling someone. (Although, if the entity being mis-labeled takes offense, the mortal in question may find out the hard way.) This file is intended mainly to clarify the "behind the scenes" terminology I use when I think about the nature of these beings. A handful of people, like Peregryn or Q'Nos, may correctly use these terms, but otherwise don't assume that just because someone is described as a demon or a god that they "really" are one. Grandipotence For all practical purposes, all of the entities described here are omnipotent, but since they're intrinsically limited by both their internecine struggles and the resistance of the universe to their actions, they're not truly "all powerful". After all, if you want to be pedantic about it, at most one entity in the universe can be omnipotent, with everyone else being limited by their inability to thwart the one all-powerful entity or their non-omnipotent peers. And as far as the gods themselves know, no one is omnipotent (although the characters in "Wall Street Angels" believe one entity is). Rather, the on-screen gods of ASH are really really powerful, or "grandipotent" to abuse the Latin. Grandipotence means that you can do whatever you want to...but. The more you break physical law, the harder the universe resists. If you stop concentrating on an active violation effect, it will fade. If another opposes your actions, they may be undone or even retroactively never have been done. The Cosmic Cube in the Marvel Universe is an example of the lowest level of grandipotence, a wishing talisman that makes whatever you want come true so long as you can maintain your concentration, albeit in a limited range (i.e. the universe pushes back on your bubble of unreality). Gods, demigods and "greater" demons are all grandipotent, and most of them are "fullbloods" with a complete portion of the Magene. No mortal can stand against even the least of them in a straight fight. Fortunately, mortals tend to get help from other grandipotent entities in such struggles, which is a nice way of saying that gods often use mortals as proxies in their disputes. The world is just one big MMO for the divine, and mortals are either the characters they play or the mobs they have their characters slay. But just as some animals are more equal than others, there's all sorts of degrees of grandipotence. When your raw power already hits the "anything I want to happen, happens" level, your standing among the gods depends more on your ability to resist the meddling of others, to keep changes stable over a long time, and to manage multiple tasks at once. Having a reservoir of external power is very useful in managing this sort of thing, so you don't have to devote your personal energies to keeping all your balls in the air. It's even more effective if you can get another god to handle things for you, which is one reason why so many families of fullbloods organize into hierarchies and portion out specific portfolios. How, and if, a grandipotent entity gains this external power defines them as a full god, a demon or a demigod. There's some vagueness about the definitions, of course, for several reasons. Entities may be in a transitional state from one to the other. They may be playing two separate games and need to keep their power sources segregated. Or it could just be that the nature of a multidimensional incomprehensible divinity is beyond mortal taxonomies. The Power of Prayer The core element that separates the "true" gods from other fullbloods is that they are able to draw power from worship. Learning how to do this is what elevated a society of sorcerors in the distant past to the status of gods, and this talent can be blocked in or removed from those who are on the losing side of deific power struggles. Of course, just because you can draw power from the faithful doesn't automatically grant you worshippers, you still have to build that up. Rebus may be a full god or he may be a demigod, but until he manages to gain some worshippers the distinction will be purely academic. And given that he managed to draw the wrong kind of attention before he was ready for it, Rebus may never get the chance to exercise his powers. Not only are mortal worshippers useful as batteries, they can be used as processors as well, maintaining the very effects they may be praying for, or simply running gambits that are low priority for their god. Generally, though, they will only be used in this way if they are faithful to a single god. If they split their worship among many gods, it's like a public server. No one's really going to want to put anything important on them. Demigods and greater demons cannot draw on worship as a power source, but they can still outsource their tasks to the faithful, making worshippers more than just an ego stroke for these lesser divinities. But without the "prayer batteries," demigods and demons simply can't compete directly against full gods, and tend to be relegated to low positions. For instance, after his fall from power, Q'Nos was used as an errand boy and enforcer by numerous gods. Without the power from his former Cretan faithful, he could no longer impose his will on other gods. Nor could he afford to draw their attention once he freed himself from their service, hence the lack of grand displays of power prior to losing still more puissance to the Eye of Purity. A Darker Route To Power One of the oddball things about the Causality Wars is that they bounce around through time. 1998 was actually one of the earliest full conflicts between pantheons, from their point of view. It was their World War I, if you will. And where WWI had poison gas, 1998 had life consumption. It had long been known how to drain another's spirit for raw power, of course. Sorcerors figured that one out centuries before cracking the riddle of faith-based power. But what Odin discovered in 1998 was how to convert that power into the same sort of power as was granted by worship. It was far less renewable, because even if you didn't pig out and take an entire life, it was rough on the faithful. It's also harder to maintain worshippers if they can feel you snacking on their souls...they tend to find other gods to worship. In general, the full gods decided that soul-conversion was a bad idea and made various compacts agreeing not to do it anymore. Of course, it didn't stop entirely. Soul-conversion is a rush, addictive in its own way, and some of the less savory gods continued to practice it when they thought they could get away with it. Additionally, the agreement only really applied to full gods. Demigods tended to fall through various loopholes, and some of them realized that if they couldn't benefit from the prayers of their worshippers, they might do well to devour their spirits instead. A greater demon is a demigod who has made a habit of soul-conversion, or sometimes a full god who evades the bans on the practice. Worshipping a greater demon is very dangerous, because they demand sacrifice, and when they offer power it is usually only because you want to use it in ways that will advance their agenda. Worship practices will tend towards things that make it easier for the demon to devour tiny bits of one's spirit, such as blood rites that willingly split off a piece of the soul or even ritual murders (of the faithful to allow complete soul-conversion, or of the innocent in order to fragment the souls of the killers). Note that greater demons need not have traditionally demonic appearances, it's more a matter of behavior than appearance. That said, the traditional ideas of what looks like a demon do tend to come from legends about the greater demons. The bestial Naobata is the greater demon largely responsible for "big, hairy and fanged" being considered a demonic appearance, for instance. Lesser demons are simply supernatural creatures who fit a particular morphology, and they rarely have their origins among the fullbloods. Most are created entities, semi-divine at best and usually quite mortal. With Strange Aeons Can a grandipotent entity die? Well, yes. But it takes some pretty special circumstances, and a rather lot of other gods have to want you dead. Usually, defeated gods are reduced in stature and humiliated rather than outright killed, in large part because gods can be petty and vindictive and prefer to see their enemies suffer for an eternity. Additionally, given that the power in a god resides in their spirit, conventional death means little to them. The death of a god requires total destruction of the spirit, elimination from existence. Otherwise, loss of physical life may be merely an inconvenience, like totalling one's car. Phaeton clearly ticked off a lot of other gods, which is why Baal Samin was able to turn him into a thin layer now known as the K-T Boundary (iridium is particularly useful a component in sun-related magic as a result). Santarus, on the other hand, was simply rendered functionally non-existent without actually dying...possibly worse, all things considered. And Q'Nos fell from god to demigod and was allowed to further fall to a state of mere semi-divinity (see below). So, odds are good that Rebus is still alive in some form or another, but it's unlikely in the extreme that he's enjoying it. But keep in mind, grandipotence means that whatever you want to happen, happens. And most entities want to keep living...any with even a hint of suicidal tendencies tend to get themselves killed long before attaining godly stature. Even the ones that seem mopey and depressed are really just putting on an act, playing to their portfolios. Suicidal worshippers may be handy for gods with a tendency towards demonic soul-conversion, but at the core of their being the gods themselves want to live. And so they do, even when it might be better to just die. A Feat Of Clay I've mentioned that all of the grandipotent can set up external "processors" for their actions, particularly the use of worshippers as tools. After all, while waving your hands and making a statue appear may be impressive, it's a more efficient use of power to get worshippers to build you a statue. Gods advance by finding ways to get the most effect for the least investment, so that they can fight battles on many fronts at the same time (or many different times, as the case often is). But worshippers are only one way to do this. Another, related way is to create lifeforms with the power to do the job, like the clay statue given life as a golem. Binding a spirit to a violation effect tends to make it more durable, as it can defend itself from being dismissed. Willing a castle to float above the landscape means that it might fall once your attention wavers. But creating a wind spirit to hold it aloft means you can largely forget about it, so long as you occasionally check in to make sure the spirit hasn't abandoned its duties. These created lifeforms and spirits occupy an odd place in the spectrum between "physical law" and "violation effects". They do not have the Magene themselves, and while some may look human, they are not human. An Anchor can't simply dismiss them, but can usually suppress their abilities. The magical effect bound to them simply retreats inside the creature's spirit until the Anchor goes away. So, for instance, the ox spirit known as Niu didn't vanish while under the Anchor effect of China's Premier Xu, but he was limited to the abilities of a powerfully built normal human (the form he had been wearing when he got Anchored) until Xu died. The advantage of created life is that it's really just an extension of the god's will. It is no more and no less than what it is made to be, and there's little chance it will decide to change its allegiance. This makes it a safe place to store external "processes" if the god in question is short on dedicated human worshippers, as often happens in hierarchical pantheons. The true purpose of a created lifeform need not be obvious, even to the lifeform itself. A dragon sleeping in a cave may be maintaining dozens of its creator's mystical effects without knowing that it is doing so, as might a three-eyed monk in an isolated temple. The overt appearance and purpose of created life is largely a matter of aesthetics, like the desktop image on your computer. So, maybe the fact that the ogre is moving boulders from one stack to another actually serves some sort of purpose (realigning ley lines, perhaps), or maybe it's just an expression of its creator's twisted sense of aesthetics. "Well, the ogre is really maintaining the weather patterns over southern Peru during the mid-850s to keep my worshippers there happy, but isn't the boulder pile thing a delightful metaphor for mortal endeavors?" The greatest weakness of created entities is that they aren't human. Their devotion cannot empower their creators. They have no more capacity than what they are specifically given, and often have curious holes in their talents because they were carelessly made. While they can be made almost entirely human in terms of creativity and free will, this can be dangerous, especially if their overt tasks are important. You want your castle- supporting wind spirit to be a complete slave, but the dragon running your spells as subconscious background processes can probably be allowed the illusion of complete freedom. Unless he figures out what's going on, of course. Since they're not physically part of their creator, the created entities can be attacked without immediately drawing their creator's attention, weakening whatever effect they were made to maintain. Goading one's worshippers into hunting down a rival's creations is a common kind of proxy battle between gods. For example, dragons may be a particularly effective sort of semi-divine creature, and therefore a common choice for proxy attacks. Eventually, despite a later absence of actual dragons, entire cultures have an instinctive fear of them because "kill the dragon" has been worked into so much of their cultural history. Avatars are a special weird case, straddling the line between human and created entity. They start human, but are remade in the image of their patron god. They are power sinks rather than power sources...even if they are utterly devoted to their god, the energy used to empower them exceeds what their worship would grant, making them more like created life in terms of energy budgeting. They're still more efficient than doing things directly, but they're an investment. A worshipper who has been granted some small amount of power (like most of the "godpowered" supernaturals of the Godmarket) are at worst self-powered, and usually are chosen because their faith is strong enough to make them a net source of power. Avatars go beyond that break-even point, which is why it was so unusual for Set to empower two in the same era (Set the ASH member and Sutekh the villain). The Gap Of The Gods So, among the grandipotent, demigods are the weakest, relying entirely on internal power. They lack the ability to draw power from worship and refuse to become demons who feed on the lives of their worshippers. But even demigods are still able to do pretty much whatever they want so long as no one tries to stop them. There's a big drop-off in power between demigods and even the strongest "superhero" mortals. But that gap is far from empty, and many entities can be classed as "semi-divine". There are three basic groups that populate the semi-divine range, weaker than demigods but clearly more than mortal. The strongest of the created entities are semi-divine, including Taoist spirits like the Western Dragon. Gods who have fallen so far as to lose their grandipotence, like Q'Nos or the Leviathan, are semi-divine. Mortals who have found a path to godhood often become semi-divine on their way to their final goal (although most are thwarted short of godhood). Lord Ebon attained such semi-divinity shortly before his demise, but Rebus jumped directly from mortal to grandipotent. In addition to the truly semi-divine, the grandipotent often limit their power on purpose when acting among mortals in order to avoid the attention of their rivals. Many figures of myth who would seem to be semi-divine were really disguises worn by gods who were acting covertly. In short, the semi-divine ranking is like minor league or semi-pro baseball. Some of the players are on the way down, some are on the way up, some are major leaguers slumming it for a couple of games for some reason, but most are pretty much where their level of ability is going to keep them for their entire career. For every Lord Ebon seeking godhood or Q'Nos salvaging what he can, there's dozens of powerful created entities or avatars that straddle the line between god and man. The Pitfalls of Puissance From a narrative perspective, grandipotent beings are a nightmare. It's very hard to write a conflict when one or more participants is capable of doing whatever the heck they want, and if they're also immortal and disconnected from the timestream you can't even do much in terms of moral dilemmas or character studies. The gods may not be crazy, per se, but they're certainly way too abstruse to be at center stage very often. Fortunately, for all their odd evolutions, the gods in the ASH Universe were human to begin with, and they can't shake certain indelible traces of their origins. Among other things, this means that they're the proverbial basket of crabs, pulling down any one of their number who might look too ready to climb out. When they interact with the mortal plane, they have to be terribly sneaky. Even if it looks to mortals like they're being flashy... trust me, they're cloaking themselves in some fashion from the eyes of their fellow gods. So a protagonist faced with a divine threat doesn't need to be strong enough to defeat the god, they just need to find a way to blow the god's cover, or tip the politics a little, or otherwise ensure that the god is dealt with by other gods. While this may look on the surface to be a deus ex machina, it's really just the usual puzzle plot writ very large. As long as the protagonist has to honestly work at it to arrange for the interference of other gods, it's okay from a storytelling point of view. Getting Rebus to drop his cloak in anger, shoving Devastation into the view of the gods, or getting Phaeton to fall prey to his own pride are all dramatically the equivalent of luring the Terminator into an industrial press and then hitting the "smoosh" switch. A Parting Thought H.P. Lovecraft's view of the gods is pretty appropriate to the ASH Universe. It doesn't matter if they're full gods, demigods or demons... you're probably better off if they never notice you. Heck, it's hazardous to your health to notice *them*, because they're probably trying not to be seen. It's kind of like Monty Python's "How Not To Be Seen" sketch, but with the announcer exploding rather than the bush. ============================================================================ For all the back issues, plus additional background information, art, and more, go to http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/ASH ! To discuss this issue or any others, either just hit "followup" to this post, or check out our Yahoo discussion group, which can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ash_stories/ ! There's also a LiveJournal interest group for ASH, check it out at http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=academy+of+super-heroes (if you're on Facebook instead, there's an Academy of Super-Heroes group there too). ============================================================================