Avoiding cliches when writing gods

tl;dr- Cliches seem bad when things are there just for the sake of the cliche itself. To avoid this, you can develop meaningful notions of the gods – including what they are, why they're there, and how they interact. Probably best to start with deciding if the gods are superheroes or full-blown forces of nature.

Step 1: Pick what kind of god(s) they'll be.

I figure that there're basically two kinds of gods:

1. Effector gods are the driving forces of existence; they cause whatever they're god of to exist. For an example of a monotheistic effector god, the guy in this xkcd is literally causing every moment of his simulated world to happen; if he doesn't actively effect something, it doesn't exist. He even apologizes for occasionally causing things to stop existing on accident:

   So if you see a mote of dust vanish from your vision in a little flash or something, I'm sorry. I must have misplaced a rock sometime in the last few billions and billions of millennia.

2. Superhero gods are basically just superheroes who have thematic powers. For example, if Thor, God of Lightning, is a superhero god, then he doesn't really cause lightning to exist in a fundamental sense so much as he just has some cool superpowers related to it, even if those superpowers include abilities like summoning lightning.

I imagine that gods were all originally conceived as effectors. For example, why does lightning exist? Well, because Thor effected it, obviously!

Effector gods are a lot like modern scientific explanations. For example, we now acknowledge Electron, God of Negative Charge, and his beloved Proton, Goddess of Positive Charge. The big change is a shift toward mechanistic descriptions (like the Big Bang theory) over fanciful anthropomorphic descriptions (like Chaos theory), largely because it feels silly to make up stuff that's not empirically meaningful.

As such, effector gods make sense. But do you want to write about Thor, God of Lightning, whose OCD causes him to effect the phenomena of lightning? Or do you want to write about Thor, God of Lightning, whose superpowers grant him control over lightning when dramatically appropriate?

Some authors seem to mix these options together:

3. Effector-superhero gods are sort of a compromise, where superhero-like gods are presented as though they're also effectors. For example:

   The fictional Marvel Universe contains a number of beings in this category that are a part of the universe, with their existence necessary to provide a certain function. Much like organs provide specific functions for the human body, these entities provide functions for the universe itself. There is no official (known) name for these beings, but they are often referred to as cosmic entities, cosmic beings or abstract entities. Many of them embody some concept or fulfill some essential need, but there are others who are considered within this reference frame simply due to their scale of power, such as the Infinites, Beyonders, Cosmic Cubes, or Watchers. Death is also considered to be a cosmic entity.

   –"Cosmic entity (Marvel Comics)", Wikipedia

   So a cosmic being's "existence [is] necessary to provide a certain function", but I think they're still basically superhero-like in the narratives.

Step 2: Figure out why they're there.

Effector gods necessarily exist. I mean, Electron, God of Negative Charge, definitely exists in the real world. Just.. well, the part about Electron being in love with Proton is fabricated.

Superhero gods are pretty unnecessary. I mean, there's no reason that we need a superhero called Thor who, for whatever reason, has powers over lightning. So if Thor exists, how/why?

I'd further clarify that having a "god of war" is not a problem, if it makes sense in the context. It is a cliché if the god of war in question is just "filling a seat".

I think this is where you can run into the problem with cliches. This is, if Thor exists simply because the story has superhero gods, then it does seem a bit more like "filling a seat".

Step 3: Figure out how they interact.

Effector-gods can overlap. For example, if you write about the effector-God who causes everything, then any effector-gods that cause individual phenomena would seem to be aspects of the effector-God. Then Electron and Proton seem to have a complicated relationship with Positron; I mean, while Proton seems to try to avoid Positron, Electron seems to seek out Positron, get caught up in a fight, and finally blow up. ...drama, amirite?

Superhero-gods seem more ambiguous. I mean, while the God of Water and God of Fire would seem to have conflicting agendas as effector-gods, superhero-gods aren't necessarily at odds with each other just because their powers are. The God of Water and God of Fire could just as easily team up and use their superpowers as part of their Ultimate Combo Attack: Stream of Steamy Justice!.

Step 4: Ensure it all works together.

So, yeah, just smooth stuff up. If you come up with a good story about gods, be they effectors or/and superheroes, that makes sense and has consistency, then awesome!

I think you can manage to avoid just "filling seats", like with a mindless copy/paste of a mythological pantheon, if you give them substance. I think the cliche thing is moreso an issue when people have a stereotypical pantheon just for the sake of having a stereotypical pantheon.

posted over 5 years ago

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Nat‭

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If you are following the design of classical civilisations and their pantheons, then it's worth considering two things. Firstly, the culture you're creating with inform how Gods with similar roles are different. Secondly, the main stories of these Gods will reflect prehistory.

Consider the difference between the Goddess of love in ancient Egypt and ancient Greece. Hathor and Aphrodite respectively. Ancient Egypt was generally speaking an okay place to be a woman, ancient Greece was generally speaking not.

Ancient Egyptian women enjoyed the right to own and inherit property, could represent themselves in court, even ride chariots. None of this was an issue. In Greece however attitudes to women were closer to those held by the Afghan Taliban. Women needed male guardians and were not, with some exceptions like Sparta, offered many rights or responsibilities outside of the home.

This cultural difference is reflected in Hathor and Aphrodite. Aphrodite was the Goddess of love, beauty, and sex. She was unfaithful to her husband, and generally considered bad tempered. Hathor in direct contrast was regarded as being good tempered, and had a diverse portfolio of responsibilities: love, beauty, sex, dance, music, cosmetics... and mining. Indeed we see a similar cultural difference with Norse mythology. Freyja was responsible for love, beauty, sex, war, death, fertility, and gold.

So the character of the Gods will surely reflect the cultures which they are tied to.

The nature of the stories will also have prehistorical significance. I have noticed, and assume others may have too, that there's a common theme with power being transfers from old gods to new gods. In Norse and Greek mythology the older and larger gods are destroyed or imprisoned by the smaller next generation. In Norse it was ice giants. In Greece it was titans.

This, I suspect, may be a creative retelling of conflict between settled farmers and nomadic hunters. Recent evidence suggests that early settled communities were actually quite malnourished, and consequently the people were small. The explanation is that farming was embarked upon out of desperation, due to overpopulation. Over time civilisation developed and settled folk were better able to organise and dominate socially, in contrast to the better nourished (but poorly organised) nomadic folk, who would have been bigger.

Point being, mythological stories likely have prehistoric origins which explain how social orders and culture changed. Just in rather grandiose terms.

You won't have any cliches if the environment and history you create isn't a cliche. So it's important to be aware of various mythologies (as you clearly are), and the histories of these societies, their relationship with their geography, etc. That will allow you to create unique societies which in turn have original pantheons.

posted over 5 years ago

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inappropriateCode‭

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My first answer perhaps did not set enough context or was too written in shorthand. Let's see if this performs any better.

Avoiding cliches when writing gods requires not relying too much on existing mythology. When I say "Mars, God of War", or "Jahova", each reader will have a set of expectations about how the god will behave, what will be important, and how the god will react to human challenges. This what it means to write in cliche -- using an existing set of expectations to evoke a standard reader response without needing to do the work of establishing the context.

If I say "Aphrodite", you know I am talking about a female god known for her beauty. If you were deeply rooted in Hellenistic culture, you would know more stories with more context. If not, you put your expectations in play to make her hypersexual, with all the suppositions that image brings to you.

To write a god without cliches, you must pull the god from a blank page. Nothing about godliness should be presumed. You construct the god from scratch, perhaps using some bits of god legend, but used carefully, contrasting this particular god from what the god legend might imply. You can use the reader's cultural expectations of a god not as a shorthand for the attributes of your god, but as a springboard for comparing, differentiating, and constructing your own.

If your gods possess human emotions and foibles, and I suspect they aren't interesting to read unless they do, you can use human contexts to import some expectations into your gods.

I don't write gods, but Neil Gaiman has. As an example of creating gods, I suggest reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods. It develops the personality of several gods in a modern framework, including the rivalry between them and integrates them into the existing Pagan theology.

He succeeded by making each god be recognizable as a human, with various extra-human abilities. He uses some human character archetypes, such as the grubby little man driven by sloth, or the silicon valley entrepreneur, to set up some of his gods. He uses events from mythology to create additional conflict, but it is done slowly. Over many pages and chapters, one comes to recognize god myth rather than having it be exposed in a sentence.

American Gods discusses the mechanism through which each god derives their power, and the consequences for the gods and for people as that power is disrupted or fades. I remember being satisfied with the book, even though I come to it with no established god beliefs.

posted over 5 years ago

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cmm‭

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You may want some of the traditional gods. War is pretty much a universal in human culture, as is love, brotherly love, luck, sexual attraction, in some forms "good" and "evil", death, birth, hunting, etc.

Gods represent archetypes of human emotion; Aphrodite is the irresistible woman; Satan is the irresistible tempter.

Gods also represent the "cause" of luck in various human enterprises subject to a large dose of chance. Including battle, whether rain comes for crops (or insects come for crops), in human diseases, in gambling, in dangerous circumstances (navigating on the ocean) in safety while traveling, in finding love or security, etc. We propitiate (bribe) these Gods with sacrifices and offerings so things won't go wrong. We interpret bad luck (a hurricane or tornado or flood or earthquake or wildfire) as "punishment" from the god and offer forms of atonement. or we offer them thanks; Moses made live sacrifices of captured virgins to "thank" God for his victory in battle.

To avoid clichés, understand the reasons we have Gods (as paragons of various human qualities, or as the source of good/bad fortune), see how those things can apply to your fictional culture and setting and what is most important to them, and devise your gods to resonate with those characters. If they are farmers, their Gods will be related to good and bad luck in farming. If they are seafaring, their Gods will be related to that; Gods of Navigation or Weather, maybe separate gods of rain and wind and heavy seas.

If they are herders, different gods, if they are miners, different gods. If they are all of these things, and warriors and craftsmen in the bargain, a pantheon of Gods.

posted over 5 years ago

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Amadeus‭

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Similarities are not the same as cliches.

Various pantheons have a lot of overlap because they draw on universal aspects of humanity. Food. Fire. Home. Love. Children (and childbearing). Protection. Etc, etc, etc.

How these things manifest will change culture to culture. A nomadic group won't need gods for agriculture. A group on the equator doesn't need gods or rituals for the solstice and equinox.

And of course each group will draw the lines in different places (both by how they divide up the god workload and how many gods there are total). Even the 3 main monotheistic religions have "aspects" of God that work on different levels. All three have God on Earth (or a human representative of God who worshipers revere), represented by The Shekhinah, Jesus (also saints), or Mohammed, and all 3 have prophets). All also have different names and aspects of God in other rheims. Ways to focus your prayers.

For polytheistic religions, gods may have different (strong) personalities or may just be the embodiment of different parts of the culture. Different entities to which to send your prayers and devotion.

All societies everywhere will have gods or spirituality or something for basic living:

• Love. Attraction. Marital matchmakers. Whatever you call it, it's central.
• Fertility. No babies = no society after a few decades.
• Childbirth. This can be a dangerous time for both woman and fetus/newborn. It may not be as visible to our modern eyes, but an awful lot of religion is dedicated to this.
• Food. For hunting, for agriculture, for timely rain, for good harvests, etc.
• Fire and light and sometimes technology (forge) that comes from them.
• War.
• Death. Sometimes an underworld.
• Cosmology. Sun, moon, various planets, sky, stars, heavens, etc.

And others (this is not necessarily a comprehensive list). Nor is this representative of the way all cultures have divided up these tasks.

To create your pantheon, think first about the society you've created.

What is absolutely essential to them? Pretty much everything on the above list will be, but perhaps others as well. A harsh society with serfs and slaves may especially value fertility since many children die. Hunters/gatherers vs pastural nomads vs agriculturally-based societies all need different sets of gods for food.

Think about the setting they're in. How many volcano gods do they need? In many places, the answer is zero. Other places would totally have one. Still others would have multiple volcano gods, one for each volcano. Mild weather vs life-threatening storms? Snow? rain? lack of rain? What's their water supply like? How much do they see the sun and the stars?

Do they live outdoors or indoors? Outdoor societies will have stronger relationships to the night sky. What about technology? Fire is the big one. But also metal working, writing, science/math, weapons, plows, etc. What animals do they use for food, working, companionship, or are in fear of?

Keep asking questions and thinking about what gods your characters might pray to. What are their needs? What were the needs of their society in the past (since religions are usually quite old, even if they keep changing)?

Your gods will be cliches if they're disconnected from the world you've built.

Ground them in your society. Show how they are meaningful in peoples' every day lives. Or how they were once meaningful but now not so much. Sometimes societies stop being religious altogether (though there are always some who persist) and sometimes they're still very religious but some gods have fallen into disuse (and other small ones may have grown big).

posted over 5 years ago

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Cyn‭

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I think my answer may be a tad tinted by my atheism, as I believe every faith and pantheon operates as a function of how a culture interacts with nature, the difficult-to-predict, and the unknown, but I would say a good starting point would be the environment your fictional society inhabits.

For example, Ancient Egyptian gods are numerous yet orderly, because of the extreme linkage between the Nile and Egypt's prosperity. When the Nile floods (which is a regular, predictable occurrence), there's an increase in fertility, plantable lands, fishable waters, et cetera, but this also brings dangers, like hippos. As such, everything has a cycle in the Egyptian pantheon, to the point where the sun's regularity is itself deified.

Meanwhile, the semitic monotheistic beliefs arise from nomadic desert tribes that largely subsist by raiding and attacking other tribes. As such, their God prioritises loyalty to their own tribe, virulent hatred of the other tribes unless they adopt the culture unquestioningly, and due to the unreliable nature of successful raids and land quality in a wilderness, their God is capricious. The tribe get hit by a flux? The tribe obviously didn't sacrifice enough. The tribe wins a tough battle? That was because God smiled upon them! Also, the presence of a non-fighting, priestly class means that sacrifices are required in the form of tasty burnt animals that are totally being given to God, not the priests.

Contrast with polynesian faiths, which is much more about animistic interpretations of natural forces, while religious figures (like Maui) are people that interact with and harness the animistic gods, as opposed to directly working for/speaking with them (it should also be noted that while most polynesian islands have Maui in their mythos, his deeds and abilities vary from island to island, emphasising the strong link to the environment again). This emphasises their society's need to accept if a calamity takes something significant; it's simply the ocean taking something back, et cetera, and unlike the semitic faiths, there's no impetus to make something happen by man's hand (as raiding is not a staple part of polynesian culture).

As for fictional faiths, I've made a few, which are generally misinterpretations of actual Gods at work. A tropical nation devised a six-god pantheon that perpetually argue over the most important aspects of life (the weather, justice, the cycle of life and death, freedom versus holding secrets man must not know), which to them explains the capricious nature of tropical weather, the human drive to explore isles upon an archipelago contrasted with storms and tides that prevent certain exploration, et cetera.

Other faiths founded by strongly class-stratified cultures focus on after-death justice, assuring peasants the meek shall be rewarded posthumously so you should let the rich do what they like, others still argue children cannot be fairly judged and so believe in reincarnation (in truth, the real Gods do both; the Underworld is a soul penitentiary, and if you do your time and repent, you get another chance at life, and similarly if you get bored of eternal bliss, you can choose to reincarnate).

Essentially, think of faith as a direct result of how cultures talk to the environment and Gods should naturally spring forth.

posted over 5 years ago

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Matthew Dave‭

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