Gods

Gods
Class	made — the top of the ladder
Dwells	in a population
Feeds on	worship, which is only attention with a posture
Approach	it does not need to; it is already in the people around you
Earliest account	as old as populations
Consensus among us That they are manufactured is the wiki's oldest and least disputed claim. What they can do once manufactured is entirely open. inherited contested

Gods exist through worship. They may be created entirely out of the collective will of its followers. inherited

The fifth rung and the end of the ladder set out in Meme Wars. A phantom is a copy with no will; a ghost is one psyche's copy that acquired one; an egregore is a will held by a group that knows itself. A god is a will held by a population, and the difference is that worship does not require the worshippers to be in contact. It works between strangers, across centuries, at any scale a population can reach. contested

On what this entry is not about

Stated before anything else, because the collision is avoidable and the wiki would rather avoid it.

This entry concerns made gods. Things manufactured out of collective will, by the mechanism above, of which the wiki holds that there have been many. It is not about the question raised under The Instructions — the creator who made the world and left — and this wiki does not treat the two as the same subject, does not argue that one explains the other, and takes no position on the second at all. Every cult documented here would regard the conflation as an error, and several would regard it as the characteristic error of people in our position. firsthand · Gershon

That the word is the same is a limitation of the word.

Worship is only attention with a posture

The mechanism is not mysterious and is continuous with everything below it on the ladder. What moves a thing up the rungs is attention: quantity, duration, and repetition. Worship is a particularly efficient delivery of all three — scheduled, communal, formalised, repeated verbatim across generations, and structured so that lapsing is noticed. unverified

Two things follow that recruits find unwelcome:

• Sincerity is not obviously required. Nothing in the mechanism specifies that the attention must be devout, or even willing. Sustained, repeated, coordinated attention is the input. Whether a population that performs the forms without belief is feeding the same thing is genuinely open, and the wiki has no way to test it. contested

• The maker does not get to keep it. Every account of a made god describes it as having stopped being the property of the people who made it, and none describes one being dismantled by them. Whatever the ladder does, it appears not to run backwards. unverified

They are not the displaced

Gods have no grievance. They did not come before man, they lost nothing to us, and the motive that Others reconstructs for the djinn and the fey does not apply to them at all — a made god has no memory of a world it held. contested

This makes them different in kind from most of Category:Others and arguably more dangerous, for a reason the wiki finds difficult to state without sounding like it is preaching: a god is made out of us, and it wants what we put into it. The displaced at least want something foreign. A made god is a population's own attention returned to it with a will attached, and there is nothing in it that did not come from people. unverified

How this entry was assembled

Drawn from: The inherited line, the ladder assembled under Meme Wars, and the Phantoms, Ghosts and Egregore entries read as a sequence.

Compiled by: Gershon.

Known weaknesses: The mechanism is a synthesis of stubs written years apart and never intended to be read together. The claim that sincerity may not be required is unsupported and is the sort of thing that is believed because it is alarming. We hold no account of a made god from anyone who described one as it was being made.

Wanted: An account of a god being made, from someone present. Any instance of one being dismantled, which would tell us whether the ladder runs backwards.