Gods and Goddesses

Power alone does not make a God. Cardorbis contains beings capable of surviving ages, commanding armies, crossing spiritual boundaries, wielding catastrophic magic, or standing before mortals with power so overwhelming that worship may seem inevitable. None of those qualities is sufficient to establish divinity. A true God or Goddess exists in a different relationship with reality.

Divinity begins when a consciousness becomes metaphysically anchored to a principle strongly enough that the being and the principle can no longer be treated as completely separate. To injure such a God can therefore mean more than injuring a powerful person. Under extraordinary circumstances, damage done to the deity may propagate into the reality through which that deity exists.

The Gods of Cardorbis arise through two major paths. Primordial Gods and Goddesses embody principles that do not depend upon mortal civilization. Their truths would remain if every sapient people vanished. Time would continue. Life and death would continue. Light, change, oceans, and other sufficiently foundational realities would continue expressing themselves whether anyone remained to pray to them or not.

Apotheosized Gods and Goddesses begin elsewhere. A mortal or other nondivine consciousness may progress through Ascension until its understanding and participation in a major mortal-created concept becomes so profound that the relationship turns reciprocal. The being no longer merely understands War, Law, Medicine, the Forge, or another sufficiently important civilizational principle. The principle begins to exist divinely through the being.

Neither origin produces counterfeit divinity. An Apotheosized Goddess of War is genuinely a Goddess. Her principle is simply dependent upon conscious beings capable of making War in a way that a Primordial principle such as Time is not.

The distinction between Godhood and other spiritual orders must therefore remain clear. An Archangel may wield astonishing delegated power without possessing a divine anchor. A Demon Lord may grow stronger than beings worshipped as Gods by frightened mortals and still remain a Demon. An Archdevil may rule an immense Dominion without thereby becoming divine.

Likewise, where a God resides does not determine what the God is. A deity may possess a Realm of Accord, govern a Dominion of Claim, travel beyond either, command celestial or infernal servants, or stand in complicated relationship with many spiritual realities. Those are relationships. Godhood lies deeper. A God is not merely a being who has acquired enough power to rule part of existence. A God is a being whose existence has become part of how something fundamental continues to mean what it means.