#fantasy cosmology

On the Back of a Snake: Imagine that your world is a very elongated place. As the snake slithers or swims through whatever medium you put beyond the sky, peoples’ views of the other parts of the world change. Also, snakes shed. How often does that happen and how does it effect the world?

The Serpent Mother: Want to keep your world round? It’s an egg suspended and protected in a nest by a lovingly coiled mother, with several sister worlds. Someday your world will hatch into the next.

The World Sloth: Algae grows on sloths in reality, so in fantasy-land I imagine that an entire world could sprout from a sufficiently large sloth. Sloth’s do poop every ten days, but how long is that on the scale of the World Sloth? What is the World Sloth even climbing, and do its periodic ascents and descents effect the world?

The Forgetful Squirrel: Your world is a nut buried by a cosmic squirrel eons ago, and now your people pray that the cosmic squirrel has died, or has forgotten about it.

The Beavers’ Dam: Your world is part of or just plain is a cosmic beavers’ dam. This has lead to many myths and fears about what the Dam World holds back, but at the same time means that the entire family of Divine Beavers routinely make repairs and improvements to creation.

The Cosmere Has Nuked Me

Obviously I'm reading the cosmere. At least if you filter out all the fanart reblogs, it was like... semi recent I was rambling about those books.

Either way, Brandon Sanderson is like... ass at a lot of things. He doesn't really write the greatest dialogue, nor does he have like... the best character arcs in the business. HOWEVER, his worldbuilding and ability to create interesting locales is second to none in my opinion.

I think that the MOST fascinating part of his worlds is his cosmology (the cosmere at large), and his intersection of physical realities with magical/mystical beliefs.

That said, I'd like to begin properly taking a stab at designing my OWN cosmology, as a way to sort-of marry my worldbuilding with my currently-beloved media consumption.

Required Context for My Project's History

Alright! So this in mind, I kind of had to take inventory of the scattered notes from the past decade of my own worldbuilding. One core concept in this project is to have divinity be legitimately unclear. I want there to be competing pantheons. I want religious conflict.

How can you do this when gods, in many fantasy settings, are provably there? Either you go LOTR and move it to the side HUGELY for the average person, you go cosmere and have it be "yeah no these are the gods and everyone else is basically just misguided or reinterpreting them", OR you go "these pantheons are ALL correct".

I have chosen the latter.

This creates the issue of interaction between pantheons though, and determining how those work. No, the reader doesn't need a guide laid out for them, but as the AUTHOR I want to have consistent internal rules so as to create a world that slides together like... I dunno... like a thing that fits together well.

The solution I INITIALLY chose for this was to begin defining the divine in my world to an almost demystifying extent. "Oh yeah no it's like percy jackson and they're just different gods tied to belief". I rapidly decided that I hated this.

SO I went back to the drawing board.

The concept I came back with was WAY more interesting to me. I decided that, for purposes of divinity in narrative, you could split gods into two factors, and to be a god all the being needed to do is get over a certain amount.

These two factors were:

Presence: how tangible are the effects of this power in one's day to day?

Awe: how legitimately powerful/unknowable is this being?

Because here's the thing, if you had like a being that just WAS the universe, but literally was entirely intangible and didn't actually call attention to it being any sort of being, then people would just see it as like... physics. Or at least they'd be essentially worshiping physics. No Bueno. Presence 0, even with awe 100, is no god.

Similarly, presence 100 but awe 0 might be represented by like... a guard to a prisoner. They hold power over every aspect of this prisoner's life, but their nature isn't remotely alien. They're VERY obviously just a guy.

SO, what I did was I devised a system where different groupings of gods were placed differently on this spectrum.

I worked with FOUR main types of deities.

Celestial Gods: These beings are highest on the awe scale, lowest on the presence scale. At least in the place my main area is in. My idea is that they ARE realms in their own right. Think that classic fantasy concept of planes/solar systems being personifications of a deity. ABSOLUTE power over their realm (with some caveats), but unable to manifest to a truly powerful degree in other realms.

Local Celestial God: In order to avoid there being one "clear" god for the planet I focus on, I decided that the celestial being making up the solar system of Galm/my main world sacrificed itself in order to grant the souls within it true free will. Thus? No living celestial being for the realm we're in, but PLENTY that look at this rotting corpse and meddle within it to the degree that they can.

I consider this one to be low presence, medium awe. But we'll get back to it.

Terrestrial Gods: So. Big local celestial god kills itself and gives free will. Left behind are shards of its essence. You can't just dissipate a being that large/strong without remnants. Thus; beings tied to aspects of this god. Some are intentional, like gods of plant life or water. Big daddy/mommy god knew those needed to exist. To have personifications. Others are less intentional, perhaps a personification of this original deity's doubt in its plan. Either way, powerful beings, but beings that are all bound to the fact that they're specters to a certain degree. Remnants of a dead god.

In order to make this make sense, I decided that the parent deity left a clear successor. A daughter goddess. Her sole purpose, more or less, is to keep this whole project running, and after early missteps allowing the terrestrial gods to meddle, has reined them in.

Natural Deities: In every mythology ever, gods FUCK, and in this setting? When terrestrial gods fuck, they don't create MORE terrestrial gods. They instead create fragments of their power, personifying aspects of it. These deities, however, are PHYSICAL. Physical in the sense that they're tied to physical things. For instance; god tied to plant life has a kid? Said kid represents rainforests, and is present in them. Rainforest god has a kid? Said kid is tied to a specific rainforest. Et cetera et cetera. The balancing of this is that the further down you get, the less sentient AND less "real" these deities are. So okay it goes like

Plants -> rainforest plants -> this rainforest -> this grove -> this tree -> this branch -> this leaf

By the time you get to tree, they're basically just an undying human with some natural magic (POG DRYAD POGGGG). Branch? an animal spirit living in the tree. Leaf? idfk a bug? But you get what I mean. The leaf spirit may as well not exist. Nearly an inanimate object with no conscious influence. BOOM, solves problem of demigods and shit being common. They're NOT.

MOTHERFUCKERS: I'm tired and don't want to be eloquent. These guys are probably gonna be called like... I dunno, 'artificial gods' or 'ascended gods'. Point being; these are low on the awe scale, but VERY high on the presence scale. Think of a lich whose power has grown to such an extent, that he can pose as a god to your average joe, and build a cult around him. Or a vampire who has convinced people to revere her as the incarnation of a god or some sort. The key trait here is that they've figured out a way to either live forever, OR convince people that they're living forever (heirs? who knows). They also need to have enough power to perform 'miracles' to demonstrate the value of treating them as a deity.

I arrived at this rough categorization, and thus decided to stick with it (with future adjustments pending).

WHY is My Justification for Multiple Pantheons Relevant to Cosmology?

Having multiple nested pantheons spread along this awe-presence axis means that you do actually need to define their interactions in a way that makes sense. Thus, you need to define the actual web of mystical bullshit that links this all.

SO, the celestial deities are all just... I choose to conceptualize them as each being a "solar system" floating in a big old sea of ethereal magic and souls and such. A big bubble bath of little deities. Our local deity killed itself, and thus the sky within it went dark, and the only light comes from its dying heart (the sun) and the tears in its flesh that let the ethereal sea of magic through (stars). This metaphor is eh but we use it for now.

SO, then. Magic in this world is to cleverly weave EITHER the power from that external sea, OR the power of the dead god. THUS THE ISSUE ARISES: what is the sun of this planet's relation to magical power? Do celestial bodies all have a purpose? Or are they just bits of god corpse. Perhaps magic is different during the night and the day? As at night it might be easier to draw from the stars for ethereal spells, and during the day easier to draw from the sun for celestial spells? (these are just categories I'm throwing out there for now)

Also, I like the idea that the sun burning is the "beating" of this dead god's heart, and just like a normal heart, it beats in phases.

I'd like to sync up the behavior of magic to phases in the sun, and perhaps even have an astrology-like thing that affects people based on which phase of this cycle they're born in.

I want to think of this system, and if it works. I like this sort-of solar and star powered magic. I'm worried about making it so that stars are... not real? Maybe the other stars are the celestial deities floating in the sea, and the ethereal sea is actually invisible to the naked eye?

I'd like that.

Much to think about, but... also much thought about.

I think that, at a minimum, the celestial deities are bound to THEIR realm for places to express huge power, but can nudge other realms (especially our dead realm).

Terrestrial gods can affect the area WITHIN the dead god greatly, but only the strongest can venture out or push. Most are bound to this realm, and by eachother.

Natural deities are probably just limited to their physical realm for power, although I imagine they can draw from the terrestrial deity that spawned them should they find themselves isolated.

The motherfuckers are gonna be a grab bag. If one draws directly from the ethereal sea? Then they can probably express their power in any plain. If they draw from magic originating from the dead god? They probably suffer the same limitations as terrestrial gods.

I DO like the idea of most magic being like, sun-dependent, and perhaps dependent on how much sunlight reflects from the moon. Then alternate magic being FAR harder to learn, but drawing on the sea of magic and souls that all things float in, and thus being more universal.

Could be cool.