Fantasy with Elected/Communal Gods

[alias_sqbr]

Are there any fantasy stories with democratic gods who follow the conscious decisions of their followers as a group? It's like... a typical god may be similar to a king who tries to listen to his citizens else he be deposed, but I'm looking for something more like a democratically elected president who was voted in and can be voted out.

This is an off-shoot of a discussion of Baldur's Gate 3/The Forgotten Realms but I think it should work for any fantasy setting where gods can be deliberately created or are a job mortals can take on, with powers reliant on simple things like their number of followers instead of anything numinous or mystical. I'm mostly thinking high fantasy set in a secondary world, but I guess it could work in other sorts of fantasy too.

In that post I suggested a democratic god who ascended after a group of unaligned people formed a collective, with miracles/theology etc decided by popular vote. Gods can pass on their job to someone else, so maybe there could even be term limits etc.

But you could also have a god who is a collective, with each follower being a small part of the god, like a sort of co-op (but not a single Hive-mind). It could be an unconscious collective will, which is all sorts of dangerous and leans towards like... Anthropomorphised Spirit Of The People type gods which I have seen in fiction. But I feel like there's other ways people could be involved in Being The God deliberately without it taking over their whole consciousness. Because most of the time you're not thinking about religion or gods and just want to live your life, but sometimes you do want to be involved.

There could also be "democratic" gods who work like pyramid schemes: recruit enough new followers to make prayers etc on your behalf, and you get to control a larger portion of the god's power!

I'm sure someone has done a god like this but I am having trouble thinking of examples and googling didn't do me much good. Of course AS WE HAVE RECENTLY LEARNED that doesn't mean much, and I am prepared for everyone to point out the many examples I am forgetting.

A bunch of secular humanists unionising to form their own better alternative to the existing religions is the sort of thing I can see Pratchett doing, but the closest I can remember is the Dorfl and Golem King plots which if anything implies any god made by committee is doomed to violent madness.

And I say bah to that! Like I'm sure a democratic god would be massively flawed, just like all democratically elected mortal rulers are flawed. But the usual sort of god is often flawed too, especially in canons like The Forgotten Realms or Discworld.

I know this sort of thing isn't what most people want from most fantasy, and it wouldn't work in a lot of canons in terms of worldbuilding or tone (it would be TERRIBLE in Lord of the Rings, for example) But for fantasy which is already playing around with anachronism or unusual worldbuilding I think it could be a cool part of the setting.

EDIT: Conversation about the Craft Sequence on tumblr.

Comments

[suncani]

This definitely sounds like something I would read the hell out of. I'm also going to pass this post onto a friend who's much more clued up on fantasy than me (or at least has a better memory) and if they come up with anything I shall report back

But I feel like there's other ways people could be involved in Being The God deliberately without it taking over their whole consciousness

I wonder if this could almost be like angels as the amount of leyway/how much they are like a god whilst not being a god varies and could have term limits and office hours like city councillors etc.

[alias_sqbr]

Oooh. I find explorations of how much free will and understanding of [God]'s Plan angels etc have interesting in and of itself even in more conventional cosmologies.

[princessofgeeks]

This isn't quite what you are looking for, but in Small Gods by Terry Pratchett, the gods thrive or fade according to the number of their adherents.

[alias_sqbr]

Right, Discworld is one of the kinds of settings I was thinking of where this sort of God would be possible.

[wychwood]

Have you read Jo Walton's Lifelode? There's some really weird and unusual worldbuilding, where the world has less magic the further you go... west, I think it is, and more as you go east, so the furthest west is almost entirely mundane and in the furthest east reality goes deeply strange. Most of the story is set somewhere middle-ish, but there's a major plot element around the gods, who live in the furthest east area and are sort of weird coalition hive-minds; there's no voting as such, but the actions of the gods are driven by the specific individuals who are making them up at a particular time.

[alias_sqbr]

I had not heard of that! I've seen some other interesting God Hive Mind stories, but they seem to be all consuming experiences, which isn't quite what I'm looking for.

[shati]

Alaya Dawn Johnson's The Summer Prince is the closest I can think of, although it's not what you're looking for. You're thinking specifically only cases where the god is, for lack of a better way to put this, definitively possessed of godly powers and elected to the position of god, not, like, a head of state revered as a god, right?

[alias_sqbr]

An elected head of state who is revered as a God but only while in the job is certainly adjacent to my idea, but yeah not quite it.

[ember_keelty]

These are neat ideas that I don't think I've ever seen in exactly these terms!

Heaven Will Be Mine has a world where consensus reality is a physical/mystical force, so humanity as a whole kind of works like the democratic God you've envisioned here, and then the story is about people from marginalized minorities trying to escape to space where they won't be "outvoted" on everything and can create their own consensus. That might be relevant to your interests?

Also I'm now thinking about how characters in a current fandom of mine might try to break their powered-by-belief magic system, which really, really needs to be broken if their world is ever not going to suck, and the whole thing is a political allegory so there really ought to be a political solution! But that's fanfic territory, no one in the canon gets anywhere close.

[alias_sqbr]

Man, that is relevant to my interests, but unfortunately the basic controls of Heaven Will Be Mine (having to click through every line of dialogue, even on replays) hurt my hands too much so I had to stop playing. I really should watch a LP one of these days.

[alephnul]

The Commonweal novels by Graydon Saunders have something somewhat similar, although the god-like beings are absurdly powerful sorcerers rather than dieties. The setting is one in which various tyrranical sorcerers control most of the world, except for an area called the Commonweal, where the sorcerers that arise are bound to a pact to only use their powers in the service of the community, as decided by the concensus-based governance of the community. I did not, personally, like the one of them that I've read (it was too war focused, and too people-must-do-terrible-things-to-protect-their-community oriented), but I have friends who absolutely love them, and it seems somewhat similar to Democratically governed gods.

[alias_sqbr]

That is certainly close to my idea, and I'd never heard of those books, thank you!

[bismuth209]

this is interesting!

i haven't got examples for you, the closest, and quite far away, thing i can think of is how in the second Percy Jackson series, when they meet the Roman gods, who are different than their Greek counterparts, but also kinda the same entity, because the Roman perception of them is different.

It seems to me your idea includes like, a conscious choice of the god to listen to their followers? I don't think i've seen that around, moreso the god itself changing because the world and their followers do

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah, it has to be conscious to count, which contradicts how a lot of stories do gods!