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Today's thread: What is a god? And why is being able to answer that question important for every storyteller?
A humble myth scholar's opinion.
A humble myth scholar's opinion.
First, this will only be useful to you if you engage with me as a fellow scholar. We're leaving personal religious beliefs at the door, and focusing on mythological and psychological understandings.
In the most basic sense, a god is a pattern writ large. Woven together out of our environment, our desires and fears, and our understanding of ourselves. Gods of corn, gods of lightning, gods of love. No matter the kind of god, they each have one thing in common; a personality.
Huitzilopochtli is warlike, Isis is protective, Yahweh is jealous. These are reflections of US, essential locusts of human psychology boiled down into glittering points. They are patterns that repeat again and again WITHIN US, all over the world, for all time.
We project the mysteries of ourselves and lives outward into the image of the gods. When we can all see them and agree upon them, it gives us a working language to orient our world by. This is the *mythos* side of our understanding of the world, as opposed to logos. We need both.
So in a sense, we'll never be rid of the gods. But. A lot is contained within a single god pattern. They shift, they change, they are interpreted differently in different places and times. Add secularism and you get The Avengers.
But there's an anchor, something sticky that makes the pattern persist. That is an archetype, the root of what makes a god a god. That's the recognizable bit that transmits universally because it's an essential part of the human experience.
So in essence, a god is a piece of human psychology, bundled up in a neat container, namable, transmittable. This is where it gets interesting for storytellers.
Since gods are bits of us, we can use bits of gods to shorthand communicate profound (okay, or sometimes funny) insights, emotions, and truths in our stories. Dare I say, mythopoetic truths.
It's important to remember that gods are mostly static. They don't really change, and people do. So if you want to build lively, incredible characters, ask which god/archetype they're embodying at that moment. When they change, what archetype are they inhabiting in the next?
Please trust me when I say that people are THRILLED when they recognize archetypal patterns in the structures and people of your storytelling, even if they don't realize it. That feeling is called resonance.
Resonance is the sweet spot between doing something novel and calling on the lexicon of the things we know and understand to do it. Mastering resonance is what I've built my career on. But it starts with my understanding of the gods.
I have a whole lot I can say about resonance, but that's for another thread at another time. If you'd like to meditate on it yourself, maybe just consider all of these renditions of the Birth of Venus 
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