On the gods

On the gods

Cultures across every kingdom we have walked agree on this much: there are gods. They differ enormously on what gods, how many, what those gods do, whose worship is correct, and whether one may be trusted to answer when called upon. We have spent decades comparing the accounts. We will offer here what we have observed, and hold to no theory we cannot ground in observation.

The gods do not walk. We have not, in our correspondence, recorded a verified case of a god directly appearing to mortals — eating with them, fighting them, sitting at a council — in any era since before the time the mountain-folk call the Falling and the sea-cultures call the Drowning and the theologians call the Sleep. The myths of the prior age describe gods who walked. The myths of the present describe gods who answer — sometimes, partially, through ritual, through omen, through the slow shifting of fortunes across a generation. The relationship changed at some point in that long-ago time. We have not been able to determine more than that it changed.

When a god acts visibly, the god acts through a vessel. This much our correspondence has confirmed: in the rare events where mortals can see a god intervene in immediate affairs, the god acts through a chosen mortal — usually a priest of the cult, usually one who has spent decades in service — whose body the god briefly inhabits through a rite the cult performs. The vessel speaks words the vessel did not intend, gives judgements no one in the room can dispute, and is afterwards burned, blinded, or mute, depending on how long the god was held. We have collected nineteen such accounts across the work of this correspondence. We believe them real. The cults that produce them are small, ancient, and unanimously resented by their neighbours.

On the diversity of the gods. Across the kingdoms our letters reach, we have collected more god-names than any scholar in any single tradition recognises. Some are unique to one register’s practice; others, we have come to believe, are the same god under several names, with priests in each tradition denying the others’ kinship. Augurs working at the highest discipline will sometimes report that two named gods are, by their sight, the same. The priests do not accept this. The augurs continue to say it. We have not earned a synthesis, and we will not pretend one.

A fragmentary report we have not been able to verify. Across the last two generations of our letters, we have heard — from cults of several registers, in kingdoms that do not normally agree on anything — that some prayers their elders had thought were going unanswered are, in this generation, beginning, in fragments, to receive something — half-formed, ambiguous, but not nothing. The cults that have noticed this have become unusually active. Cults whose gods are well-established and known to answer have, in places we will not name, moved against these newer-attentive cults.

What this means we do not know. We write the report; we offer no explanation. We are listening.