Gods as Jobs

ImpishIdea is back online?? I need to investigate this further.

Presently, I’m reading the one book I found in the Hispanic Heritage Month display in the library’s YA section that wasn’t a romance. Still playing God of War; right now I have done basically everything except kill Sigrun, the Valkyrie Queen, though she has killed me! Let’s see if we can reverse that. And I’m almost done with season three of Mr. Robot.

Gods as Jobs

I think there's some confusion about how godhood works in mythologies, and I blame superheroes.

We tend to think of the heroes and gods of mythologies like superheroes; in fact, I’ve seen educational materials make that connection, and it’s easy to see why. If you want to explain to young people or newcomers the idea of powerful beings who nonetheless have human-like personalities, a superhero is a good analogy. And with modern understanding of genetics, people imagine that these characters inherit traits from their predecessors–so it’s not uncommon to see mythology stories written today where the children of the gods inherit their parents’ powers. Percy Jackson runs on this idea. If you are the god of the sea, it’s because you’re born with power over the waters, and your children likewise have those powers.

Except… that’s not really how mythology works.

Mind you, I don’t blame Rick Riordan for taking the Percy Jackson series in that direction; he’s explicitly writing for kids, and the whole idea of a superhero-like story involving Greek myths is the whole appeal. But that’s not generally how those stories work.

Heracles, for instance, does not have lightning powers. He’s incredibly strong. And yet his father, Zeus, while obviously a powerful deity, is not especially known for physical strength in the way that his son is. And it’s the same with Zeus’s other children–their powers and abilities are not drawn from a set of traits they inherited, they just… are. There are some exceptions in mythology, like how Helios is associated with light and the Sun, just like his father Hyperion, but for the most part it simply doesn’t work that way.

I remember someone (probably on TV Tropes) was commenting on the final battle in the movie Wonder Woman, saying something like, “Ha! Ares should have known better than to throw lightning at Diana, she’s the daughter of Zeus!” which, is, uh… not how that works, in mythology or in the movie. Ares is also a son of Zeus, for starters, and their wielding of lightning probably has nothing to do with that inheritance.

Speaking of lightning, anyhow, people seem to forget that a lot of the gods’ powers and abilities aren’t things they’re born with. Zeus doesn’t use lightning bolts because he was born with the ability to zap people; lightning is explicitly a weapon he was given in the war with the Titans. Other gods cannot use the lightning without his authority–and only Athena has been given that privilege.

On the same note, Poseidon isn’t god of the sea because he’s just an ocean-y kind of guy, he and his brothers drew lots for who got which realm, and their powers sprouted out of that–though I’ve seen retellings try to claim the gods as previously wanting those jobs before officially getting them anyway. The gods being ‘god of suchandsuch’ isn’t because they were born for that job, it’s because those are the jobs they were assigned or signed up for. Even then, it’s not like they only have one god per job, other than monarch roles–remember, there are two gods of war in the Olympian pantheon (Ares and Athena). More if you count minor deities like Enyo.

And the thing is, outside of the Greco-Roman tradition, gods’ positions aren’t so easily separated. A lot of older sources liked to say that of the two tribes of gods in Norse mythology, the Aesir are gods of war, and the Vanir are gods of nature. That’s not really accurate: it’s more that one is a set of gods of order and civilization, and the other is a group of gods of chaotic nature, but even then, most of the positions aren’t clear. We know Odin is king, yes, and Thor is his champion, associated with the weather, but other than that? Heimdall’s the guy who guards the gates, but what does that make him god of? Tyr is often pictured as a god of justice, but that’s from a throwaway line, and might be a pune based on him having one hand. 

The whole, ‘The Aesir are gods of war’ statement is built on the observation that so many of them appear to be warriors. That’s not really a great statement, though, because if you look at so many other mythologies, you notice that the gods fight in massive cosmic conflicts. The Olympians fight the Titans and Gigantes, the Tuatha de Dannan fight the Fomorians, and so on and so forth.

Which is why I find the way the God of War series handles the whole idea of gods, and how they work, so interesting. In God of War, being ‘god of’ something is explicitly a job. At the conclusion of the first game in the series, after Ares is killed, Kratos is given the throne of the God of War on Olympus. At the end of Ragnarok, Kratos is being offered the throne of the God of War in his new home, the northern region. The deity that is god of war isn’t born for that role, it’s a job that one inhabits.

Godhood isn’t a set of powers easily inherited, either. When Atreus finds out that he’s a demigod, Mimir points out that all gods tend to be different in their abilities, and when he does come into his own powers, they’re very different from his father’s. He is strong, but nowhere near as absurdly strong as Kratos. He does inherit his father’s ability to gain a power boost when enraged, but instead of manifesting as fiery rage, he shapeshifts into a vicious animal.

Now admittedly, across the board it’s not consistent; Magni and Modi appear to have inherited lightning powers from their father Thor, though then again he’s also explicitly raising them to take up his hammer one day.

It’s an interesting view of how to talk about mythological figures, and I think it’s a lot closer to the mythologies they’re adapting than the usual view of things that you see in most media. I’d also be very interested to see how they adapt other mythologies with this system, if they do expand to other mythologies (which the last two games implied that they might do).

Because for a lot of these deities, being god of something isn’t a thing they’re born for. It’s just a job.

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