Divine bureaucracy

TotallyHuman

It's good to be home.
Joined
Feb 13, 2019
Messages
4,003
Points
183
In many stories we have certain ideas of a divine bureaucracy: gods in charge of things so that the world(s) don't fall into chaos, reincarnation gods that ferry souls all over the place dutifully, even systems that make sure to send agents to scenarios and prevent some sorts of injustices.
All of those are somewhat similar to government workers who handle problems.
But... Our world's bureaucracies are fueled by taxes (in some way or another. Even when it comes to countries whose revenues are mostly from natural resources, technically those natural resources belong to the people of the nation hence it's also a kind of tax). We are never told about the taxpayers of the divine bureaucracies (and no, our souls or anything like that wouldn't count as taxes from us, since that would be considered natural resources), so who does pay the taxes?
I think this idea has much potential world-building-wise.
 

Mr.Grey-Cat

Well-known member
Joined
Jun 10, 2021
Messages
212
Points
103
well, it depends on the story, but your question is also probably not the right one.

I mean think about it. you have a god, and a human, and what? Do you think the human actually have something to pay ? no, no, I don't think they can, and so in a lot of stories, the gods don't really expect much from humans, at most they help from time to time to guard the peace, and leave, or they shepherd them from the very beginning intervening in everything, and in this case, they can't really take taxes from their own, no ?

though, if after all of what I said, you still don't get the point, then just try reading a novel with a god protagonist, and you will see.

in most of these novels where the mc is a god, humans can't really give him much, except some limited characters. especially when the mc is always either :

too strong: so he doesn't really need humans to give him shit, because they don't have something of value for him.

too lazy: why would he go out of his way and wait for them to give something ? he will just laze around, and ONLY when something necessary or of value appears will he act.

too good: the MC is just that type of person, so he help without really expecting anything in return, and doesn't really care if he is paid.

too busy: and so he doesn't really have time to waste on humans and their payment.

so now, take this action of the MC we do know about, and imagine those isekai gods, we know shit about, doing them. and Voila! it all makes sense why they don't get much taxes.
 

ArcadiaBlade

I'm a Lazy Writer, So What?
Joined
Dec 23, 2018
Messages
880
Points
133
For every prayer is equals to how divine a god is for example. Their taxes consist of them living, using their divine abilities and how much income they are earned.

Since living in the divine realm cost money, their currency is prayer and gods would pay money for rent solely on how much people worship them.

Using that as RL comparison, lower gods, middle class gods to even high gods are classed and they die mainly due to being non-existent.
 

Echimera

Well-known member
Joined
Jan 29, 2021
Messages
271
Points
103
I agree, worship would be the currency of the gods, both explicit by rituals and prayer and by actions related to the domains of the respective gods.

A god of war gets fueled by actions related to war, from training soldiers and warriors to actually fighting.
A god of creativity gets fueled by craftsmanship and artistry.
A god of the sea gets fueled by using ships, fishing, and swimming, but also by painting a nice picture of the ocean (splitting the gains with artistry over there). Probably also by all the animals living in the ocean, but to a lesser extent compared to intelligent beings.
 

TotallyHuman

It's good to be home.
Joined
Feb 13, 2019
Messages
4,003
Points
183
I mean... Worship = taxes doesn't really make sense, if you think about it. There are many many ways to have people worship something without doing anything and then you could just have Gods come to an agreement to terrorise humans into worship or raise them like cattle, so that would make for very distopian fantasy stories. Besides, worship as a currency or a resource feels kinda dubious. It can come in huge amounts with little effort and if it has a fixed value, then its too broken and would certainly have serious reorganisation to how the divine society would work, with the entirety of gods milking humans for all they can, turning worlds into hyper-efficient dystopia worship farms, or it would just be super inflationary. Like, ridiculous levels of inflation. Which would also suck, obviously and force gods to work hard to catch up with the inflation, again making humans into worship-delivery machines. Here worship is more of a resource that can be grown and harvested, so the obvious question is, why not take it? A super powerful being that can affect reality just by virtue of its identity on a large scale that can probably live virtually forever nor exploiting all possible gaps to exploit? Don't be kidding me.
What I was on about, was the idea of a huge divine otherworldly organisation like a pantheon where the gods are careful and work to maintain the world balance and do things like supply priests with magical powers and assign gods to properly reincarnate living things. That sounds a lot like how human governments also work, if you draw the right parallels. But that begs the question of how the whole thing would run, if you are going to have gods be human-like characters. Meaning, where do the incentives come from. Meaning, who supplies the taxes, how are things regulated, and why doing what the pantheon does is important.
Exploring these ideas could be fun in a story.
 

Jemini

Well-known member
Joined
Jan 27, 2019
Messages
1,897
Points
153
As just about everyone thus far has been saying, it is often depicted that the worship of mortals is the currency on which the divine beauracracy is run.

In fact, this is so commonly portrayed in both Japanese origin and English original web novels that I am kind of surprised the OP made their post as though they were unaware of this. I am half convinced the OP was intentionally leaving out this part just to make for a conversation starter.
 

SailusGebel

Well-known member
Joined
Mar 7, 2020
Messages
8,878
Points
233
I mean... Worship = taxes doesn't really make sense, if you think about it. There are many many ways to have people worship something without doing anything and then you could just have Gods come to an agreement to terrorise humans into worship or raise them like cattle, so that would make for very distopian fantasy stories. Besides, worship as a currency or a resource feels kinda dubious. It can come in huge amounts with little effort and if it has a fixed value, then its too broken and would certainly have serious reorganisation to how the divine society would work, with the entirety of gods milking humans for all they can, turning worlds into hyper-efficient dystopia worship farms, or it would just be super inflationary. Like, ridiculous levels of inflation. Which would also suck, obviously and force gods to work hard to catch up with the inflation, again making humans into worship-delivery machines. Here worship is more of a resource that can be grown and harvested, so the obvious question is, why not take it? A super powerful being that can affect reality just by virtue of its identity on a large scale that can probably live virtually forever nor exploiting all possible gaps to exploit? Don't be kidding me.
What I was on about, was the idea of a huge divine otherworldly organisation like a pantheon where the gods are careful and work to maintain the world balance and do things like supply priests with magical powers and assign gods to properly reincarnate living things. That sounds a lot like how human governments also work, if you draw the right parallels. But that begs the question of how the whole thing would run, if you are going to have gods be human-like characters. Meaning, where do the incentives come from. Meaning, who supplies the taxes, how are things regulated, and why doing what the pantheon does is important.
Exploring these ideas could be fun in a story.
Dude, it was explained in this very thread. Without being worshipped, god will cease to exist. Worship = acknowledging the existence of a god, thus making the said god real. And they don't need any currency as they can produce anything, after all, they are gods. That's also the reason why anything except for worship is useless. And that's why most of the gods don't bother themselves with humans.

As for the pantheon of gods running the world, well, it's the final arcs of almost every Xuanhuan novel. And guess what, all those gods from the pantheon were birthed from the one most godly god. And that godliest god of the gods doesn't need shit. And yeah, the novel death mage did what you described. And yeah, they don't need currency if I remember it correctly, but they need to be worshiped.
 
Joined
Feb 6, 2021
Messages
2,305
Points
153
I mean... Worship = taxes doesn't really make sense, if you think about it. There are many many ways to have people worship something without doing anything and then you could just have Gods come to an agreement to terrorise humans into worship or raise them like cattle, so that would make for very distopian fantasy stories. Besides, worship as a currency or a resource feels kinda dubious. It can come in huge amounts with little effort and if it has a fixed value, then its too broken and would certainly have serious reorganisation to how the divine society would work, with the entirety of gods milking humans for all they can, turning worlds into hyper-efficient dystopia worship farms, or it would just be super inflationary. Like, ridiculous levels of inflation. Which would also suck, obviously and force gods to work hard to catch up with the inflation, again making humans into worship-delivery machines. Here worship is more of a resource that can be grown and harvested, so the obvious question is, why not take it? A super powerful being that can affect reality just by virtue of its identity on a large scale that can probably live virtually forever nor exploiting all possible gaps to exploit? Don't be kidding me.
What I was on about, was the idea of a huge divine otherworldly organisation like a pantheon where the gods are careful and work to maintain the world balance and do things like supply priests with magical powers and assign gods to properly reincarnate living things. That sounds a lot like how human governments also work, if you draw the right parallels. But that begs the question of how the whole thing would run, if you are going to have gods be human-like characters. Meaning, where do the incentives come from. Meaning, who supplies the taxes, how are things regulated, and why doing what the pantheon does is important.
Exploring these ideas could be fun in a story.
I think worship is the answer; however, not individually. Induvial worship would work only if the gods were a handful, any lesser/new gods would perish.

Now if you take all of the worship and put in a box (let's call it a well), then you have something more concrete. The whole pantheon would be responsible for the well, and shares would be fairly given out. You could go anywhere from here, politics, power-struggles, unfavorable champions, anything really.
 

TotallyHuman

It's good to be home.
Joined
Feb 13, 2019
Messages
4,003
Points
183
As just about everyone thus far has been saying, it is often depicted that the worship of mortals is the currency on which the divine beauracracy is run.

In fact, this is so commonly portrayed in both Japanese origin and English original web novels that I am kind of surprised the OP made their post as though they were unaware of this. I am half convinced the OP was intentionally leaving out this part just to make for a conversation starter.
I am aware of that idea, and I did leave it out (only to then write a comment on why I think it makes no sense). I wanted to throw around ideas that 1) were different (because I think this could go a long way) and 2) made sense and maybe 3) were more interesting.
 

Jemini

Well-known member
Joined
Jan 27, 2019
Messages
1,897
Points
153
I am aware of that idea, and I did leave it out (only to then write a comment on why I think it makes no sense). I wanted to throw around ideas that 1) were different (because I think this could go a long way) and 2) made sense and maybe 3) were more interesting.

You're talking about this one, right? I skipped it before because of lack of proper spacing. Just went back to read it after your comment here.

I mean... Worship = taxes doesn't really make sense, if you think about it. There are many many ways to have people worship something without doing anything and then you could just have Gods come to an agreement to terrorise humans into worship or raise them like cattle, so that would make for very distopian fantasy stories. Besides, worship as a currency or a resource feels kinda dubious. It can come in huge amounts with little effort and if it has a fixed value, then its too broken and would certainly have serious reorganisation to how the divine society would work, with the entirety of gods milking humans for all they can, turning worlds into hyper-efficient dystopia worship farms, or it would just be super inflationary. Like, ridiculous levels of inflation. Which would also suck, obviously and force gods to work hard to catch up with the inflation, again making humans into worship-delivery machines. Here worship is more of a resource that can be grown and harvested, so the obvious question is, why not take it? A super powerful being that can affect reality just by virtue of its identity on a large scale that can probably live virtually forever nor exploiting all possible gaps to exploit? Don't be kidding me.
What I was on about, was the idea of a huge divine otherworldly organisation like a pantheon where the gods are careful and work to maintain the world balance and do things like supply priests with magical powers and assign gods to properly reincarnate living things. That sounds a lot like how human governments also work, if you draw the right parallels. But that begs the question of how the whole thing would run, if you are going to have gods be human-like characters. Meaning, where do the incentives come from. Meaning, who supplies the taxes, how are things regulated, and why doing what the pantheon does is important.
Exploring these ideas could be fun in a story.

I think you are discounting the concept of faith determinism. This is the name I am using for the concept where the beliefs of the people will affect the nature of the god in question. There is a different name for it among religious scholars. I have heard the proper term once, but I forgot what it was and no matter what key words I put into a search engine I can never get the proper name to come up. So, I will use "faith determinism" unless and until someone who knows the proper term comes along and provides it.

Anyway, by faith determinism, whatever people believe about a god will actually change the nature of a god. I actually incorporated this into a story I'm writing where when a nurturing god grew angry and started killing off the children of some of it's worshipers, the fear and hatred this generated actually injured the god due to the change in the nature of their faith.

Also, the issue you are talking about with the value of worship is easily solved. It is proportionate to the strength of the worshiper's faith and dedication to the god. This is the way almost everyone writes it when they apply this concept. Those who do not seem to consider this issue write it vague enough that it can be easily incorporated should it ever pop up, and the people who are not even using the faith = empowerment of the god concept are usually still writing in such a way that it would be very easy to just toss it in as an explanation for the manner in which the god values their worshipers.

You really do seem to be over-thinking this. Literally every complaint you have has been long since thought about and solved by the people who leverage this concept, and this concept really does answer all your questions.

It is true that this can be viewed as apologia, but it is apologia that fits to the standard behaviors of god figures neatly and seamlessly, making it the best kind of explanation. Anything else you can possibly come up with would be needlessly clunky and dissonant. It really wouldn't make any sense at all. As such, this is something of an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" situation.

If you are looking for more interesting ways to explore the concept, you might want to take a quick brush through my world bible at my avatar ascension system for the apotheosis process in my world. There actually is a lot of room to leverage out interesting concepts from the worship = divine empowerment model.

 

Echimera

Well-known member
Joined
Jan 29, 2021
Messages
271
Points
103
I mean... Worship = taxes doesn't really make sense, if you think about it. There are many many ways to have people worship something without doing anything and then you could just have Gods come to an agreement to terrorise humans into worship or raise them like cattle, so that would make for very distopian fantasy stories. Besides, worship as a currency or a resource feels kinda dubious. It can come in huge amounts with little effort and if it has a fixed value, then its too broken and would certainly have serious reorganisation to how the divine society would work, with the entirety of gods milking humans for all they can, turning worlds into hyper-efficient dystopia worship farms, or it would just be super inflationary. Like, ridiculous levels of inflation. Which would also suck, obviously and force gods to work hard to catch up with the inflation, again making humans into worship-delivery machines. Here worship is more of a resource that can be grown and harvested, so the obvious question is, why not take it? A super powerful being that can affect reality just by virtue of its identity on a large scale that can probably live virtually forever nor exploiting all possible gaps to exploit? Don't be kidding me.
What I was on about, was the idea of a huge divine otherworldly organisation like a pantheon where the gods are careful and work to maintain the world balance and do things like supply priests with magical powers and assign gods to properly reincarnate living things. That sounds a lot like how human governments also work, if you draw the right parallels. But that begs the question of how the whole thing would run, if you are going to have gods be human-like characters. Meaning, where do the incentives come from. Meaning, who supplies the taxes, how are things regulated, and why doing what the pantheon does is important.
Exploring these ideas could be fun in a story.
Taxes might not be the right word, yes. It's often more like sustenance, basically bypassing the act of exchanging some form of currency with food.
Also, worship might also be a bad term here, as it implies at least some form of awareness for the existence of the gods on the side of the mortals, which may not be the case. Maybe something like collective intelligence/psychic potential would be more accurate.

This could be collected individually, with each god having a domain and everything mortals do related to that domain generates worship for them. Depending on the domain (and to some extent the specifics of how this worship is generated), that in itself can give them an incentive to properly manage their domain, as they need mortals to live in a way that they interact with their domain, ideally in a positive way.
A god of the sea that makes fishing near impossible by causing too many storms will get less out of the people living at the shore than one that ensures stable periods of calm sea so the people can develop and use good ships.
A god of war may get a ton of worship out of full on extermination wars, but once one side of the conflict is gone, they'll have to live off the scraps coming from the infighting of the remaining faction or simply starve when both sides exterminate each other completely.

An alternate variant could see all worship generated by intelligent life in the setting collected in one big pool and the gods having a system to distribute it among themselves. One of the results of this could quite literally be the bureaucracy this topic started with.
 

Ddraig

<First Dragon of SHF> <Pokemon Goddess of NuF>
Joined
Dec 23, 2018
Messages
558
Points
133
Worship = acknowledging the existence of a god
Not necessarily, I think most of us are do know a bit out the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Meso-American and Norse deities even if none of them are worshipped today.
 

SailusGebel

Well-known member
Joined
Mar 7, 2020
Messages
8,878
Points
233
Not necessarily, I think most of us are do know a bit out the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Meso-American and Norse deities even if none of them are worshipped today.
I meant this in the context of what we are talking about. I've tried to explain what I mean by using the word "worship" in this particular thread. Gods probably don't exist in our world after all. Of course, the only exception is the god of r-18 novels, Cupcake. When we talk about gods in novels, the act of worshipping them shouldn't necessarily be an offering or a sacrifice. In novels gods exist, why? Usually, because mortals acknowledge their existence. How to strengthen this acknowledgment? To make mortals spread the teachings of a particular god. How to make this? Well, for example, by making a sermon, or doing a prayer. What will happen if all the mortals suddenly die out? The god they were worshipping will cease to exist as well. Something along these lines.
 

Chaos_Sinner777

Imprisoned Soul Seeking Isekai
Joined
Dec 25, 2019
Messages
377
Points
103
I thought of a Dungeon system the other day that works great for this! Creatures with souls naturally generate mana. The mana they expend goes out into the world to become "Natural Mana", or overflows from them if they don't use it. Dungeons absorb mana directly from creatures with souls under certain circumstances, I.E. if they spend time in the dungeon's area of influence, or die there. Dungeons also absorb natural mana. All pretty basic, so far. But for the interesting stuff. Dungeons don't actually create monsters, they offer mana to Divine Beings in order to summon monsters from the Gods private realms. Dungeons would have specific mana types, restricting them to gods who can use the type of mana the dungeon uses. Mostly elemental mana, which could be compatible with a wide range of domains. For instance a Light dungeon could summon monsters from the respective domains of the Goddess of Light, the God of Magic, or the God of Life. And so on. There'd presumably be a lot of options. Anyway, in this case Divine Energy is just a super advanced form of mana. So the people generate mana in all sorts of elements, non-elemental attributes, or other forms, dungeons process it into a few broadly useful types, then send it to the gods to fuel their divine power. And isekai is useful because isekai'd people have weird powerful magic attributes, or special abilities that use mana but work on some different logic from the local magic, and have a natural inclination to become VERY powerful, so they end up putting off a lot of mana. Kinda, not exactly taxes though? More like the government producing a special resource that only they can provide and selling it to the farmers? Guess you could squeeze some middlemen in there somehow to collect taxes. Maybe the chief deity is compatible with all mana types and takes a little slice of the pie anytime a dungeon summons a new monster.
 
D

Deleted member 45782

Guest
Well growing up hearing traditional Chinese folk/taoist religion, it sounded pretty much like a bureaucracy. There was a Jade Emperor, there were generals (from heroic deeds or someone famous, ain't just cultivation), the kitchen God that reports back how mortals behave (give some sweets so his mouth is stuck and can't report back to Jade Emperor how you were doing this year), and every piece of land like county, house? had some land god/deity in charge of that place. Or something like that.

Not talking about how nowadays it's twisted where you can go up and down to heaven and hell just for the act of love and simply just cultivating. And the only thing you get is pretty much punishment by a divine love triangle.

Traditional beliefs grew up hearing in, love was forbidden in heaven. If they caught you, they send you down to human world for centuries of punishment. Or some sort. Or like, Erlang Shen's mom, since some myths he was half mortal. His mom was punished for falling in love with a human. And the weaver girl and cowboy...got split on different sides of milky way. Yeah they weren't that much into love then.

... interesting how I just found another god by mistyping and came across Tu'er Shen. Wtf almost opposite in character of other dude. Ah learned something new today ..

Anyhow with so many deities and stuff and it mirroring how the mortal system worked (emperor monarch king govt back then since the religion is old and from people during that time mirror it from their own sort of thing too), it felt like so many deities and levels, so many deities and which to pray for what, sorta felt bureaucracy as in layers and layers of some organization system (and you go to this dept for this and another for that etc etc ).


I thought godchecker was nice as some source for myths, but scrolling thru some ..take it with a grain of salt. It may have lot of list but was never really place for serious research into myths.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Ai-chan

Queen of Yuri Devourer of Traps
Joined
Dec 23, 2018
Messages
1,413
Points
153
I mean... Worship = taxes doesn't really make sense, if you think about it. There are many many ways to have people worship something without doing anything and then you could just have Gods come to an agreement to terrorise humans into worship or raise them like cattle, so that would make for very distopian fantasy stories. Besides, worship as a currency or a resource feels kinda dubious. It can come in huge amounts with little effort and if it has a fixed value, then its too broken and would certainly have serious reorganisation to how the divine society would work, with the entirety of gods milking humans for all they can, turning worlds into hyper-efficient dystopia worship farms, or it would just be super inflationary. Like, ridiculous levels of inflation. Which would also suck, obviously and force gods to work hard to catch up with the inflation, again making humans into worship-delivery machines. Here worship is more of a resource that can be grown and harvested, so the obvious question is, why not take it? A super powerful being that can affect reality just by virtue of its identity on a large scale that can probably live virtually forever nor exploiting all possible gaps to exploit? Don't be kidding me.
What I was on about, was the idea of a huge divine otherworldly organisation like a pantheon where the gods are careful and work to maintain the world balance and do things like supply priests with magical powers and assign gods to properly reincarnate living things. That sounds a lot like how human governments also work, if you draw the right parallels. But that begs the question of how the whole thing would run, if you are going to have gods be human-like characters. Meaning, where do the incentives come from. Meaning, who supplies the taxes, how are things regulated, and why doing what the pantheon does is important.
Exploring these ideas could be fun in a story.
That's actually part of Japanese mythological lores. The kami (translated as gods) are nature spirits that have no shape or form, but comes into being and provide benefits if they're worshipped. Once they stop being worshipped and their names forgotten, they cease being gods and disappear. Therefore, in some stories, these kami practically trolls for worship, such as causing drought or infertility of they're not worshipped because they didn't want to disappear. Supposedly, the Shinto Head Office at Yoyogi, Shibuya, Tokyo catalogued the names of all these minor kami, even ones who supposedly already died.

In the story of Fatal Frame 2 for example, there is a kami of a deep pit that a village worships through sacrifice of a pair of twins every few years. Through the sacrifice, the kami is pleased and provided minor benefits to the village. It's a completely malicious kami though, and the villagers were pretty much forced to worship it or the kami would bring them untold suffering. As the story went, the last twin girls who were supposed to be sacrificed botched the sacrifice ceremony and that caused the kami to lash out, killing everyone in the village and forcing them to haunt and be tormented in the village after death.
 
Top