Beyond Deification

What Salvation Means

“God” does a lot of heavy lifting in English, translating a large number of terms from Mediterranean, Southwest, Central, East, and Southeast Asian, African, Oceanic, and North and South American cultures for deity. Every culture constructs deity differently, of course, and deities play different roles in the cultic and mythological imagination of most religious traditions, such that while there are parallels, analogues, and points of convergence disclosed by careful comparison, the spiritual multiverse of human religiosity is irreducibly pluralistic. Numina, daimonia, theoi, elohim, ahuras, devas, shen—this diverse range of nomenclature frequently encompasses many shared qualities, like immortality, unbelievably long-life, or general resilience to death (even when gods undergo cultic or mythic death as a fundamental feature of their theography), power (usually with certain limits) over nature, cosmic rank and authority in some (suspiciously) anthropomorphic government system (even when the deities themselves are theriomorphic), and (usually) superior beauty, often quantified in radiance (especially celestial phosphorescence), to that of humans (but not always: there are plenty of ugly gods). And, further complicating matters, plenty of these qualities are shared with beings not otherwise cognitively registered as deities by their respective cultures, including nature spirits, ancestors, powerful magic users, sapient animals, abstract concepts, and monsters. In point of fact, the main difference between gods and monsters is that, most of the time at least, gods theoretically use their mighty life-force and supreme power to construct a cosmos in which lesser beings, especially humans, can thrive (in subjection to heaven’s government, of course), while monsters, theoretically, use their hideous strength to brutalize the well-ordered world, the cosmos, in an effort to reduce it to chaos. Again, I say most of the time: several developed systems end up retconning the monsters of older myths as divine pets, servants, and subordinates, and in some myths it is gods who are the troublemakers in the universe and the less personal, less human, more Titanic entities that are the ones deserving of ultimate reverence.