I have this mental fanfiction that every god has a way to be killed, and when you kill them you can get things from them.

For instance, the one that I refer to the most often is Ben Franklin using a kite and a key to slay Zeus and to steal electricity from him.

And then of course there’s Prometheus who intentionally and willfully laid down his own life so that humanity could have fire.

But there are more gods than there are words to describe them.

What other gods have we claimed existed, that we humans have likely slain, and what do you think we got from them?

  • invertedspear@lemmy.zip
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    52 minutes ago

    Terry Pratchet wrote in Good Omens that the apocalypse horsemen Pestilence was slain by the advent of penicillin.

    From my own head:

    Mercury was killed to bring about the Internet.

    Athena was not killed, but severely weakened to domesticate the herd animals.

    We sacrificed Fenris for lap dogs.

    I love this thread and will be working some of this into my next RPG storyline.

  • Match!!@pawb.social
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    2 hours ago

    There’s a myth that when the Spanish arrived in the Philippines, the precolonial supreme god Bathala went into hiding with the help of the Goddess of Lost Things, and has seemingly stayed lost

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 hours ago

    The first microscope was, in fact, Asclepius’s stolen staff. That lead to germ theory.

    In the early 20th century, we finally mined deep enough to collapse the underworld on Hades and found Uranium.

    A DARPA radio transmitter fried Hermes in flight and brought us the internet.

    One of the V2 rockets landed on Selene, who was visiting Earth, and opened up the way to travel to the moon.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.social
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    9 hours ago

    Until Dionysus died, we only had super strong wine that was only tasty if sweetened with lead.

    After killing him, we were awarded with moonshine, whiskey, and vodka. But it also unleashed all the STDs known to man, straight out of Pandora’s disease-ridden box.

  • Komodo Rodeo@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    I have this mental fanfiction that every god has a way to be killed, and when you kill them you can get things from them.

    I’ll encourage you to investigate the AD&D-D&D 5th Ed. material concerning the Forgotten Realm setting’s Gods, all the way up to Ao. Murdering them imbues their killer with their ‘portfolio’, specific deity controlled influence over Harvest, War, Music, Healing, etc. See also, the entire plot concerning ‘The Time of Troubles’ most notably seen in Baldur’s Gate (1998).

    • NaibofTabr@infosec.pub
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      10 hours ago

      an incredibly detailed understanding of ocean currents.

      So that we can watch them fall apart.

    • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
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      10 hours ago

      incredibly detailed understanding of ocean currents.

      Wikipedia is no help in explaining this, could you expand on this a little?

      • Look, this is a tangent but who the hell would downvote a sincere question? Who believes that asking for details is neither worth doing, nor fulfilling in a community called asklemmy? Your finger had better have slipped, because you’ve made an enemy for life, anonymous stranger.

        • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
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          9 hours ago

          I have a downvote follower, pay no attention to that. Sometimes it gets really bad, which makes me laugh because they have to do a lot of work to do that. I’m not sure who they think they’re hurting by having to possibly log out and log in with numerous alts. It’s a slow downvoting. Occasionally people really are downvoting me, which is fine too. The points really don’t matter.

          • Oh thank god, it’s just singular fixation, not aspirational deadening of curiosity. I thought it might have been the mention of Wikipedia, which also tends to draw downvotes. I’m sorry you have to deal with that

            • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
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              9 hours ago

              I’m sorry you have to deal with that

              Thanks, but it really is no big deal. I’m in a lot of the politics spaces, so it’s expected there.

              I will say to anyone reading this, to upvote comments as much as you think you can. Some new people really do care about upvotes and downvotes. It’s a better vibe too if the authentic people are getting upvoted.

      • Trawlers really took off like 200 years ago, contemporaneous to the Industrial Revolution which also saw human scientific advancement exploding. It’s just a coincidence that I’m joking about

  • Chainweasel@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    I like the Discworld approach, as people stop truly believing in a god they will weaken until they fade away.
    This could be either just not believing, or believing more in the system than the God itself.
    Small gods is a good read and introduces the concept well.

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
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      7 hours ago

      Douglas Adams takes this in a different direction in one of the Dirk Gently books, namely, all gods continue to exist in a dimension beyond ours and live according to how many people currently remember them.

      Over there, gods are basically just people. Forgotten gods live in shacks and hovels in out of the way places. The Abrahamic god isn’t actually mentioned much that I remember. Probably because he’s off living in a palace somewhere, and his former pantheon mates, along with his wife, are doubtless relegated to squalid conditions nearby.

      Ironically, it’s been a while since I read that book so I may have misremembered some of the details, but there’s a weird mind-bending concept that if we think of misremembered details as a god then my recollection is at least partially, and paradoxically accurate.

  • Skua@kbin.earth
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    8 hours ago

    The old Mesopotamian gods were each patrons of a city, and their importance waxed and waned with the strength of that city. Babylon was, for centuries, the single largest city on all Earth. It was the pinnacle of human society’s work, the centre of learning and culture nearly unparalled by all it surveyed. With this strength, so too did Marduk supplant Enlil and become known as the foremost amongst the Annunaki.

    Marduk was said to be a temperamental god, quick to anger but willing to forgive. When King Sennacherib brought the might of the Assyrian empire down upon Babylon and pillaged the city, the wrath of Marduk soon found him: his son Arda-Mulissu murdered him. Sennacherib had not, however, acted out of simple hate or bloodlust; he was avenging another son of his. Marduk therefore did not curse all of Assyria nor all of Sennacherib’s plans, as Sennacherib’s chosen heir Esarhaddon - Arda-Mulissu’s younger brother - prevailed in the conflict for the throne. Esarhaddon arranged for enormous restoration works to Babylon and its neighbours, an effort to make right the destruction wrought by his father, and even returned the stolen statue of Marduk. His reign would go on to be incredibly successful, and he even ensured a peaceful succession of his sons to both Assyria and Babylon despite the tumultuous nature of his accession. Marduk’s wrath was great, but so was his capacity for mercy.

    The end would come at the hands of an outsider. Babylon declined, but did not die, as Persia rose to dominance. Marduk remained respected and his rituals were observed, but the new imperial masters took their toll. Marduk was not dead, but he and his city were now shells of their former selves. It is perhaps ironic, then, then Marduk would share his fate with that empire. A conqueror from a backwater across the narrow strait to the west arrived, a young man by the name of Alexander whose armies fought with the all the might of Marduk himself when he struck down Tiamat. Alexander’s march took him from Greece to Persia to the distant banks of the Indus, stopped at last only by the revolt of his own soldiers.

    It wasn’t long before Marduk’s wrath found Alexander. The young conqueror was warned by Marduk’s people that for him to march west, into the setting sun, would be the death of him. Even now, Marduk offered advice to his foe. They were right, and Alexander lay dead in Babylon at only 32 years old.

    At last, though, Marduk could not forgive. His people had been crushed; his prophecy had been ignored; there was no heir of Alexander to heal the wounds. It was at this moment, stripped of his mercy and left only with wrath, that Marduk was no longer Marduk, and so he too died.

    Babylon survived Marduk, but it would never again be the colossus that it once was. It would fade over time, its bricks stripped away to build new cities, until it was forgotten.

    Marduk’s death left us all a legacy that matched his temperament. Soon, humans identified and began to produce potassium nitrate, or nitre. This remarkable mineral is both life-bringing and life-ending, as it is a foundational component of fertilisers and gunpowder. Thus, even with his death, Marduk brought both wrath and mercy.


    To be less flowery for a moment:

    • The thing about patron gods is, in broad terms, thought to be true about the Mesopotamian gods. Marduk was basically a nobody until Babylon’s rise to prominence, after which he replaced other gods in extremely important mythical roles due to Babylon’s influence
    • The stuff about Sennacherib destroying Babylon, his son murdering him, his two sons fighting over he throne, and the winning younger son rebuilding Babylon all happened. Babylonians at the time are said to have considered Sennacherib’s fate a form of divine retribution
    • There is some dispute over the character of Marduk, but we know of prayers praising both his fury and his mercy so I’m going with it
    • The earliest mention of nitre that I know of is from 3rd century CE India, but the work in question really was (coincidentally) started roughly when Alexander the Great died. The finished work is a compilation of many other texts, and I do not know if the one mentioning nitre is one of the early ones
  • Maiq@lemy.lol
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    7 hours ago

    God is dead. Of his pity for man hath god died. So be thee warned against pity. From where thence there yet cometh unto men a heavy cloud. Verily i understand the weather signs.

    But attend also to this word. All great love is above all its pity. For it seeketh to create what is loved.

    Myself do I offer unto my love and my neighbor as myself. Such is the language of all creators.

    All creators however are hard. Thus spoke Zarathustra.

  • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    Here’s one for ya: Hermes killed Thoth and got the knowledge of alchemy from him, resulting in the syncretic creation of Hermes Trismegistus and the hermetic tradition. Then later we killed Hermes and got the scientific method.

  • Canconda@lemmy.ca
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    10 hours ago

    Ben Franklin using a kite and a key to slay Zeus and to steal electricity from him.

    Well you better hope Michael Faraday didn’t get any bonuses from St. Peter or else we’ll be guessing what super powers he’ll get from you!

    • bizarroland@lemmy.worldOP
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      37 minutes ago

      On the one hand, it kind of makes me feel like Nikola Tesla was just a god in human form doing cool, fun stuff and then fucking Edison, the “Wizard of Menlo Park” showed up and he probably killed, you know, dozens of Native American gods that we don’t really even have the names for anymore to create the moving picture and the phonograph.

      I also bet the punishment for killing a god is something so unbelievably onerous that it would shrivel your soul to know the truth of it.

      Like I bet Edison right now is screaming an eternal agony, ripped away from the cycle of reincarnation, and being subjected to immortal punishment.

  • BreathlessPuppy@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    10 hours ago

    The abrahamic god was turned on by its angels. Its only refuge was in the underworld, ruled by their banished son, Morning Star.

    The underworld denizens, heartbroken at being abandoned and forgotten in their time of need and their prayers unanswered, began to overwhelm and consume the being that once believed it was all-powerful and the one true ‘God’.

  • Cosmoooooooo@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    All religion is fan-fiction. The only problem is that once you make it, followers take it far too seriously and start killing and hurting innocent people over it.

    Fictional gods don’t die. Nobody reads their book anymore. Same as any other fictional character. They’re just replaced by something new, that is just a remake of something old.

    • bizarroland@lemmy.worldOP
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      43 minutes ago

      I mean, I’m glad that there are pockets in the world where people feel confident in saying that nobody studies religion anymore because representation is important, but saying “nobody reads their book anymore” casually overlooks like six plus billion people who do actually participate in a religion of some type.

      Like, I get what you’re saying, but more people are religious to some degree than are not.

      By a huge margin.

      I checked the World Population Review website for the least religious countries, and it seems like there’s approximately 1.2 to 1.4 billion officially non-religious people in the world as of 2020, And three-quarters of a billion of them are in China.

      So if we were all placed onto a massive chessboard and forced to battle it out life for death style, the atheists are gonna be out numbered approximately 6 to 1.

      I said all of that not to disparage your atheism, but rather to say that it’s okay to have mental exercises in fiction about religion and religious adjacent topics like this, if for no other reason than to enjoy our imagination and to have conversations with each other.

  • toiletobserver@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    Artemis: Goddess of the hunt, wilderness, wild animals, the Moon, and archery. We got the ability to hunt and have had massive extinctions ever since.