I cop-out on this. I play the gods so that no mortal on-the-ground can tell for sure if the gods are aware entities or not. They just don't intervene in any way which would be a for-sure giveaway. It's easy. That way I don't need to know (or decide) either way. No mortal can force a god to show its hand. Maybe it's because there isn't a hand at all, maybe not.
There are certainly very complex magical phenomena out there. Whether you call them gods or not is a matter of faith.
> If the
> gods are supposedly totally formed of their worshippers then I have severe
> difficulty. Apart from gods with no worshippers (like the barley head in
> Snake Pipe Hollow),
no worshippers = not god [he says, defining his terms as he goes along...] Might be a big spirit, or a hero, or a force of nature; but not god. Gods arise from the re-enactment of rituals and telling of tales about said big-spirit/hero/force-of-nature. The cult defines the god.
> the gods are supposed to have pre-existed their
> worshippers. So if they now consist totally of their worshippers (even with
> a sum is greater than the sum of its parts line) there must have been a
> distinct change somewhere.
There are no objective facts. All we know of the gods is what the worshippers tell us. The Compromise might have been retrospectively invented to explain why the gods don't act as they "used to" (when in fact they never acted like that at all, ever).
What's wrong with saying that Godtime is just prehistory (or at least, "longenough ago that we're not sure what order events happened in"). And the godmyths are poorly remembered accounts of events which are not fully understood; re-told with lashings of artistic licence?
If this generates the magic then what's the difference?
___
CW.
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