so about the nature of deities (maybe spoilers)

[apolloooo]

could they be used to be an ordinary kith soul, had an awakening, but does not go crazy, even after that, they somehow retains all memories, knowledge and experience. those means quality soul, quality soul = magic strength, and they gain powers so immense after thousands of lifetime retaining memories and do not go crazy.

 

it's like they reache level 10 in first life, and born as level 10 baby, as they live, they get to level 20 then start as levle 20 baby again, repeat till gain godly powers.

 

this transpired from a book about abydon i think and durance's explanation how abydon used to be mortal, but skillful animancer and bound his soul to an automaton. durance consider him lesser god if a god at all, but what if most if not all deities are like this

[Peanuckle]

From what I saw (mostly from the last snips of Thao's soul at the endgame where he's activating the device and soul-draining all those people), the gods are conglomerations of millions of souls mushed together into one being. The fact that Woedica's grand scheme involves eating more soul-juice is supporting evidence, I think.

 

All the written books and lore is suspect, since Thaos' goal is to spread misinformation to create faiths around manmade gods.

[manageri]

From what I gathered, it seems the Engwithans used their mysterious devices to transform themselves into the gods like Peanuckle said, as we see in a vision near the end of the game, when Thaos activates the device to meld thousands of souls into one. Thaos himself stayed behind to forever hide the truth. This would explain the Engwithans' sudden disappearance from Eir Glanfath. It would follow that the reason they instructed the Glanfathans never to allow entry into their ruins is also a part of hiding the truth about the gods; Since the Engwithans apparently somehow discovered that there are no "true" gods, perhaps something within their ruins could lead others to the same conclusion, or at least to the discovery of the true, false nature of the current gods.

 

If their mastery over soul manipulation was a large part of how the Engwithans discovered there are no gods, it makes sense that Thaos tries to halt the contemporary study of animancy. Since Thaos is attempting to use the device around the giant adra pillar in Sun in Shadow to empower Woedica (and ONLY Woedica), perhaps the other gods were created and reside elsewhere, originating from other tribes (or somesuch congregations) of Engwithans.

[Grand_Commander13]

That makes sense, but weren't the missionaries that Iovara had to deal with in one of your past lives Engwithan? It's possible that they were not truly Engwithan, but I'd think that people would notice a civilization completely disappearing overnight and not be fooled when people claimed to be from that civilization.

 

Also, if ~50,000 souls are strong enough to allow Woedica to stand against all of the other gods, I doubt we're talking many more than a million souls used to make a dozen gods. It's possible that there were only a million Engwithans, but... They managed to reach some dizzying heights.

Edited April 2, 2015 by Grand_Commander13

[Vadász]

Many fantasy settings have gods that  "New gods" that appeared when the creator gods left, others have only one true god like Ao in forgotten realms and all other gods are usually lesser gods were once simple mortals die if mortals stop worshiping them. Gods in PoE are not that different.

 

But to explain the nature of a true god, specially in religions that belive in reincarnation i ave to explain first the nature of the soul, spirit and body trinity (Which is not unlike the christian trinity). Some religions argue that living beings have soul and spirit, the spirit resides in a realm of energy or light the body in the terrenal and the soul serves as a nexus between both. After a person dies the soul ascends the spirit learns everything the soul learned in this life and is sent to the terrenal again to inhabit a new body, yet the soul sometimes keeps fractions of knowledge from past lives and then why some may remember them. Spirits that learn enough may eventually become "gods" themselves, the problem is that most soul get "degraded" when they inhabit a body since some situations get imprinted so hard that cannot be erased by the spirits, the more advanced the life form it inhabits the more likely for that to happen. Some souls actually get degraded so badly that they cannot leave this realm and they become ghosts that cannot find it's way to the spirit.

 

Putting those these things together we can assume there are true gods that are powerful omnipotent beings that have strong spirits that underwent the path eons ago probably in another world. Those gods may want to create new spirits and a place for them to live and learn before moving on when they are satisfied with their creations. But there is another kind of god, the lesser god, they could have been created by the true god himself, or maybe they are just mortals that held great power and managed to achieve transcendence though magic or other means, and yet this lesser gods are more important for the mortal men than all the true gods together because they are the ones that listen to their prayers and can influence their daily lives. Some even know this truth and still worship them either because they don't want to cross a being that powerful or maybe because they don't care because to them they are real enough.

 

To sum it up, PoE gods are as real as they get, even if they were engineered by Engwithans. You can tell how real they are because some of your party members still end up worshiping their gods even after learning the truth, for them the truth changed absolutely nothing.

[Peanuckle]

To sum it up, PoE gods are as real as they get, even if they were engineered by Engwithans. You can tell how real they are because some of your party members still end up worshiping their gods even after learning the truth, for them the truth changed absolutely nothing.

The rest of your post was a bit of a ramble, but I agree with this. Does it really matter if the gods were made from the willing sacrifices of the Engwithan people? They exist and have the sort of power a being would need in order to claim divinity. They desire and reward worship, and manipulate the world according to their own plans. Sound like gods to me, though they're kinda dickish.

 

The real conflict in the game was Thaos harvesting the souls of children to empower Woedica. Maintaining the secret, I think, was unnecessary. There's plenty of real-life religions that involve gods who were created just as mortals were, and they're still worshiped. I think it would've been a better plan to tell everyone that the gods were made to answer the needs of humanity. People would've turned to them all the same.

[Vadász]

The rest of your post was a bit of a ramble.

 

I had no choice but to take Theology as a minor in college, i need to use that knowledge from time to time to justify all those wasted hours.