Something I’ve wondered for a long time is whether there is actually a God in FL. There’s certainly a Hell with devils and the church seems to believe in God. But no one ever talks about the prospect of Heaven or God. Even with death all anyone does is go on about the Garden. So does anyone actually believe there is a God in the FL universe?
This is mainly speculation so if there’s some late game content which tells you about this, please be liberal with the spoiler tags.
I suppose there MAY be one, but not in the sense we expect. How would you define ‘god’? The one who created the world?[li]
If the stars are a host of great power, maybe we just discovered a God worth about twenty-one billion of them. But seriously, even if they are part of a heavenly hierarchy, the situation is more Ammit and Anubis than Gabriel and Yahweh.
I guess by God I mean the one the church believes in. The presence of Hell seems to suggest the church got one thing right so why not God as well?
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Who says that god must exist? It may be possible though ‘god’ could be an alien in this game, as far as I know… after all, who expected the devils to wear fedoras and actually have embassies?[li]
If there’s a god then it’s probably an uber-strong Judgement that probably has the power and sanity of Azathoth. If the Sun is an average "angel" since it’s a normal main sequence star then ‘god’ is Sagittarius A*, the purported supermassive black hole hiding in the center of our galaxy.
My delicious friends, welcome to Fallen London. Behold! This Is Your God Now!!
All Hail RNG!
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edited by Charlotte_de_Witte on 2/18/2016
There is but one god, and their name is RNG.
In all seriousness, anything pertaining to religion and a god to answer your question would be a pretty massive spoiler, so I’ll just list what I know in a spoiler tag below. Short answer, though, is…maybe? You’re partially right, but there are things even we have yet to fully understand.
[spoiler]Enigmatic answers aside, there are "gods" of a sort rather than just one single god (at least to our knowledge). The stars, also known as Judgements, control the universe with their light that acts as the "universal law" for how reality should behave and everything that is not of their making or control is considered empty space, nothingness, and Is-Not. We’re not entirely sure if there’s a head Judgement; all we know for sure is that they have a Great Chain for all life that is more or less a caste system for every being in the universe and they are at the top of their own list (divine racism, that’s a new one). They even feast off the souls of humans, which are sort of like tiny star sparks inside a person almost like a living story, to digest their stories and emotions from life. The actual person, though, ends up on the Boatman’s (aka Death) boat on the silent river, hinted at to be the equivalent of the river Styx. We aren’t sure what exactly is beyond the river and on the shore beyond the waters where the dead may lay, since the main character is too terrified and confused to discern what they’re looking at when they take a peak beyond the veil.
Still, Christianity is the dominant religion in London and the church’s beliefs are hinted to be based off of the lore of Fallen London. That becomes apparent when you learn that the Mountain of Light’s garden mirrors The Garden of Eden and that some speculate that humanity may (heavy emphasis on may, since I’m not up-to-date with this info) have originated there and were possibly cast out long ago and we as a species just don’t remember it. To add to that, there is some symbolism in the Bazaar’s falling from grace (possibly a Lucifarian figure?) as it ran from the Judgements to hide its message underneath the earth in the Neath, related to Hell in that it is celebrated as a place of darkness, lawlessness, absence from the light of god, and want (which, if you know anything about the story, you’ll know that a lot of people have a want or desire in them). Hell, meanwhile, either took on the form of what the Church believed to be demons simply to mess with people as troublesome tricksters, or (more likely in my opinion) the Church’s idea of devils and souls happen to be based on what existed below the Surface in the Neath. Keep in mind that most if not all of this information is not well known amongst London’s populous and are mainly known by powerful individuals, educated citizens, delvers into strange and mystical occurrence, and the players themselves.[/spoiler]
edited by Sir Joseph Marlen on 2/18/2016
I think most regular folks in London are still christian. So from their point of view there is one.
Aye, and his name is Alexis.
– Mal
This might be toeing a line as I’ve seen a great deal of the non-fate locked portion of FL but hadn’t run across this: but I’ve seen a result text relating to someone who “begins to pray - in the manner of the old church, not the new.” And another I can’t find now relating to the fact the Church is not what it was.
I believe that might all be due to he fact that the Church has received much editing since London fell below to the Neath. God’s Editors are a group who take it upon themselves to attribute the new knowledge and lifestyle of the Neath to better fit to the Bible. After all, certain religious views become challenged or more muddied when Hell lives next door, death is just a temporary inconvenience, and squid-men roam the streets. This has come to the point that it borders on complete reformation of Christian values and beliefs; for instance, many saints have had their names changed and a saint named Saint Meliflua is considered the christian saint of anarchists and devils. So yeah, things have changed quite a bit.
[quote=Sir Joseph Marlen]
I believe that might all be due to he fact that the Church has received much editing since London fell below to the Neath. God’s Editors are a group who take it upon themselves to attribute the new knowledge and lifestyle of the Neath to better fit to the Bible. After all, certain religious views become challenged or more muddied when Hell lives next door, death is just a temporary inconvenience, and squid-men roam the streets. This has come to the point that it borders on complete reformation of Christian values and beliefs; for instance, many saints have had their names changed and a saint named Saint Meliflua is considered the christian saint of anarchists and devils. So yeah, things have changed quite a bit.[/quote]
I’m note sure that I know the proper etiquette regarding spoilers here, as I have not posted here… ever, so I hope that if I cross the line, that it may be forgiven.
From all that I’ve read in Fallen London, it seems that revising the bible is one of the smarter things that the church has done after the fall.
On the topic of gods, and the things that are so close to be indistinguishable from them.
[ul][li]The Lady in Lilac serves some power. I suspect the Nadir is the one she serves.[/li]
[li]There’s also the Bazaar, which is godlike in its own special way.[/li]
[li]This leaves the Judgements, whatever you may or may not be conversing with when you drink the moonish water "The creators of the universe", who are prone to impropriety. From this encounter, we discover that the universe seems to have the same utterly inhuman size as the one we live in.[/li]
[li]The Elder continent has it’s mountain, and there’s always that deeply alarming mount Nomad, which seems to trace its lineage in some way back to the Bazaar, I think, some kind of progeny of the Bazaar and the Mountain. [/li]
[li]There’s the Avid Horizon, and whatever or whomever made the gate.
Mr. Eaten is more troubling for this view. As the Seventh Letter’s ending scene with the Dragons consuming time and space and all we hold dear. Those might actually be the Sagittarius A*, or some sort of personification of entropy.
Or they are real things other than the physical laws that doom us mortals to our deaths; I find that thought distressing.[/li]
[/ul]
Then there’s the possibility that the Bazaar is just a sentient spaceship, the Judgments are just the interstellar or stellar empires of aliens.
I’d hedge on some sort of mixture of these two different views, as mountain+spaceship doesn’t equate to floating mountain.
And I have an even more difficult time fitting the devils or hell into this rather unpleasant mixture, or the "souls".
I’m inclined to think of the Fingerkings as computer entities however. I suspect that there are more problems with the fingerkings than I can account for in either cosmology.
Ah. I found the other bit I was looking for, but I’ve now clearly also seen it to be Fate locked (from Cut with Moonlight).
The Church in the Neath is not the same at all, and God as previously thought of isn’t really the focus any more.
What I did miss is whether what I’ve read is really true or not…
edited by Parelle on 2/21/2016
Pretty sure liliac serves the bazaar, because that’s the impression her dialouge gives off… but then, it’s entirely plausible that she serves the nadir, and has forgotten.
edited by Grenem on 2/20/2016
[quote=Parelle]Ah. I found the other bit I was looking for, but I’ve now clearly also seen it to be Fate locked (from Cut with Moonlight).
[spoilers]The Church in the Neath is not the same at all, and God as previously thought of isn’t really the focus any more.[/spoilers]
What I did miss is whether what I’ve read is really true or not…
edited by Parelle on 2/20/2016[/quote]
Oh yeah! That’s from Cut with Moonlight, and in that it shows an alternate London that never fell and was overthrown by Revolutionary figures. Although the Church is done with here, technically speaking all that never happened due to spoilery things. In the "real" Neath, though, god is less directly quoted and things have changed big time, but that doesn’t mean that he’s completely done with from the religion. Tell any average Londoner that God isn’t real or something more offensive about him and you’re likely to get some nasty looks.
[quote=jaked122][color=rgb(194, 194, 194)]I’m note sure that I know the proper etiquette regarding spoilers here, as I have not posted here… ever, so I hope that if I cross the line, that it may be forgiven.[/color]
[color=rgb(194, 194, 194)]From all that I’ve read in Fallen London, it seems that revising the bible is one of the smarter things that the church has done after the fall.[/color]
[color=rgb(194, 194, 194)]On the topic of gods, and the things that are so close to be indistinguishable from them.[/quote][/color]
[color=#c2c2c2]I’m going to put this under a spoiler due to the fact that some of this stuff is, you guessed it, spoiler material.[/color]
[color=#c2c2c2][spoiler]The Bazaar is a messenger. High up on the chain and super powerful? Yes, but not quite god-like. In fact, that’s the whole reason it’s down here: it’s abandoned its job as messenger to avoid giving a nasty rejection letter to her not-so-loving lover the Sun that may quite likely kill it from grief. She gathers love stories for the Sun for…something. I don’t quite remember what, but it seemed like either to console the Sun to not blow up. Don’t quote me on that last bit, though.[/color]
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[color=#c2c2c2]The Bazaar uses others to get her stories. One of those agents is Lilac. She’s what Spacemarine9 calls an "irrigomancer", aka a fancy word for someone who has given up a significant part of themselves and in exchange have taken a sort of control over irrigo from the Nadir, sort of like a permanent mark on themselves.[/color]
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I got excited because I’ve been playing the Church straight all this while but there really isn’t too much on how things changed. But, don’t mind me, moving on…
“For I was hungry, and I ate you. I was thirsty, and I drank you.”
Regarding the devils (Massive Spoilers!)
They are not biblical devils. They are, literally, bees. It’s unknown if the form they take when they talk to Londoners is their true form and biblical devils are based on that or if they’re taking that form to mess with us. Also, the biblical lore regarding souls and devils is pretty off. No one is quite sure what souls actually are, except that they collect memories, experiences and the personality of the person, and the devils really want them for very vague reasons (There are parallels to pollen, and souls are also star-spores). That’s about the most spoilerific thing I’ve written