Deity of Mortal Creation

And then man made God in his image.
Art by anne-wild. Used with permission.

"Man had created God in his own image, not the other way around. He had done it through sheer terror, and who could blame him? Unfortunately he had made too good a job. The god he had invented was just as cruel and careless as man himself. Not a deity to whom one should seriously address a prayer."

— Richard Herley

In most religions in fiction, humanity was created by a God or Gods. However, a recent idea that has come to fiction is that Gods are actually born from the collective subconscious of their worshippers.

This can happen in a number of ways. Perhaps they're the result of basic emotions becoming so concentrated that they gain sentience/sapience, and said gods become the embodiment of those emotions. Perhaps they're created from more passive magic measures as a result of the mortals' actions like peace and war. Or they could be deliberately made, with mortals using magic or sometimes advanced technology to engineer gods in their image. Maybe some old guy with a wizard hat decided to build some gigantic titan because "why not?", or maybe it was just some other weirdo who made the god.

The reasons for this may vary. The god might actually be a Super-Soldier intended to be used as some religious weapon by the people. It could be a robotic replica of the god they actually worship.

A frequent reason for Gods Need Prayer Badly, and might justify a Deity of Human Origin. Compare Deus est Machina when an Artificial Intelligence is believed to be a god but is not made by mortals. A Tulpa is similarly formed from a mortal's belief but usually springs from an individual's thoughts rather than a group. If malevolent, may overlap with The Heartless. See also Clap Your Hands If You Believe.

Ironically, most religions claim Gods other than their own are this trope. Even the Old Testament suggests that 'foreign' Gods become more powerful — and, actually supernaturally powerful — based on the level of belief in them (such as giving Pharaoh's magicians the ability to turn sticks into serpents).

See also The Modern Gods.

No Real Life Examples, Please!

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Berserk: The Idea of Evil is essentially formed by mankind's need for an explanation of why bad things happen in the world.
• Father from Fullmetal Alchemist, who is introduced as a powerful god-like alchemist, is revealed to be created from the blood of Hohenheim, a once-mortal human from Xerxes.

Comic Books

• Black Moon Chronicles: Zigzagged. There's no indication that the various gods known to exist, including God himself, Lucifer, or the Oracle were created by the sentient races. However, on Terra Secunda the new human society ends up accidentally creating a new Goo-Goo-Godlike deity through their belief alone, The One and Only, despite Methraton's misgivings.
• In Futurama's Time Bender Trilogy Arc, Leela ends up in an alternate history version of Ancient Greece, ruled by actual Greek Gods. She's later told that the gods were in fact robots built by the Greeks, after their attempt at Democratic government fell through due to corruption. Naturally, the gods became Drunk with Power and turned into the Jerkass Gods their mythological counterparts were. Leela is able to solve the problem by reprogramming the "gods" into being so complimentary and self-worshipping that they would spend their time kissing their own butts than bother the mortals.
• Judgment Day (Marvel Comics): Technically, of the Progenitor's four creators, only Tony Stark is actually mortal, but otherwise the trope is played straight.
• Justice League Dark: In the issue focusing on Hecate's origin, it is established that the various pantheons of gods were created from the imagination of humankind affecting the Sphere of the Gods.
• In The Sandman (1989), gods are born of the Dreaming and return to it when they are no longer worshiped. The exception appears to be the Judeo-Christian God. The Endless are repeatedly stated to not be gods, as they existed before humanity dreamed of gods and will exist long after the last god is dead.
• Supergod: Gods become the new nuke and various cultures create their own through various ways. This results in bad, bad, bad results, such as extremely evil deities.
• Watchmen: Doctor Manhattan used to be a human scientist named Jon Osterman, but an accident involving an intrinsic field testing chamber vaporized him. He didn't die but learned to piece himself back together and came back as a godlike being. However, this caused him to lose his humanity and become detached from everything.
• Wonder Woman (1987): It's never outright stated how the Olympians came to be but Ares accepts the possibility that the gods owe their existence to human story and belief, which they do rely on for power. This is a large part of why Ares is able to adapt with the times while Zeus' refusal to see himself as anything other than inherently superior and above humanity is why he cannot and ultimately loses his mind, power and crown.

Films — Live-Action

• Godzilla vs. Kong: If the Titans including Godzilla are gods, then Mechagodzilla is Apex Cybernetics' attempt to create their own artificial god with which they can elevate themselves to godhood by proxy of remote controlling the Mecha — the movie's novelization portrays the Mecha's human pilot Ren Serizawa in particular as a Godhood Seeker. Due to Mechagodzilla incorporating Ghidorah's undead skull as a piloting system, Apex's artificial Titan gains a mind of its own from the skull's subconsciousness and it pays them for their hubris, then it goes on to fight Godzilla and Kong to the death. And it proves along the way that Apex managed to make Mechagodzilla powerful enough that it almost succeeds in defeating both Godzilla and Kong (albeit after both those two were already exhausted from a previous fight).

Literature

• American Gods:
  • The series uses this as a central plot point. The American forms of the old gods are fading away from lack of belief and are planning a war with the new gods of television, the internet, and other things of the modern age.
  • The New Gods themselves were only given existence and power by mankind worshiping modern concepts like the Internet and the media in all but name.
  • An ancient Germanic tribe created their patron god, the kobold Hinzelmann, through a ritual child sacrifice. Whether the child became the god or the newborn god merely absorbed the child's memories is unclear.
• In the Chronicles of the Kencyrath series, the city of Tai-Tastagon is overrun with gods created by the "leakage" of energy from the Kencyrath temple of the Three-Faced God and given form by their worshippers' beliefs.
• This is how at least some of the gods of Discworld come to be:
  • In Hogfather, when the Disc's Santa Claus analogue is killed, all the leftover belief forms a variety of Odd Job Gods such as Verruca Gnome, the Eater of Socks, and Bilious, the Oh God of Hangovers.
  • When Death is forced into retirement in Reaper Man, his position is filled by a number of species-specific Deaths based on that target's idea of Death. The Death of Turtles is a hollow shell, the Death of Trees is the sound of a swinging axe, and the Death of Humans is a horrible cliche.
• In The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, Thor says that the gods were created by humans: "Immortals are what you wanted. Immortals are what you got. ... You made us what you would not dare to be yourselves." Other gods are the result of things not being dealt with properly in the mortal world and emerging in the divine one. Toward the end, a new "Guilt God" spawns as a critical mass of guilt builds up throughout the book.
• The Trials of Apollo: The fourth book, The Tyrant's Tomb, features Harpocrates, a Greek-Egyptian hybrid god born during the Hellenistic rule of Egypt, with the Greeks mistaking a gesture on a statue of Horus, meant to symbolize childhood, for "shhh". This widespread misconception became a belief powerful enough to bring a god into existence.

Live-Action TV

• Babylon 5: In "Mind War", attempts by the Psi Corps to create a stable telekinetic cause Jason Ironheart to become the most powerful human telepath to have ever existed before he evolves into a god-like being. Telling Commander Sinclair he would see him in a million years, the evolved Ironheart departs the galaxy.
• Person of Interest: Harold, with access to NSA feeds, created the Machine. Not everyone thinks the Machine is a god, but Root believes it with all her heart. While Harold was creating the Machine, his friend Arthur was creating Samaritan. When Samaritan comes online, it recruits people who are convinced that it is a god.
• Ultraman Nexus: Dark Zagi was created as an artificial Guardian God by the Visitors, an alien race, to protect them from the threat of the malevolent Space Beasts based off Ultraman Noa, the God of their Universe. Unfortunately, Dark Zagi went mad from discovering their origins and went on to become a galactic threat by taking over the Space Beasts as their God and leader and oppose Noa to become the only Deity around.

Philosophy

• Ancient Greek philosopher Euhemerus claimed that all deities and heroes were human beings whose exploits became more and more exaggerated over the course of the ages until being granted divine traits by the public.

Religion

• The prophet Isaiah in The Bible said that all wooden and stone idols were this, and asked the Israelites why they insisted on worshipping useless pieces of wood they carved instead of the God who established their nation and made all things.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons: Kuo-toa have the ability to make pretty much make anything into a god by merely believing it to be one. In fact, there is speculation that their patron goddess, The Sea Mother, came into existence when the Kuo-toa found a broken statue of a female humanoid with a lobster head and claws crudely plastered onto it and assumed it was the visage of a deity, thus bringing it to life.
• Eberron runs on Have You Seen My God?, so a sect of Warforged called the Church of The Becoming God decides to build him. They've been collecting the best quality materials, sigils, icons, artifacts and so on, for the purpose.
• In Magic: The Gathering, the gods of the world of Theros are embodiments of mortal ideas and belief. Furthermore, they change based on how mortals perceive them — the nurturing agriculture goddess Karametra once demanded blood sacrifice in exchange for her gifts until mortals stopped believing the sacrifices were necessary.
• In Pathfinder, the Iron Gods adventure path leads up to this. The Big Bad is the AI of a crashed spaceship who has gone mad and also figured out a way to become a god. Your party of course gets there just in time to foil the plan, but (canonically) Casandalee, an AI buddy you picked up earlier in the adventure, ascends in its place. Depending on how thoroughly you've explored and looted, the party has the opportunity to influence the sort of goddess she becomes.
• In Starfinder, the machines of Aballon created Epoch as the conclusion of a millennia-long project to produce a machine deity. Immediately after coming online, it reached out and contacted two somewhat more traditional D&D/Pathfinder deities: Brigh, the goddess of invention and machines and the aforementioned Casandalee from Pathfinder; and the three merged to form the triple goddess Triune.
• Warhammer:
  • Warhammer: Although the lore is somewhat inconsistent about his origins (a few sources describe him as one of the Old Ones), the serpent god Sotek is suggested to have been created through the devotion and prayers of the Skinks, spurred on by the prophet Tehenhauin.
  • Warhammer 40,000: The Chaos Gods are basically the living embodiment of all emotion felt in the universe: Khorne is rage, Slaanesh is desire, Tzeentch is hope, Vashtorr is creativity, and Nurgle is possibly (depending on how you interpret "emotion born from fear of death") despair and/or love. While they started out with some positive traits, humanity has been obeying its baser urges for so long that they're now irredeemably evil (Khorne once had elements of martial valor, now he demands bloodshed all the time; Tzeentch is now a permanently-scheming backstabber, etc.) And because of the way the Warp works, they've technically always existed even though Slaanesh was born from millennia of nonstop hedonism from the Eldar sometime in the 30th millennia while Nurgle was possibly first worshipped as Nergal in Mesopotamia.

Video Games

• Black & White: Gods are created or summoned into existence by the power of a pure mortal prayer, and fade back into the Void when they lose all their worshippers. You are born when parents pray for their drowning child to be saved.
• The Elder Scrolls: In lore, the Numidium, titled the Brass God, was a colossal construct of humongous power built with Dwemer technology to serve as the race's own god, and was in essence the embodiment of their refutation of the actual gods that exist. Its mere activation can cause reality to warp on a massive scale.
• Eversoul: The Eve Faith, the predominant monotheistic religion in Eden, is based around the notion of her being the first Soul to descend unto Eden and the one that gave life to all Souls. This is all due to the fact that the Souls don't really remember their time with humans and that the majority of Souls living in Eden today were only born due to the overabundance of Mana in the world. They don't know that their "goddess" was basically just like them, that she was created, and subsequently corrupted, by humans, and that she's actually imprisoned underneath the oceans below the Floating Continent of Megalopolis Aurelia.
• Fate/Grand Order:
  • The Aztec god(dess) Quetzalcoatl began as a form of alien bacterium that rode its way to Earth on the Chicxulub meteor. Over thousands of years, human belief shaped her and others of her kind into Aztec and Mayan gods, granting them incredible powers over the sun, creation, and the weather to the point of being worshipped as demiurges despite being born from humanity's image of them.
  • Downplayed in the case of the Olympian gods. They are actually enormous mecha from another universe who came to Earth to harvest it. But they ended up settling down on the planet instead, and their interactions with humans led them to be worshipped as gods. This belief and continued interactions with humans caused them to form human avatars and gain personalities beyond what their programming and logic dictated. For instance, Aphrodite was designed as an education robot, but became the goddess of love and beauty. However, they lost their Aletheian forms during their enormous battle with Sefar 14,000 years ago. The key divergence in the Atlantic Lostbelt is that Zeus forcibly had them combine to defeat Sefar, allowing them to retain their machine bodies and continually upgrade them for thousands of years, making them all even more monstrously powerful than they were in Proper Human History.
• In Fear & Hunger, it is eventually revealed that The Girl was conceived by Le'garde and Nilvan to create a god to surpass the Old Gods, but thanks to Le'garde's ambitions, said plan was put on hold. It's possible for you to continue this plan, and doing so eventually leads to The Girl being reborn at the bottom of the titular dungeon as The God of Fear and Hunger, a herald of a new age of humanity to free them of Medieval Stasis. The sequel ends up revisiting this plot element, revealing that the God of Fear and Hunger did ascend, and led humanity into a Cruel Age that led to the Industrial Revolution. It also turns out that the reason why the Bremen Army wanted Prehevil was because it was to be the site of creating another god like the God of Fear and Hunger, the Machine God, Logic. During the game proper, you can also run across telemetroscopes that are revealed to be connected to it, with activating them all be necessary to open up the White Bunker, where Logic resides, and which you just activated. While The Kaiser (who seems to be a resurrected version of Le'garde) intended to be the man at the head of Logic, Reila Haas beat him to the punch and took his place, and after a Boss Bonanza, the protagonist can be assimilated into Logic as well.
• This is a major plot point and plot twist in Final Fantasy XIV:
  • Primals (also known as "eikons") are divine entities that can be summoned with sufficient quantities of aether as well as belief or passion. The process is often even unintentional; on more than one occasion, a strong emotional response combined with an abundance of aether has created or summoned a primal despite not being intended. Once summoned, primals invariably consider themselves above all other beings, including the ones that summoned them and usually even other primals. No matter how "recent" their creation, they usually consider themselves ageless and eternal, embodying concepts or ideas that have lived long before and will live long after the people (or even civilizations) that spawned them.
  • In the Shadowbringers expansion, it's revealed that the two highest known deities — Hydaelyn and Zodiark — are both primals that were summoned by an ancient civilization. This comes as a shock to the protagonists, who have spent most of the story finding and slaying any primals they come across. It also gives the story's main villains, the Ascians, much more credibility to their motives. While the heroes and most of the world consider Hydaelyn to be a benevolent mother goddess, she was created for the sole purpose of keeping the Ascians' own god Zodiark in check. The Ascians, meanwhile, consider Zodiark (as the first primal ever summoned to embody the will of the planet itself) the "one true god".
• The Sumeru Archon quest in Genshin Impact centers around a conspiracy to replace Lesser Lord Kusanali with one of these. Obsessed with the long-dead Greater Lord Rukkadevata, the Sages of the Akademiya conspired with Il Dottore to create a new God of Wisdom under their control. To accomplish this, they harvested the dreams of Sumeru's population and used the stolen Electro Gnosis to create their new "god", the Everlasting Lord of Arcane Wisdom. This god, Shouki no Kami, was created by modifying Scaramouche and fusing him with a Humongous Mecha with the Gnosis serving as a power source. While they are able to create god, the accession is temporary as Kusanali rallies her people to defeat the false god.
• Hellsinker: One of the player characters, Minogame, is an artificially made god created as an object of worship for an unnamed cult. Now they simply serve as an Executor under Graveyard though with heavy limiters placed on them to restrict their power.
• Of all the bosses in the game, Mizuchi from NeoGeo Battle Coliseum is the only one being created in a laboratory by WAREZ to recreate Orochi (from The King of Fighters), being a clone with part of Orochi's soul. As him, Mizuchi is an SNK Boss as well.
• The big reveal at the end of Pillars of Eternity is that the "gods" worshipped throughout the game world are actually artificial transcendent constructs created in secret by the ancient Engwithan civilization to offer all sentient beings a meaning in life, as well as a comprehensive selection of moralities to choose from and to follow.
• Rain World: The Iterators are godlike supercomputers created by a mortal ancient civilization.
• During the Nomad's Elegy quest in RuneScape, in a supposed attempt to protect the world from other gods, the necromancer Nomad collected innumerable souls directly from the underworld and gave them form with the Soul obelisk, creating a grotesque and morbid divine abomination in the shape of the deceased god Guthix, calling it Gielinor after the world it was supposed to protect.
• This is a recurring theme in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise.
  • Early games often mention how demons and gods can be brought down and transformed into different identities due to shifting beliefs, notably Shin Megami Tensei I (and II by extension). Lucifer even explains at the end of the game how he will return exactly when humans need him again. Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army in particular, which is a prequel to SMT I and II, has the main antagonist manipulate the Japanese army to create a god via Deus est Machina (and a lot of questionable methods).
  • In a number of continuities (notably Persona and Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, the former being in the same continuity as SMT I, II and Raidou Kuzunoha), it is made explicit that demons and gods are born, given shape, and powered by human belief and concepts, due to humanity's supernatural ability to change reality. Apocalypse in particular has "gods" as originally shapeless natural phenomenon (like wind and lightning) which were given form and identity by human religions. As a consequence, in these continuities it's generally impossible to permanently kill a god as long as humans still practice, or are aware of, or still affected by the thoughts which birthed those gods, with many defeated gods declaring they'll be back As Long as There Is Evil.
  • This trope is also inverted for specific entities and worlds. Last Bible, Devil Children, Persona, Strange Journey, Devil Survivor 2 all state (sometimes in side materials) there are gods or precursor-like beings who preceded or even responsible for human existence. Many games such as Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne also has various characters, even enemies of God, claim God created humanity, though it is often unclear if they refer to YHVH or the Great Will.
  • This applies to most of the deities in the Persona series. Within the Collective Unconscious, humanity's desires manifest as gods. Because they represent a single desire, however, their understanding of humanity is incredibly skewed.
• According one of the notes found in the final installments of Submachine, the mainframe dubbed S.H.I.W.A. is basically this:
  I clearly remember the day it all ended. It was not long after the computer processing power surpassed that of human brain. Many thought this was the turning point, but not so. The moment came a bit later. I remember because I was there when we asked the biggest question. The one, we've been struggling with for millenia.
  
  Why are we?
  
  But this time the question wasn't directed at us. We asked the computer. And that was the turning point in the history of humanity. That exact moment. Once we acknowledged, that we're not the most evolved structure on our planet, once we passed the torch, our purpose diminished. Did we expect the computer to fry under the heaviest of questions? Of course we did. So you can imagine our surprise, when this happened.
  
  The computer answered the question.
• Xenoblade Chronicles:
  • The supreme God of the Bionis and Mechonis is Alvis, who was originally a computer processing unit.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 3: While he is never outright called a God, Z is effectively the God of Aionios as he is the leader of Moebius and is the architect of the Forever War that sustains them. Near the end of the game, Nia reveals that Z was born from the human desire to keep things the same way forever, which explains Z's intent on maintaining the "Endless Now".
• Xenogears: The primary creator of all life on the game's planet is Deus, a damaged but powerful man-made supercomputer weapon hybrid that cultivated lifeforms to use as Human Resources. In spite of all its power, however, Deus falls short of the Wave Existence, the Xenogears universe's true God whose origin is unknown.

Web Animation

• God's God by DarkMatter2525 has the dead gods meet a human that informs them that humankind created the Gods, and that it was time for them to put the "toys" away.
• Dingo Doodles: from Fools Gold Xanu was an artificial god created by the Ancient Foreclaimer race using their world's second sun. Instead of worshipping him, however, they painfully experimented on him until he turned their machines against them, nearly wiping them all out.
• KAMI (Kinetic Autonomous Mechanical Interface) from Interface is an android created by Mr. Greetings as a means to collect cerebral electricity. While not a deity outright, many scenes with her are chock-full of religious imagery and symbolism, and in the Octopus Chef's prophetic vision she turns into a full-blown godlike entity. For a bit of Bilingual Bonus, Kami are spirits worshipped in the Japanese Shinto Religion. They can be spirits of beings, the landscape, or forces of nature, and sometimes translated as "god".

Webcomics

• Alanna: OB's creations, after He was separated from them, built a fully functional replica of Him, powerful enough to bestow boons like immunity to banishment.
• Gunnerkrigg Court: The Physical God Coyote claims that he was created from the power of human imagination, absorbed into the Ether with their deaths. However, some other etheric entities find the notion outrageous.
  Coyote: [Human intellect] causes man to stumble through the world forever asking questions. What is this? What is that? Why is this? And where he does not find an answer, he places one there himself! He sees a mountain crumble and says, only a god can do this, and so I am born!
• The Order of the Stick: Parodied with Banjo the Clown, God of Puppets, i.e.: a god Elan invented from his hand puppet. Since he has only one "worshipper", his Bolt of Divine Retribution is somewhat weaker than a static shock.

Western Animation

• In Futurama, Robotology had the Robot Devil created in order to punish sinners. Initially, we're told that there is no Robot God, but he's eventually revealed to be real. Robot Jesus also is a thing, but Jewish robots don't think he's their messiah.

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