Home of the Gods

"Welcome to Mount Olympus."

"With that, the bright-eyed goddess sped away to Olympus, where they say the gods’ eternal mansion stands unmoved, never rocked by galewinds, never drenched by rains, nor do the drifting snows assail it. No, the clear air stretches away without a cloud, and a great radiance plays across the world, where the blithe gods live all their days in bliss."

— The Odyssey, Book VI (Translated by Robert Fagles)

Assuming your Stock Gods aren't of the omnipresent variety, they'll need somewhere to put up their feet, or at least hold meetings with each other. Most likely this location is going to be someplace fairly inaccessible to all those pesky mortals. This can mean Another Dimension, but it's not impossible for them to live somewhere in our own world as well; at the top of a tall mountain is fairly popular, especially if this particular mountain is topped with exquisite palaces wreathed in eternal cloud cover.

This may or may not be the same as The Afterlife, depending on how welcoming the residents feel. The method of getting here is likely to be a Stairway to Heaven. If there's a God of Evil or Satanic Archetype, he will likely have been banished from this place to Hell or a similar location.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Dragon Ball:
  • The Lookout is a heavenly palace that floats far above the Earth, from which Kami, Earth's God, watches over the planet.
  • Dragon Ball Z: the Kais of each galaxy each have their own Baby Planet and the Supreme Kais live on their own enormous planet, both in Other World. Beerus, the God of Destruction has his own palace-like planet in the mortal universe.
• The Pangaea Castle in Mary Geoise in One Piece is where the self-styled descendants of the gods, the Celestial Dragons, live and is treated as a holy ground. They're mostly just nobles with delusions of grandeur, but played straighter with the reveal that the top leaderships have attained Physical God level power along with eternal life, and can back up their claims of 'godhood'.

Comic Books

• The Mighty Thor and The Incredible Hercules:
  • The title characters live on Asgard and Olympus, respectively. Both are portrayed as unusually shaped asteroids with cities on them, just hovering in space. Sometimes they're portrayed as being "near" Earth, but since Earthlings can't see them they're probably in Another Dimension.
  • After Asgard got destroyed, Thor recreated its major city and placed it just over Broxton, Oklahoma. One imagines the tourism industry picked up.
  • As part of a Continuity Snarl, you actually had two sets of "gods" on Mount Olympus. The actual physical mountain had the city of Olympia, which was home to the Canon Immigrant Captain Ersatz race known as The Eternals, ruled by Zuras and later his daughter Thena. The mountain also housed a dimensional portal leading to the dimension of Olympus, home to the gods of Greek mythology and ruled by Zeus.
  • In a "What If?" comic, an amnesiac Thor befriends Conan the Barbarian and they decide to go find the home of Conan's god Crom. He turns out to live on some bleak mountaintop, but the heroes get an unpleasant shock when Crom turns out to be a Domain Holder who can cancel out any other godly powers on his turf... including Mjolnir's enchantments.
  • In Marvel's Golden Age Venus comics, the gods lived on the planet Venus.
• Wonder Woman
  • In Volume 1 the gods that do show up are each tied to a physical place or two, like Mars and Venus, and also hang out on another plane where they can watch an manipulate mortals.
  • In Volume 2 & Volume 3, the Greek gods live in a cloudy extra-dimensional version of Olympus with Bizarrchitecture aplenty, save for Ares who has his own domain, Aeropagus, and the Chthonians who live in Hades.
  • In the New 52 Olympus is an impossibly tall tower that changes to reflect whomever is currently ruling it.
• New Gods: The titular Physical Gods live on two vast planets (New Genesis and Apokalips) that may or may not be in another dimension. Depending on the Writer, if you travel there through means other than a Boom Tube, it may turn out that everyone there is a giant and the Boom Tube rescales people to fit. The New Gods themselves seem to worship, or at least revere, the Source, who Depending on the Writer may or may not live behind the Source Wall, which is made up of the petrified bodies of those who've tried to go past it and see for themselves.
• The Sandman (1989) features many gods, all of them with their own realms. The Norse gods of course have Asgard; the Lords of Chaos and the Lords of Order, who seem to have their own realms that match their respective temperaments; and the Christian God (never seen on-panel and referred to only as the Presence) resides in the Silver City along with his angels. As per the narration, "it cannot be visited."
• In The Multiversity, Olympus, Asgard, and so on are part of Skyland, which is opposite The Underworld in the Sphere of the Gods.

Fan Works

• Enlightenments: Much like the game it's based on, the fic takes place entirely within the deity Dormin's land, where Wander has also been banished to. It forces the two of them to get used to each other and slowly become friends.

Film – Live Action

• The Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Asgard is the home of several people who were worshipped by the Vikings as Gods. It's basically a Flat World planet that exists in outer space.
  • Asgard gets destroyed in Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame has the Asgardians settle in New Asgard in Norway.
  • Thor: Love and Thunder introduces Omnipotence City. A golden city in space where gods from several human and alien religions dwell, lead by Zeus.
• The Ten Commandments (1956): Zipporah describes Mt. Sinai as home to God, something Moses finds absurd because a "real" god should be omnipresent. Nonetheless, Zipporah assures him that God shows up there from time to time and she is, of course, proven correct.

Literature

• Tolkien's Legendarium gives us Aman. This is where the Valar live, but they also invite the Elves to join them when they become weary of Middle-earth, and in some exceptional cases they'll invite some others, like Frodo. On the westernmost part of Aman are the Halls of Mandos, basically the afterlife for Elves, where they wait until Mandos permits them to reincarnate back to the land of the living. (Men also visit the Halls after they die, but only for a brief time before they depart and leave Arda completely. Where they go afterwards Eru only knows, but it is implied to be the actual Heaven or something like it.) Originally, Aman was just a continent on Arda much like Middle-earth is, but when the Númenoreans attempted to sail the sea to reach it, Eru made the world round and cut off Aman from the rest of it, and now it can only be accessed by a "Straight Road" known only to the Elves.
• C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy had the gods living in the heavens... literally. They live in space and each of them has their own planet (and "shadow forms" they use while visiting other worlds; for example, the gods living on Venus and Mars came to our world as the classical deities of those names). Oh, the and the one who rules our world is basically Satan.
• Conan the Barbarian. The title character's patron god Crom is said to spend his time brooding atop a great mountain, but no details on its location are given, most likely because there's no point in asking Crom for help (it just annoys him).
• Cthulhu Mythos: The weak (as in, their physical abilities and toughness are barely superhuman barring their basic unaging immortality; mortals with enough wits, or even guns, could kill them easily enough) gods of Earth, sometimes called the Great Ones, dwell in the city of Unknown Kadath, which is most likely in the remote northernmost reaches of Earth's Dreamlands. Given how weak said gods are, it's a good thing that they and their city are so isolated, and under the protection of the Outer Gods. Or maybe not...
• Discworld: The major gods live in Dunmanifestin, their city at the top of Cori Celesti, a ridiculously tall mountain at the center of their (disc-shaped, duh) world. There they spend their time playing games with the lives of mortals. It appears in The Last Hero as a vast structure of conflicting architectural styles, the gods coming from various different cultures, and also having zero taste.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The existence of Thor is a Running Gag in the "trilogy", and we finally get to see Asgard in And Another Thing.... It's encased in a ball of ice and, to get in, you have to get by Heimdall (who can have photon torpedoes rain on you with a gesture, or make you go on quests if he feels like it), and inside it's full of various wonders like the Fountain of Youth, along with some very dissatisfied zombie Vikings working maintenance jobs.
• Of course, Douglas Adams had already shown us a vision of Asgard in The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul, where it's in another dimension accessible through St. Pancras station in London (why? Who knows?). It's not in terribly good shape when we see it, due to Odin trading away much of his power to an advertising agency.
• The Young Elites: The Gods live in a place unreachable by normal mortals, reachable from a portal the protagonists can only access thanks to their own relationship to said Gods. Passing through requires fighting monsters and crossing through dangerous terrain.
• Warbreaker: The Court of Gods is a palatial complex in the city of T'Telir where the Returned — humans sent back from death with idealized bodies and supernatural abilities — live in cloistered luxury, each tended by their own priestly order.
• Arcia Chronicles: The Illuminous is a pocket dimension created by the Seven Lightbringers (Physical Gods-slash-archangels serving an even greater overdeity known as "the Light") after they conquered Tarra. It is accessible through their respective temples on Tarra but has stood abandoned since the Great Exodus three thousand years before the books, and devoid of all life by the time Roman and his cohorts visit it. The Illuminous is finally demolished for good by the Great Brothers (a pair of even older gods) after Roman's band leaves it, having inadvertently led them there in the first place.
• Reflections of Eterna: The eponymous Eterna was an extraplanar fortress that served as base of operations for the Guardians of Sunset, godlike warriors holding back the eldritch chaos from swallowing the multiverse. On their rare days off, the Guardians have occasionally created new worlds, such as Kertiana, where the books are set and which was brought into being by four Guardians as a sort of R&R resort for themselves. However, this was so long ago that most Kertianans don't even remember the Four Creators, let alone the fact that they hailed from Eterna. Only one (very minor) character in the books has ever visited Eterna (being a Guardian himself), and it has actually been overrun and destroyed by chaos well over a thousand years before the books, with the Four Creators of Kertiana presumed killed in action defending it.
• N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy:
  • The divine realm is an eldritch alternate dimension where the gods can exist in their incomprehensible natural forms, free from the limitations of the material universe. It's distinct from the afterlife; human minds, living or dead, can't survive the sight of the realm.
  • By the second book, Physical Gods are a Mundane Fantastic element of life on earth, so a few of these crop up in the city of Sky. Madding hosts a social club of godlings in his spacious home, and by the third book, a different group is based out of an up-market bordello.
• The Camp Half-Blood Series:
  • The Olympians reside in Mount Olympus, which is currently located in Manhattan and not the actual Mount Olympus in Greece. This is because the gods move as the center of Western civilization moves, so they presently reside in the United States. It can be accessed through an elevator in the Empire State Building.
  • The Titans have their own rival home of the gods in the form of Mount Othrys. Like Olympus, it moved to the United States, now taking the form of Mount Tamalpais near San Francisco.

Myths & Religion

• Mt. Olympus is this in Classical Mythology. There's a unique twist in that it is indeed a real mountain in Greece, and nothing's stopping you from going for a hike on it. However it's important to remember that the ancient Greeks believed in more of a metaphysical Mt. Olympus that existed in tandem with the physical one. The gods lived on the metaphysical part, while mortals could only visit the physical one we see.
• Norse Mythology has Asgard, one of the Nine Realms, in which the gods had their own individual halls, like Odin's Gladsheim and Thor's Thrudvangr. They kept a separate hall for the souls of the valiant dead, called Valhalla.
• Celtic Mythology generally has the gods living in the Otherworld. The Irish called it Tir na nOg. It's accessible through "thin places" where the two realms meet. Thin places can be found in various hills and mounds, beneath the sea, or traveling through a magical mist. It's also more accessible at certain times, like dawn or dusk, or Samhain and Beltine, solstices, etc.
• Japanese Mythology has the Takamagahara (meaning "Plain of High Heaven") where the heavenly gods (called Amatsukami) reside.
• Australian Aboriginal myth has the "Dreamtime". It's a sort of Place Before Time that still exists as a Dream Land (or something), where all mankind's ancestral spirits lived and still live.
• Mesopotamian Mythology had the Cedar Forest, guarded by the Demi God Humbaba, famous in the Epic of Gilgamesh for one of his adventures.
• The Lokas in Hindu-Buddhist-Jain cosmologies. Loka means realm or planet and some are inhabited by Devas. In Hinduism some Gods have their own Loka. In Buddhism and Jainism there's the Realm of Devas where they lived ruled by Mahabrahma, with the difference that unlike Hinduism for Buddhists and Jains Devas are just another life form like humans and animals.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Imperial Palace is where the God Emperor of Mankind has been enthroned for the past ten thousand years in a palace that takes up most of Eurasia, his psychic might keeping the Astronomican lit to allow Warp travel. Terra has become a holy site, with pilgrims dying of old age in the line to see Him (note that the Emperor is only considered a god by most of humanity: the Eldar, the forces of Chaos and the Emperor himself think otherwise).
  • Warhammer (as well as 40k): Each of the Chaos Gods has their own dedicated area of the Warp, which grows in size and magnificence as their owner's power does: the Fortress of Khorne, the Maze of Tzeentch, the Garden of Nurgle, and the Palace of Slaanesh. In Warhammer Fantasy these places can actually be reached on foot if one is able to survive the Chaos Wastes.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The default cosmology of The Multiverse, as seen in Planescape, is a Great Wheel where the 17 Outer Planes serve as the afterlife and the home of the gods. Most deities have their own realm within the Plane that corresponds to their Character Alignment, but a few build their divine domains in other Planes instead.
  • The Forgotten Realms cosmology was Retconned into a "Great Tree", with 26 Celestial and Fiendish Planes representing concepts other than Character Alignment, and the godly realms divided up accordingly.
  • The 4^th Edition Points of Light setting has the "Astral Sea" as the Void Between the Worlds, with each god's or pantheon's realm free-floating like a planetoid within.
  • Averted in Eberron: Its unique Outer Plane cosmology includes a default afterlife of sorts, but the gods aren't found in any of them, and no one knows where they actually are.
• Exalted: The Gods live in the city of Yu-Shan, a continent-sized Pocket Dimension. It was first created as an idealized replica of the Gods' original home on Creation, which they abandoned after the Primordial War; now it's a decaying husk with a corrupt Celestial Bureaucracy, kept running only by the Sidereal Exalted and a few unusually dedicated gods.
• Magic: The Gathering: On the Plane of Theros, Nyx is an Eldritch Location that serves as the night sky, the realm of mortal dreams, and the home of the gods. When gods manifest physically, the night sky of Nyx peeks through any shadowed part of their bodies, signifying their status as Liminal Beings.
• The devas in Against the Dark Yogi hang out on Mount Niru. It's a physical mountain in the mortal real world, so you can go there to besiege the devas for favours, though it's quite a climb.

Video Games

• Pit People has the characters visit Mt. Olympus briefly. It's full of machine-gun-wielding Cupid security statues, watchmen who resemble gigantic monster heads, and other vaguely Classically-inspired insanity. There's also a road sign with directions to Valhalla and, uh "Zoopy Zoop".
• Anor Londo in Dark Souls is the capital city of Lordran and a city of gods created by Gwyn, the Lord of Sunlight. It used to be populated with various deities, but then Gwyn along with his army of Silver Knights departed from the city to link the First Flame, and the deities have abandoned the city. By the time when the Chosen Undead enters Anor Londo. It has already become an abandoned city, and the sole remaining deity in Anor Londo is Dark Sun Gwyndolin, who created the illusion of his sister Gwynevere to make the city look like it's still in its former glory.
• Elden Ring: Leyndell, like Anor Londo, serves as the home Queen Marika, the foot of the Erdtree and the capital of the Lands Between. Much like Anor Londo, it's hit hard times following The Shattering, including several destructive (but unsuccessful) sieges on the city's walls. Most of the inhabitants remain, but they've also largely gone mad, through a combination of the the nationwide Trauma Conga Line, the toll that immortality has taken on the city's population and the Perfumers' plentiful Fantastic Drug. Most homes are now uninhabited and uninhabitable, sealed from the inside with corpse wax or completely fallen into ruin due to time and lack of civil maintenance. Also like Anor Londo, only one demigod remains to give the city a semblance of functionality.
• EverQuest doesn't have a single dedicated home to the pantheon of gods, but there does exist the Plane of Tranquility, home of Quellious, the Goddess of Tranquility. In the Planes of Power expansion, the Plane of Tranquility serves as the access point to all of the other gods' own planar realms.
• In the first Neptunia game, the CPUs were depicted as living in a realm called Celestia, apart from the rest of Gamindustri. Later games in the series depicted them as living on their home continents in their main church, the Basilicoms.
• In the world of Dragon Age, the Maker (the deity at the center of the setting's main religion) is said to have lived in the Golden City. A thousand years or so before the series begins, some mages attempted to break into the city; their trespass turned it into the Black City, which can be seen from a distance by dreaming mortals when they visit the Fade. But the Maker is presumably somewhere in the vicinity, along with his Deity of Human Origin bride Andraste.
• In Final Fantasy XII, Giruvegan serves as this for the Occuria. Though never discussed, environmental cues like a lack of physical continuity with the previous zone make it clear that Giruvegan is somehow disconnected from Ivalice proper. For instance, there's no sign of the Feywood visible from within Giruvegan, despite the party passing through the former to get to the latter. We even see multiple suns in the sky as Ashe speaks with the Occuria.
• In the Divine Divinity series, the Hall of Echoes is an inchoate Spirit World where the gods live and the souls of mortals travel after death. The player characters of Divinity: Original Sin II travel there both spiritually and physically and learn the Awful Truth that the gods reside there to devour their worshipers' souls for power.
• The game world of Shadow of the Colossus is a Forbidden Land where the god Dormin is sealed.
• In Xenoblade Chronicles 2 it's believed by the people to be the home of The Architect is Elysium, a "land of plenty" that exists above the World Tree at the center of Alrest. Reaching Elysium is the primary goal of both Rex and Pyra. Turns out that while The Architect does technically live 'above' the World Tree, Elysium is actually an ancient artificial satellite in the planet's orbit, and while it once hosted a beautiful habitable environment, it has long since fallen out of use and become a ruined, barren desert.

Webcomics

• A-gnosis' comics on Greek myth feature Mount Olympus as home to most of the pantheon, with some exceptions: Demeter and Persephone keep a cottage on Earth to avoid their Big, Screwed-Up Family; Hades lives in The Underworld to be closer to his work; and Athena spends her childhood being fostered by a human family.
• In Champions of Far'aus, deities reside in Elsewhere, a place where their powers are unrestricted so long as they are not currently in another deity’s domain, and they can create as many new realms as they please, either on their own, or co-created with others. Elsewhere is also the home of spirits, elemental, Magical, etc., and is only accessible to mortals after they die and their spirits are separated from their physical bodies.
• The Order of the Stick: In the Dungeons & Dragons-inspired cosmology, the gods and the spirits of the dead inhabit the Outer Planes, spiritual otherworlds that are themed by Character Alignmentinvoked and can be accessed through Dimensional Travel.
  Thor: Everything out here is made of ideas, when you get right down to it. Even me! The Outer Planes are ideas that were so powerful, for better or worse, that they became places.
• Return to Player: Where the Gods meet and talk is depicted as an internet chat room.

Western Animation

• Earthworm Jim: In "Assault and Battery", Jim discovers that his super-suit is low on power, and since it's powered by the Battery of the Gods, they have to travel to the Fabled, Long-Sought Home of the Gods to get a new one. Peter Puppy manages to look up the address in the phone book, and when they get there they find all the big-name gods are at a party at Valhalla, and they have to negotiate with the God of Nasal Discharge, the God of Puns, and the Goddess of Disco.
• In DuckTales (2017), Ithaquack is the Vacation Spot of the Gods. It's not as popular as it once was, ever since the other Greek gods got fed up with Zeus being a sore loser after Scrooge bested him.

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