POLITICS, PANTHEONS, IDEOLOGIES AND THE WARP
The warp is the “Hyperspace” of Warhammer 40,000. Unlike Hyperspace in Star Wars though, the warp is far more than a medium of transport, it is what I would call a “possibility space”, chaotic ad unpredictable, full of demons and gods and even stranger things. Any time the warp bleeds into our space it’s considered a disaster, because it corrupts all it touches.
However, there’s something about the warp that makes it very useful for the purposes of this post: The warp forms entities based on the beliefs of the peoples in real space. If enough people have a belief about something, it will form in the warp. There is a sort of parasitic relationship here, Zeus needs people to believe in Him if he is to continue to exist, so he will do anything to make sure the people are enslaved to their belief. If the warp existed, Zeus would probably have faded into nothingness in this modern age of unbelief (or rather, strange beliefs). The crazy thing here is these gods are immensely powerful, they exist in the warp, since that’s where the belief shapes them, but because they’re sentient beings, with agendas and interests, they can manipulate the people who spawned them. I can’t go into all the detail here of how this works, but I want to cover the analogies of this in the real world.
The gist of the warp entities and its gods is this: People create their gods, they give their allegiance to their creations. The gods of old represented concepts and real world phenomenon that had great impact in how people lived their lives. They worshiped gods of rain and Sun, kings made themselves deities, and usually associated them with an aspect of life, abstract or physical. This is no less true in today’s world, the difference being our gods have taken a different form, even different gods altogether. The series American Gods uses this concept. We place what I could only call religious trust in Technology and social media, meanwhile, the old gods of state absolutism and celebrity worship morph into new and far more powerful forms. Ideologies replace traditional religions, religious wars occur over them. Even both world wars, and especially the Cold war, where the god of Capitalism, incarnated in the US system, warred against, and won a major controversial victory, against the god of communism,incarnated in the Soviet system.
Contrary to what the propaganda says, we do live in a very religious world. That has never changed and probably never will. What changes are the gods and religions. The war continues, on social media, in trade wars, and in political maneuvering. You could even say it’s heating up again, on a far grander and dangerous scale, the god of social media is a far more powerful god than most these days, since it (I can’t find a gender, pick one or none in the comments section) has almost direct access to the hearts and minds of people, something Zeus or Augustus could only dream of. Those who write fiction often write deep truths embedded in beautiful stories, I hope we look through their eyes to see the world’s hidden parts, for if we are blind, how can we lead the blind?