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bluewing@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

The gods were omnipotent to humans, not always so much to other gods perhaps. In polytheistic religions the pantheon was often comprised of siblings of some sort. But the top god, like Zeus or Odin, where all seeing and all knowing if they wanted to be. But they often did didn’t really care that much as long as they were fat and happy.

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Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Neither Zeus nor Odin is canonically all seeing or all knowing. Zeus was tricked by Prometheus by accepting bones wrapped in fat as his sacrifice leaving what he really wanted, the nice juicy meat, as the human’s share. He had to get word of Persephone’s last known location from Apollo and has routinely been tricked by other clever Gods and mortals in his myth.

Odin was not able to discover the plot behind the murder of Baldur until the confession of Loki nor did he know the location of Thor’s hammer when it was stolen (they had to ask Heimdal). He may have sacrificed his eye to trade one form of perception for another… But we aren’t really let on to what that perception actually is. In Norse myth only Mimir is functionally all seeing and Odin takes his council from his severed head, he has to ask for information he doesn’t implicitly know himself.

There is a difference between simply very knowledgeable or powerful and actual omniscience or omnipotence it is not a matter of scale based on perspective, it’s a boolean function - one is either all powerful or they are not. If ever a god or other character needs to ask someone for information, is tricked by something obscured or fails to know something they are automatically proven to not be omniscient… In storytelling that tends to make them very boring characters because it means that most conflicts are automatically resolved and the cleverness or stupidity of a God is undercut when they simply know everything. Odin’s stories are ones where he goes and scouts, learns, adapts, formulates a plan and then gets away with murder because we are supposed to admire the process.

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