This is a post I made to the Wold Newton group I belong, that intertwines various fiction, a la the Baker Street Irregulars. Very ambitious, it started out as a genealogy of Mister Miracle...and grew. Do not take at all seriously...I don't. Just literary fun.

The most far-fetched explanation I have EVER done.

This is going to be in several parts:

First off, I'm going to make some distinctions here.

I think there is a difference between an omniscient, omnipotent Creator who creates things out of ex nihilio---examples in religion are the Judeo-Christian God, Allah, and others---in fiction, Illuvatur, perhaps the Source, etc.---and a pantheistic powerful being who calls itself a "god" who is one of MANY extremely powerful beings who perhaps embody a principle or power. (The Aesir. The Olympians. The Cthulhu Mythos.) I am going to discuss the genesis of "gods" with the quotes, these pantheistic, immortal or near-immortal beings, often oddly humanoid in form, oddly able to cross-breed with us, and try to place them in some sort of setting.

But I must say----if "god" means to you extremely powerful beings who can end Creation and may have been behind the present ordering of creation---these beings actually have a claim to it.

This started as a geneology of the New God Mister Miracle/Scott Free, but I soon realized there was a discrepency. In JLA# 36, December 1999, "World War III", Mister Miracle talked about the Old Gods.

"Before this universe there was Urgrund, the world of the Old Gods....we don't know much about our predecessors, but we do know this; they manufactured weapons beyond our comprehension and tore infinity apart."

In other words, it is claimed that the Old Gods were from a universe prior to our own. Nor do we JUST have Grant Morrison's word for it. In the Takion comic, Takion meets an Old God called Arzaz who somehow survived the destruction of the Old Gods, and who claims to predate the universe. So did his rival, the Nameless One. Takion was involved in the storyline in which Hal Jordan gave up his life, and is hard to remove from DC contunity.

Granted, Grant Morrison exagerrated. The JLA must have stopped Mageddon long before it reached our solar system. Morrison exagerrated and made the threat more immediate for a more personal and touching story. Still, from those references, it appears the Old Gods were from a cosmos before our own.

"Tore infinity apart" makes it sound like the Big Bang is the final destuction of the Old Gods. That they CAUSED the Big Bang.

That's...pretty powerful.

But...

Then what do we make of Jack Kirby's claim that after the Old Gods were destroyed, the molten remains formed two new planets? Or John Byrne's claim that a wave of force erupted from the destruction of the Old Gods and fostered other "gods"? Or Jack Kirby's that Lonar found a horse of the Old Gods in the ruins of a city of the Old Gods. Or...

There are other puzzling things. There are numerous references that make it sound that New Genesis and Apokolips occupy another, neighboring reality or "dimension". There are just as many references, though, that make it sound like New Genesis and Apokolips are part of OUR reality.

I started thinking about this...and I realized we are talking about two different events. One a destruction of a previous cosmos, and later, a destruction of an individual, albeit possibly very large, planet.

The Old Gods were originally pre-cosmical, of a reality that existed before our own. That over aeons, one culture won ascendescy over the previous universe...although others cultures, such as Taa's, existed. A race very humanoid in many ways, but much more powerful, and almost unlimited lifetime. (Whether they go in genetic manipulation of their own species, or had naturally evolved that way, I don't know.) That in the culmination of one of their wars, they tore their reality asunder--and birthed ours. (It's interesting to note that Galen, who some call Galactus, appears also to be from a cosmos before ours. I suspect Taa was stricken by a plague unleashed by the Old Gods. So in effect, Galactus was just an "innocent bystander" in the war of the Old Gods.) It's possible that Taa might have been a scattered colony of the Old Gods.

Now, how do you survive a universal cataclysm? Well, Galen/Galactus seemed to have done it the hard way, but if you can create pocket or, as I sometimes call them, "bubble" universes---mini-realities...it might be perfectly possible to create a pocket universe around your home solar system while the Big Crunch/Big Bang happened, and re-enter the main universe when it settles down. You might even be able to choose from the possible physical laws that might be used for a universe that would be very receptive to your sort of life...

And oddly enough, that's the sort of universe we have. There is considerable evidence---look up the "anthropic principle"---that the universe seems to be fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life. That if the laws of nature were changed very slightly, little or no intelligent life would result.

Many scientific theists (myself included) have drawn the conclusion that the cosmos almost looks as if it were---designed.

I submit that if you design an entire pocket universe to make sure at least one planet and star survive, you'll go to the trouble of making sure the next universe is survivable, also. (It may be that when they re-entered the main universe, they made the "bubble universe" semi-permeable, for protection. That their system was partially hidden in our reality, and harder to reach. That would explain the way the Apokolips-New Genesis system seems both in our reality---and not in our reality.)

And interestingly enough, in the WNU texts, such as James Branch Cabell's JURGEN and THE SILVER STALLION, a being is encountered. He has many names---Ardnara, or Ptha (the Egyptian creator-god) or Jaldalaoth (who in some Gnostic writings is one of the Seven great Angels in front of the true Creator who is often mistaken for Jehovah) or Abraxas, the Persian supreme diety, or...

Koschei, the Deathless. In Russian myth, he was a sinister magician, but Cabell's writings make a much higher claim for him---that he created things as they are. But the SILVER STALLION makes it clear there was a previous creation, and a serpentlike being who created things as they were--

In the SILVER STALLION it was claimed by Odin (under another name) that Koschei was an immature godling, still playing at world-creating, but Odin is often guilty of shading the truth or lying to increase his own reputation. Nor is Koschei without his own wiles, and he may have even have fooled Odin.

What if Koschei was an old God? Suppose as hostilities escalated, one of the two sides realized that their weapons were so great that the entire universe was in danger...and plans were made to preserve at least one of their worlds. (Not necessarily Urgrund, with "Glorious Home", its star-city.) And someone was appointed to influence the new universe that would have been born. What if he was the one in charge of taking the chaos after the destruction of the previous universe...and ordering it so that the Old Gods in their pocket universe could enter it without harm?

Note I am NOT saying that Koschei (or whatever his true name is---he said his true name was known to none, to Jurgen.) is the ULTIMATE creator. I leave that to your religious and philosophical sensibilities, if any. He was a native of a previous creation. Only that he might have helped order and select the possibilities in the new creation, in the universe we now inhabit.

The Old Gods, before the current cosmos, made huge biological weapons, entities such as Mageddon, who was bigger than the solar system and could spread hate and confusion to the world he was approaching...

Note that Cthulhu could also send madness in the exact same telepathic way that Mageddon spread hate and hostility. There is a similarity that is very...striking.

The end of the old universe might have also been brought about by such a biological "weapon". A weapon with its own name and a sort of conciousness, as Megaddon was named. A weapon called---Azathoth.

Consider Azathoth's descriptions by Lovecraft: "...that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity...the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth..."(DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH)

"The mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos."--"The Dreams of the Witch House".

"I started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth."--"The Whisperer in Darkness".

Or this section in the long poem, "Fungi from Yogguth".

"XXII. Azathoth
Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me,
Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space,
Till neither time nor matter stretched before me,
But only Chaos, without form or place.
Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered
Things he had dreamed but could not understand,
While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered
In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned.

They danced insanely to the high, thin whining
Of a cracked flute clutched in a monstrous paw,
Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining
Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law.
"I am His Messenger," the daemon said,
As in contempt he struck his Master's head."

Azathoth is described as "mindless", and Aztek had much the same complaint about Mageddon---that one of its thoughts blinded him, yet Mageddon itself was essentially mindless, a machine, a weapon following its programming. So seems Azathoth, although he seems part and parcel of the "primal chaos" from which the universe sprang.

Clark Ashton Smith did a partial family tree of the "gods" of the Cthulhu mythos, all of which sprang from Azathoth, who originally reproduced through fission. (The later gods seemed to have some sexuality, however.) Smith, one of HPL's confidents, seems to have had inside knowledge.

In my view, Azathoth was (probably) a weapon of the Old Gods, the ultimate weapon to rearrange and re-start reality, and who ended the old universe in the Big Crunch/Big Bang. Koschei, one of the Old Gods, sidestepping the Big Bang in a small pocket universe of his won, set out to make sure the new universe was hospitable to their kind of life, bringing order out of the Chaos. The Cthulhu mythos Outer Gods and the Great Old Ones were either biological weapons created by the Old Gods or descended from them, via fusion or blasphemous breeding.

Of course, Koschei didn't do it alone. He couldn't. But he had all the resources of a race that had risen to the pinnacle of the previous universe. First he created beings to help him in the ordering of the cosmos---beings who are part of that cosmos, and would die when it ended. Whether these beings might be called golems or androids or merely the personifications of some principles is a matter of semantics. (However, note he created them where they could cross-breed with the Old Gods. As I will demonstrate later, the Old Gods and the New Gods and several other patheons could intermarry with humans...and Rose Walker was descended from one of these beings). He created these beings and named them the Endless...who oddly enough in English tend to have names that start with "D"---Destiny, Death, Destruction, Dream, Desire, Despair, Delight/Delirium...and set up the rules under which they operate. (Presumably he also set up the Three who rival their power, known as either the Fates or the Furies. They appear in both Cabell and Gaiman's writings.) Destiny and the Fates may have been set up in rivalry to Yog-Sothoth, one of Azathoth's progeny, who exists outside of time and space, since they can view all of time as a scroll. (Note in the original BOOKS OF MAGIC, Death ends Destiny's existence at the end of the universe, and it is implied that no others live save the time-travelling Mister E and Tim Hunter---including any of the Endless---save them. Hence my statement that the Endless to not outlive this universe.)

Miramon Lluagor---whose sibling was Grandfather Death---seems to have been a French medieval guise for Dream. Grandfather Death is another guise for death---with the Endless, as Desire shows, gender is an option.

He gave each of the Endless their own "bubble universe" or realm to retire to when they are not ordering this universe. They each had their own function. Destruction made sure no race would ever rise to the universe-destroying status of the Old Gods, for instance.

He also set up some lesser, yet mighty beings, to help bring order out of the chaos, the Lords of Order. These were more single-minded and less creative than the Endless, yet still mighty. That they were lesser is shown that all of them collectively only were given one "bubble universe" in which to dwell. Lord Donblas was one of their leaders. (On a cosmological note, many cosmologists are surprised at Hubble's findings that galaxies formed at an extremely fast rate, in cosmic terms, after the Big Bang. Perhaps we see why.)

Please note that in these "bubble universes" the laws of nature are not necessarily the same as in the outer universe. So certain effects are possible there which we would call non-scientific, or magical---certainly obeying different laws than we are used to. Some might be carryovers from that previous creation, some might be made to order for those particular cosmos.)

Meanwhile, the chaos seeping around Azathoth not only spawned the Outer Gods and the Great Old Ones, but a serpent (and coincidentally, the maker of things that were was a serpent---did Azathoth do it in imitation of that being, mentioned in THE SILVER STALLION?), perhaps a living fractal pattern caused by the chaos.

That Serpent of Chaos in turn spawned the Courts of Chaos, the Seven who were leaders of the Chaos inhabitants. (Whether Lord Arioch and the other Lords of Chaos Elric and others encountered are from these selfsame courts is a matter to be researched.) One of their member, Dworkin Baridan, after the Serpent was injured by a mystical unicorn, fled the Courts of Chaos and invented the Primal Pattern, one way of creating pocket or bubble universes, and the Courts of Amber. Each of the Amberites could create or travel among the bubble universes that ring the real universe at will. His son, Oberon, was the first true king of Amber.)

(Though the legends of the Serpent indicated it was an easy creation, actually the genetic imprint of the Chaosers was based on some Old Gods' cell samples that Azathoth had saved from incineration in the destruction of the old universe. They were made as continuations...but also mockeries.... of the Old Gods. Hence, the Chaos-crew as well as the Amberites were able to crossbreed with the Old Gods---and as it turns out, with humans as well. Will explain why in a future chapter.)

Eventually the sterile, monomaniac Lords of Order met the wildness inherent in the Courts of Chaos, and instant emnity began.

Meanwhile, the bubble universe of the Old Gods, on the world which they renamed Asgaard, re-entered the fresh new creation.

The history of the Old Gods is not done yet. The Celestials, the Aesir, and many more to go. Watch this space. More to come.