final crisis: fighting gods?

Grant Morrison:

"When we decided to do a book about gods, we felt it was important to do think through what a ‘god’ actually is. Gods aren’t like souls, or ghosts, gods are much bigger and scarier than that.

You know, it’s like every single word culture developed is own pantheon of Gods -which unsurprisingly all share similar traits, like the Greek goddess of Love is Aphrodite, while the Voudon goddess of Love is Erezulie and the Norse goddess of Love is Freya and so on. Now, what you have to understand is this: our primitive forebears weren’t stupid and when they talked about gods what they were describing were ‘eternal qualities’. In a normal human lifetime, we become possessed by ‘gods‘ every day. When we fall in Love, we are possessed by Aphrodite, when we are witty and clever we are possessed by Hermes or Thoth, when angry we‘re possessed by Ogun or Tyr or Ares. We tend to call such possessions ’moods’. but even when we are not personally in love or angry, there is always Love and Anger in the world and those eternal wells of Love and Anger and the other ‘big’ qualities of the human emotional spectrum are what our ancestors personified and called ‘gods’. The ‘god’ in this case, being the timeless quality of ‘Love’ or ‘Anger’ that we can all tap into for a little while.

No-one was really ever suggesting that there is a real woman you can touch called Aphrodite, who lives on Mount Olympus - but the sum total of every single human experience of Love is what the Greeks called Aphrodite and the Celts called Brigit and so on. I hope that makes sense.

In the case of Darkseid and his diabolical court, we’re dealing with personifications of absolute negative qualities. We’ve all been possessed by Greed or Hatred in our lives but Darkseid and his pals are embodiments of the timeless qualities of Tyrannical Will or Sadism or Envy or whatever. So in the sense that we can be cruel, or ignorant, or hate people we’ve never met, we all have Darkseid or Desaad within us. It’s like the idea of being possessed by the Holy Spirit, except in this case they are Unholy Spirits and the Gods of Apokolips want us to replace all our good qualities with all our bad qualities so that we become vehicles for their evil intentions.

There’s always Greed in the world. There’s always Fear. And a lot of this ties into what Geoff’s doing in Green Lantern with the idea of the emotional spectrum. We’re creating a big mythology for the DC Universe and Final Crisis is intended to be a myth for the 21st century."