“Those are the basics, now we’re getting to the interesting part. The Tauriel don’t even know where they came from but we do know they existed long before humans. When they realized another self-aware species was evolving they started communicating with us, influencing us, helping us along. Over time humans started viewing the Tauriel as gods, or rather, the concept of gods developed around the Tauriel. As long as humans were mostly living in small tribes, we were able to coexist with the Tauriel, as if it was natural to have gods living among us. When our societies became more organized however, things changed.
We don’t know exactly how it started or where it happened first but some time around the early Bronze age, in different cultures around the world, humans started currying favor with specific ‘gods’ in order to gain advantages over other people. At the same time the Tauriel realized that if they could get people to “believe” in them – though there wasn’t really a word for religious belief back then – they would gain power. And not just power as in being the leader of people, but as in divine power. Remember I mentioned that their powers are limited by how humans perceive reality? Our belief in them changes how we perceive reality, changing the limits of their power. As you might expect, that led to all kinds of trouble: Tauriel competing with each other for followers, humans fighting over which God to believe in, Tauriel punishing former followers for switching loyalties, and so on. The Tauriel realized the situation was getting out of hand and they decided, through a sort of ‘consensus of the mind’ to leave humans alone.
No one knows exactly where they went, all we know is that they disappeared. People have speculated that they went to another plane of existence, others have claimed they dissolved into the Ether. Whatever the truth is doesn’t matter, what matters is that they left. Apparently quite abruptly as well, because the people of the ancient tribes suddenly found that the gods who had been walking among them were gone. It has later been revealed that some Tauriel told their followers they would return some day. A lot of early biblical stories and other ancient myths stem from this. The idea of gods interfering directly in people’s lives also comes from this period of time, as does the common belief that some gods disappeared, vowing to return when people need them the most and so on. Of course, the stories from this period of time have been heavily distorted by being told and retold through generations, which is why we call them myths and not history but there is a grain of truth in much of it.
Anyway, the humans didn’t stop believing just because their ‘gods’ had disappeared. And here’s the thing, that link between human belief and Tauriel power was never severed. Despite being ethereal, the Tauriel’s character is remarkably similar to ours: those who have power tend to want more. So when they discovered that the link remained unbroken, some of them started trying to influence humans from afar in order to gain followers. Because of the consensus there was never any direct contact. Instead they used subtler methods, sending us visions and such. History shows us that it worked; pretty much all of the gods ancient people believed in, Baal, Ra, Anubis and so on were all power hungry Tauriel.
Among those Tauriel was one named Yehova, who we know today as the God of Christianity. He wasn’t particularly powerful to start with – several of the other ‘gods’ had more followers. But then he came up with the concept of a chosen people – brilliant PR move really, get people to believe that they are special and they will be far more loyal. That it happened to be the Israelites that became ‘his people’ was pure chance. Mesopotamia was one of the most populous areas of the world at the time and he basically just looked at the tribes there and selected one at random. He basically used the bronze age Israelites as his own personal army, sending them out to slaughter the followers of other gods. Other people would of course take note of this and even if they didn’t actually believe in Yehova, they would claim they did in order to avoid getting killed. So, little by little, Yehova gained followers while many of the other Tauriel lost theirs. Remember what I said about the Tauriel’s undefined life spans? Some of those guys lived for thousands of years but then, when humans stopped believing in them, they died.
Eventually Yehova became so powerful that even other Tauriel started following him. At this point he stopped using the name Yehova and started calling himself The Lord. As we all know, that name stuck with him. Another PR move was that he started differentiating between normal Tauriel, and Tauriel that followed him, by calling the latter Angels. Some of them were devoted enough to break the consensus and make direct contact with humans. Thanks to this, he was able to spread his message even further and gain even more followers among the humans, making him more powerful and thus gaining more angels and so on, in a kind of positive spiral. And so you see, God exists, but he isn’t almighty or all-knowing and he isn’t even the only god. He is simply an ‘angel’ but a very powerful one, with a large following among both humans and other angels.”
The old man took a deep draft of his cocktail, swirled the remaining liquid around for a moment then emptied his glass. I signaled for the bartender and ordered two more drinks then turned back to the old man. “So what about The Devil,” I asked. He raised his eyebrows, “Now that’s a good question.”
Leave a Reply