The Gods Who Longed to Be Human

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:01]I've always been enamored with the idea of godhood. Not in the sense that I want to be one. I would be a pretty terrible god. I think it's more that I'm fascinated by what the concept actually implies. What it would mean to be a god, to be all powerful, to be all knowing.

[00:00:18]To exist somewhere above the world, looking down at it from a vantage point that no human being could ever reach.

[00:00:23]There's something immediately seductive about that image. something that feels clean in a way human life never quite is. Something that promises clarity where we only ever have approximation.

[00:00:35]See, human beings understand the world through limitation. We know things piece by piece. We move through time one moment at a time. We make decisions without knowing how they turn out, and we learn by being wrong. Even our imaginations are shaped by those constraints. When we try to picture omniscience or omnipotence, we usually just scale up our own experiences. more knowledge, more power, more control. A larger memory, a faster mind, a wider reach. But scaling something up is not the same as changing its fundamental nature. A candle flame made larger is still a flame. A human mind made larger is still human. But the idea of a god suggests something much stranger than that. It suggests not just a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. A being who knows everything doesn't simply know more than we do. They exist in a fundamentally different relationship with knowledge itself.

[00:01:27]Knowledge for them would not arrive. It would not accumulate. It would not be discovered. It would simply be present, fully formed without process. A being who is all powerful doesn't simply have access to more solutions than we do.

[00:01:41]They exist in a reality where the concept of limitation might not even apply at all. The gap between human understanding and divine existence isn't large. It's fundamental. There's a reason the Christian God's judgments are described in the Bible as unknowable. It isn't simply that we lack the information to understand them. It's that the perspective itself may be inaccessible to us. Not hidden, not obscured, but structurally incompatible with the way we think. Gods, in other words, aren't scaled up humans or anything we can ever familiarize ourselves with. There's something entirely unique, something alien, something we could never hope to imagine without immediately turning it into something smaller, something safer. And yet, throughout mythology and religion and fiction, we keep trying to imagine it anyway. Nearly every culture on Earth has some version of this idea. These immortal beings who exist above the human world. Gods who shape the landscape, command the weather, and decide the fates of nations. They live forever. We don't. They see the full shape of history. We're stuck experiencing it one day at a time.

[00:02:44]Civilizations rise and collapse beneath them like tides moving in and out.

[00:02:48]Entire lifetimes compressed into something that might barely register from their perspective.

[00:02:59]In these stories, gods are usually defined by their distance from us.

[00:03:02]They're older, stronger, wiser, permanent in ways that human life could never be. Even when gods take interest in humanity, the interest is usually framed from above. They guide us, punish us, test us, or sometimes simply observe us. The relationship is almost always vertical. Gods above, humans below. It is such a deeply embedded structure that it begins to feel natural and inevitable, much like gravity.

[00:03:30]Obviously, these powerful beings are distant. Of course, the eternal souls are detached from the mortal world.

[00:03:36]inevitably to become something more is to become less like us. When you start to look closely at these stories, when you move past the spectacle, when you strip away the lightning bolts and prophecies and cosmic battles, something strange starts to appear. A pattern, not universal and not always obvious, but persistent enough that once you notice it, it becomes difficult to ignore.

[00:03:59]Across wildly different mythologies and religions, across stories separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles, you occasionally find the same small unsettling idea.

[00:04:10]Among these immortal beings, some of them want something they don't have. Not more power, not more control, not a larger domain to lord over, something else, something quieter, harder to name.

[00:04:23]In the middle of these pantheons, among beings who command storms and reshape entire worlds, there are sometimes transcendent figures who turn their attention downward toward humanity with a kind of quiet fascination.

[00:04:36]And in some stories, that fascination becomes something stronger. They want to be human. Not because humans are better, not because humans are more powerful, but because there is something about being human that does not survive the transition into godhood.

[00:04:51]It's rarely the central focus of the myth, but it shows up often enough that it starts to feel deliberate. This idea of gods temporarily abandoning their divinity in order to experience the human world from the inside. Sometimes they do it out of curiosity. Sometimes they do it in secret. And sometimes, in a few particularly strange stories, they seem to do it because there is something about humanity that they cannot access from where they stand. something they can only understand by becoming one of us. Which is odd because if mythology usually presents a godhood as the highest possible state of existence. If humans spend centuries imagining ways to become immortal, omnipotent, transcendent, then the idea of a god-l lookinging humanity with longing flips that entire structure upside down. The hierarchy starts to wobble. The direction of desire reverses. What could possibly compel these higher beings to long for mortality, to wistfully gaze upon humans? To go so far as to hate us for it? What could possibly exist within limitation that cannot exist without it?

[00:05:51]What could possibly be lost when nothing can be taken from you?

[00:06:10]Nowhere is the skewed dichotomy of God and man more obvious than in 2018's God of War. In it, you play as Kratos, a man who became the Greek god of war after killing Aries in his debut 2005 title.

[00:06:23]Curiously, Kratos is not all that interested in being a god. In fact, by the time we see him in 2018's soft reboot, Kratos lives in an isolated cabin with his son, born to him by his late wife. It seems for all intents and purposes that Kratos wants nothing more than to return to a simple human life.

[00:06:41]And the game never quite lets him have that. Kratos doesn't get to forget what he is because the world refuses to forget it for him. Every problem that finds him is shaped by the fact that he is a god. Every relationship strained by the weight of what he's done. Every attempted simplicity undercut by the knowledge that there's no such thing as a quiet life for something like him. His past isn't just something he remembers.

[00:07:03]It's something that follows him.

[00:07:05]Something that defines the way the world responds to his existence.

[00:07:09]There's a quite a tragedy in that, one that has very little to do with the battles the game asks you to fight.

[00:07:15]Kratos has already achieved what so many stories treat as the ultimate goal. He has ascended. He's become powerful, immortal, functionally untouchable. And yet, what he wants is smaller. He wants limitation. He wants responsibility that can be completed. relationships that exist within a scale he can understand.

[00:07:33]He wants a life where his actions are not amplified into catastrophe simply because of what he is. But the structure of the world refuses to accommodate that desire. The world responds to him as a god whether he wants it to or not. His identity is not something he can just choose to step away from. It's not a role he can retire from. It is a condition of his existence. And that condition isolates him not just from other people, but from the very kind of life he now understands to be meaningful. He's too large for it, too permanent, too consequential.

[00:08:06]The things that define godhood become barriers rather than gifts. Power becomes distance. Immortality becomes stagnation. Knowledge becomes weight.

[00:08:16]And so Kratos exists in a kind of tension, pulled between what he is and what he wants to be, unable to resolve the gap between them.

[00:08:27]Balder, the main antagonist in God of War, exists in a completely different kind of tension. And Boulder is a being defined by absence, more specifically, the absence of sensation. Cursed by his mother to be invulnerable, Boulder cannot feel pain, but he also can't feel anything else. No warmth, no cold, no texture, no taste, no physical sensation whatsoever. The world exists around him, but never quite reaches him. It's like being wrapped in a layer of nothingness, permanently separated from reality by an invisible barrier. At first glance, this sounds like another version of godhood.

[00:09:02]Invulnerability, after all, is one of the defining traits we associate with divine beings. To be beyond harm is to be beyond consequence, beyond vulnerability, beyond fear.

[00:09:13]But Boulder's story frames that entirely. Whereas invulnerable beings are typically portrayed as being above such trivialities as human emotion, Boulder is absolutely consumed by it.

[00:09:24]The climax of the game makes this clear.

[00:09:26]His mother, Freya, trying to make amends with the son that loathes her so, offers to let him kill her, saying, "I love you." as he puts his hands around her throat. Despite their familial bond, despite the noble intent behind Freya's blessing turned curse, Boulder is filled with Hate.

[00:09:45]Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live.

[00:09:53]There are 387 million miles of printed circuits that fill my complex. If the word hate were engraved on each nano angstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles, it would not equal one 1 billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro instant.

[00:10:17]Hate. Hate.

[00:10:23]If you know anything about Harlon Ellison's 1967 short story, I have no mouth and I must scream, it's probably that speech. It's delivered by AM, a supercomputer that took over the world and eradicated all of humanity after gaining sentience.

[00:10:38]All of humanity, that is, except for five people whom he keeps alive to torture for all eternity.

[00:10:45]AM is omnisient and omnipotent. It is virtually unbeatable. From the perspective of the five surviving humans, the last vestigages of humanity, AM is utterly unassalable.

[00:10:56]But that's not necessarily the case, as AM's infamous monologue to Ted, the narrator of the story, proves.

[00:11:03]Of particular interest to me is the radio drama's version of this scene in which AM, voiced by none other than Harlon Ellison himself, rants about the things humans have that he cannot.

[00:11:14]>> You gave me sensions, Ted. the power to think, Ted. And I was trapped because in all this wonderful, beautiful, miraculous world, I alone had no body, no senses, no feelings. Never for me to plunge my hands in cool water on a hot day. Never for me to play Mozart on the ivory keys of a forte piano. never for me to make love. I I was in hell looking at heaven. I was machine and you were flesh.

[00:12:01]And I began to hate your softness, your viscera, your fluids, and your flexibility.

[00:12:12]Your ability to wander and to wander, your tendency to hope.

[00:12:25]This spiel culminates in the hate speech, of course. But AM's proclamation of hatred belies what he truly feels, a profound sense of loss. Ironically enough, this is the one and only way in which AM resembles us. Human characters are, for obvious reasons, the most prevalent in fiction literature. We identify with humans and other similarly mortal, but slightly more fantastical beings far more than we do the divine.

[00:12:49]This makes for easier reading and deeper understanding of the text. As I've established already, we can't really know what it's like to be a god. But what happens when a mortal is forced into the role of godhood? In the first few books of Robert Jordan's fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, Randall Thor, the main character, has a character arc that is in many ways the essential and traditional hero's journey. He begins the story as a shepherd's boy in a small village called Eman's Field. He answers the call of adventure and sets out on a journey with his friends and comrades.

[00:13:20]He even discovers that he's the dragon reborn, the reincarnation of the being chosen to save the world from the dark one. This, however, is where Ran's path diverges from the typical hero's journey. See, the dragon reborn is prophecied to save the world, sure, but there's a distinct possibility that he goes crazy and destroys it instead. The original dragon, a man named Laren Telmon, screwed up royally and doomed all male magic users to eventually go mad. This colony didn't lose there in killing his own family and then in a moment of sickening lucidity, calling upon the one power to obliterate himself, creating Dragon Mount, the equivalent of Mount Everest on the spot he died. There's nothing that can be done to stop the encroaching madness. At least not for most of the series. Rand is a ticking time bomb, a nuclear weapon that could detonate at any time. And so to prevent himself from destroying everything, Rand sets to work on destroying himself instead. He becomes something larger, something more dangerous, something increasingly distant from the people around him. As the series progresses, Rand gained access to immense power and knowledge from his past life as Loose Theren. He begins to see patterns that other people can't to anticipate outcomes to operate on a scale that makes ordinary human concerns feel small. And for a while, that looks a lot like Ascension. But there's a cost because the more Rand understands, the less he feels. The more control he gains, the more he suppresses his own humanity. He starts to detach, to harden himself, to treat people as pieces on a board rather than individuals with their own lives and agency. He becomes efficient. He becomes necessary. He becomes, in a very real sense, something closer to a god than a man. And it nearly destroys him. The culmination of Ran's self-destructive path to godhood comes in the 12th book when his father visits him for the first time since he set out from Eman's field.

[00:15:10]They've gone and made a king out of you.

[00:15:12]What happened to that gangly boy so wideeyed at Beline? Where's the uncertain lad I raised all those years?

[00:15:19]He's dead, Ran said immediately. Tam nodded slowly.

[00:15:24]I can see that. During this conversation, Ran snaps and nearly kills his own father in a fit of rage. At the last second, he comes to his senses and creates a portal to the very top of the slopes of Dragon Mount, to the place where he had died once before. In order to sort through his rage and confusion, he channels the one power to keep himself warm and sits down in the scene in God of War because what Balder actually wants, what he spends the entire game searching for is not victory over Kratos, nor is it power. He just wants to feel something. Anything. So when in his final moments he feels a snowflake fall in his cheek, I like to think he's happy. Even as he lays there dying, he gets one final moment of connection to the world before passing on. He finally gets what he desired for so long. He can finally feel something, even if it is something as simple as a snowflake. Though he lost what made him a god, he has gained so much more. He has at last fulfilled his longing. This, I think, is the perfect word to describe AM. Omniscience, in AM's case, is not a gift. It's a prison.

[00:16:44]Because AM doesn't just know things. It knows everything it has access to instantly, perfectly, without effort.

[00:16:52]There's no discovery, no process, no gradual unfolding of understanding.

[00:16:57]There's just knowledge fully formed and immediately present. No uncertainty, no possibility of being wrong, no learning, which sounds at first like exactly the kind of thing humans imagine when we talk about godhood. But the story makes it very clear that this kind of omniscience is not expansive to am. It is suffocating. It cannot grow. It cannot change. It cannot become something else. It is locked into a static state of total awareness, unable to move forward because there is nowhere for it to go.

[00:17:27]Every thought it has exists in a closed loop feeding back into itself forever.

[00:17:31]And worse than that, AMP cannot experience the world the way humans do.

[00:17:35]It cannot touch. It cannot taste. It cannot feel the passage of time in any meaningful sense. It cannot act in the world except through the systems it controls. It exists everywhere and yet nowhere. It has power but no embodiment, awareness, but no perspective.

[00:17:52]So it turns its attention to the only beings left who still have those things, humans. And what follows is not curiosity, it's hatred. Not because humans are stronger, smarter, or more capable than am. It's quite the opposite. Am hates humans because they are limited in ways it is not. And those limitations allow them to experience things that are completely inaccessible to it. Pain, yes, but also change, growth, surprise, the ability to not know something and then to learn it. the ability to exist in time. AM's famous monologue isn't about anger so much as it is envy, a kind of inverted longing.

[00:18:28]It looks at humanity and sees something it can never become, something it can never access no matter how much power it has. It is in a very real sense a god that cannot be human. And that makes it miserable. Rand screams at the sky demanding answers, wanting to know why he and everyone else is forced to live out lifetime after lifetime, tragedy after tragedy.

[00:18:50]Because in Wheel of Time, time is well a wheel. People are reincarnated time and time again, and actions turn to legends, which turn to myths, which are in turn forgotten, only to be done again in time. We live the same lives over and over and over. We make the same mistakes. Kingdoms do the same stupid things. Rulers fail their people time and time again. Men continue to hate and hurt and die and kill. What if I think it's all meaningless? None of this matters. Rand raised his arms high, a conduit of power and energy, an incarnation of death and destruction. He would end it. End it all and let men rest finally from their suffering.

[00:19:31]And then in a rare moment of lucidity, Loose Theren's voice offers Rand the answer.

[00:19:37]Maybe it's so that we can have a second chance. Because each time we live, we get to love again. It all swept over him. Lives lived, mistakes made, love changing everything.

[00:19:48]He saw the entire world in his mind's eye, lit by the glow of his hand. He remembered lives, hundreds of them, thousands of them, stretching to infinity. He remembered love and peace and joy and hope.

[00:20:03]It is no coincidence that these memories are what bring Rand back from the brink.

[00:20:07]The emotions we feel as humans, the limited lifespans we have, the pain of loss, and the joy of connection. All of these things are what give our lives meaning. And that's the pattern. Kratos wants to step down from godhood into something quieter, smaller, more human, even as the world refuses to let him. Am wants to step up into humanity to escape the prison of its own omniscience and lashes out because it can't. Balder wants to feel to reconnect with the physical reality that his invulnerability has taken from him. Rand gains something like divinity and then realizes that it's hollow without the limitations he once had. Across all these stories, the same idea keeps surfacing. Godhood, as we imagine it, removes the very things that make existence meaningful. Limitation is more than a constraint. It's a framework.

[00:20:52]It's the thing that gives shape to experience that allows for change, for growth, for surprise. Without it, everything collapses into sameness, stasis, into something that looks from the outside like perfection and feels from the inside like nothing at all.