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Sobre os deuses, esses quotes não são de nenhum mago, mas mostram uma visão sobre eles que alguns escritores de fantasia usaram e que pode ou não ser de interesse.
What do you think are the origins of the whole "gods are created by men and sustained by belief, they die when they are forgotten" theme or thread that I've seen cropping up in so many places? I'm asking you because, though similar lines of thought are pretty everywhere now, over time I've seen it repeated in your work. And Terry Pratchett's, but he doesn't have a neat website window where I can ask about it. When did you start working with the idea and why?
I don't know what the origins are, but it's a very venerable meme: it's implicit in places like Herodotus, when we learn that Great Pan is Dead, and the Greek and Roman writers who discuss why the age of miracles is over and if it ever existed at all, but it flowers in David Garnett's "The Twilight of the Gods and other Tales" (1888), James Branch Cabell's "Something About Eve" (1927), and in a great deal of Unknown type fiction in the late 30s and 40s, stories by people like Fredric Brown. I tend to think of it as one of those self-evident ideas where the actual historical observation (people make gods; the people are conquered or intermarry and those gods are abandoned and forgotten) can become a very solid metaphor for a lot of things as soon as you assume that the gods are real (and thus are created by men, and cease existing when they are no longer worshipped, etc.).
I started using it in Sandman, and during The Kindly Ones I realised that I could use it to say some interesting things that Sandman wasn't about... which turned into American Gods.
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Several people have pointed out that Lord Dunsany also wrote about gods dying when they were no longer believed in, and one person pointed out that so did Harlan Ellison in Deathbird Stories (although that one was already credited at the back of American Gods). I'm sure that lots more can be found. As I say, it's a pretty venerable meme, whic
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