I really like the way that Charles Stross deals with vampires in The Laundry Files.
in a world where doing magic using your brain leads to bits of your brains being eaten by demons until you die (I paraphrase somewhat to avoid spoilers) Vampires exist.
They must feed on human blood, but not daily, and they don’t need so much that it will kill the victim. They don’t create new vampires by feeding. But by feeding they set up a symbiotic link to the victims brain from the realm of magic and demons start eating their brain. But because of that, the Vampire can do ritual magic at a level far beyond most humans.
So Roger’s rules for negotiations are actually possible. While vampires are individually powerful a concerted group effort can take them out. So there is a balance of power which means that reasoning can take place.
Surely the whole man-god relationship in ancient times was based on negotiation? The gods wanted worship and sacrifices, the humans wanted rainfall, a good harvest, etc. Incidentally this acts as incentive to build a civilization, as each individual can’t offer the gods much (not even a hero of the Achaeans, say, once he’s a lone castaway on a beach) but a whole society has real leverage. (The same principle as mounting a class action lawsuit against a multinational company.)
It occurs to me that the God/gods are often open about eventually destroying the human race because they are going wipe out the world. If we knew this for sure I wonder how many people would take the deal and how many would want to fight the system or just have nothing to do with it.
I seem to recall finding a quote from one of the Old Testament prophets (Hosea maybe?) saying that people who look forward to the Day of Judgement are crazy.
I suspect they’d all still take the deal and hope the destruction happened to a later generation. Few people are seriously doing much about the climate crisis, after all. I have many friends who take multiple foreign holidays a year and run two cars. None of them is a climate change denier; they just can’t seem to relate what’s happening to their own inability to sacrifice to the gods – so to speak.
And then there are all the nutters who positively revel in apocalyptic predictions. (Actually, wasn’t that Jesus one of those?)
I don’t know. Tone is very important and there is no way to know how he announced that the end was coming ‘soon’ and a lot of people were going to look very silly.
There are plenty of people nowadays, especially the ones who believe in ‘the Rapture’, who look forward to the Day when they will prove to have been right all along.
I see the historical relationship with gods as one of authority-through-fear rather than negotiation. An early god is like an early king: he’s in charge because he’s in charge, and you do what he says or he’ll thump you. You can plead with him, but you have nothing to offer him that he can’t simply demand of you.
We do often have instances in Greek myth of worship that is explicitly framed as transactional - the mortal states what sacrifice he’ll make and what service he expects from the god in return. And the Romans would invite the gods of a beleaguered enemy to switch sides, which also suggests a mindset of negotiation rather than simple servitude. The god is of course vastly more powerful than the mortals, and could kill them by withholding rainfall, for example, but historically when that happened the priesthood fell and the people transferred their allegiance to another god. With a more immediately fatal disaster like a flood or plague the god can secure a lose-lose outcome, but that’s always risky when there’s a whole pantheon (or multiple pantheons) of other gods waiting to step in. A bit like telecoms contracts these days!
There’s lots of Roman transactional lead sheet ‘letters’ to various gods, or ‘votive altars’ erected as payment for the god keeping their part of the bargain.
“Hi Jupiter, if my wife recovers from her illness, I’ll sacrifice a bull in your honour.”
“Marcus Didius Falco fulfilled his vow and erected this altar to Neptune after his safe sea voyage to Britain.”
Transactional does make me wonder if poor people thought rich people got a better deal out of the Gods? Skint Severus can only afford to sacrifice a pigeon. Millionaire Maximus can erect a marble altar and sacrifice a bull. Do the gods like Maximus’s ‘payment’ better than Severus’s?
I suppose it explains why rich people have much better lives… they can afford to bribe the gods more often!
Certainly by the time Christianity comes along you get the “widow’s mite” (and the same thing applies in some but not all versions of modern magical thought, that the value of a sacrifice is in how much it hurts you, not in how expensive it was).
Which is a departure from the god-as-king view, because the king is not going to be impressed if you pay him one bent stick in tax and say “this is all I own”. (And nor is a priestly class.)
It is the duty of the poor to support and sustain the rich in their power and idleness. In doing so, they have to work before the laws’ majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
Anatole France, Le Lys Rouge [The Red Lily] (1894), ch. 7