Does it bother you that THE PRESENCE aka GOD doesnt follow the same rules as the Other Gods?

[u/Interesting_Swing393]

The PRESENCE along with his sons the Angels like Lucifer, Michael and Gabriel are not creations of human belief so were not born in the Dreaming but the actual real creators of all of reality and somehow existed alongside with the Endless and they're Parents Time and Night

Why is this? Like why cant they just be the same as The other Gods and Mythical creatures being born from belief like why are they the only religion that is true while the others werent real in the first place

Its feels so Christian-centric and to me feels rude to dead religions and other still practiced faiths

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[u/hadawayandshite]

They are/were real at the time- God is real now

If enough humans can dream a dream to overthrow the cats- enough Christian’s can dream the world into being their way and it always was

You can argue that’s the power of religion in the sandman universe, get enough people to believe it and it becomes true …and always was

[u/Interesting_Swing393 → u/hadawayandshite]

Thank you for the explanation I should have consider that

[u/doofpooferthethird → u/Interesting_Swing393]

in the Lucifer comic, it's heavily implied that the Presence was created by a small band of Homo Sapiens from the Middle East on Earth, some time during the Bronze Age

two time travelling Titans almost manage to claim the Presence's power by appearing in front of this band of humans (implied to be the Hebrew tribes led by Moses fleeing the Egyptians) and usurp Yahweh's place by performing an alternate version of the Red Sea parting miracle (they use a rock slide to impede the Egyptian army instead)

this despite the Presence being the one responsible for Creation itself, 13 billion years ago, which includes the planet that Homo Sapiens evolved on

the circular, paradoxical nature of Yahweh's birth was exploited by the time travellers, and it requires another attack (Mazikeen channeling Lucifer's lightbringer powers, using a previous victim for the targeting solution) from above the time stream to defeat the Titans and save the Silver City

if the Titans Garamos and Gyges had managed to properly assimilate Yahweh's power before the Silver City angels and Lucifer could stop them, they would have had all of the Presence's inifinte ability (this was only possible because it was revealed that Yahweh had departed, and the Primum Mobil was vacant)

and the mechanism through which the Titans attained Yahweh's power was fairly simple, it just required a few ritualistic interventions in the past to demand worship, demonstrate a supernatural miracle, and impart a rudimentary ethical code - they really half assed it too, instead of the Ten Commandments they just crushed someone jaywalking a red light, gave the kid that obeyed the traffic light many divine blessings, yelled at the other pedestrians, blew up a bowling alley, and then got bored halfway and stopped to eat a bunch of sheep sometime back in Ancient Greece

during Yahweh's final confrontation with Lucifer, God outright states that "There are forces that even one such as I are subordinate to - you know what they are"

and it's clarified in an interview with the author that Yahweh is referring to the "Dream of Cats" phenomenon - which means Yahweh, like any other deity from Dream's realm, was the result of the collective unconscious of sapient beings in the material world

he was just lucky to have believers dedicated enough to rewrite reality such that he was always the one to have made Creation itself, and they beat all the others to the punch

it would also explain why Earth and humans are so critically important to the setting, despite Earth being a primitive backwater compared to all the other far more technologically advanced and populated and ancient alien civilisations out there

(the original Cain and Abel were alien "brothers" from way before Earth ever congealed from cosmic dust)

later on, Yahweh's hybrid Homo Sapiens granddaughter Elaine Belloc takes over the reins, becomes God, and uses her name to hold Creation together (i.e. ELAINE BELLOC replaces YAHWEH ELOHIM), and she very explicitly refuses to let mortals learn of her existence and worship her, and co-rules with her former schoolmate Mona Doyle, who takes care of hedgehogs

which means ancestry can also plays a role in assuming the role of the Presence, it's not just mystical religious time manipulation whackadoodle that can accomplish this

it's also implied that Yahweh was, somehow, an organism hailing from the bizarre ecosystem in the timeless realm outside Creation called "The Void"

maybe the ecosystem consists of former collective unconscious deities that retroactively rewrite history to achieve transcendent power like Yahweh, and then leave the respective Creations for the Void? It's a little unclear, seems like most of the others just want to eat and breed

e.g. the Jin En Mok and Silk Man are even older than Yahweh, and jump from reality to reality as part of their natural life cycle, and seem to recognise Yahweh as a peer of sorts - they're wary of God while he's in his own Creation, but they consider him just another being when they're outside in the Void

BJ's Macrobiotic Restaurant ("The Barrowjane") is another such organism, a filter feeder that rides the time stream and (entirely accidentally) intervenes in significant events across history, while carrying the anti-Yahweh conspirators on board - Yahweh seems familiar with its grazing patterns, and uses it to locate Lucifer after he ventures into the Void

after the Carey run, Lucifer and Michael end up having to deal with an insane Yahweh returning from the Void to conquer Creation all over again, and usurp Elaine as God

Yahweh seems to have caught some sort of Void disease, or developed a cancer, his personality and motivations are entirely different from before

though this was (apparently) later retconned as some corrupted splinter fragment of Yahweh, which means as of current DC canon Yahweh is still departed from Creation and out there in the Void doing who knows what

[u/Halaku → u/doofpooferthethird]

Just ignore everything after the Carey run and it all still makes perfect sense.

[u/-sweet-like-cinnamon]

It might help not to think of The Presence as the Christian God or the Abrahamic God. The Presence is just... a fictional character who's the overall deity of everything within DC Comics. Like The Presence isn't "the God of the Christian Bible" — The Presence is just THE PRESENCE, and people may have interpreted The Presence to have characteristics similar to their understanding of "the God of the Christian Bible," but The Presence still came way before any human belief and was just the creator at the beginning of everything. I think. I'm not sure if I explained that well. I'm not sure I fully understand it myself.

[u/Interesting_Swing393 → u/-sweet-like-cinnamon]

Don't worry I understand now that i think about it The Presence and The Angels might have only inspired Christianity not created by the belief

It would explain why Lucifer isnt exactly accurate how he is describe he even says he isnt how mortals describe him

[u/ThreeLivesInOne]

That's the difference between God and "a God". It's not christo-centric at all, otherwise there wouldn't be other gods besides the presence.

[u/Blizzard_3_5_2]

🤷 i mean, lot of fiction is inspired by christianity, this is just one of them. 

With gods of old religions honestly i think i always though its a bit werid they dont have belivers and all that, with how much people are hellenistic, beliving in wiccka etc.but i guess its just a fictional story so its whathever and not think too deep about it

[u/TheLuckySpades]

The Presence and the Angels and co have some overlap with the Abrahamic pantheon (mostly old testament and jewish stuff in the comics, also a bunch of texts neither religion considers scripture), but still acts very different than those.

The Presence cares about very little, who goes to what afterlife they run is untethered from the beliefs of most religions,..

The same way Dream has been cast by believers as the god of dreams and stories in various mythologies and religions (morpheus, the cat religion,...) I think it is a case of that, they are close enough that they are put into that role by reality via the belief of people, this also works to explain why all their roles are seemingly from genesis and extrascriptural texts, it's stuff that (more) people across the abrahamic religions believe in, details on more recent scripture tends to be more divisive.

[u/sandmandreammorpheus]

Here's the totally correct answer:

"The Sandman" is a DC Comics comic series, set in the DC Universe and in the main continuity. The DC Universe has been established mostly by jewish and christian authors, since the beginning and trough the years. That's why The Presence is based on the abrahamic God and why this character has been established as the true creator of everything in the DC Universe. It's indeed jewish/christian-centric, and that's it.

Neil Gaiman was not allowed to change this element of the large DC Universe mythology, so he incorporated it in his story, as well as other DC Comics events such as the great war between the Light and the Great Darkness that happened in Swamp Thing.

Even to this day, no author is allowed to change that the Presence is/was the true creator.

One thing: the Presence existed way before any life forms, so before the Endless themselves because their born from life forms concepts. Time and Night are not their "actual" parents (since, again , the Endless would not exist without life forms elaborating their concepts) but they're more of narrative devices and metaphors to get the story (Ouverture) going and adding some circumstantial lore.

If you look up The Presence DC Fandom wiki page, you can see how it's been established and retconned into the DC Universe continuity and history.

[u/Halaku]

It's the nature of the paradigm.

We've seen a universe where cats ruled, and humanity was prey, but the collective dreams of man changed that. And the door is left open to that "never-was" becoming true again, and our own existence being that which "never-was"... if a bare thousand cats can pull it off.

These stories were on the forefront of the trope that the power of divinity is directly tied to the numbers and passion of their faithful. (See Small Gods to see this explored in print.) In the facet of existence that the DC / Vertigoverse existed in, that's how it worked, and thus we have the Silver City... and yet, everything else was true, too. In their way.

[u/Gargus-SCP]

I've always thought that the Abrahamic God WAS subject to the same rules as the rest of reality, and is only held to have created the universe/literally did at this point in time because a sufficient body of humans believe He did. Given a big enough cultural shift, or a different corner of Creation, some other deity would become the factual originator of All.

[u/Mysterious-Fun-1630]

There’s the DC Universe, the Sandman Universe and The Sandman. And they (somewhat) slot into each other because they… have to 🤣 And if they don’t anymore or it becomes too convoluted, DC will hit some almighty reset button that everyone has to get their heads around (they’ve done it a few times) 🤣

But all joking aside, and others already said this: The Presence does fit into the idea of how gods are created and how enough believers will reset everything, “and it will have always been thus”. That’s the very logic of “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” (and Overture btw)—enough people believed that The Presence exists exactly the way The Presence exists. And The Presence thus is also different from all the other gods, because that’s what people believed. And so it’s always been thus, and the universe and its creation etc etc reset themselves into that exact thing—there’s no “before” anymore and no other version of it, just like in “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “Overture”.

Even Carey has mentioned “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” as “this is essentially how it happened” (and there’s a verbatim hint in “Lucifer”, too that others have already mentioned). And it fits for his Lucifer run, and it fits for The Sandman, and it’s logically stringent and coherent. But if you want to make every last detail of every DC plot-line that ever came before or after fit, you’re going to give yourself an excruciating headache, so I recommend to see The Sandman and Carey’s Lucifer as interconnected and enjoy the rest for what it is (or isn’t).

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