Divine Realms

Theological cosmologists, dating back to the influential Drankorian work On the Classification of Divinity, have distinguished between Embodied Gods, powerful celestial beings with an embodied physical manifestation, and Incorporeal Gods, spiritual essences spun out of the divine power of creation itself. Current theological understanding, as represented in the Standard Multiversal Model, suggests that these distinctions are critical for probing the nature of the divine realms.

The Embodied Gods, as even a cursory knowledge of the theology of any of the Elder Folk reveals, must have some extraplanar locus of their power, independent from the Divine Presence. All have heard the stories of dwarves traveling to the divine locus of the Bahrazel, which they call the Heart of the Mountain; or the tales of the strange powers of ancestral memory the halflings possess from being able to access the divine locus of the First Ones. These extraplanar places, the homes of the Embodied Gods, are referred to as the Divine Realms in the Standard Multiversal Model.

The nature of the Incorporeal Gods, however, has long been a puzzle and matter of contention about theologians and philosophers. The current theological consensus, at least among scholars of the Eight Divines, suggests that Incorporeal Gods are best though of as manifestations of the Divine Presence itself, with memory and an independent mind and power, but located within the nexus of the Plane of Creation itself. Indeed, the famous first stanza of the ancient Mos Numenan lyrical poem, “Blossom of the Eightfold Light,” hints at the connected nature of the Divine Realm with the Plane of Creation:

Not sundered, nor a realm apart, but rising,
Rooted in light, yet swayed by unseen currents,
A bloom upon Creation’s heart unfolding,
Ever in flower.

Whether theologians of the most prominent other human religion, the Five Siblings of the Dunmari, agree, is unknown, as the Dunmari Mystai do not share their secret knowledge with outsides.