Since I'm doing the Age of Stars Ending, it seems fitting to pose as a Nox. Come to think of it "Age of Stars" is a HORRIFYING premise for how whimsical it sounds, when you remember that Astel was a star. A corrupted star, but a star all the same <_< I don't know if it's actually a good ending. Without the greater will, the other outer gods can do what they want. And the thing is... all of them except the Greater Will deal EXCLUSIVELY in entropy... corruption and destruction of things that already exist. Only the Greater Will has the power to both create and order life. Say what you want about the Greater Will, but it's the only one that cares to keep the actual advancement of life in this otherwise overtly entropic universe. It seems like a giant ego, in human terms. But I don't think it actually has the morals to constitute a unified ego. None of the outer gods seem to. All of their wills are singular, almost non-sentiently unwavering. As in, I don't sense any unifying body of morals behind what any of them do. It's more like a duty, or instinctual compulsion. Regardless, it's basically got a mycelial hold on the Lands Between, keeping other infections out through its dominance over the life resources that all of the other gods are drawn to instinctively. All of them are trying to shake-out the Greater Will's present order for that reason. All of them are gathering followers, seizing power over aspects of both nature and societies coping with it. Because like it, they have a compulsion to meet any and all existing life with whatever unchanging concepts define their wills.
The Elden Ring is many things, but first and foremost, it keeps the majority of life born of the lands between divided into hierarchical categories. When the Greater Will came to the lands between in the form of the Elden Beast, it penetrated and divided the One Great, a singularity of homogeneous life born directly of the Lands Between, as the Elden Ring in its first form. Think of the Eucharist... God, the father, son, and holy ghost - three discreet aspects of one unified deity. The Greater Will is the father above, the Elden Beast is the son who walks the earth as 'acting father-god,' and the Elden Ring that the son gives up his living body to become is like the holy ghost... the general, all-reaching, permeative 'presence' of the god that these things all constitute.
What makes this confusing is that it sometimes seems like there was already life in the Lands Between before this. The Greater Will is sometimes implied to be the originator of all life forms, but countless other examples show that to be something the Greater Will only wants everyone to think, literally burying said evidence much of the time. Non-Elden-Ring-derived life predating its ages of different orders seems to have come from other places in the cosmos and served outer gods already present. Even in the time we arrive, the offspring of these races are still existing somewhat outside of, if not wholly contrary to the golden order that commands control of life bound to the ring. It is the beginning of all life OF but not IN the Lands Between, because there is a cosmos, from which outside life forms can and have entered. The other gods were likely drawn to the life held in the Lands Between as The One Great, and sent their follower life forms through the cosmos to try and contact it long before the GW arrived, same as the GW itself.
It gets hard to work out the timeline at this point in the game's past. But we do know from the existence of things such as glintstone star energy and cosmic collisions that the stuff needed for life exists all over the cosmos. And in fact there is evidence of outer gods and more beastly races that predate the arrival of the Greater Will, let alone the Greattree, or the damaged form it later took around the time when the dragons lost their order and gods to unexplained cataclysmic events, around when the Crucible era would've begun.
The One Great, I like to think of as something akin to... the energy of a planet's core. You could say the Lands Between itself, before the reign of the Greater Will, was like a life form of its own. Rather than a planet with life on it, the planet that the Lands Between is analogous to WAS alive, was the birthing cradle for life itself. In depictions of the tree, it is always growing from a bent crescent shape, a cradle. With the arrival of the GW's Elden Beast, a seed was planted to tap that and dominate it, in a sense. The Elden Ring links the One Great to the Greater Will, allows it to tap into that pure power and disperse it, impart order on it.
This fact actually shows the Greater Will kind of being on its own plane of power - it renders the time of these more ancient races and outer gods instantly primordial by comparison to what it quickly enacts for reality. IIRC, the GW is the very progenitor of intelligence for the original beast races. I don't think the title of "Greater Will" is exaggerated at all. The level of influence it gains over corporeal matters, and the ways it does so, are far beyond what you see with the so-called 'other' outer gods. These abilities mark it as a distinctly different entity from any other entity in (or in this case, beyond) the cosmos. Creating a thing like the Elden Beast is extraordinary... ...it's a living creature rather transparently composed of stars, sent in a great golden star. It's like the Greater Will created a living sun and shot it at the Lands Between's "Earth." We're talkin SERIOUS life-wrangling and growth-spurring abilities. It transcends the limits of outer godhood. The greater will becomes fully real, and imposes a new framework on the reality of life much more directly, forcefully, and comprehensively. When you think about all of the crazy things other outer gods do, it all pales in comparison to that level of corporeal propulsion.
It appears that the Elden Ring evolves each time one order dies and a new one arises. It mirrors the Greattree becoming the Crucible, and then becoming the Erdtree. They are the physical embodiments of the Elden Ring as it exists in their respective times, the nature of the link between the greater will and the corporeal. The runes of the Elden Ring itself, and depictions from different eras, always show it resembling a tree in different conditions and stages of growth. The runes of the Elden Ring overlay the depictions of tree differently, in different carvings of a few distinct transitions the physical tree itself (greattree, crucible, and erdtree are ALL the same tree) underwent across different periods. It represents the gradual diversification/refinement of life and civilization and is allegorical to our own world's history, and IMO, evolution (as well as the fundamental conflict that whole dynamic thrives on.) It is an instrumental force when it comes to life in the Lands Between.
What's really interesting to me, is that while the Golden Order is very Abrahamic in visage, the Greater Will more embodies Darwinian forces, or something like a Kami of Japanese mythos. I don't have enough time to discuss why, but it may come out a bit in what I write below.
At the time of the game, the Golden Order is crumbling, and because of that we see ancient, pre-fucking-Azula outer gods like the God of Rot taking over much more than it would've been able to during the pinnacle of the order's age, along with the suuuuupppeeerrr ancient deathbirds coming to claim those living in death. We see the abandoned tarnished previously guided by grace, now enthralled by the grandiose machinations of Mohg, Lord of Blood - the omen demigod champion of the Formless Mother... the outer goddess(?) of eternal goddamned bloodshed and wounding, a truly primeval entity. Bro's got a follower intercepting tarnished the moment they pop out from Fringefolk Hero's Grave, to ultimately guide them to Rose Church, to aid him in essentially infiltrating/ursurping the Golden Order and ushering in an age of unceasing bloodshed. Stars and meteors crash to the ground, bringing with them great beasts, beasts of whom threaten the existence of entire regions with their calamitous power, as well as birthing strange magics and cults. Radahn had to halt the stars to stop the destruction as well as stall Ranni's great, disruptive fate... and had to contain a beast in Sellia. The order's most golden, most beloved god's soul was killed, his still-living body overtaken by the outer god of death, who now permeates the root networks of the erdtree to steal the life force of buried followers of the erdtree. Post shattering, nearly all of its vassal gods are dead (world-shattering truth, previously believed impossible,) lost astray or otherwise corrupted.
The Golden Order does not have the power to hold it all back anymore. It never really did. The GW just created an order that choked out the influence that would spread the power of great entropic forces, exactly as mycelium does to the ingress of bacteria, molds and other microbial scavengers... they can't penetrate the networks. Only through symbiosis are other species allowed to share a spot with it - the Golden Order, for all of it's hegemonic dogma, did tend to quietly accept the influence of outer gods, so long as it served their order well. The shattering severed the influence it needed to string up such a massive ordering of forces. When mycelium is damaged significantly enough, other scavenger species CAN begin to overtake and kill the mycelium. Some have even adapted poisons or special digestive mechanisms that take advantage of the networks themselves.
Like... for all that the greater will cares, you could side with the god of pestilence and curses, take up the mantle of the dung eater and ascend to elden lord, mending the elden ring as the lord of curses. If your order of pestilence is able to fully dominate the lands between as Godfrey's might once did when he was still known as Hoarah Loux, then the hegemony of the greater will remains secure and it will bless a new order with new gods. Worth noting... HL's strength and love of bloodshed/conquering at that time was of the Formless Mother, aforementioned outer god of such things, and the greater will simply made him take on power that suppressed his beastial ways when he became the much more civil, family-oriented Godfrey, First Elden Lord. The omen curse of another outer god was considered a divine thing before the Golden Order arose to mark the end for the Crucible. The misbegotten were similarly not reviled or enslaved. Both were core parts of the previous order, only to be discarded by the next. The pestilence-dominated lands between just becomes the substrate for yet another revolutionary order, channeled by a new form of the Elden Ring. The Golden Order will be just another chain in the prehistorically long lineage of life within the Lands Between, not unlike the order of the Crucible era, or the ancient order of the dragons before it.
I mean, the actual, but unofficial first elden lord was a damned dragon (their god was the first being chosen to wield the power of the greater will and its elden ring in the age of Farum Azula) and it was a VERY different world, much more like dinosaur times, or the very earliest times of proto-human species, when beast first became man. The greater will can be more flexible than you would think. From everything I've seen in this game, it basically just seeks to take whatever is going on, and arrange it into A stasis. The type of stasis is less of a concern. It is basically the outer god of life and order... and it just so happens to be much more powerful and cunning than most others, orchestrating even the roles of other outer gods in the whole equation. Whatever EITHER preserves the current status quo, or progresses the stage of the living world into its next stable phase, works for the Greater Will.
The outer gods WE see are ALL just scavengers when you break down what they actually do, what they seek. None of them create anything on their own, and creep in wherever destruction is possible like water through cracked concrete. This was why The Golden Order put a chokehold on death itself. The law of regression that the sealing of death enabled, sees that all dead and loyal followers of the order physically return to the Erdtree, where all of that diverse life is combined and then split anew. I'm guessing this was a response to the chaos and decay introduced in the crucible era, the uprising of more primordially brutal and Dionysian forces. The regressive system of the Golden Order leaves as few openings for outer gods to meddle as possible. It acts as a filter, keeping all things 'corrupted' by outer forces, confined beyond its own systems.
It also condemns the Nox to live eternally underground, under a false night sky. It suppresses, cripples and shackles the Carian diaspora. It curses the once-cursed fire giants a second time, condemning the last of their kind to keep and contain the flame capable of burning all eternally. And in doing so, through genocide carried out by its vassal-god, Marika, the GW pauses the work of the outer god of chaos. Actually... not all of the other giants were destroyed. If you look at the giant troll enemies scattered about, they've been gutted. That face in the belly of the fire giants ties them to the curse of the eternal flame, bestowed by the outer god of chaos. The tell is in the cursed eye of chaos the face has. So it seems many had that forcibly and brutishly removed, leaving the only remaining giants as the aimless husks we see as big, dumb, angry trolls. Some of those gutted trolls even use fire giant magic - they still remember that much. If I'm not mistaken, there's a runic stone tablet covered in roots, similar to Margit's Shackle in their chests, symbolizing the Greater Will's control over them.
Point is... mycelium have a tendency to sterilize what they eat - systematically control the biomass they target. They leave no accessible resources, no basic environmental conditions for those life forms to take hold. They monopolize. The Greater Will wins its battles by stealing all of the footing, by altering the very arena itself to suit it. Under this analogy, the events of the shattering broke the very platform the Greater Will stood on, depriving its order of function and creating a bunch of smaller platforms for other wills to mount and roost on.
Goldmask was dead right about the Golden Order though. It HAD made a mistake. It's mistake was also the greater will's mistake. It all has to do with the selection of gods who were to bring about the order that would express the power of the greater will. This chain has a fundamental weakness. Marika was born a mortal, of the Numen race. She's not a natural demigod, born of a singular purpose to enact the will. As such, neither she, nor her children were immune to the influence of the outer gods. It was by choice that she served the greater will. It is seen that in the beginning she was very optimistic and believed the order would bring splendor to all life. But the same traits that allow her to adopt that perspective, also make her equally susceptible to other influences. All gods operating directly in the mortal realm can be manipulated or simply corrupted by outer gods. Marika's AND Radagon's children were all born BOUND to other outer gods. In fact, this is a weakness that basically any god existing in the physical realm has. It's as though this is something fundamental to the nature of all souls. For the gods, it is also in their fundamental nature to serve outer gods as obelisks for their wills. A strong or clever enough outer god can sometimes find a way, willing participant or not. The same can be said of things created by physical, soulbound gods. All it takes is for any of them to realize it's up to them who they follow and link souls to, and the whole thing falls apart.
This weakness brought the outer gods into direct contact with the Greater Will's whole system for managing life born of the Lands Between and compromised the Elden Ring itself in a more dire way than ever in its history. Because of this, Marika's Golden Order could never attain the perfection of balance that their regressive system was not only built to evoke through its dogmatically moralistic filtering, but could only survive under. The plan was that none of the gods would even be able to die and Marika would be the supreme deity of the Golden Order, ruling over the lands between for all eternity and managing all life in perfect, forever-uninterrupted reincarnation-driven synchronization under which the Greater Will ultimately manages cycles of evolution according to its designs. Godfrey's not the first Elden Lord, ever. He's first in a line of Elden Lords of the now eternal Golden Order that supersedes all to the point of attempting to erase even their old form's histories from the very lexicon of time. It expects to continually evolve and need new lords to fit the ever changing state of its little self-manifested universe of imposed existential principles.
It's worth noting that outer gods in ER don't directly contact the world, for the most part. They more embody forces of nature and/or ideologies derived from causal tendencies in the corporeal realm. Those who follow them channel their power, and it is through the words and acts of these beings that their wills are made real. With enough loyalty, a higher bandwidth link is formed, and godlike powers can be manifested. It's incomprehensibly immense power, moving between the cracks of universes on a cosmic scale, like an extra-dimensional presence. It seems they require mortal beings', living wills to open doors into their reality. They are not physically connected to the more mundane realms in any way. They are connected to being with minds... or really souls. A being can lose their mind, with their soul connected to an outer god or comparable cosmic force. They sense the fundamental energy of souls and essentially enter reality through them. Further, if any of you recall from fighting the Elden Beast, the arena is an infinite horizon of rows of erdtrees connecting shallow water to stars... as though the Greater Will is linking endless universes through its Golden Order, and the Golden Order of the Lands Between is just one branch in an inter-dimensional network that constitutes an astronomically larger order spread across all existence. That's the scale that I believe these entities operate on... something almost beyond metaphysical... or at least hypercosmic. Wherever/whenever in existence there is life, the Greater Will, like the outer gods, is drawn. The outer gods are simultaneously as far away from all of mortal existence as possible, and right behind the veil - seemingly as an eternal constant. All that we can know about it from this game, is a tiny sliver of everything going on with these entities. It lets you know *only* that much.
IDK, it could come down to all of this moon stuff. I think the moon might be related to an unmentioned outer god.
But before I can talk about that, we gotta talk about humanoid races and cosmic power. In the academy's legacy, you have the ancient history of primeval sorcery... which is banned like necromancy is in standard high fiction. They were PURE researchers with no care for normal humanistic ethics or values. If not evil, they were intellectually outside the commonly prescribed genealogy of morals for life. Something resembling Nietzsche at his most radical (he essentially argued that right and wrong are not real or meaningful values - there was only good and bad, strong and weak.) They have the ethical scruples of supernovae. Sellen was one, and was banned for the atrocity of turning living, breathing, and most crucially unwitting sorcerers into the seeds of stars... those graven masses... the stitched-together balls of sorcerers' faces. That's good to her, because it furthers her research towards becoming a star. For this, the order pursues her as a criminal. Primeval founders Lusat and Azur lost their minds and organic forms in their pursuit of primeval sorcery, became living glintstone beings, permanently rooted to the primeval current, their bodies unable to move from where they lie. They look horrific, strewn out on the ground as rockmen in ornate robes, with bodies almost wholly overtaken by glintstone tumors save for human mouths laid agape, scarcely able to move or communicate, save to lower their frail hands in order to bestow upon you, their primeval sorceries. But I think for them, there's nothing better.
You have to wonder what they see, being plugged into the primeval current... this stream of cosmic energy. Perhaps they accept the state of their original bodies out of a lack of need from wherever they are perceptually. They do after all believe they are meant to return to the current. So for them, the loss of their earthly bodies symbolizes leaving a false existence and returning to their forgotten home. Like, do they even know or care that you are there? Do they sense you at all? Or do they divine through some advanced vantage over more general causality that they can simply know that right then is the moment to drop those spells into the world? Something they can foretell through their relationship with the stars perhaps? Sellen seems to think so... that they give you the spells is part of her believing you are part of her own celestial fate. It symbolizes your 'approval' by the primeval current.
Incidentally, all glintstone sorcerers will develop glintstone souls. Primeval sorcery, and the comparatively-defanged glintstone sorcery from which it is derived by the Carian family, are predicated on the notion that the glintstone drawn of the viewing of the primeval current is essentially the core power of the universe - the most basic unit of star power and life energy. Sellen holds this belief, and seems to consider what the academy thinks about harnessing it and following the moon to be foolishly blasphemous. In her mind, and the mind of all primeval sorcerers, you cannot harness that which is already a part of you. It's self-defeating to wish to contain the energy of glintstone. Lusat and Azur did some quantum entanglement shit when they glimpsed the current within the great void of the cosmos and bore witness to the deaths of countless stars... these impossibly, maddeningly grand celestial cataclysms unfolding before their very spiritual essence. It was made real for the lands between in those same moments, and glintstone was scattered across it for the first time. So they're not totally crazy. Nearly all of Raya Lucaria's sorcery is predicated on this event. Without it, there's no glintstone, or even knowledge of such a thing. The primeval sorcerers see themselves as the lost children of stars, waiting to return to the cosmos. Interestingly, glintstone seems to change everything around it to glintstone. The Carians of Rennala's ilk put the moon on equal footing with glintstone itself... they work with glintstone, but in a comparatively self-restricting manner. They do this out of the belief that the moon grants them the power to do that. They seem to believe they are on the path to conquer the stars. I can't help but wonder how all of this really comes to be without some great power involved, somewhere. It's implied that the current was once opened, and glintstone flowed. But it's also implied that it was closed. Sellen's goal as of the game is to re-open it, and it was Raya Lucaria that saw that and banished her for it. This makes me think maybe the Carians used moon-magic to close-off that link to the current, and have since worked to keep it that way.
I believe this was destined to occur when these mysterious forces revealed themselves to Rennala as a child - she saw that moon and learned what would become her moon sorcery... knowledge and power that would put her on a similar level to an actual demigod... powerful enough to be granted fingers by the Golden Order itself - a telephone to the Greater Will. It makes me think maybe it's the machination of an outer god sneaking in... or some living cosmic body, much like the stars. Perhaps the moons are to another god, what the Erdtree is to the Greater Will. Rennala and Ranni would be vassals to this entity's scheme, like Marika to the order. And this outer god wants hegemony over the stars... it needs vassals and followers who will elevate the status of its moons and cement its will to power in the corporeal realm. It needs people to believe that its moon is fully divine... as fundamental as glintstone itself is to the energy of all stars, that to serve the moon is to participate in the coming age of stars. You could say it has higher aspirations than the Greater Will, more cosmic. However, some of the goals of those who use it served the greater will when they closed off the primeval current once again. The endgame for opening a path to the primeval current basically turns everything to glintstone in the end, merges all of the lands between with the cosmos itself. No more domain for the greater will. It's a major threat.
With the golden erdtree... the order's immutable will to power was given that hegemony over life via war and genocide. All life resisted its Golden Order in the beginning. The greater will came in like the sun. A supposed outer god of the moon might prefer to hide in the shadow cast by that particular sun's imperfect glow (remember, the Golden Order IS imperfect.) Perhaps Rennala got piped-into the GW's program so they could keep tabs, keep her under their thumb... or fingers! If Ranni is made an empyrean and serves the order, it weakens whatever is behind the power hidden in the moons, while still allowing them to surpress the primeval revival that would undo everything without the order lifting a finger. Hence why Ranni had to sacrifice her empyrean body to return to her original fate. Rennala's ability to grant rebirth is also not really in line with the order. It ties in with the Nox. The embryonic larval tears required for rebirth are the cores of their Silver Tears, a creation of the Nox. The Amber Egg is of primordial origin as virtually all other things of amber hue are (this particular amber is like glintstone for primordial life energy from the Lands Between, rather than the stars.) It would usually be shunned by the golden order entirely. It's clearly arcane. Are they getting played by some weird moon god? Or are they playing a knowing game with it by allowing these things to carry on in relative containment? There's this theme of fate with Ranni's bunch especially. But all of these stargazers perceive some vague, zen-like fate in the stars. And perhaps they aren't wrong. But then... what or whom is guiding that fate, what forces *really* brought you to the lands between to enact that fate? It's almost like... okay... if the Golden Order is like a big corporation, the hypothetical "Moon God" is like a smaller corporation from another continent, that's been bought out by it and become a subsidiary. It's like a cosmic in-law who only speaks Mandarin, or something. I think that in truth, the moon god is of similar 'stature' to the Greater Will, but the bulk of its presence yet remains in a realm not unlike the one that seems to be universally dominated by the Greater Will, with its followers working to change that balance in favor of the moon.
Even weirder, the Moon Of Nokstella charm describes a dark moon lost by the Nox, a dark moon that guided many stars. So there is more than one moon, and one guided stars, whatever that means? Are they like conduits, lighthouses for cosmic entities? IS the dark moon even a moon at all? Or is it like a wormhole linking parts of the void surrounding the stars and current? It seems to me that that the Nox opened one when they summoned Astel to the underground and it destroyed one of their major cities. A dark moon that 'guides many stars' sounds like a black hole that sucks them in and poops them out closer to the Lands Between. I wonder if it was through the Nox's study of their dark moon that they learned to create the spell that basically teleported Astel to their home deeeep underground and caused a calamity. Is this dark moon what originally guided the Numen that would become the Nox to the Lands Between? Was Marika, originally a Numen becoming the vassal god of the Greater Will a form of infiltration? Again, man... it just feels like something has to be pulling the strings on all of it. Everything to do with the Nox and this moon shit feels like it came from an alternate universe. I suspect that their Dark Moon outer god is similar to the Greater Will in its not-like-other-gods qualities, and hides similarly rigid whims for all living under its rule. And again, the reason it is all so much more obscure is because it is outside of its own home plane of existence, trying to take over the Greater Will's bit by bit.
Stuff like this also makes me think much of the Nox's actions considered blasphemous by the Golden Order, were carried out in the name of the moon rather than the stars they outwardly claim... or whatever forces are behind it. If this is true, then the Golden Order would be suppressing whatever entity might be orchestrating it all like they would any other, maybe enough that none would so much as know of it by name. Perhaps this is related to how the Nox are able to do things usually only reserved for gods, such as creating a living substance that could be used to create a race like the albinurics (cursed, I suspect, by the golden order itself...) or forging a godslaying blade from a corpse, like the elden beast's sword, which it forged from the body of Radagon/Marika in its fight with us.
It's very suspicious that these post-Numen people have access to such arcane abilities. The Alabaster race might have some things to say about it, I'm thinking that has something to do with the 'black hole magic' as well. They seem to derive their power from a cosmic god of their own, but perhaps they are closer than they seem. And yet the Nox only claim to follow vague notions of 'the stars' or the 'dark moon.' I don't buy that this is all just allegory for secularism, to stand opposite to the the golden order's Abrahamic underpinnings. I think they serve a little more than ideas of freedom and self-determination on an existential level. It feels like propaganda compared to what their magic of black holes, puppetry, and arcane alchemy seem geared for. That it is antithetical to the philosophy of the Greater Will does not mean it isn't simply all of a different entity, one of perhaps few capable of standing toe-to-toe with the greater will itself. The question for me is whether the Nox realize they might serve the disruptive moon/being that Rennala and Ranni may also serve. The betrayal by Ranni, and their reaction makes me think not and that they worked together only where the goals of the moon and the stars of the primeval current did align. It just so happened that what befitted them returning to the stars, befitted Ranni's usurping of the order's grip, and beckoning of this moon-dominated celestial era for the LB. I kind of wonder if ANYONE involved sees an overminding entity potentially steering their movements. And then I start thinking about the arcane puppet magic that these same people like again lol. This game makes me feel schizophrenic. The more I think about the things I know, the more I feel like I just don't know anything.
Sometimes I think the primeval current itself is like an order of sentient stars analogous to the Golden Order of the Lands Between, governed by a greater outer god than even the greater will seeking a similar form of permeating dominion over forces and life, only it doesn't aspire for 'planets' like the Lands Between, but entire bodies of cosmos (universes essentially...) that all of this stuff blaspheming and sneakily challenging/manipulating the greater will is due to the pull of that force.
At any rate, a moon is clearly a huge source of power every time one is evoked in the lore. It's all pretty sketchy lol no matter what you try to make of it... and not very talked about in the game. I swear to god though... there's a fucking outer god hiding under the radar, and it's connected to The Nox, Rennala, Ranni, ancient sorcery, these moons that have existed across the history of the LB, and what they all want to accomplish. Is there perhaps an entity out there, that so terrified the Greater Will, that it sought to push its entire existence into absolute obscurity within the confines of its entire domain? Is it possible that like other outer gods to the greater will, the greater will simply lives where this even greater and notably more 'celestial' entity does not control?