The Sandman/Headscratchers

• In this series, all the world's gods and pantheons are the result of people creating the ideas of them and believing in them so much that the dreams get more powerful and become gods. The gods don't exist until people start believing in them. But 10,000 years ago, Morpheus sentenced Nada to suffer in Lucifer's Hell for all eternity, predating (Judeo-?)Christian ideas of the devil and hell by many thousand years. And The Creator (God) and The Silver City (Heaven, essentially) are consistently described differently from all the other gods in the series. It all adds up to suggest that the Christian God is real while the other gods are only mostly real. And it really seems that Gaiman did it that way just so he wouldn't offend people.
  • Actually, there's been evidence for a genuine Abrahamic God in the DCU for years- Gaiman may have just been working off of that. The Spectre, aka Wrath of God, has been a superhero for a while, as has Eclipso, aka The Former Wrath Of God Until Being Fired. There's also an angel who was standing in for Hawkman for a while. Even the New Gods of New Genesis admit that there's a mysterious Higher Power above them. So, its merely in keeping with DC continuity that Yaweh be more "real", since his influence is felt more widely- whereas the others are only felt on a localized scale, plus the odd artifact.
  • Um... there really isn't anything in the series that says that the other gods are strictly created by belief. They aren't part of the Dreaming, they don't answer to Dream anymore than they do the other Endless. There is some suggestion that the other realms are related to the Dreaming in some unspecified way, but none of this means that belief, imagination, dreaming, or anything of the sort, creates the gods. And in Endless Nights we even see the Universe being laid out by stars, planets, gods, and other strange entities, with the Endless serving as little more than observers/advisors, long before Earth, let alone human beliefs (let alone any beliefs, really) come into the equation.
    • The gods begin in the Dreaming and return there to die. The gods exist retroactively when humans dream them up. If you dream up a god that has existed since the dawn of time, his existence goes back to the dawn of time even though he was technically born last Thursday. The same thing happens in Dream of a Thousand Cats and American Gods.
    • Not to mention that if gods were powered by belief, there isn't much reason for the Norse gods to exist in their same old forms, rather than adapting forward as other gods do.
  • Of course, belief is shown to be an extremely powerful force, capable of changing history even. If we consider the God presented in the Sandman to be the god of all Abrahamic religions, it's possible that the belief from all his followers changed the past so that he has always existed, thus allowing concepts related to him to have existed before he should have come out of the Dreaming.
  • The Abrahamaic God that exists in the DCU isn't necessarily The Creator. After all, there are many creator gods, and Ollie Queen had sex with at least one of them. And didn't call the next day. Regardless, it may just be that there has always existed Somewhere Unpleasant, and that's where Dream stuck her. When Lucifer rebelled against God, he was cast into the same Somewhere and built Hell around her.
    • Not around her. Morpheus said Lucifer fell millions of years ago, so that happened before he exiled Nada.
      • Ten billion years ago to be exact, according to his own words.
  • Just to make things more confusing:
    • Near the beginning of Season of Mists, we're told that the Silver City is not Heaven. The narrator says so, and Lucifer treats the Silver City and "the fields of paradise" as distinct, non-Earthly realms. At the end, angels from the Silver City take over Hell, and we're told that Hell is now under Heaven's jurisdiction.
    • The world of American Gods seems roughly contiguous with that of The Sandman — same way of creating gods through belief, Delirium showing up in San Francisco, etc. (The Sandman already provides cases of multiple versions of history, and it's somehow adjoined to the DCU's multiverse, so it wouldn't be too far-fetched to say that American Gods takes place in one of those parallel/overlapping realities.) But in American Gods, Jesus is actually treated as a god-sustained-by-belief, rather than a capital-G God who antedates Dream and the other Endless. He's not running around with Wednesday, Czernobog and the other old gods because there are lots of Christians in America, but just like there's another Odin back in Iceland, there's another Jesus wandering around Afghanistan. Maybe, if small-g gods come from the human heart, then all the ideas which followers of one religion have about the gods of the others can themselves manifest as minor deities? In medieval Europe, there was a Termagant; in modern Japan, a young boy named Tabris . . .
    • Although in American Gods it is stated clearly that Thor killed himself in the 1920's, but he is in The Sandman alive well after that period. Also Odin and Loki of The Sandman are nothing like their American Gods counterparts. So it looks like separate stories.
      • The American version killed himself int he 1920s. The version that lives in The Dreaming could be fine.
    • Also, consider the beings who are powerful enough to give Dream a seriously bad day. There's Lucifer, who thinks very little of Dream's capabilities (and, it appears, rightfully so). But then there are the Furies, who actually devastate the Dreaming and force Morpheus into his sister's realm. So, of the supernatural entities who appear not to come from human belief, we have one belonging essentially to Christianity and one/three to Greek mythology.

• • • • In the case of the Furies, it's made pretty clear that they only have that power because Dream is a stickler for following rules and the rules say that they have that authority under those circumstances. Death, among others, is not impressed by the Furies' power and pretty clearly indicates that Dream could dismiss them if he wanted to.

• • • I always assumed that it was because when Christianity became prominent reality retroactivly rewrote itself to fit those myths. As we saw evidence of in A Dream Of A Thousand Cats. Or it might just be because the "Creator" is not a god in the normal sence of the word. Likewise Lucifer seems quite able to sustain himself without belief.

• • • • I don't know, it seems like Lucifer always has people to believe in him. In Seasons Of Mists, it's pretty much explained that people go to hell because they believe they're going to hell. The principal's mother comes to mind. But I agree on the belief causing the world to retcon an abrahamic God in.

• • • • More evidence: it's hinted that Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel were not human originally (Abel says "Oh, this whuwasn't on Earth, thu thu..." in Parliament of Rooks). My impression was that there have always been myths about life after death, a place of reward and a place of punishment, and the Christian Heaven and Hell are just the latest forms that these stories have taken.

• • • The Abrahamic religions (along with all other faiths) may simply be reflections and approximations of a reality which isn't directly experienced by any mortal. The Silver City is real; the Christians call it heaven and suppose that God lives there.

• The Endless are embodiments, not just of their namesakes, but the opposite as well-- that's why there isn't a Volition, Vitality, or Veracity running around. But if Despair existed, why was there Delight? Aren't they opposites?
  • I think the opposite of Despair is supposed to be Hope^[1], not Delight. Way back when a Delight existed, her opposite may have been Unhappiness. Nowadays, Delirum's opposite is pretty clearly Sanity. If you look at it that way, the transition from Delight - Delirium and Unhappiness - Sanity is a sign of the "universe" maturing from it's youth into a more rational form.
  • Not Unhappiness. Horror. Delight defined both taking joy in something and horror toward it.
• So do the comic/book covers actually mean anything, or they just supposed to look cool?
  • The latter (mainly to show off Dave McKean's artistic talents). Neil Gaiman actually had to fight to keep Morpheus off the covers after the first issue.

• I just want to say that reading this comic made my head hurt. Too much to think about...but cool nonetheless.

• As much as I love an immortal being based off Brian Blessed, wasn't Destruction a bit redundant? He ends up being a really interesting plot point... but it seems that he's already pretty clearly encompassed within Death, seeing as she embodies the end of all things, from the smallest living organisms to the Universe itself. Sometimes it seems like Gaiman ran out of big D words, but really wanted to hit magic seven.
  • With Destruction's miserable attempts to create things, such as cooking a meal from basic ingredients, my guess would be he represents the act of destruction. As performed by living beings, or by forces of nature, your guess is as good as mine. But there is a distinction between mere destruction and the death it possibly causes. From what I gathered, Death is really about the transition itself: the end of life itself, not how it happens or why. Destruction would be more about the means to get there, about the process of things coming apart. But then, there is some manner of overlap between more Endless: if Dream is concerned with the fictional and explicitly unreal, then what is the purpose of Delirium? Neither rules over a domain firmly rooted in the waking world, and neither domains seem very concerned with any sense of logic )though the Dreaming probably some sort of dream-logic to it, especially given Morpheus' character). Where would fever-dreams go? With his curses, Morpheus has driven several people to madness, in a way that seems as much his own as his sister's.
    • Alternately: First you meet Destruction, then you belong to Death.
  • Destruction is about change, about one thing turning into another. In Endless Nights we are told that his power upholds the nuclear reaction of the stars. Death is the end (and new beginning) of the living things, whereas Destruction is any destruction from atomic decay to exploding planets, regardless of whether anything living is involved.
    • Yes, it's made quite clear that Destruction is about change, about one thing losing its form and becoming something else. That's why he's so into cooking, and that's why he's the key character in Brief Lives, which is all about change (or, in Dream's case, inability to accept it). In that story arc, we see that he starts to consider leaving his post when Newton first speculates light and matter are controvertible. It's implied he figures that if humanity can soon change things on their basic particle level, an antropomorphic personification of change is no longer needed. Presumably being an personification of change also makes it easier for him to just leave (i.e. change), which apparently no other Endless has ever done before.
• Is it ever explained what happened to turn Delight into Delirium? I know an unspecified Really Bad was mentioned in passing in the main series, and it had to do with Destruction leaving, but is anything specific attributed to her transformation, or is it one of those Fridge Horror Noodle Incidents peppered throughout the narrative?
  • Delight had changed to Delirium long before Destruction left his post. In the chapter of Endless Nights that takes place millions of years in the past she's still Delight, but in her next chronological appearance in Sandman Special #1, which takes place in Ancient Greece, she's already Delirium. Destruction didn't leave until the 18th century. Why she changed is never explained or even hinted in Sandman, I think it's supposed to be a sort of a Riddle for the Ages. Though IIRC Gaiman has stated that he knows the reason, and might write that story someday.

• One of the tropes said that the only people who go to hell are convinced on a fundamental level that they deserve it.Using that logic that means you could rape, torture and mutilate children but not go to Hell as long as you didn't think you were going to Hell.Doesn't make much sense.
  • ...how doesn't it? Hell only exists because everyone inside it believes they should be there. If you're raised up so that you believe all those things were not evil things, then you have no need of hell. It's the same way that Hob Gadling is immortal; he at the most fundamental level refused to die. Not just conciously doing it, at every level of his thought process he refused the concept of death being an ineivablity. The universe has a Clap Your Hands If You Believe feel to it, so it works by the internal consistancy.
    • That's not quite true when it comes to Hob Gadling. Yes, that's how he thinks it works, but if Death and Dream hadn't overheard him talking about it then they wouldn't have decided that Death wouldn't take him. If Death went back on that, or if Hob decided to die, then I assume he will become mortal. I think with regards to Hell, if you believed in it then you believed that your sins would lead you there. I'm not sure what would happen to people that didn't believe. Perhaps just nothingness. YMMV as to which is worse...
    • How about this: if you truly believe in rape, torture and child mutilation, then when you die you'll go to an afterlife perfectly tailored to your heart's desire... a world where rape, torture and pointless evil is the way to go. And you'll have nothing to cling onto, to have ease your existence... because there's nothing else in that world. "The price of getting what you want is having what once you wanted."

1. ↑ (The same kind as when Morpheus story-battled that demon in hell)