Divine Presence

Gallery

### Other Aliases

God, The Creator, Yahweh, God of the Covenant, The Light, The Voice, The Hand, The Source, Elohim, Hashem, The Lord, Master Programmer, One Over All, The One Above All, Jehovah , Allah, Tetragrammaton

### Relatives

Lucifer Morningstar (Son),
Michael Demiurgos (Son),
Gabriel Hornblower (Son),
Angels (Children),
Elaine Belloc (Granddaughter)

## Origin

### Creators

Jerry Siegel, Bernard Baily

  *True, I'm **Infinite** and **Eternal**. But even I was shaped by forces external to me. You know what they are.*
—**The Presence** src
In the history of the DC Universe, **the Presence** is the ultimate creator, the Source of all things, often presented as a fictionalized counterpart to the **God** of the Abrahamic religions; in particular, he is often given Christian attributes. However, the religious cosmology of the omniverse is complex, with many pantheons of gods co-existing alongside each other. It includes elements from multiple religions, mythologies, and modern concepts such as the Endless. The Presence has taken numerous forms throughout history and has many aspects, including **The Voice**, **The Hand**, and **The Source**.

## History

### The Creation

An avatar of the **Divine Presence** was shaped by the collective dreams of humanity, which alter reality atemporally - past, present and future.

Main article: Big Bang

Before existence, there was only a Great Darkness; a single, black infinitude. Within that darkness, however, a single, burning Light was born. As it grew, the darkness screamed, resulting in an imperceptible flaw in the once-immaculate perception of the Light. And in that moment, the cosmos was born.

As "the Voice", the Light created the word and the Omniverse. In the process, it wrote its divine name into all creation on a sub molecular level, making the Light present in all things.

The first of his living creations was the *First of the Fallen*, created to be his companion and the embodiment of his conscience. His next creations were the most powerful of all its creations the Demiurgic Archangels: Samael, Michael and Gabriel the most powerful of all the Angels. He gave *Michael* the Dunamis Demiurgos (Source of Creation), *Samael* the Lightbringer Power (Will of God) and *Gabriel* an equaled sized power; Gabriel lost it soon after the multiverse was created. God also created the Angels alongside the Djinns, but differ from them in nature. While angels were created from light, the djinns were created from smokeless fire.

Main article: The Source
As the Source, He sent The Hands out into the greater overvoid, where they were tasked with creating new Multiversal systems using seven connective energies. After the creation of their Multiverse, each member of the Hands would pass and allow their energies to return to Source of All Things. However, one amongst their number, Perpetua, refused. She built a vicious, predatory multiverse, one locked in a never-ending cycle of crisis and rebirth. Her children, however, betrayed her, and she was imprisoned within the Source Wall. Her flawed, predatory multiverse was made to restart.

As the Source, the Presence became bonded to a being of unknown provenance known as the Mother Entity. Though their connection was not marriage in any traditional sense, the Mother Entity is considered to be the Source's bride. The Mother Entity is the energy tapped into by the Mother Boxes of the Fourth World.

Zeus of Mount Olympus supposed that through the manifestation of the Source, He birthed Urgrund, the vast and unknowable realm of the Old Gods. When Urgrund shattered, it cast the Godwave through the cosmos, seeding the fabric of the multiverse with the potential for godhood. Firstborn of the Godwave were the beings of Apokolips and New Genesis; as the Godwave moved through the cosmos, the secondborn pantheons, like the Gods of Olympus arose.

According to the Orisha Orunmilla, one of the many faces He wore was Mawu, creator-god of the Dahomey peoples.

### The Rebellion

When the first of the fallen came to believe that God was crazy, God banished him from Heaven and cast him into Hell. The first became Satan, and was the first of many others who would fall. When the rogue Guardian Krona traveled back in time, he witnessed a great hand shaping and creating the multiverse; some believed this to the hand of the Presence. God also created Adam and Lilith, ostensibly the first two human beings, and made them inhabit the Garden of Eden, but when Lilith rebelled, he banished her and created Eve instead.

Eventually, the Djinns also rebelled under the leadership of Elias, the *Devil* himself, by they having been created to be subjugated to the will of humanity.

In the meantime, God began to speak to the Host only in the form of "the Presence", only heard and never seen, and some of his angels began to doubt his decisions, in part because of what happened to Lilith. Eventually, Samael led a rebellion against God, convincing many of his brothers to write their own destiny. God did not participate in the battle, but neither did he approve of violence among his children; so Michael gathered several faithful angels and fought against Samael and his followers, who were eventually defeated and thrown into Hell. Believing that Samael, who was now called Lucifer, would have been happier away from him, God entrusted him with the government of Hell, already foreseeing what would have happened later. As expected, Lucifer entered the Garden of Eden and tricked Adam and Eve into their exile from paradise onto Earth.

### New Earth

But that was what God wanted, because now humans were mortal and had free will, being able to shape their own destinies, choosing virtue or sin, good or bad. With rebellion and sin, the concept of justice was also born, and some celestial beings, first Eclipso and then the Spectre, that became the personification of God's Wrath and Vengeance, respectively.

Eons later, faithful angels like Zauriel and rebels like Asmodel, redeemed demons like Etrigan and corrupted like Neron, played a role in their eternal lives, but also mortals, who contributed with each action to the great project. God also created Jesus of Nazareth, that his teachings started the religion of Christianity. The disembodied Voice of God spoke to and empowered Jim Corrigan with the Spectre. God answered Spectre's prayers and resurrected the murdered Justice Society. The Voice of God is the primary force responsible for Spectre's powers.

The Hand of God was seen by Swamp Thing, Deadman, and the Phantom Stranger when Heaven was threatened by the return of the Original Darkness. The Presence (as god) also commands the allegiance of the host of angels, including Zauriel. Lucifer continued to try to escape from God's plan, which eventually abandoned his place in Hell and entrusted him to Dream of the Endless, and began to roam Earth in his new rebellion. Dream organized an auction between gods and demons to find a new lord of Hell, but God ordered two angels, Remiel and Duma, to take possession of Hell on his behalf, an authority that overcame that of all other auctioneers.

Later, God gave his wayward son a letter of passage out of creation in exchange for a task that any of his other angels could have done, so he arranged for even faithful Michael to be expelled from Heaven, and eventually he disappeared, abandoning his tower in the Silver City, with his name beginning to disappear from all atoms of creation, a condition that could only end with its dissolution. When God appears in physical form (Avatar), he sometimes presents himself as an gentleman wearing a bowler hat, dark suit, umbrella and with a gray mustache.

### Prime Earth

In the midst of the nearing end of the universe, God sent Mary Seward down as a ghost to kill both Lilith and Cain. Lilith was forced back to Hell by the closing of the portal when Andrew shoved the Keeper into it, transforming Tig back into her proper self in the process.

The Presence cursed the herald Shrra to reincarnate across space and time alongside Ktar Deathbringer, as she decided to save him by reaching out and making herself visible to him despite the great slaughter he committed.

After Shayera Thal and Carter Hall died, they awake in the Sphere of the Gods, reverted to Ktar and Shrra. The Presence explains that Ktar's debt is repaid and offers to allow him to pass on and to restore Shrra, however, they do not wish to be parted. So the Presence offers them another reward, to be reincarnated a final time in their favourite lives, and they agree and are restored to life in the 1940s as the Golden Age mortals Hawkman and Hawkwoman.

The Presence is the creator of the Council of Eternity, a circle of ancient wizards based out of the Rock of Eternity that oversaw and defended the ancient world, judging the guilty for their sins until they were betrayed and wiped out by Teth-Adam. The only survivor of the Council was Mamaragan, who exiled Teth, naming him Black Adam.

## Aspects & Avatars

The Supreme takes many forms; while many are analogous to the Abrahamic God, this is not universally true.

* **The Presence**: Its main avatar, through which it speaks.
* **The Light**: The primordial aspect of the One Above All dating back to the moment of creation. Through interaction with the Darkness, the Light, once an immaculate and infinite whiteness without flaw, became part of the first narrative, and created within itself story.
* **The Source**:     The great energy behind creation; the Source is responsible for the power behind creation. Much of the underlying architecture of the cosmos was forged by the Source, which sent its Hands into the Overvoid in order to create new Multiversal Systems; places where new stories might grow and thrive.
	+ The Hand of Fire: A form used by the Source to communicate with the New Gods and occasionally those connected with them, like Superman and, in one situation, Renee Montoya.

## Powers, Abilities and Skills

### Power Level

**Boundless**: The Divine Presence is the creator god of the DC/Vertigo continuity, immensely above both Lucifer Morningstar and Michael Demiurgos. Equal in importance and complexity to The Source and The Primal Monitor (Overvoid), being the supreme creative force from which absolutely everything, existent or nonexistent, sprung from, and that which is known by millions of names and aspects but ultimately translates to one singular entity, The Creator.

## Notes

* The Presence's avatar has stated that it was shaped by external forces (which author Mike Carey clarified as the collective dreams, stories and beliefs of humanity that change reality backward and forward and create the gods they worship.), apparently intended to be the beliefs and imaginations of humanity, rather than a 4th Wall reference to the writers or real-world humans. This concept was introduced in *The Sandman: A Dream of a Thousand Cats*, which depicts that originally cats were the dominant species on Earth, being giant beasts which hunted humans. However, the collected dream of a world where humans ruled over cats altered reality from its very beginning, making it so that humans were always larger than cats.
* The true form of the Presence, that being The Creator/The Divine Presence, exists on a similar level and is strongly related to the Overvoid itself.
* DC's superhero comics have always drawn upon the Bible for plot elements - the first appearance of "The Voice" was in the 1940 origin of the Spectre - but it has traditionally been known through surrogate concepts and names rather than by referring to God directly. For many years, superhero comics were published under the Comics Code Authority - a set of ethical guidelines drawn up in the 1950s in reaction to anti-comic book hysteria. The Code did not explicitly refer to God, but did say that "Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible." Later revisions of the code were phrased in terms of respecting religious beliefs and religious institutions. That may account for the superhero comics' hesitancy when dealing with God. The lack of a central doctrine means that multiple "aspects" of God have been introduced by different writers.
* Many references to similar beings appear to be obvious references to God, but they are sometimes revealed to be other entities in the DC Universe. For example, the voice that gave powers to the heroes Hawk and Dove, was retconned into belonging to a Lord of Chaos and Lord of Order respectively.
* Some Biblical events are assumed to be fact in the DC Universe, but they often involve significant artistic license. For example, it was Eclipso (the original agent of God's Wrath) who caused the Great Flood and it was his replacement, the Spectre, who unleashed the ten plagues on Egypt and later parted the Red Sea for Moses. The DC Universe is repeatedly shown to have been created via a variation of the Big Bang and human evolution from apes, yet paradoxically, it also has a Garden of Eden and a version of Lilith, Adam's first wife. Also, this is supported with Cain and Abel's presence.
* It is often hard to discern which elements of the mythological history of the DC Universe are a result of the inhabitants beliefs, and which are not, as the DC Cosmos is built on belief; gods exist largely because the inhabitants of the multiverse believe in them, and, according to Metron, the Source (and therefore the Presence) exist because the gods believe it does. As such, it is possible that much of the Abrahamic history of the DC Universe simply exists because the people of the multiverse believe it does; however, this is impossible to confirm.
* Greg Rucka has stated *"But the sort of unspoken rule in the DCU is that the Judeo-Christian God sits above all others. And then below that you can have your New Gods and your Greek Gods and whoever else you want."* implying just how supreme he is compared to others.
* The Presence is considered one of the three major manifestations of God. Its "Divine Presence" key refers to its true and purely abstract form, which is mostly unrelated to its avatar of Yahweh as the Judaico-Christian God. Please do not confuse the two.
* The Presence's avatar has stated that he was shaped by external forces, apparently intended to be the beliefs and imaginations of humanity, rather than a 4th Wall reference to the writers or real-world humans. This concept was introduced in *The Sandman: A Dream of a Thousand Cats*, which depicts that originally cats were the dominant species on Earth, being giant beasts which hunted humans. However, the collected dream of a world where humans ruled over cats altered reality from its very beginning, making it so that humans were always larger than cats.
* The avatar form of The Presence is incapable of killing The Great Darkness, with both being equal halves of the same whole. The Presence is also not fully Omniscient. There are certain things he doesn't know, and which occur outside of his plan, and he cannot know the thoughts of comparable beings.
* Finally, multiple comics have either suggested or outright stated that the avatar of the Presence was born out of the primordial Void from which all things originate, thus making him just another character is drawn from the canvas that is The Overmonitor.
* This character or object is an adaptation of God, a character or object in traditional stories. These include, but may not be limited to religious texts, myth, and/or folk lore. More information on the original can be found at Wikipedia.org.

## Related

### Footnotes

1. ↑ *Lucifer* #68
2. ↑ *Justice League Incarnate* #4
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 *Dark Nights: Death Metal* #1
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 *Spectre* (Volume 3) #58
5. ↑ *Action Comics*  #544
6. ↑ *Spectre* (Volume 3) #0
7. ↑ *Lucifer* #75
8. ↑ *Sandman* (Volume 2) #18
9. ↑ *Justice League Incarnate* #4
10. ↑ *Lucifer* #26
11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 *Teen Titans* (Volume 6) #27
12. ↑ *Dark Nights: Death Metal Multiverse's End* #1
13. ↑ *Dark Nights: Death Metal* #1
14. ↑ *Bug! The Adventures of Forager* #6
15. ↑ *Wonder Woman* (Volume 2) #102
16. ↑ *Hellblazer* #59
17. ↑ *Crisis on Infinite Earths* #7
18. ↑ *Swamp Thing* (Volume 2) #100
19. ↑ *Spectre* (Volume 3) #10
20. ↑ *Lucifer* (Volume 3) #15
21. ↑ *More Fun Comics*  #52
22. ↑ *Spectre* (Volume 2) #1
23. ↑ *Swamp Thing* (Volume 2) #50
24. ↑ *Sandman* (Volume 2) #28
25. ↑ *I, Vampire* #19
26. ↑ *Hawkman* (Volume 5) #25
27. ↑ *Hawkman* (Volume 5) #26
28. ↑ *The Phantom Stranger* (Volume 4) #0
29. ↑ *Superman and the Authority* #4
30. ↑ *Final Crisis* #3
31. ↑ *[[1]]*
32. ↑ *Sandman* (Volume 2) #18
33. ↑ *Dark Nights: Death Metal Rise of the New God* #1
34. ↑ https://www.cbr.com/rucka-reveals-final-crisis-revelations/