Above the Gods

Thor, God of Thunder,^note The little guy at the bottom. meet YOUR gods.

"You may be a god, but I am a Titan!"

— Kronika, Mortal Kombat 11

While gods are usually the most powerful forces or entities in a given setting, this isn't always the case. Sometimes, there are beings out there that are so powerful, they are considered to be even greater than the gods. They may represent Capital-G God or his greatest servants in comparison to a Fantasy Pantheon of little-g gods, be Anthropomorphic Personifications of eternal concepts, or even abstractions of forces far too powerful for mortals to wrap their heads around. In other cases, they're even Eldritch Abominations. These sorts of beings usually don't interact much with our level of reality, though there are exceptions. In fact, some sufficiently powerful mortals can fit this trope as well.

Compare and contrast The Old Gods, the forerunners to the gods, however they don't necessarily have to be stronger than the gods and can still be classified as gods. The "God of Gods" archetype of Top God might count assuming they aren't an official deity themselves. If the gods themselves aren’t considered cosmic entities, this figure probably still will be. Also compare Even More Omnipotent.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Dragon Ball:
  • Kami is supposed to be god in the original Dragon Ball, King Kai is supposed to be Kami's god in Dragon Ball Z, and even he has his superiors... all of which are eventually overshadowed in power by Goku and the enemies he faces.
  • Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods introduces Beerus, God of Destruction, who is the strongest god of Universe 7. However, even he is still far weaker than his attendant and martial arts trainer Whis, who is eventually revealed to be an angel. The Tournament of Power arc from Dragon Ball Super reveals the existence of Jiren, a mortal whose claim to fame is that he's stronger than his god of destruction.
  • Goku himself temporarily achieves this state and surpasses even Jiren by achieving and completing the vaunted "Ultra Instinct" technique. Which grants him such power, that alongside his fighting instincts being honed to perfection, he can go toe to toe and eventually overwhelm even Jiren, the mortal beyond at least one God of Destruction. To further show the momentous nature of the occasion, the gods even stand up at attention when Goku achieves the completed form, and Beerus demonstrates a mixture of pride and jealousy at Goku doing what he cannot.
  • Eventually, in Super, we're introduced to Zeno, the literal King of Everything, and the most powerful being in the multiverse. He's so far above even the Gods of Destruction that he could casually eliminate entire universes if he wanted to.
• Holoearth Chronicles Side:E ~Yamato Phantasia~: Fubuki, who is already called a Kami of the Shirakami region, answers to Kyubi, a shrine priestess who answers to master Inari.

Audio Plays

• The audioplay Spock vs. Q: The Sequel has Spock and Q trading powers and personality traits. Q has no idea how this could happen without his knowledge, given that he's supposed to be omnipotent. Eventually it's revealed to be the work of "Petunia", who reveals some cosmic truth to Q. Spock is interested, but Q can only say that "P" comes before "Q". Beings more powerful than members of the Q Continuum aren't exactly common.

Comic Books

• Marvel Comics is a Crossover Cosmology with gods from countless human and alien pantheons, with phenomenal cosmic power. However they are still lower in rank to the cosmic entities, who are the very forces of nature and cosmic powers that govern the universe. Yet even they answer to the Living Tribunal, the second-in-command to The One Above All itself.
  • The Mighty Thor has Those Who Sit Above in Shadow. As the Asgardians are Gods and therefore more powerful by far than most of the midgardians, these guys were like that to the Asgardians. But then Loki, having recently become God Of Stories rather than Evil, Lies, or Mischief, allowed the multiverse to end, starving them out of existence, before creating the multiverse in its entirety once more (as it is the Marvel multiverse and therefore entirely made of story, which is his new purview).
• New Gods: The titular New Gods are a race of deities, with Darkseid and Highfather being the Top God of Apokolips and New Genesis respectively. However, they're still inferior in power and stature to the Source, a cosmic force which created the New Gods and the universe in the first place, which lies beyond the impassible Source Wall.
• In The Sandman (1989), you're dealing with a Fantasy Kitchen Sink scenario, so there's gods to spare. None of them can stack up to The Endless within their given purview, however, and most of them step rather carefully around them. Most of this comes from the fact that the gods are not, in fact, immortal — they can be destroyed, by various means. The Endless, meanwhile, are... endless — even if killed, which can only happen with the cooperation of one of their numbers, they are simply reborn with a new body within the hour. Mind, the gods tend to have much broader powers than the highly-specialized Endless, so the respect often goes both ways. A few entities only match the Endless, and even then, there is plenty of variance there. The Kindly Ones are a very frightening trio who kill Dream himself, though only as part of an elaborate gambit he set up to be killed and reborn, since it's implied they wouldn't be able to kill him in his home turf. They're also pretty subdued when Death starts getting mad at them. Death herself, arguably the most powerful of the Endless, has a very few individuals (about two or three) outside of her jurisdiction, and that's the Presence and his two sons, one being none other than Lucifer Morningstar.

Literature

• The Arcia Chronicles have the Lightbringers, a group of seven deities who invaded Tarra over nine thousand years ago and killed off its Old Gods, placing them firmly among the divinity. That said, all seven serve an even more powerful entity known only as "the Light", which has called them back after seven millenia, leaving Tarra without any divine protection.
• In Brandon Sanderson's multiverse, several works feature powerful physical beings worshipped as divine, but the Shards of Adonalsium are more powerful than any of them.
• David Eddings really likes this one:
  • In The Belgariad, UL (father of the gods) and the two opposing Destinies (Sentient Cosmic Forces of Prophecy) are much more powerful than the gods (the Destinies are exactly equal in power; how they stack up to UL isn't elaborated on).
  • In The Elenium, Bhelliom (bound in the form of the local MacGuffin for most of the books) and its opposite number Klael create the worlds where gods and mortals exist. They have the power to kill gods and imbue mortals with power on a divine scale.
  • The Dreamers tetralogy has the original male and female creative powers embodied as the peasant couple Ara and Omago, who created the world and the lesser gods. In the climax, they effortlessly rewrite reality to negate the crisis the gods were fighting.
• Played with in The Death Gate Cycle. The Sartan and Patryn races aren't technically gods, but consider themselves to be such- and get a nasty shock when they learn that there are things more powerful than them out there.
• The Jenoine of Dragaera. The gods used to be mortal slaves to these Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, serving as both test subjects and unwilling lab assistants to the Jenoine's eternel For Science! quest. Then a freak accident (possibly engineered by the slaves) empowered the slaves into godhood. The new gods used the confusion of the accident to throw the Jenoine out of their plane of reality, and have done their utmost ever since to make sure the Jenoine stay out. As an example of the difference in their power, even after godhood was achieved: the world contains a type of Soul Eating blades known as Morganti weapons. Though gods are immune to the Soul Eating effects of "ordinary" Morganti weapons, being stabbed by a sufficiently powerful one would still deal a severe blow to a god, preventing him or her from manifesting anywhere for a long time. But to a Jenoine, being stabbed by the exact same weapon would only be an irritating distraction.
• The Faerie Queens in The Dresden Files are as good as gods, but the Faerie Mothers (formally, the Queens Who Were) are an order of magnitude stronger, though they seem to be pretty restricted in how they can use their power, and don't do much during their first appearance other than offer some cryptic advice.
• In Discworld, there are occasional references to entities known as "The Old High Ones", beings to whom even the Gods of the Disc are answerable. They are first mentioned in The Colour of Magic, which states that when the first Mage War threatened to destroy the Disc, they intervened by banishing the gods to Dunmanifestin and rewriting the laws of magic to make spells adhere to Vancian Magic, thus limiting the destructive power of the wizards. The only Old High One ever named or given any characterisation is Azrael "the Death of Universes"; it is said that entire nebulae of galaxies are little more than glints in Azrael's eyes, that all manifestations of Death are merely his reflections, and that he is the keeper of the Universal Clock, which is the logical opposite of a normal clock in that it tells Time what it is and not the other way around.
• In H. P. Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath the Outer Gods and their messenger Nyarlathotep are far more powerful than the gods of Dreamland (Nyarlathotep can instantly summon all the gods back to their proper place on mount Kadath with the snap of his fingers). The Outer Gods also appear in the Cthulhu Mythos and are also far more powerful than the Great Old Ones (the Old Ones aren't technically gods, but are worshipped as such by numerous cults). Cthulhu may be able to drive mankind to insanity and death when he wakes up, but the Outer Gods include beings that can create and unmake entire universes or exist in every point in space and time at once.
• Everworld: Ka Anor is an alien god that can eat other gods, making him The Dreaded among the gods of Everworld.
• N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy: The Primordial Chaos of the Maelstrom created the three Top Gods, who in turn created the universe and all the lesser godlings. Not even the Three can get close to the Maelstrom without being reabsorbed, so it's unknown whether it's even sentient. The godling Kahl attempts to evoke the Maelstrom in his bid to become a God.
• Malazan Book of the Fallen: Elder Gods and Ascendants tremble before the Eleint, especially their mother, T'iam, whose can destroy a reality just by incarnating in it.
• In the Mithgar books, the Fates are said to be above the gods, and the Great Creator is above them. Whether or not any of these exist as discreet entities or just abstractions is left ambiguous.
• In Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the gods are feared by mortals for their ability to vaporize them with so much as a finger snap. The gods fear their ancestors, the Protogenoi, the primordial entities that created the Earth and the rest of the universe. They're particularly on edge around Gaia, the embodiment of Earth itself, who has been plotting to overthrow them for millennia and are only spared by the fact that she's asleep and not at full power. The protagonists' job is to make sure she stays asleep, lest she begins The End of the World as We Know It.
• In The Silmarillion, the Valar are a pantheon of immensely powerful entities that can be considered gods, but Eru Ilúvatar, Arda's true monotheistic deity (and it's heavily implied, the very same one that led the Hebrews out of Egypt in our world), is far more powerful than them (and created them in the first place). Melkor's inability to accept that causes him to become the Satanic Archetype of the story. Ungoliant might also be a manifestation of a higher dark power, or just a particularly unpleasant demon- Tolkien never really elaborated much on her origin.

Live Action TV

• Implied in the Doctor Who story "Genesis of the Daleks." The Doctor hypothetically asks Davros that if he had created a bacteria that eventually grow and would wipe out entire planets, would he allow it. Davros muses and in a moment of megalomania exclaims that such a move of power would set him above the gods.
• Season 15 of Supernatural confirms that the Abrahamic God created the gods of other mythologies, and despite his name he’s more accurately the Anthropomorphic Personification of existence and is referred to as the Light, which contrasts his sister the Darkness who represents nothingness.

Myths & Religion

• Possibly the worldview in older Abrahamic texts; the Book of Job (thought to be the oldest written) describes a council of Heavenly beings, with YHWH being the one at the top seat.
• Classical Mythology: The Ancient Greeks believed that You Can't Fight Fate. This didn't just apply to mortals, but even the gods were subject to the will of fate, sometimes specifically the Fates. Whenever a god attempts to Screw Destiny it'll only lead to it anyway, such as Titan Cronus devouring his children to avoid his own father's warning they'll overthrow him, only for it to lead them to do just that.
• Norse Mythology: Similar to the Greek gods, the Norse gods are subject to the will of fate. Odin is concerned with defying fate to avoid Ragnarok, only for it to inevitably come despite his best efforts.
  • There are also a few mentions of the Ginnreginn (literally "Great Powers") in the Elder Edda, who may inhabit their own realm, and are implied to have created the very runes that Odin had to sacrifice himself to discover.
• In Buddhism all gods of all other religions are considered to be Devas, finite beings that although very powerful and long lived are not omnipotent nor eternal. Above the Devas are the Buddhas, Boddhisatvas and Arhats who everyones can attain to be. Buddhas are fully awaken beings no longer in the material Universe, Boddhisatvas are enlighten beings willingly spending time in the Universe to help others attain Nirvana (for example the Dalai Lama) and Arhats are enlighten beings in pure meditation. A very similar view is held by Jainism but with Thirtankaras. Some branches of Taoism has also a similar view with Immortals filling the role of the Buddhas (whether this is original from Taoism or Buddhist influence is a matter of debate).
• In Gnosticism the Demiurge created the material universe and the Archons who act like archangels/gods upon humanity, but the Demiurge himself is a lesser deity, the son of goddess Sophia who herself is one of the (normally) twelve divine forces created directly by the highest God of Light.
• An "heretical" variant of Zoroastrianism thought that a god named Zurvan (time itself) was above both Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, the two opposite deities of Zoroastrianism.

Radio

• Discussed in Old Harry's Game. God reveals in one episode that his real name is "Nigel", and he's rather embarrassed about this. At the end of the episode, the Professor speculates that if God didn't want to be named Nigel, then there must have been some other entity above God to give him the name.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons
  • Mystara The Immortals are the BD&D equivalent of deities. The Old Ones are a group of extremely powerful beings who are to the Immortals as the Immortals are to mortals. If someone becomes an Immortal and reaches the highest level of Immortality twice, they can join the Old Ones.
  • The city of Sigil in Planescape still stands because the entity known as The Lady of Pain maintains the status quo. The city is barred to gods, and the last time the god Aoskar tried to usurp Sigil (which means he's at his most powerful, being the god of doors in a city of doors, and every citizen prayed his name as they are about to enter a portal), she annihilated Aoskar and his followers across the multiverse, in an instant, which is something that not even a god is capable of doing to mortals.
  • ''Forgotten Realms has Ao, the overgod. He exists to keep the other deities in check, and is too powerful to care for the likes of mortals. It is because of him that the normal deities of the Forgotten Realms need prayer and worship to survive.
  • The Elder Evils sourcebook introduces Pandorym and Atropus. Pandorym is an Eldritch Abomination that was summoned long ago by wizards as a deterrent to threaten the gods. Pandorym was sealed away, but he aches to escape so he can slaughter the entire divine pantheon. Atropus, on the other hand, is either the rotting remnants of the creator of the universe, the last deity created by Ao, or a long dead primordial of immeasurable power. Either way, he resembles a gigantic moon that annihilates the life of entire planets and cannot be permanently stopped, even by a deity.
  • In Grim Hollow, the gods are dead. What killed them? They picked a war with the Aether Kindred.
  • Taken up to 11 with The Immortals Handbook: Epic Bestiary, a third party handbook for 3.5e that focuses on content for epic level parties. And by content for epic level parties, I mean that this book contains a handful of monsters that make the gods look like whining toddlers. For reference, this book assumes that the cutoff between deities and elder ones is somewhere between ECL 161 and 320.
    • Alabaster is the sample monster with the Amidah template. The Amidah is the paragon of paragons: effectively the ultimate life form in a given universe. For perspective, the Amidah gets the ability to cast the infamously overpowered Wish spell an unlimited number of times per day. Alabaster is a level 117 vampire fighter(For reminder, in third edition, a level 20 character is already hopelessly overpowered). His lore states that he is the strongest warrior in the known universe, mentioning that even war deities who challenged him have ended up dead. His ECL is 245, which puts him around the border between greater deities and elder ones.
    • The Seraphim are the mightiest angel given stats in the book. They are known as the greatest warriors of good. Each one is the living embodiment of a celestial plane of existence. The book states they battled evil overgods in times past, and went into hibernation to seal away entities which threatened to destroy the multiverse. Their ECL is 252.
    • Adamic Dragons, also known as Dimensional Dragons, are tremendously powerful dragons that live in space. They trace their origins back to the dawn of the universe itself, and are known to take out pantheons of deities. The two types given stats are Cometary Dragons and Void Dragons. Cometary dragons are two-headed white dragons that glow when they move and wield control over time. Void Dragons, on the other hand, are headless draconic abominations made of pure darkness that aren't quite alive and specialize in massacring other dragons. Both of these dragons are comparable to Greater Deities even as infants(Cometary Wyrmlings are ECL 174, while Void Wyrmlings are ECL 190). Very Old void dragons and Ancient cometary dragons both surpass the strongest elder ones with an ECL of 336. Great Wyrm cometary dragons reach an ECL of 372, while void dragons reach an ECL of 390!
    • Nehaschimic dragons are interdimensional entities that lurk between dimensions and make even Adamic Dragons look pathetic. The only Nechasmic dragon given stats is the Nexus Dragon: A six winged abstract serpent that can banish people from reality, drive people to madness, and whose size seems to grow bigger than the universe to the viewer. Even nexus dragon wyrmlings can reach an ECL of 624! Great Wyrm Nexus Dragons reach an ECL of 1035!! If old ones are to deities what deities are to mortals, then Ancient Nexus Dragons are to old ones what old ones are to deities.
    • However, the absolute king of this trope when it comes to statted monsters in this book is the Neutronium Golem. They are golems forged from the cores of white dwarf stars. They are used by extradimensional lords of reality to take out a divine pantheon or solar system they don't like. What is their ECL? 17,497!!!
    • Of course, countless beings are alluded to but not given stats, that are stated to be superior to deities. These include demiurges, time lords, even more powerful angels, vast eldritch abominations, more kinds of adamic and nehaschimic dragons, guardians of higher realms, the supreme being, and of course, the players who would be crazy enough to play dnd 3.5e at triple to quintuple digit levels.

Video Games

• BlazBlue this is what Terumi says about the True Azure. That it’s above absolutely everything, above Takamagahara and even above Amaterasu. Which is why almost everyone wants it. And because Terumi is a legit god Takehaya-Susano'o-no-Mikoto, he isn’t exaggerating.
• Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star: Around 14,000 years ago (from modern Earth time), gods existed as physical beings that walked the Earth. Then an extraterrestrial being called "Sefar" came, killed many of those gods and caused major devastation before it's defeat by the hands of a mortal wielding Excalibur. It results in the first decline of the "Age of Gods".
• Mortal Kombat:
  • The Elder Gods existed alongside an entity known as the One Being, who constantly fed off of their essence in order to sustain itself. In order to save themselves, the Elder Gods cooperated to weaken its omnipotence and divided the One Being into the realms (and by proxy, the six Kamidogu as seen in Mortal Kombat: Deception). Merging all of the known realms together will eventually reawaken the One Being and it's hinted in later games that the likes of Shao Kahn and Onaga are being influenced by it in their conquest of the realms.
  • Mortal Kombat 11 introduces the Titans - individual beings of such immense cosmic power that they outstrip even the Elder Gods. They take a myriad of forms, ranging from humanoids to betentacled star-horrors. The only named titan encountered, Kronika, is in fact the biological mother of two Elder Gods - Shinnok and Cetrion.
• While YHVH is the front-runner for the divine pantheon of the Shin Megami Tensei series and commonly seen as the Top God, behind even Him there is the Great Will. It is a mysterious being or force that permeates the whole multiverse and is generally only described through second-hand information from several sources with various levels of bias. What is known however is that it is the source of everything, with YHVH being it's most prominent avatar.
• Touhou Project: While there are a few gods, messiahs and divine-descended people running around of immense power running around (belonging to Shinto, Buddhist, Taoist and even Greek pantheons), it's accepted that the Dragon who created Gensokyo (and has never been seen) outstrips them all by far.

Visual Novels

• Nasuverse: Gods are, strictly speaking, a terrestrial phenomenon in this 'Verse, meaning that their influence doesn't actually extend beyond Earth ^note what this means for, say, Ishtar, the Goddess of Venus, is that she doesn't actually hold dominion over Venus, but rather Earth's CONCEPT of Venus. Cosmic and interstellar beings are described as being greater than any god that has ever walked Earth.
  • Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star: the Big Bad is an entity known as "Sefar", who fell to Earth 14,000 years ago and very nearly slaughtered all the gods that existed on Earth at the time. And Sefar was only one tiny part of an interstellar entity called "Velber", which apparently goes around annihilating entire planets for kicks. Only the Holy Sword Excalibur was able to defeat her. In another pruned timeline, it took the literal combining of the bodies and powers of the Olympian gods just to fight Sefar to a draw long enough for Excalibur to finish her off.
  • The Ultimate Ones are physical embodiments and/or personifications of celestial objects (usually planets). In terms of raw power, they stand above all else. They are so mighty they passively warp reality on a fundamental level around themselves without even meaning to. To put this in perspective, one character said that if the world-saving organization of Chaldea would be considered a 50, and a full-blown god as a 1000, then an Ultimate One would be over 10,000.
• Shinza Bansho Series: While it is initially presented as the great Hegemonic Gods that the series focuses on as being at the top of the hierarchy, it is more and more made clear that there exists a being, or beings, above them referred to as Naraka. Just what Naraka is exactly is not well known with only the First Heaven really seeming to be informed on the matter, though she certainly seems to hold a grudge against it.

Web Animation

• On Youtube, DarkMatter2525 posted a video that highlights this trope. In the video, God's Assistant, Jefferey, asks God how he was created. God is unable to answer the question and replies with the fact that he is omniscient. They end up killing each other, out of frustration, and ascend to a higher plane of Heaven. There, they meet the person who created God. They kill God's creator before ascending to yet another part of Heaven. They keep killing more creators until they reach Earth and meet a person.

Webcomics

• In the world of Aurora gods are giant souls formed from mortal's perceptions of things like places or concepts like fate or smithing and are generally limited in scope to their domains. The six primordials who died creating the world were the totality of each of the six elements comprising the world and with their enemy the Void Dragon embody concepts like adaptation or stability.
• The Snarl, resident Eldritch Abomination from The Order of the Stick, is so much more powerful than the gods that it wiped out an entire pantheon in minutes. The remaining gods were able to beat it, but only because it's completely brainless in spite of its power. It's later explained exactly why it's so much more powerful: It was made by four pantheons at once, their combined essences (or colors) forming a much more powerful being than any single god or pantheon. Since there are only three pantheons left (the Snarl slaughtered the fourth pantheon upon its creation), nothing the gods can create is ever as solid and as "real" as the Snarl. The only hope to defeat the abomination permanently lies in the creation of a new "color" that isn't already part of the Snarl.
• Return to Player has very powerful gods manipulating people, but above them are the Game Masters.
• Tower of God has something like this, although it's a bit hard to define since there isn't a single group of beings called the gods. Jahad is the God-Emperor, and certainly a Physical God, with the heads of the Ten Families not far behind him. The layer above them are the Administrators, the Powers That Be that each have complete control over a single (continent-sized) floor of the Tower; even Jahad only rules with their permission. Even above them are the most powerful Irregulars: Enryu, who's just so powerful he was able to demonstrate that the Administrators are not completely omnipotent, and Phantaminum, who Word of God states has Author Powers and is completely untouchable by anyone else within the story. Finally, people also make references to God, either one outside the Tower or the God that made the Tower (and the Tower itself may be a Genius Loci), but it's not clear this is anything but a vague religious sentiment. It's anyone's guess how the Tower or "God" would rank next to Phantaminum.^note There's a fan theory that Phantaminum is the God of the Tower and the God outside the Tower.
  
  In summary, if the rulers are called gods, as they sometimes are, then the Administrators are above them. If the Administrators are called gods, as they sometimes are, then above them are the most powerful Irregulars, especially Phantaminum, and possibly the Tower itself and God.

Western Animation

• Prismo from Adventure Time is more or less some sort of god. He will fulfill exactly one wish for everyone who visits him, and that means any wish. Want to destroy all life in the universe, alter reality in drastic ways or have a sandwich? You name it! However, there are two moments in the series that allude to being who might be more powerful than him: When Magic Man wishes for his wife, who was taken by GOLB, to come back, the wish fails, with Prismo stating that this had never happened before. In a later episode, he asks Finn and Jake to help him clean up a mistake he made in an earlier episode, because otherwise "his boss" would hold him responsible. One wonders what kind of creature could be Prismo's boss...

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