God of Order

Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb ...
when I fixed the limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,
when I said, "This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt"?

— God, Job 38:8-11, The Bible

Deities have a lot of domains, but one thing they're usually supposed to keep is some sort of order. However, most have their own agenda or goals that can prove counter-productive to order, like screwing around with mortals. So sometimes, the Fantasy Pantheon needs a responsible, lawful figure to be in charge of order itself, whatever that may entail. That's where the God of Order comes in.

This is the super-ego of the gods, a deity that maintains order like a living Cosmic Keystone. Exactly what that order is supposed to be is either some sort of cosmic balance, being in charge of societal order, making sure the universe is stable and/or being the order part of Order Versus Chaos. While usually benevolent, sometimes Order Is Not Good and they can come off as totalitarian.

It's possible the duty of the Top God is to act as the God Of Order, as someone as powerful as them is going to need to prevent the other deities from being too chaotic. The polar opposite of the God of Chaos, and almost always in conflict with them. Of course, sometimes Opposites Attract and they work together instead of against one another. The God Of Order likely has a high ranking in the Celestial Bureaucracy, if they aren't in charge of it.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL: The Astral World is a realm representing cosmic order, which is at conflict with the Barian World that represents chaos. Eliphas serves as the god of the Astral World, who hates chaos and will do anything to erase it. However he is still considered better than God of Chaos Don Thousand, and neither order and chaos are inherently bad and both are necessary for reality.

Comic Books

• DC Comics: The Lords of Order, cosmic entities who are in charge of order and usually in conflict with the Lords of Chaos. They're usually treated as good and the Lords of Chaos evil, but more recently both have been treated as more morally gray. Doctor Fate is an Agent of Order and Nabu is the Lord of Order in his Cool Helmet. Hawk and Dove are the result of an experiment by the Lords of Order and Chaos to see if they can get along and work together.
• Marvel Comics: Master Order is the Cosmic Entity in charge of his namesake. Appearing as an Oracular Head, despite his nature he's allies with his brother Lord Chaos and they have a champion in the form of the In-Betweener who represents dichotomies and balance. The Ultimates (2015) has him angered with Galactus's change to the "Lifebringer" since it changes the status quo. He ends up consuming and fusing with the other two to become Logos, in hopes of enforcing a new order.
• In Mortal Kombat (Malibu Comics), there's Abacus, the God of Order (who looks like an old librarian) who's also the brother of Zaggot, the God of Chaos and the Big Bad of the miniseries Goro: Prince of Pain. Abacus and Zaggot are foils of each other, being also the Abel and Cain of the series, and he's the one who taught Goro how to defeat his brother as well giving him a BFG to stop him.

Fan Works

General

• It's not rare for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfics to include an embodiment of order to serve as a counterpart to Discord, the canonical Anthropomorphic Personification of chaos and disorder. This is often a direct embodiment of Harmony, presented as something of Discord's opposite number in the show, but just as often Harmony and Order are treated as distinct things, with the former acting as a balancing force between the deities/embodiments/avatars of absolute Chaos and absolute Order. Usually, it's Princess Celestia, canonically the show's Big Good.

Specific Examples

• Antipodes: Celestia came into being as the primordial embodiment of order, although over time she drifted away from her original elemental nature as she became more and more like mortal ponies.
• Chronicles of Harmony's End: Array, a Winged Unicorn, embodies order and stability and wishes to eradicate Chaos in order to create a world where Order will rule uncontested. Harmony also exists, but as a balancing force responsible for ensuring that all parts of the universe, including Order and Chaos work together, well, harmoniously. As such, in order to be able to actually get rid of each other, Discord and Array decide to destroy Harmony for good.
• The Last Draconequus: Chaos and Order, the two main cosmic forces in the setting, act in the world through physical avatars. While multiple Avatars of Chaos have existed throughout history (chaos is rarely big on constancy, after all) with Discord simply being the latest, only one Avatar of Order has ever existed; Matrisse, a mountain of living crystal, that hindered and fought the Avatars of Chaos as they rose and fell. Matrisse is not a good force — it seeks to enforce absolute order, and at one point sought to destroy all magic after finding it overly chaotic in nature.
• The Powers of Harmony: Harmony is the equal and opposite of Discord, representing order and cooperation where he embodies disorder and turmoil.
• Romance and the Fate of Equestria: Sørmur dï Mitgaeard, the eldest and greatest of the new gods — she's still around twenty-five million years old; the old gods are extremely old — is obsessed with order, symmetry and geometric perfection. She finds the chaotic and disordered nature of life and the world loathsome and repellent, and seeks to remake existence into a world of smooth surfaces, metallic reflectiveness and perfect geometric shapes; her end goal involves turning the planet into a perfect, lifeless sphere, thus eliminating all disorder and irregularity from it. Rather ironically, her son is none other than Discord himself — he was originally a perfectly symmetrical, effectively mindless creature named Accord that Sørmur dï Mitgaeard had created, but eventually remade himself into an avatar of chaos. His mother was... not happy.
• The Shape of the Nightmare to Come has the Star Father, who's the reborn Emperor of Mankind. He's a Chaos God of Order (however that works) whose Angyl worlds (his version of Daemon worlds) have a weakened connection to the Warp rather than a stronger one, and with the catchphrase of "OBEY!"

Literature

• In The Cosmere, the sixteen Shards each have an Intent that embodies part of the will of Adonalsium. Of those:
  • The Stormlight Archive: Honor's Intent is to make and uphold oaths and agreements. He created both a Functional Magic system that draws its power from Intrinsic Vows and a Magically-Binding Contract that protects the planet from the evil god Odium's servants. One of his Spren is deeply disturbed when it bonds enough with humans to understand why someone might have a good reason to break a vow.
  • Mistborn: The Original Trilogy: Preservation's Intent is to provide stability to the world. This makes him the Big Good on a planet facing an apocalyptic threat, but also means he's much better at stopping bad situations than at fixing them, and it's hinted that if he had complete control over a world, he'd freeze it in time to keep everything safe and sound.
• Discworld: The Auditors of Reality are a Celestial Bureaucracy who personify order and bureaucracy, making sure the universe works as its supposed to. They're auditors in a very literal way, more or less having to do the accounting and such for things like every last chemical reaction. Being pure order, they're highly unimaginative and humorless beings who loathe things like life because it's chaotic and harder to keep track of.
• The hero in Michael Moorcock's book series The Elric Saga is caught between gods of chaos and order, and Both Order and Chaos are Dangerous. See here for more detail.
• N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy: Itempas is the Old God of Light and Order, who co-created the universe by imposing structure on the raw chaos of his elder sibling. However, he's also prone to Black-and-White Insanity and has great difficulty changing his mind, even when he knows he's made a bad decision.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: The White Guardian is an enigmatic but otherwise benevolent cosmic being who represents Order, and is in an endless Cosmic Chess Game with the malevolent Black Guardian who represents Chaos. The expanded universe reveals that they are but two of six Guardians of Time, one of which is the Celestial Toymaker.
• The Magicians (2016): Fillory is supposedly ruled by two gods, the brothers Ember and Umber. While Ember is a loudmouthed, hedonistic, boorish being of entropy and chaos, Umber is a neat, detached god of creation and order. The deterioration of Fillory is initially partially attributed to Umber's death.
• Star Trek has the Q Continuum, an extra-dimensional plane inhabited by a race of non-corporeal, godlike beings known as the Q. They style themselves as Space Police, when they are not acting as Great Gazoos or Jerkass Gods. However they do have the galaxy's best interest in mind.

Mythology And Religion

• The Bible: While God is seen as a God of, well everything^note Or at least every positive quality, being lawful is one of His most mentioned attributes. A lot of what He tells His chosen to do are rules for how to live one's life and organize society, most notably the Ten Commandments.
• Classical Mythology: Zeus, king of the gods, is seen as a patron of laws and leadership, with Sacred Hospitality being one of the things he protects — at least in terms of his job. Personality-wise, he's a lot more chaotic than most examples of a God of Order.
• Egyptian Mythology: While many gods are on the side of order in Order Versus Chaos, the goddess Ma'at is considered the embodiment of order. She represents truth, justice, piety, and cosmic balance, and the Pharaoh was considered a "Lord of Ma'at".
  • When the souls of the dead were brought to the Hall of Judgment to be tested of their worthiness to enter the afterlife, their hearts were placed on a scale to be weighed against the ostrich feather that Ma'at wore on her head. If the heart was weighed down by the deceased's sins, or alternatively outweighed by the feather, it was fed to the hippo/crocodile/lion hybrid monster Ammut, dooming the soul to eternal torment.
• Gnosticism re-imagines the Old Testament God as the Demiurge, a flawed creator of the physical universe. Through its archons, the Demiurge is a tyrannical figure who wishes to enforce its order and law on reality, though some interpretations have it as more misguised than outright evil. And while creator of the physical world, the Demiurge is actually at the bottom of the celestial totem pole and merely thinks that it is God.
• Hindu Mythology: Vishnu is known in most Hindu traditions as "the sustainer" or "the preserver", who maintains order in the universe.
• Japanese Mythology has two opposing "forces" which make up all of creation, including man, spirits, nature and kami: the nigi-mitama and ara-mitama. While not considered "sentient" gods or forces in their own right, they are nonetheless all-encompassing. Ara-mitama is the force that conflict and chaos while nigi-mitama is that which creates harmony, serenity and enables co-existence. While genuinely seen as "positive", it isn't specifically "good"; nigi-mitama can promote passivity, complacency and stagnation, as well as crush an individual's free will under the weight of the collective.
• Some branches of Satanism see Yaweh as this, but in a bad way. Similarly to Gnosticism, they see God as an evil dictator imprisioning the human soul and undermining creativity and freedom, whilst Satan and/or other pre-Cosmic Chaotic forces like Leviathan, promote the opposite; freedom, creativity, indulgence, etc.
• In Scythian Mythology the Top God was Tabiti, the queen of the gods. Its speculated that, being the goddess of the hearth, she held a role as a cosmic arbiter of order, extending to the social realm (Idanthyrsus did claim that she protected the king after all)
• Zoroastrianism: Zoroastrians worship Ahura Mazda, a God of Good who represents order and truth. By contrast, his polar opposite Angra Mainyu is a God of Chaos and lies that represent evil, and while equal in power, Ahura Mazda is more intelligent, so he inevitably wins.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Forgotten Realms has the Top God Ao functioning as the setting's God of Order. Ao's only purpose seems to be to function in the role of godly intermediary, as he holds no domain over mortal life and isn't known to or worshiped by mortals outside some extremely esoteric cults. Being a follower of Ao doesn't grant spells or powers. During the Time of Troubles, Ao delegated Helm, the Lawful Neutral god of watchmen and guards, into this role by charging him to guard the Stairway to Heaven and prevent any of the other gods from reclaiming their domains. Helm performed this role to the letter, causing him to slay Mystra when she attempted to force her way back in.
  • Planescape has multiple planes and deities of order. Mechanus is the top plane of Lawful Neutral and is run with machine-like order by a mechanical race named Modrons. The opposing plane of Chaos is called Limbo and is populated by the terribly Chaotic Neutral Slaadi.
• Exalted: She Who Lives in Her Name, the Principle of Hierarchy, is a Primordial who embodies the concepts of order and hierarchy and wants for all of reality to exist under a perfect, idealized and all-encompassing hierarchy. She isn't especially fond of the concept of free will, which she was against including in Creation in the first place and blames for the gods' and Exalted's rebellion.
• Pathfinder: Most Lawful Neutral gods embody this trope to some degree (as do many of the Lawful Good and Lawful Evil ones, for that matter), but Abadar is a particularly notable example. He is the patron god of civilization, law, cities and commerce, and promotes the growth of ordered civilization, the settlement of the wilderness, the taming of chaos and the ordering and structuring of preexisting communities. He does this with neither the moral focus of Lawful Good deities nor the selfish ulterior motives of Lawful Evil ones; to him, the growth of civilization for its own sake is the only goal that truly matters.
• Warhammer:
  • Older lore mentioned the existence of four Gods of Law to contrast the Gods of Chaos; Solkan the Avenger, the god of justice, who punishes criminals, hunts down creatures of chaos and acts as a counterpart to Khorne, the Chaos God of war and slaughter; Arianka, who represents the disciplining nature of law; Alluminas, the god of light, whose gaze renders other beings utterly unchanging and unmoving; and a fourth deity who was never actually named or described. They were never big players even in their heyday — Arianka had been trapped in a magic coffin by the Chaos god Tzeentch and Alluminas' utterly alien nature meant that very few mortals worshipped it; only Solkan was particularly active — and were eventually dropped from official lore altogether.
  • Solkan has his counterpart in Warhammer 40,000 in Malal aka Malice, the God of Justice and Balance. Although this version makes him a fifth Chaos God, representing the paradoxical tendency for Chaos to destroy itself.
  • Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: The deities of the Grand Alliance of Order — one of the four main factions in the setting alongside the alliances of Chaos, Destruction and Death — play this role in opposition to the four Gods of Chaos. Sigmar, the god of the realm of the heavens, the leader of the alliance and its most devoted member to stamping out all traces of Chaos in order to create a perfect utopia, hews the closest to this concept among them.
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse: In the cosmology of the Garou, the Weaver of the Triat fills the role of God (or rather spiritual personification) of Order, with the other members of the Triat being the chaotic Wyld and the Wyrm of balance. The Weaver gives form and function to things the Wyld creates out of primordial chaos, while the Wyrm destroys those creations to ensure that neither order nor chaos become more dominant. However, the Weaver grew tired of her compatriot's actions and trapped the Wyrm in her Pattern Web, injuring him and causing him to go insane. The Wyrm now destroys everything indiscriminately, pushing the world to the brink of destruction, while the Weaver attempts to make things into perfect Stasis, taking particular delight in humanity's drive towards advancing science and technology.
• World Tree (RPG): Reluu, one of the Verb gods, presides over Ruloc magic — that is, magic focused on controlling and directing a desired substance. He greatly favors structured, hierarchical societies, and designed his created species, the Cani, to naturally gravitate towards urban life, value tradition, and form extensive networks of loyalty and kin ties.

Video Games

• Diablo franchise: Anu the Warrior of Order is one of the two deities who participated in the earliest recorded point in time by slaying Tathamet the Prime Evil in a Mutual Kill. Anu's corpse eventually formed itself into The High Heavens, while Tathamet's became The Burning Hells.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Jyggalag, the Daedric Prince of Order. Jyggalag is very Anuic (static, orderly) in nature compared to the other generally more Padomaic-inclined (chaotic, disorderly) Daedric Princes. It is quite likely that this Order Versus Chaos conflict is one of the reasons the others despise him so much. He was an incredibly powerful Control Freak even other Daedric Princes were scared of, so they cursed him into an Ironic Hell of being the most chaotic Daedric Prince of them all; Sheogorath, Daedric God of Madness. It is also likely the reason why, once he separates himself from Sheogorath, he generally ignores Mundus, the mortal plane. (Due to the actions of the Anuic Aedra during the creation of Mundus, it is much more orderly than the rest of the universe.)
  • To a lesser extent there is also the Daedric Prince Peryite, whose sphere includes menial tasks and the ordering of the lower realms of Oblivion. He is known as the Taskmaster and delights in the lowly drudgery of the daily grind which keeps the rest of reality functioning.
  • While the Aedra Akatosh isn't directly called "of Order" except in the loose Anu sense that applies to all Aedra, he is the god in the Eight/Nine Divines with the strongest association to it, partly from being the Top God but mostly from being the god of time, time when it functions being orderly and predictable (as shown by how chaotic and confusing things get during Dragon Breaks, periods when Akatosh is disrupted).
• Final Fantasy
  • In the Dissidia Final Fantasy sub-series, Cosmos is the goddess of harmony and opposite counterpart to Chaos. She is a benevolent, but ultimately weak, deity that winds up sacrificing herself to free her chosen warriors from a Vicious Cycle that traps them in an endless cosmic war. She is replaced by Materia, a goddess of machinery.
  • Throughout the majority of the series, the primary opposing force to any gods of strife, darkness or discord are the Crystals, which are less "gods" than sentient Cosmic Keystones, although they do tend to be able to shape or influence human destiny. Some games (such as Final Fantasy IV) even have crystals of light in contrast to crystals of dark, although these names are usually just used for function and all of the crystals have to work in unison to keep their world balanced and whole.
  • Final Fantasy XIII has Bhunivelze, the Top God that created all of the other deities of the setting and is something of a massive Control Freak. So much so that he killed his mother Mwynn because he wanted absolute control of the world. He also hates his own "daughter" Etro, not only because she looked exactly like Mwynn but also because after dying, she took control over the world of the dead and fashioned humankind from the "chaos" which resided there. Thus, Bhunivelze becomes the deity who is most opposed to the forces of chaos and, in Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, seeks to destroy and remake the world to remove all forms of chaos, including that which makes up humanity's free will.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: The goddess Hydaelyn is never directly referred to as a goddess of order, but she is stated to be the creator and protector of the world and greets the Player Character with the statement of "All are one", thus implying that her sphere encompasses harmony. Further illustrating this point, her opposite is the god known as Zodiark, the embodiment of destruction, chaos and darkness. Ultimately it's revealed that Zodiark was created to reconstruct the law of nature on the planet after a cataclysm, and Hydaelyn created to prevent Zodiark being abused. Light and Dark are shown not to be good or evil but much more complimentary concepts. The closest the game has to wording them is Light as Harmony and Darkness as Vitality. In this sense. Both gods served Order.
• Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn: It's eventually revealed that this is what Ashera actually is, rather than the warm and benevolent goddess humanity had hyped her up as over the centuries. She's a cold and unfeeling being of order and stability with no empathy or compassion. It's later revealed that this is because she and Yune, the goddess of chaos, are two halves of a former whole, the goddess Ashunera who ripped her emotions out after an emotional breakdown caused her to flood most of the planet and kill millions. Unfortunately, without Yune's influence, Ashera has decided to wash her hands of the imperfect races of man and replace them entirely with something more orderly. This sets the final part in motion, where the protagonists join forces with Yune and race to stop her.
• Genshin Impact has Focalors (also known as Furina), the Hydro Archon and Goddess of Justice, who is also the nominal ruler of Fontaine. As the official ruler of a nation ruled by it's court system, she presides over trials which are treated more as opera performances. In practice however, the trials are based on a Computerized Judicial System that neither she nor the official Chief Justice Neuvillette have much control over. After the events of Chapter IV, Act V when it's revealed that Furina is actually just a normal human created by the actual Focalors to help her stop the Prophecy that her people will all dissolve into the Primordial Sea and the real Focalors decides to execute herself to return Neuvillette's full powers to him as the reborn Hydro Sovereign, he saves Fontaine and becomes it's new leader while Furina loses her old position.
• Heroes of Might and Magic Ashan: Asha is the Dragon Goddess of Order and creator of the world of Ashan, as well as mother to the 6 elemental dragons that serve as her world's caretakers.
• Majesty and Warlock: Master of the Arcane: Dauros is the god of order and opposes his brother Fervus, the God of Chaos. In contrast to Fervus' association with the wilderness, Dauros's followers are monks and paladins who act in rigidly self-controlled and righteous manners and scholars who seek to gather, order and expand knowledge.
• Runescape: Saradomin is a god of Order and Wisdom who believes the world is best served by unifying it in peace under himself as supreme being. His religion presents him as a God of Good but, when confronted with some of the brutal acts he's committed to gain power, he admits that he'll do whatever it takes to see his vision through, however cruel.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • The primary conflict in the series is one of Law versus Chaos. The god of law, represented by obedience and conformity, is the God equivalent YHVH. Unfortunately YHVH is malevolent and is trying to eliminate free will so He can make humanity worship Him forever. Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse shows He doesn't even care about order beyond being worshipped and obeyed forever, with the main leaders of Law and Chaos being set up by Him in a Forever War to justify and continue His supremacy.
  • In the intro scroll for Shin Megami Tensei V, the God of Law (who may or may not be YHVH) sought to strip rival deities of their Knowledge, debasing them into the demons known throughout the series. Only when Lucifer stole that Knowledge away and used it to kickstart Armageddon was He cast off His throne and killed by Lucifer as well. The angels sought to find a successor to the Empyrean Throne while also working to sustain free will, but when word gets out that the God of Law is dead and his Condemnation is no longer in effect, all of Da'at is thrust into a massive conflict as all the old gods wage war and try to take the throne for themselves.
  • Persona 5: The Greater-Scope Villain Yaldabaoth (a name for the above-mentioned Demiurge) is the god of order through control, manifested through the collective consciousness' desire for control. As such, it's a Control Freak who wishes to bring societal order at all costs.
• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: Galeem is an Angelic Abomination who represents order, and enforces this by slaughtering almost everyone so it can remake it in its image. Its opposite number Dharkon is a God of Chaos, and just as malevolent. And they hate each other.
• Thief franchise: The Builder is the God of Order, Technology and Civilization, revered by The Order of the Hammer for elevating humans out of primal savagery and teaching them to use tools so they could shape nature to their benefit. His doctrine encourages construction of buildings and machines to advance civilization, and the harsh punishment of thieves, liars and other law-breakers.
• In World of Warcraft the Titans of the Pantheon are all Gods of Order, serving as Benevolent Precursors that shape and order the world, and are themselves planets fueled by arcane energy as their lifeforce.

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