You can die for your country or your people or your family, but for a god you should live fully and busily, every day of a long life.”

Amnesiac God: Om remembers he's a god at the beginning of the book, thanks to Brutha's proximity. He has spent three years at least without being aware of what he was, and is consequently terrified of what happens if he gets too far away from Brutha. In such instances, you need an acolyte, and fast. Enter Brutha, the Chosen One - or at least the only One available. He wants peace, justice and love - but that's hard to achieve in a world where religion means power, and corruption reigns supreme . . . In a hundred years we'll all be dead, but here and now we are alive" becomes the cornerstone of Brutha's philosophy. That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right. You couldn't get that on a banner. But the desert looked better already. Does This Remind You of Anything?: Urn and Didactylos' discussion re: armored turtles. Compare to discussions of doomsday weapons. Urn figures that if someone else builds armored turtles, he'll just build bigger ones.He Who Fights Monsters: Sergeant Simony becomes disturbingly zealous in his efforts to overthrow the church of Om, until Urn points out how much like Vorbis he's become. Animal Motifs: Pretty explicitly Brutha with tortoises (harmless, slow, thoughtful) and Vorbis with eagles (predatory, focused, elevated); the eagle will lift the tortoise off the ground and broaden its horizons only to drop it to its death, just as Vorbis promotes Brutha with every intention of eventually having him killed. The problem for Vorbis comes in when the tortoise, as described in the opening tale, learns how to fly...

An Olympian god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness, religious ecstasy and theatre.Doublethink: Vorbis repeatedly refers to the difference between the trivial, surface truth and a deeper, 'fundamental' truth. The latter, of course, is always a convenient justification for his actions.

There are many references to famous Greek philosophers in the book. In fact, if you know the legend of how Aeschylus died, then with some thought it becomes obvious how Vorbis will die.One of the twelve Titan Gods, Crios was known as the god of the heavenly constellations and the measure of the year. He was father to Astraeus, Pallas, and Perses.

Genius Ditz: Crossed with Idiot Hero in Brutha. Probably the weirdest example, in that he is brilliant, but in a different way than most people understand, and it takes a while for him to get to the point where he can use it. When Om does regain a lot of die-hard believers, he's able to beat up Dunmanifestin's chief god Io because nobody believes in thunder gods all that strongly anymore. Chess Motifs: Brutha becomes a bishop, which (the narrative reminds us) moves diagonally to crop up in unexpected places.

Bishop Drunah, a member of La Résistance, is the secretary of The Congress of Iams in the Omnian Church, and as many of those people are old and of poor hearing, this is implied to give him the opportunity to alter records of the meeting. Running Gag: Everyone who notices Om for the first time remarks, "There's good eating on one of those."