Before that, there was a supernatural being who would cease to be if belief in her failed: Tinker Bell (1904).
…I’ve now read the other thread (linked to above, in Justin_Bailey’s post). I see that CalMeacham had the same idea I wrote about, above (that J. M. Barrie may be responsible for the earliest incarnation of the ‘supernatural beings need belief to exist’ idea).
Still seems plausible. We do have millennia-old examples of writings in which gods supposedly take notice of offerings to them…but possibly no explicit mention of those gods fading away without the offerings (and attendant belief) until Barrie’s innovation.
I can’t claim to understand Shinto very well, but I seem to remember reading that the kami (gods and spirits of Shinto) gain power from being revered by mortals. They definitely notice being revered by mortals and get annoyed if they aren’t, but IIRC they eventually become weak from lack of attention. Minor *kami *can also become more powerful if they manage to attract more reverence. I couldn’t tell you where I read this, but I remember thinking that it sounded similar to how Pratchett described small gods gaining and losing power in Small Gods.
Thanks. Don’t know how I missed it.
Isn’t this kinda sorta explicitly the whole point when Jesus can’t work miracles in his old hometown?
This was the one i came in to mention.By the way,one it was co-written by Frederick Pohl.
Very interesting–thanks. On reading this I thought about the bringing of Japanese culture to Britain (depicted in Mike Leigh’s 1999 Topsy-Turvy). James Barrie was a young man when that happened. Is it possible that the Shinto beliefs you mention were being discussed at that time? Did Barrie later alchemize these ideas into the 'you must believe in [the supernatural being] if she’s to live’ concept?
Yeah, nice try. I’ve got to go to work tonight; I can’t be clicking on links to TV Tropes… 
No. That’s the idea that you can’t get a miracle if you don’t believe in it. That goes back very, very far, but without any implication that a deity requires that belief. The only one suffering is you.
The idea in the OP is that a god requires belief in order to survive. That’s a much more recent idea.
Mark 6 - seems to imply strongly that the lack of faith/belief by the locals was the cause for his inability to do miracles - it could certainly be debated if they did it to themselves or if this lack of faith was “interfering” with his abiltiy -
[QUOTE=Mark 6]
4 Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” 5 He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. 6 He was amazed at their lack of faith.
[/QUOTE]
I also find it ‘odd’ that laying hands and healing was, at this point, not considered a ‘miracle’. (poor wording or translation, likely).
Anyway - I would say this counts as the first use of that meme -
Merged duplicate threads and edited thread title to reflect merge.
Thanks for the merge, twickster. Amazing simulthreads–same day, same thought.
As to my original question: what was the first use of the meme? Sherrerd suggests Tinkerbell, possibly influenced by Shinto beliefs mentioned by Lamia.
Anyone got an earlier reference?
The wording you quote explicitly considers his healing miraculous. He couldn’t do other miracles.
Earlier than Peter Pan or earlier than the Shinto religion?
Jean Ray’s Malpertuis (1943) has a premise that is close: an old warlock has captured the old, weakened greek divinities and keeps them prisoner in human form in a crumbling Flemish manor.
It was made into a movie starring Orson Welles in the early 1970s.
This is basically the entire premise of the D&D setting Planescape. The entire world is powered by belief. If you can convince everyone (and yourself) you don’t exist, you can basically commit suicide-by-nonexistence if you want. Naturally, this applies to gods too, who very much need believers to retain their powers, but they also have to be careful because if enough people who believe in them (not necessarily worship them, but just believe in their existence) think certain things about them they might come true. This could be anything from a loss in power to a radical personality change, to your best friend suddenly hating you because a very large cult convinced people he always hated you.
There’s also Glorantha, a world that’s powered by belief in very strange ways. There was once a society called the God Learners whose goal in life was essentially figuring out how hard they could hack the universe by fucking with the Godplane (long story) and changing beliefs. They actually managed to intentionally create their own synthetic god at one point doing this. They also managed to switch two harvest goddesses patron crops, which then caused a very large famine when a bunch of these crops suddenly withered. Of course, their screwing around almost tore the universe asunder and they all kind of died from the universal backlash, because the universe very much hates being hacked.
TV series The Almighty Johnsons sort of plays with this idea. You could describe it as an Antipodean mashup of American Gods and Shameless.
In his * Monstrous Regiment * Terry Pratchett describes a deity, the Duchess , who started off as human but developed supernatural powers because of the prayers of believers .
Redshirts was fantastic. Fuzzy Nation was awful, cliched, lazy, and vastly inferior to the book it rebooted.
That isn’t too far off from regular D&D either. Back when Planescape debuted in 2e, the standard-setting rule for a mortal adventurer bent on becoming a demigod through divine ascension was – well, step one is that he’s required to have “at least two hundred followers that regard him as virtually a deity already.”
(I mean, sure, you also need at least one superhuman attribute, and have to champion your alignment while reaching a suitably high level – but if there ain’t enough people who truly believe in you, it just ain’t gonna happen.)
2e likewise explicitly specified that cleric-types don’t even need a patron deity so long as they’ve got “an idea, or set of ideas, which (in these magical worlds) is so compelling that it attracts magical energy and faith to it … not a god, but a philosophy, and one so compelling that it generates magical energy which priests of the philosophy can tap like a true god’s priests are granted energies by the god.”