Confucius

No one was more surprised than Confucius to learn Confucius had become a God. After all, he had spent a lifetime as an underemployed philosopher whose education and refinement never netted him a decent job, with a passel of students he encouraged to spend as little time as possible thinking about Gods and spirits. It was only after his death that he really blew up, kicking off a scholarly tradition — the Rújiā — known by various English names, most commonly Confucianism. This system, which recommended a government centered around a charismatic and perfect gentleman and structured like a family, dominated public life in China, Korea, Japan, and elsewhere, even to this day. During the Neo-Confucian period, wires got crossed somewhere, and to his consternation, Confucius was deified.

Confucius’s philosophy extolled family’s sanctity and primacy. When a duke told Confucius how one of his subjects snitched on his own father for stealing sheep, Confucius famously replied, “Where I come from…sons cover up for their fathers and fathers cover up for their sons.” Law and government were of little use to him if family didn’t come first. His relationships with his Scions are predictably demanding.

Confucius’s incarnations tend towards the erudite and high-class, but never quite the highest: non-tenure-track professors of hard-sell topics like literature or philosophy, second-string socialites, government apparatchiks. He’s inevitably followed by a train of students and hangers-on, which Laozi and other Daoists frequently try to sneak into to piss off Confucius, since Confucius’s temper tantrums are inevitably hilarious and often enlightening.

A strict Confucian would never presume to describe the Master as a God, or anything more than a revered sage or ancestor; but that hasn’t stopped thousands of supplicants over the course of history from earnestly and devotedly worshipping him. Confucius frequently deploys his Scions to disabuse Cults in his honor of his divinity. Sometimes, it doesn’t even make things worse.