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God Guise (view source)

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== [[Literature]] ==
* [[Older Than Feudalism]]: In ''[[The Bible]]'', Barnabas and Paul are briefly worshiped as Jupiter and Mercury by the people of the city of Lystra. (They obviously did not approve...)
* ''[[Ring WorldRingworld]]'' by [[Larry Niven]]. The main characters deliberately use their advanced technology to make the primitive inhabitants think they're deities -- a technique they call "the God Gambit".
** Unfortunately it backfires {{spoiler|because Louis can't keep a straight face.}}
* Mildly subverted in ''[[Dune]]'' with the Bene Gesserit's Missionaria Protectiva, wherein false legends were implanted in various cultures all over the galaxy by a cult specifically so that its members could fulfill them to take advantage of the natives in an emergencies. {{spoiler|Then ''[[Deconstruction|massively subverted]]'' when Arrakis' version of the Missionaria Protectiva turns out to be ''right''.}}
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* One Marra in ''[[The Madness Season]]'' poses as a god on a primitive colony planet. When he is finally "defeated", he even does a convincing impersonation of the Burning Bush.
* In ''[[John Carter of Mars]]'', there are several levels of this. The Therns (White Martians) present themselves as gods to the other Martian races, in spite of actually being only technologically advanced and strategically-placed mortals (though, judging from the Thern princess Phaidor, at least some of them buy into their own hype). The Therns in turn worship the goddess Issus, who is actually only a very manipulative, very evil old woman- whether she simply deified herself or impersonated a pre-existing god isn't elaborated on, as she's been in the role for time-out-of-mind.
* In [[Orson Scott Card]]'s ''[[Pastwatch: theThe Redemption of Christopher Columbus]]'', Hunahpu Matamoro is a native Mayan (in fact, he's named after a heroic figure in Mayan mythology). He is chosen to be one of the three people to be sent into the past to {{spoiler|the conquest of either the Americas by Europe or of Europe [[It Makes Sense in Context|by the Native Americans]]}}. His task is to found a new empire with different values from the bloodthirsty Aztecs and Tlaxcalans (mainly, those that combine Mesoamerican culture with a more temperate version of Christianity). In order to do this, he appears to a bunch of Zapotec villagers as a king (named One Hunahpu after his mythical figure namesake) who has come from Xibalba, the Mesoamerican underworld where the gods live, as an emissary from the gods. After proving his divinity through the use of technology he brought with him (a flashlight and some medicine), they accept his claim and start to follow him. Also, thanks to the technology that allows future people to view any event in the past as a video stream/recording, he knows everything about each villager. It also helps that Hunahpu is a full head taller than an average Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican.
** One of the first things Hunahpu does is, essentially, call the bloodthirsty and powerful (in the minds of the villagers) Aztec god Huitzilopochtli his bitch.
* In the novel ''Sixth Column'' by [[Robert Heinlein]], scientists pretend to be priests of a god called Mota (atoM) and some others to conceal their new super-science and overthrow an invasion of America.
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== [[Web Original]] ==
* The Archai originally suffered from being inadvertently treated as gods by modosophonts, in ''[[OrionsOrion's Arm]]'', as a result of their attainment of [[Sufficiently Advanced]] technology after having crossed several [[The Singularity|singularities]]. For a while the archai tried to convince people that they were not actually divine, but then later gave up and let the modosophs believe whatever they wanted. Thus, they're now often referred to as "AI Gods".
 
 
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