Are the God Hand in the corporeal world?

[Overtdeath]

Ok so by now we know The God hand resides on The astral plane. My question is how does anyone assume they are on The terrestrial plane Since there seems to be no direct explanation of this. We see some strange panels:

a brain closeup (void) a sea of naked bodies with slan at The end of The tunnel (Slan) skulls and rats with The shape of conrad (conrad) and a weird painting with ubik speaking with creatures ( ubik)

I point this because Many episodes later The godhand is still absent, so it Made me wonder; why everyone assumes The god hand now resides on The astral plane based on four strange metaphoric panels? What gave You that idea? I never seeing Miura confirming the godhand on The terrestrial plane.

Help me understand please

 

[Aazealh]

Ok so by now we know The God hand resides on The astral plane.

I mean... "By now" is a bit of an understatement since we see that they dwell on another plane of existence in volume 3.

My question is how does anyone assume they are on The terrestrial plane Since there seems to be no direct explanation of this. We see some strange panels:

a brain closeup (void) a sea of naked bodies with slan at The end of The tunnel (Slan) skulls and rats with The shape of conrad (conrad) and a weird painting with ubik speaking with creatures ( ubik)

I point this because Many episodes later The godhand is still absent, so it Made me wonder; why everyone assumes The god hand now resides on The astral plane based on four strange metaphoric panels? What gave You that idea? I never seeing Miura confirming the godhand on The terrestrial plane.

I think there's several components to your question. The first thing is that it seems like you might be confused about the words "astral" and "terrestrial". The astral realm is different from the corporeal realm. I would refer you to Flora and Schierke's explanation in volume 24 as to how they relate to one another. By default, the God Hand reside deep inside the astral world.

However we know they can influence the corporeal world. We see it directly a few times, for example in volume 17 when Conrad's face is formed by plague rats or in volume 19 when Slan's figure appears in the smoke in the heretics' cave. Their abilities are vast and not fully known to us, but we do do know the basics. The Skull Knight explains it to Guts in volume 18: they exist anywhere in the world where negative human thoughts concentrate enough. However, because they're such massive spiritual entities, they can't fully materialize in it. Slan herself tells the Skull Knight as much in the Qliphoth when he asks her where the others are.

OK so that was for how things were before the God Hand was completed. With the advent of Femto, a larger plan was put into motion. Its first step was the incarnation of Femto into the world. Like we just saw, in normal circumstances the God Hand just cannot physically manifest in the corporeal realm. But in the Conviction arc we saw the occurrence of a "once in a thousand years" event, something of an enormous magnitude. The result was that Femto took flesh. He acquired a corporeal body (in the form of his old one, which had been destroyed) and became able to subsist in the corporeal world.

The next step in the plan was to effect the fusion of the astral and corporeal realms. This involved a number of things that had been laid out long in advance, the key element being Ganishka's desperate desire to obtain enough power to stand against Femto. In doing so, he went deep into the astral realm and absorbed as much as he could, becoming a bloated, incoherent mess. And then, with the Skull Knight's involuntary help, Femto popped that "balloon". That unleashed what the Great Gurus of Skellig call the "Great Wave of the Astral Realm". A gigantic wave of light that covered the entire planet and created a new world: Fantasia.

When that wave covers the world in volume 34, we're shown a number of things that can be summarized as "the sudden appearance of astral beings in the corporeal realm". That wave of light is like a tidal wave covering the land. It represents the astral realm spilling into the corporeal one. And it's not just creatures either but also the landscape that is altered, as we see with the World Spiral Tree or when Rickert and Erika are approaching Falconia. And now we get to those four two-page spreads of the God Hand. They aren't shown at random. We see them as we see the astral realm spilling into the corporeal one. The implication is quite simple and quite clear: in creating Fantasia, Femto managed to bring the four other members into the corporeal realm.

Of course, we don't know anything beyond that. They came into the world in some way, but we ignore to what extent, under what form and in what capacity. We don't know if they are in a specific place, we don't know what they're doing or even what they can do. But one thing is sure: they came into the world.

 

[Overtdeath]

Nice, man. Your explanation is good. Might need to step back and read again from vol. 24 onward.