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Monday, March 25, 2024

Forgotten Gods

There are so many gods, it's inevitable that some get forgotten. We can forget gods, but let's not forget the people who made them. Contributors will be listed in parentheses.

  1. Wailing God of Signal-From-Noise: Like the ability of babies to learn the statistical properties of language through mere exposure that persists to this day, there was once a god in the linguistic dark ages when language first evolved with no fossil record to show for it. This god granted humans the ability to cry and laugh and scream, and to create distinct sounds for different kinds of predators. This god was borrowed from nature, it was not originally a god for humans, and when eventually they found (or created) their own gods, they had no more need for Wailing God of Signal-From-Noise, which is why today humans struggle to understand probabilities and large numbers.
  2. Shore-Striver (Wasitlikely): God of those nameless organisms that dedicated their lives to crawling incrementally further onto solid ground, especially those who made it so far they died on the returning stretch.
  3. Nameless Mother (Sheepandsorcery): In a cavern, on a mountain, where the dawn just pokes a single rosy finger into the stony crevice, there is a crack along a back wall, smoothed by a long dead creek into a yonic shape, in front of which have been rolled two smooth round stones, one on top of another, small on top, larger on the bottom. The top stone is vaguely rough for in the first age of man hands carved a face into this stone. This is the first god, the first goddess ever invented by mankind and the mother of all the gods, yet she has been forgotten. Time has worn away her identity and this is not even the first time. The one who carved these stones was not making an idol, only something by which he might remember his mother. Now she is forgotten. Now she is remembered forever.
  4. Folded-Wrinkles-Blossoming (Archonsmarchon): Back when stars could lie and crows could laugh, people knew how to wrap themselves in their own sagging skins to be remade in the prime of their youth. The god who guided this process was called Folded-Wrinkles-Blossoming, at least to some.
    In this time humanity was abundant, filling every corner of the Earth, yet this abundance was not to our strength - it made us the favoured prey of horrors: the hunting marrowflame, morph-again locusts, and Gib the Goreful being the few that remain to today.
    Humanity rejected their living rebirth, and cried out for Death. Death answered, and was so flattered by our self-offering it evangelized unto our enemies as well, inflicting mortal weaknesses or slaying them outright. It has been favoured ever since.
  5. World-Eater (Stygianseas): Bones aren't alive. The cells threaded through them are, and they heal due to being re-engineered, but bones are a mineral. World-Eater is the ancient protist-god of... something, of which biomineralization is a subcomponent. Its a god of structure but not determination. Its form is bulbous shells and tests, frustules and skeletons (both exo and endo) blooming off of each other asymmetrically and irregularly.
    World-Eater has been valued on earth since the first cells began to build biomineralized shells. Those few who remembered it in the first days of the Hominids understood that each flint tool or carved den was also sacred to it.
    All worlds with biomineralization or tool use are in its (un)awareness, but it is at the end of the day a very ancient sort of being.
  6. The Antecedent of Falsehoods (Glassziggurat): Who leapt into the mind of the first being that ever slept. It had so much fun there that it lost track of time and vanished when the creature woke.
  7. The God of Truth: Many Gods claim to be the God of Truth, but Truth was forgotten long ago. Or really it's more like we turned our backs on it, because it's ugly, and inconvenient. It looks diseased but it's not, that's just the germs inside all of us, even the good ones. Those maggots in its eyes, you have those too, they're eating the skin around your eyelashes right now. It has a dusty, flaky aura, like marine snow, but it's just illuminating that which our consciousness attenuates, all the meaningless murk, the detritus life leaves in its wake. Perhaps it's for the best, good riddance, c'est la vie.

1 comment:

  1. I completely agree with your statement: We can forget the gods, but we cannot forget the people who created them.
    Thank you for your record. I almost forgot about them, which is not a good sign.

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