The Old Gods

by Dennis Green

The pagan gods and superstitions not only survive, but flourish, in spite of the best efforts of Christian Soldiers to stamp them out. Just as the spiritual traditions taught at the Shaolin Temple in China defy the best efforts of modern socialism to suppress them.

Christianity itself grew in large part by adopting many of the features of earlier faiths, including Judaism, which had itself retained much of the old pagan lore of Canaan. “Clean” and “Unclean” animals and food…human and animal sacrifice, (preferably the fatted cow, but a thief or Messiah will also do), talking whirlwinds and burning bushes, missionary whales and accommodating Red Sea waters. Monotheism, Pantheism, who’s to say?

Monotheism, to a Western mind, is so abstract it gets positively wishy-washy and boring. “God the Father?” Who’s your Daddy? None of us can be truly sure. Might be that dude married to your Ma, or married to her at one time…but after all, who can really know? “Daddy’s home!”

Most folks know that Mother’s Day is sometime in May, but Father’s Day? Uh…a month later? June? How many times have you scoured the Hallmark rack for a Father’s Day card at the last minute the way you do for Mother’s Day? Mother’s milk. Motherly love. Mothers Against Drunk Driving. And then there’s “Fathers For A…Better America..?” Or something.

But the Navajo god Coyote? Now, there’s a deity we can dig. “Coyote sang out ‘Fuck You!’ and ran away…” the poet Gary Snyder writes. Coyote the Mischief Maker, Coyote the Trickster. Or in Java, the Monkey God Trickster, who plays with his own feces and throws his food.

Most of the gods of pantheism are archetypes, so intimately familiar. There’s Cupid, and Narcissus, Venus and the warrior god Mars. They are all so familiar because we carry them around inside us. We peek, they hide. And when we least expect it, they reveal themselves. Mount Olympus is very crowded, and so is my solitary heart, filled as it is with ghosts and spirits and demons.

The more I see, the less I understand. “Epistemological modesty,” I think it’s called. We know so little, so much less than we assume. And in that swarm of all our ignorance and uncertainty, the spirits live. And thrive. If our minds are just smart phones, we harbor more than a hundred thousand apps. And some of them are all about spirit.

Others are old songs we can’t get out of our heads, old lovers we can’t get out of our beds, old banquets laid out for the Grateful Dead… if all romance ends in despair, all doubt ends in faith, not certainty, but faith. The thin suspicion that, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, things are going to be just fine. That politics and government exist in a parallel reality that has, finally, very little bearing on the one we live in.

There’s nothing romantic about the Old Gods after all, just a sneaking suspicion that they might have as much meaning in our lives as any Abrahamic abstractions and dogma and theology. They are all around us, and Abraham is not. Except, perhaps, for a few very pious Rabbis.

As for St. Valentine…how’d he get to be a saint, anyhow? Now, Venus, the Goddess of the Loveboat! I can dig. And also today, welcome in the Year of the Tiger. More about him later…

The Old Gods are still with us, and if we let them in, they will prove themselves every bit as vibrant as the Hollywood celebrities getting most of the attention in our society these days…All hail Bacchus! I’ll drink to that!

©2010 Dennis Green