Funeral for the gods

Among all the great crimes of history – the wars, the genocides, the systematic rape of nature – one great crime has passed unnoticed. It is the crime of deicide. The American journalist H. L Mencken described this oddity in cultural evolution in his Treatise on the Gods. Once we exalted the gods; we built monuments to their great names and beseeched their blessing, prayed for their protection and sought favour with them. Yet now their temples lie dormant and desecrated; mere curiosities of our past and testimonies to the superstitions and folly of the ancients perhaps. From the Aztec gods like Mictlanteculhtli through to Mars of the Romans; Osiris, Egyptian god of the underworld, and the Nordic Odin, it seems that Nietzsche was right when he declared “God is dead and we have killed Him – you and I”.

It is more than a little ironic that beings, whose defining characteristics were omniscience, omnipotence, and immortality, have slipped away from this world without so much as an obituary in the press. Most of the great religions books agree that when we die we are called to account for all our deeds while living. The good proceed to heaven and a life of eternal bliss. Meanwhile, we are told, the bad, the sinful and the downright abominable will have to be content with the rather less salubrious atmosphere of Hades. That’s the basic idea. But how do gods die, and where to they go when they die?

At one point in history there was no Jehovah (or at least we did not know of Him), nor was there a Baal, or a Zeus, yet by some process whether of divine, artistic, or political instigation, they sprung into existence. Deities and religions seem to be spawned out of thin air. In the Bible, the book of Genesis tells us that “In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” all in six days, leaving Him time for a divinely deserved break on the seventh. But the book of Genesis doesn’t really start “in the beginning” – it doesn’t mention where God came from.

Considering that numerous gods and religious traditions came before the God of the Bible, it is a matter of some curiosity when the Jewish God, Jehovah, was first recognised as a Supreme Being. How are deities born? Perhaps by some monumental misapprehension – a mirage or an hallucination – a great chase of Chinese whispers ensued, and turns a simple error of perception into a self-perpetuating myth, spurred on by mankind’s gluttonous appetite for the supernatural and the incredible.

I am prepared to accept that perhaps gods become known to us by gradual divine revelation. Yet by the same cultural-sleight-of-hand that spawns them, they disappear; just as inexplicably as they had come to being in the first place.

In the case of the Abrahamic Faiths, each successive revelation, first to Moses, and then through Christ, and finally through the Prophet Mohammed, claimed that the preceding one was inaccurate or needed updating (if you ask me, it seems a little similar to the way that Microsoft releases a new version of windows virtually every year, despite the fact that the previous version always seems perfectly fine).

Each new incarnation of the Supreme Being brings something new to the idea. The Judaic tradition enshrined the concept of a monotheistic deity whose nature was incomparable, name ineffable and being was unique. But as often happens with deities, the idea went out of fashion.

Through Christ, divine wrath and vengeance became divine compassion. The Christian belief is that God became man, and the friend of sinners. The idea of a direct link to God is central in Christian doctrine and was largely alien to previous monotheistic religions.

The final section of the trilogy, revealed half a millennium after Christianity, proclaimed that the previous two were wrong or at least in need of editing (although to be honest, it doesn’t seem profoundly different from the previous versions). Muslims believe that this last version was a sort of direct tele-fax from God, and unlike Christianity, is proved by the absence of intermediaries between the message and its recipients.

Today we are left with the sombrely hilarious scenario in which none of the three conceptions of God will give way to the other, and the harmony that they were intended to bring, is all but an elusive aspiration with no near possibility of coming to fruition. Perhaps this is the reason why gods die. This world ain’t big enough for all of them, so they fight one another – physically through wars and ideologically through holy books and PR campaigns. And because deities and legends thrive on memetic perpetuation rather than necessarily on substance, the one with the greatest popular appeal will always win the day.

This is why the way we see them today probably bears little resemblance to the way their initial worshippers saw them. This is also perhaps why they eventually die. They die of neglect.

Perhaps deities die because they are too human. We all know how susceptible the gods of the Greek pantheon were to all those vices that make us human: greed, envy, lust and gluttony, and I suppose fatigue too (why else would God need to rest after speaking the world into existence?). But we tend to ignore all that and place exaggerated emphasis on those attributes we hold in esteem – bravery, beauty, justice and perfection. This led Socrates to comment that “if the lions have a god he must surely be a lion.” No doubt too, when fish conceive of a god, if they can conceive of a god, they consider such a being to have fins, and gills, larger in proportion and superior in appearance to their own.

I am not saying that religion is merely a figment of our imagination nor am I deriding belief – there must be something in it for it to have held such sway over humanity for so many thousands of years. Rather I am saying that the wise words of yesterday’s prophets must be interpreted for today and with an appreciation for the context of their times. When we fail to do this – to adapt the message – it becomes incongruous and arcane, eventually defunct and dead.

Maybe Gods don’t die at all. They are merely reincarnated in a form to suit the wisdom of the times. In the legend of King Arthur, when he is wounded in his final fight, Arthur is returned to the island in the middle of the lake, to be kept "until he is needed again". Perhaps it is the same with the gods; Ra, Woden, Dagon and Apollo may well indeed return when we have need of them again. They may now be consigned to the Realm of Ideas, whence they came, but from there they have as much hold over our imaginations as they did when their statues and temples graced the earth.