Last night, I dreamed that
Last night, I dreamed that all of the gods returned to earth. Seems they had gone off on holiday for a week, and when they came back two thousand years had passed. There were the really big cheeses like Yahweh, and Allah, but there were also the long-forgotten ones, like Tiamat, and Marduk, and Anubis, along with the more famous Zeus and the rest of his crew. But most of them were has-beens, vaguely remembered for smiting this or that city or increasing the harvest in the fields of some nameless ancient king.
They strode this way and that across the face of the earth, searching for and visiting their various priesthoods. Yahweh accidentally killed the Pope just by showing up: his old ticker just burst like an overripe plum, which, if you're the Pope, has got to be a great way to go. He also visited all of the Jewish Orthodox here in Brooklyn, and they didn't fare too well. "You all look ridiculous." Imagine hearing that from your god when you've done your damndest to fulfill every jot and tittle of the Law. Then it was over to Israel, where he and Allah needed to talk some things over. Allah, for his part, had been running rampant throughout the Near and Far East: "It's just a book, you freaks! And Mohammed got half of it wrong because the man couldn't read!" Then he got into a tussle with Asar, Anbay, Gad, and that whole crew from pre-Islamic Arabia. You could see the dust and smoke from New York.
The most poignant, though, were the ancients: Alilat, Damu, En-uru, Aya, Kamrusepa, Hendursanga, Ama-arhus, Ebech...all of those, remembered now (if at all) only as an inscription on the odd bit of broken brick from a wall long turned to dusty rubble, or as careful incisions on a piece of clay tablet that's behind glass in a museum somewhere. They found each other in the remote deserts of central Africa and got drunk. They talked about old times, when the sacrifices were plentiful and nations rose and fell in accordance with the degree of their faith. The endlessly parched open spaces around them grew verdant with green wheats and burst forth with fruiting trees as the night wore on.
But it was a certain group: Ahriman, Belial, Afrit, Agas, Asmodaios, Edem and Jarri, Iblis and of course Saitan--all of the ones who shouldered the burdens of evil and calamity for so many millennia--who were most glad to see one another. They didn't hang out with the others in the desert. Instead, they shot off to somewhere quiet in the steppes of Central Asia, and they plotted. Most disturbingly, they had gathered with the old war gods--Attar, Chemosh, Burijas, Jamm, Wurunkatte, and the like. They all spoke long into the night, and the next day, and the night after that.
While the other gods were partying, glad to be in one another's company on this earth once again, and checking in to see just how badly their followers had mucked things up in their absence, this last group kept to themselves. They wanted to see how far along their old plans had gotten. And of all the old gods, they were the most pleased with how things were going.
