The New Gods

Even a cursory exploration of mythology will lead an earnest researcher to a syncretic view of religious belief and pure bafflement at the durability of mythological characters and stories. Any time there's a new god, it's almost always grafted onto an older root and when we follow the root, inevitably it vanishes into the ancient past.

There are a couple of modern gods, though, that don't seem to have any ancient ancestors. The History God and the Disembodied Math God don't seem to have parents in the ancient mythological systems.

Sauron, Lord of the Cycles

The ancient mythical systems seem to revolve around the idea that everything in the world is governed by cycles. Again and again the heroes and gods try to escape the cycle, but inevitably they're consumed.

The artificial, the man made world seems to be a refuge from the cycles. Cities endure from generation to generation. Civilization rise and grow. Through Art (in the most general sense of the word), then, maybe man can escape the necessity of the cycles once and for all.

Columbia as Manifest Destiny

The History God is, I think, relatively new compared to the entities that populate the ancient pantheons. Possibly, the concept comes from the historians of the classical era, which maybe got their idea from legends of founder kings and dynasties such as Pelops or of course Romulus and Remus or King David or Moses. Those stories seem to be composed entirely of ancient mythological themes, but rather than graft the same old gods onto new gods, they're grafted onto human, supposedly once living, figures.

It's a subtle change, like the difference between science fiction or fantasy novels and historical fiction. The remote, divine, mythical past gets linked to the present. History, rather than an impossibly complicated and disconnected series of events suddenly becomes a linear, unfolding narrative and History becomes not only the god of the past, or the record of events, but a sort of prophetically defined road into the future.

The History God, maybe is like the pre-frontal cortex of the meta-animal of civilization. Maybe it's the negative space concept of cyclicality and limitations; it's the idea of linear and logical unfolding of events.