The Gods and Man

The major gods of the western world today are the disembodied math god and the history god. These are the gods of the Enlightenment. These are gods of the city and their priesthood is technocrats, academics, and pundits. The city, civilization, is a world of lies many degrees removed from nature.

The mind of the man of the city is all pavement and walls. The gods no longer speak to him. There's no hope for freedom or free action when the gods are silent. There's no hope for meaning when understanding is systematic and codified.

As the clockwork universe ideas of the Enlightenment break down, the old gods--personal gods begin to rise again. There were always seven major gods and a multiplicity of others just as there were seven ages of man, seven planets, and seven days of the week. The Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. The Sun and the Moon were the mother and father, the king and the queen. Mars was the warrior, venerated by some and scorned by others. Mercury is the clever intercessor between the realm of the gods (the sunrise and sunset lands) and Earth. Jupiter is a mighty king, the sun at night. Venus, a treacherous beauty. Saturn, a stranger, an old king, a mad king.

The gods could be found in nature. They were nature. Where the Enlightenment science trained biologist looks at a crow and tries to understand it as an instance of one particular brand of animated meat and bone, a seer or a shaman sees it as a brother, or a messenger, a thread in the complex tapestry of the universe.