Who Writes the Gods?
Every heaven is a portrait of who held the brush
I have spent my life gathering the versions of stories the singers left behind.
And I have noticed something the singers were paid, quite deliberately, not to notice.
Every god in every tale was written by a human hand with a human purpose.
The thunder god who blesses kings was, curiously, most beloved by kings themselves.
The goddess who demanded obedience from wives was praised loudest in the halls of husbands.
A , I have come to believe, is a portrait of who held the power to paint.
When a people conquered another, their gods did not merely win; they rewrote the losers'.
The defeated deities were folded in as demons, or servants, or cautionary tales.
Nothing reveals the shape of a society so clearly as the gods it insists you fear.
Ask what a myth forbids, and you will learn what its authors were to control.
Ask whom a myth blames, and you will find the group its authors wished to keep below.
The stories did not fall, finished and holy, from an untroubled and sky.
They were assembled, edited, and enforced by councils with names, and lands, and enemies.
This is not to say the gods are nothing; it is to say the telling is never .
A sacred story is still a story, and every story is told by someone, for something.
I do not despise the old myths; I love them enough to ask them harder questions.
To read them as innocent is to hand the ancient powerful a victory they have not earned.
To read them as made is to the right to make something truer in their place.
Whoever controls the story of the gods controls the story of what a person may become.
That is why the losers in these tales are silent: their silence was a policy.
And that is why recovering their voices is not , but a kind of justice.
I am not tearing down the temple; I am reading the names carved beneath the paint.
Beneath every divine , I keep finding a very human interest, comfortably disguised.
So the next time a story tells you what the gods demand, pause and ask the older question.
Not merely what do the gods want, but who first wrote down that this is what they wanted.
Answer that, and the whole shining ceiling of heaven begins, quietly, to move.