On the Death of Gods

I am not going to talk about dead gods in the sense that Terry Pratchett wrote of the diminshment of the Great God Om to a small one-eyed tortoise, because only one person truly believed in him any more; neither will I talk about that other atheist, H L Mencken, and his essay written in the 1920s, The Graveyard Of The Gods, where he asks with rhetorical certainty: “where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today?” As an undergraduate at Lancaster University in the 1970s I attended a lecture by Professor Ninian Smart, Head of the Department of Religious Studies, and he told us that there was still living one old farmer he knew in the Lake District who still believed in the old Norse Gods. People started tittering. And that, he said, was a Good Thing, because Norse Tradition says that when people cease to believe in the old gods, the world will end. Lots of people laughed. I thought, you patronising smartarse, there’s a coven of witches up the road in Quernmore and I bet you don’t even know about them. The only paganism he gave a shit about was Hinduism, because millions of living people still believed in it, so that meant you had to take it seriously. Well, it started me thinking: Do gods really die, like people do, and if so, which ones, and why?

And by the way, when I speak of gods, I mean the big lads, not spirits of place, or the Fair Folk, or elementals. Though in some cases I might also mean ancestors.

Well, of course gods die. It is written in any number of sacred texts that they do. The Hindus and the Heathens alike, believe in a cyclical creation and destruction process wherein one world and its inhabitants are destroyed, and another is created. Immortality is relative.

There are stories of individual deaths of gods. But today, I want to look at the slow process of death,literally, and through natural causes, of one particular god, by way of a case study.

The God of the Bible.

 

To begin at the beginning… Genesis 18:1-16

Abraham sees his god as one of three men, he recognises one of them as his lord, prostrates himself respectfully, then invites them for lunch. ‘God’ flirts with Abraham’s wife Sarah, and the next year she gives birth to a son, Isaac (Genesis 21:1-8)

When we next see Abraham’s ‘Lord’, he orders his servant Abraham to sacrifice ‘his’ son Isaac to him (Genesis 22:1-14), but then changes his mind.

(This explains why the Jews, as “the children of the Most High” (Psalms 82:6, John 10:34), reckon their qualifying status among humans as matrilineal, because their common father wasn’t human). Now fast forward 720 years from c. 2,100 BCE, to around 1,380 BCE…

On the run from Egypt for murder, Moses meets the Lord God in southern Trans-Jordan (Exodus 3) , but he refuses to show Moses his face, hiding instead behind a column of fire or a pillar of smoke. He tells Moses: “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.” (Exodus 33:20)

When Moses goes up Mount Sinai to talk to the Lord, he can be heard, but remains hidden. He is either a different god claiming to be the same God Abraham knew – or in his old age, he’s becoming more shy and remote, for some reason.

God, when he decides to come along with Moses and the Israelites fleeing Egypt, tells Moses he wants a big tent to live in, or to materialise in, or to communicate with Moses, Aaron and the priests in secret in, by means of a box known as The Ark Of The Covenant, which fatally electrocutes anyone who isn’t wearing the right protective gear or touches it without using the insulated carrying handles. He is really meticulously demanding about a whole bunch of stuff that has to go with it, even to the number and colour of the bobbles on the curtain fringes. But beyond the soft furnishings, the weirdest thing he wants is this breastplate… it is to be made of gold wire with three insulating colours… yes, you can call it a divinatory apparatus – but it’s still a form of remote communication technology.

Exodus 28:6-29

Later, God gives Moses instructions for the making of the High Priests’s Hoshen, and the mysterious instruments, the Urim and Thummim.

Left: iPhone; Right: Hoshen

The Hoshen is a jewelled breastplate engraved with the 12 tribal names, and the Urim and Thummim, mean

‘The Cursed Ones’ and ‘The Innocent Ones’, respectively…

… a Holy Ouija Board of Judgement?

Now fast forward again, Another 200 years later, to 1,100 BCE…

According to (1 Samuel 2:27, 3:10-15) God is now communicating only to clairaudients and prophets.

He visits young 12-year-old Samuel in the sanctuary of Shiloh, but can only be heard, not seen.

“And the word of the LORD was precious in those days; there was no open vision.”
(1 Samuel 3:1)

Thereafter, the Lord God is only perceived in dreams or visions:

“And he said, Hear now my words: If there be a prophet among you, I the LORD will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream.” (Numbers, 12:6)

And it gets harder and harder. By the 7th or 6th C BCE:

“Then the Lord said unto me, The prophets prophesy lies in my name: I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spake unto them: they prophesy unto you a false vision and divination, and a thing of nought, and the deceit of their heart.” (Jeremiah 14:14)

At this time, the late 6thC BCE, the Ouija Board of Judgement, or whatever it was, disappeared when King Nebuchadnezzar’s army sacked the Temple at Jerusalem. It seems reasonable to assume that the Babylonian army looted it along with other valuables. Whether they managed to get through to the God of Israel on it or not, we’ll never know. Certainly Balshazzar, a putative grandson of Nebuchadnezzar and ruling as his regent at the time covered by the Book of Daniel (Chapter 5) in the 6thC BCE, is recorded there as having used the holy things from the Temple at Jerusalem at a feast. The story goes that letters of light, or of fire, appeared on the wall. This may be a garbled account of Balshazzar using the Holy Ouija Board Of Judgement for some after-dinner titillation, as a party game, and getting his comeuppance. Certainly the words ‘written’ are divinatory in a symbolic way – Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, actually taken literally simply mean ’2 grams, 2 grams, a kilo, division’. The kind of thing you might expect from the ‘lights’ of the Hoshen-board. So: what do you make of a god who…

• Eats, drinks and has sex with a human in 2,100 BCE
• Won’t show his face in 1,380 BCE (maybe he no longer has one)
• Who by 1,100 BCE is invisible, and needs a ouija board or a clairvoyant to get through to people?
• Regards the descendants of his human offspring Isaac, as family, and is evidently increasingly frustrated at their behaviour and his inability to interact?

If you were in such a position, fading away, what would you do?

Personally, I’d reincarnate into the family as one of my own descendants. Remember these statements by Jesus:

“I, and the Father, are one.”(John 10:30)

“I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.” (John 14:6-7)

But that’s just Christianity, I hear some say.

Well yes – to a point. But there is plenty of other evidence of gods getting old, dying, or being killed. In the Norse Prose Edda, Iðunn has access to the fruit of the Tree Of Life, strangely reminiscent of the one in the Garden of Eden:

“And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: the Lord God banished him.” (Genesis 3:22-3)

Now, ‘forever’ is a long time:

Strong’s Number: 5769

Original Word  עוֹלָם

Transliterated Word `owlam

Spelling o-lawm’

Parts of Speech Noun Masculine

Definition

long duration, antiquity, futurity, for ever, ever, everlasting, evermore, perpetual, old, ancient, world

ancient time, long time (of past)

(of future)

for ever, always

continuous existence, perpetual

everlasting, indefinite or unending future, eternity… (thus, Strong’s Concordance to the Old and New Testaments, with Hebrew and Chaldean Dictionaries and Greek Lexicon).

But in Norse mythology, we see something similar – the life-prologing, rejuvenating golden apples of Idunn. Without this fruit of the Tree of Life, the gods (the Norse Aesir) begin to grow old, and weaken.

The Graeco-Roman Olympian gods have Ambrosia (ἀμβροσία) which is semantically linked to the Sanskrit अमृत (amrta), also a food indefinitely prolonging life.

It’s described as a cure-all, and even a sniff of it renews courage and hope in the heroes of Greek myth.

And in Hindu mythology:

“We have drunk Soma and become immortal; we have attained the light, the Gods discovered” (Rig-Veda 8.48.3)

This is also the Haoma of Zoroastrian myth.

And in Sumerian mythology, some dairy product prepared by Ninhursag has the same properties (as the milk of Hathor in ancient Egypt), while Adamu, a mortal son of the god Ea, is offered the Food of Life.

The Babylonian hero Gilgamesh also sets out on a quest for the “Food of Life” and the “Water of Life”, with which the gods have made the once-human Utanapishtim (known to the Sumerians as Atra-Hasis) immortal.

Clearly, gods can be killed – at least, by each other – even if they eat their apple a day. Osiris, Attis, Baldur, Dumuzid, the Tuatha De Danaan, are all examples… the Olympians, who killed the Titans, also have a go at each other in Homer’s Iliad (a bit pointless, since although they can be hurt, and bleed, they all have independent access to Ambrosia). And at Ragnarøkkr, it is foretold that the Aesir will kill and be killed.

Yes, OK, these are all myths. But in the myths, there is a general agreement that the gods were physically interactive among us for a time, but they aren’t any longer.

My point is, they must either have gone home, and/or have died and reincarnated, or are still dead and anxiously hanging around our sacrificial barbecues with the ancestors, to taste the spiritual essence of the food that sustains us physically.

So… is there any real difference between a believer who communicates a strong impression of interactive contact with a god, and a spiritualist medium? Is that what we’re actually doing?

And why do we bother? Why remember dead friends or family on their anniversaries? Because we hope they are aware of our remembrance, even if we cannot communicate directly, and are pleased. And in some real, tangible way, we continue to sustain their lives by thinking about them, and celebrating them.

Gods are essentially like humans, or any other animal. The difference lies chiefly in the extent of their scope.

 

What would you like people to say about you at your funeral?

One day, Mullah Nasruddin was passing by a chaikana when he overheard two men discussing death. One was saying: “When you are on your funeral bier, and friends and family are mourning you, what would you like to hear them say about you?”

The other answered: “I would like to hear them say that I was a devoted husband, a loving father, and a generous and hospitable man. And you?”

The first said: ” I would like to hear that I was a dutiful son to my parents, a true and loyal friend, and a pillar of the Umma.”

Then they both looked up from their tea and noticed the Mullah had stopped to listen to their conversation, so they asked him: “Tell us, Mullah – what would you most like to hear people say about you when you are carried to your grave?”

Nasruddin thought for a while, then replied: ” I would like to hear them say… LOOK!! HE’S STILL BREATHING!!!”

On the Origins of Mullah Nasir-ud-Din

In Turkey they claim him as their own, as they do also in Iran, in Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan.

The name, without the various titles, is Nasir-ud-Din, which means ‘Pillar Of The Faith”. So who is this pillar of the faith, this Mullah, this religious teacher? From the stories that are told about him, from Eastern Europe to Western China, he appears to be an idiot, the generous subject of a hundred thousand jokes, all repeatedly told at his expense. Yet in every story there is a deeper meaning to be pondered and, often, beneath the surface of that other meaning, still another of yet more fundamental importance. Very often the Mullah suffers some indignity or absurdity, but only to make a more telling point about the absurdity or idiocy of human institutions or social assumptions. As such, the universality of his appeal as a folk-hero has meant that his popularity has spread far beyond the cultural borders of medieval Islam where he originated, to Europe, India, East Asia, and even America, where they have recently elected a pumpkin to reign over them.

I could try your patience with a load of factitious information about the historical Mullah who allegedly came from Hortu near Sivrihissar in northwestern Turkey and his importance in the teaching methods of the Dervishes, or Sufis, a mystical sect of Islam, and his use up to the present age by philosophers such as Gyorgiy Ivanovich Gurdjieff and Idries Shah, or by the radical underground press in Azerbaijan during the Bolshevik revolution… but I feel that would be like describing the scent of May blossom by drawing you a diagram of a Triethylamine molecule…

How the Mule of Ibn Khaldun Learned To Read

Long ago in the days when the Mongol khans ruled all over the civilised world, Amir Timur-i-Lang, Protector of Scholars, enjoyed the company of the learned. Those who answered his questions with wisdom were *relatively* safe. Before he sacked and burned Damascus to the ground, he even bought, as a gesture of personal esteem for the renowned scholar, the grey mule of the celebrated historian Ibn Khaldun, whose noble demeanour impressed him. Ibn Khaldun’s noble demeanour, that is, not his mule’s… or it might have been both…

…Timur-i-Lang – an irritable man with the power of life and death over many millions – and who suffered from rheumatism – and it was particularly bad that day, and trying his temper – summoned his entourage of scholars and asked them what he should best do with the mule.

From the assembled clerics and academicians, there was a resounding silence.

“Let good advice soon be forthcoming from among you,” Timur snarled, “Because dead men are less troublesome than dumb companions.”
Mullah Nasir-ud-din spoke up, and said: “Great Khan, I could, by an ancient and most secret art, which I alone of all men living have learned, teach the mule to read. It should take no more than three weeks, in’sha-Allah. All I shall need is complete seclusion for me and the mule, and plenty of food and drink for us both.”

“So let it be done!,” Timur Khan ordered.

For three weeks the Mullah enjoyed excellent food – pilaf, borani, baklava, loucoum – fine coffee, sherbet and tea, and a peaceful and luxurious retreat in the Amir’s palace. As for the mule, it had a rather less pleasant time with the Mullah. Instead of a decent feed, Nasir-ud-din presented the hungry creature, several times each day, with a large, beautifully bound book, Ibn Khaldoun’s ‘Muqaddima’, written in exquisite Arabic calligraphy. Between the pages he scattered tasty grains of rye.

After two weeks of fasting the mule became very interested in the book and able to pick out the grain from among the erudite pages, with his tongue.

The day came when Timur-i-lang remembered (for his memory, unfortunately, was always excellent) to have the now-expected-to-be-literate mule brought before him.

Nasir-ud-din stepped forth with the big leather-bound book under his arm. He bowed with deep respect to the Amir, put one knee to the ground before Timur’s throne and opened the treatise on his other knee while the mule was brought in.

The clever beast rushed to the book and proceeded, skilfully, to turn the pages with his tongue after looking each page up and down. As he didn’t find anything of interest, he turned many more pages and gave various audible signs that he considered the treatise rather disappointing.

“Here is the proof!” exclaimed the Mullah. “Under our very eyes, my student reads page after page of the Muqaddima!”

Timur Khan smiled nastily and said: “We are not amused, Mullah. It reads – perhaps – but how can we know, since it cannot speak in a tongue we understand?”

“O Amir, even your thought becomes a command for me before you even utter it!” Nasir-ud-din told him. “If Your Excellency desires the mule to speak Mongol, Arabic, or Turkish, then, it will speak. It will take ten years of hard work – though I shall need only a modest pension – and of course the good food, drink and accommdation for both of us, as before. If I lie, then may my head lie between my feet.”

“Very well, Mullah. I command you to teach this mule to speak like a man. If you fail, your head will speak from a lance-point, as a warning to other insolent charlatans.”

With this, Timur left, to attend to other business.

“You fool!,” said the Wazir to Nasiruddin afterwards. “You will lose the bet and your head with it! Timur has no mercy for jokers.”

“In’sha-Allah!” replied Nasir-ud-din. “Do not trouble yourself. The Amir is sixty-four years old. I am quite old myself, and the mule, too, has seen many years. Before ten years pass, the Amir may be dead of old age, or I may well die myself, or else the mule may die, or – who knows? The mule may even learn to speak Arabic.”

The Donkey That Became A Saint

The father of Mullah Nasruddin was a caretaker of a shrine, the burial-place of a great saint (no-one was sure of which faith, but a saint he assuredly was, all the same) and which was a place of pligrimage attracting Seekers After Truth from many parts of the inhabited world.

In the usual course of events, Nasruddin could be expected to inherit the job from his father – but soon after his fourteenth birthday, when he was considered to be a man, he decided to follow the ancient maxim: ‘Seek knowledge, even if it be in China.’

‘I will not try to prevent you, my son,’ said his father. So Nasruddin saddled a donkey (me) and set off on his travels.

He visited the lands of Egypt and Babylon, roamed in the Arabian Desert, struck northward to Iconium, to Bokhara, Samarkand and the Hindu-Kush mountains, consorting with dervishes and always heading towards the farthest East.
Nasrudin was struggling across the mountain ranges in Kashmir after a detour through Little Tibet when, overcome by the rarefied atmosphere and privations, his donkey laid down and died.

Nasrudin was overcome with grief; for this was the only constant companion of his journeyings, which had covered a period of a dozen years or more. Heartbroken, he buried his friend and raised a simple mound over the grave. There he remained in silent meditation; the towering mountains above him, and the rushing torrents below.

Before very long, travellers who were taking the Great Silk Road that runs from China through Central Asia via the temples and mosques of Turkestan, observed this lonely figure: alternately weeping at his loss and gazing across the valleys of Kashmir.

‘This must indeed be the grave of a holy man,’ they said to one another; ‘and a man of no mean virtue, if his disciple mourns him thus. Why he has been here for many months, and his grief shows no sign of abating.’

Presently a rich man passed, and gave orders for a dome and shrine to be erected on the spot, as an act of piety. Other pilgrims terraced the mountainside and planted crops whose produce went to he upkeep of the shrine. The fame of the ‘Silent Mourning Dervish’ spread until Nasruddin’s father came to hear of it. He at once set off on a pilgrimage to the now far-famed holy place. When he saw Nasruddin sitting there, he asked him what had happened. Nasruddin told him. The old man raised his hands in amazement:

‘Bisma’Allah! Know, O my son,’ he exclaimed, ‘that the shrine where you were brought up and which you abandoned, was raised in exactly the same manner, by a similar chain of events, when my own donkey died, more than thirty years ago’.

None can escape his destiny, it seems – be he saint, shrine-keeper, seeker – or donkey.