When Gods Die

Have you ever wondered what happens to all these deities dating back to the beginning of time when people stop acknowledging their existence? Do they simply cease to exist, evaporating into the cosmos, their immortality revoked, or are they banished to live among the mortals? If that’s how it works, imagine how a former god feels when forced to live alongside a species that once worshiped him. Life would become very complicated for the demoted celestial, having to move every ten or twenty years because your neighbors would eventually notice that you never aged while they grew older.

Anu, the Sumerian sky god, and Emil, the Sumerian god of wind and air, are the oldest deities in written history. Imagine what it would be like for them to continue living from century to century, watching humans pollute and destroy the very things that they were in charge of preserving, and are powerless to stop it. Now your only hope to fix the mess humans have made is by organizing protests and doing what you can to sway people to your side. Of course, you know that anyone with a large bank account would steamroll your efforts. Oh well, maybe the Egyptian gods have had better luck.

More people are familiar with Ra, Anubis, and Osiris than any of the Sumerian gods. Their former places of worship are now popular tourist attractions, but no one goes there to pray or offer animal or human sacrifices at the altars anymore. People simply go to gawk at the statues and architecture. Of course, Ra and his minions, as well as Zeus’s clan of Greek gods and Jupiter, along with the Roman copycat deities, have gotten plenty of notoriety over the centuries, but never garnered any new followers.

Thanks to Marvel Comics, the Norse gods have experienced an upsurge in popularity as of late. Thor, wielding his oversized hammer and Loki with his never-ending bag of tricks, have made them very popular in the Marvel Universe, but unfortunately for them, having a comic book fan club is different from being worshiped as a god. They must remain in the dead god category for the foreseeable future.

I doubt it’s possible in this short piece to list all the gods that have come and gone over the years, centuries, even millennia. There was a time when early man thought fire was a god or at least came from the gods because lightning came from the sky, where they thought gods lived, and caught a tree on fire. Volcanoes were considered deities and offered living human sacrifices in hopes they wouldn’t erupt. These fire mountains are still with us, but fortunately, people no longer get tossed in.

You may have noticed that I have left out the main modern-day religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. These relative newcomers on the religion scene may not have been around long enough to worry about being replaced by some new version of a deity, but if it’s true that history repeats itself, then they most assuredly will be replaced, and when it does happen, where will they go?

In three thousand years from now, will future generations wander around abandoned synagogues, mosques, temples, and churches, inspired by the architecture but wonder, “What were our ancestors thinking. And if our currently revered gods have been relegated to the same fate as their predecessors, who will have taken their places? Will beings from another planet take over Earth and bring their own gods with them, or will they become the gods? Maybe everything will go back to the way it originally was, and we’ll all get a do-over, including all the out-of-work gods.