The Norse Rednecks
The most obvious candidates for a flyover-state pantheon are those lovable, drunken, violent Vikings. If pickups had been around, all the Norse gods would have been driving them. All of these guys (and most of their women) have done time, probably in one of those mostly-Aryan prison systems of the Northwest. You can see Thor any time; just go to visiting hours at an Idaho prison. He’s put on a few pounds, sure, but he can still wield a bonecrusher like lightning. And he’s not a bad guy, sober and in a good mood. Take Loki: best friend you ever had when you were in junior high. Then he got old enough to try as an adult and the fun sort of went out of him. They’re all like that, endearing but dangerously unpredictable, helping you put in a new transmission one day and shooting your dog the next.
Disadvantages: A little too Aryan for anyplace downhill from the Idaho Panhandle. Good gods for juvenile delinquents or the officer corps of an armored division looking for a patron deity, but their message to supplicants is a gruff, “You know better’n to fuck with me when I’ve been drinking.” And the girls in the family are weirdly dull and plain for Swedes, Clydesdale mares compared to the Nile goddesses or Athena.
The Aztec Carniceros
We need to stop America’s Hispanic population from sliding toward Evangelicalism, and ancestral religions have a proven record for halting this sort of cultural decline. That’s the best and most urgent reason to resurrect the Mesoamerican pantheon, though there are plenty of others, notably the magnificently bloody art in which they are celebrated, the fact that a rain god, natural for the American west, is included in the group, and those wonderful names that pop off the pages like superheated kernels of blood-marinated blue corn. “Huitzilopochli”—top that for the name of a war god. Even in translation it’s a cool name, “Left Hummingbird.”
Besides, these are American-made gods, which can’t be said for any of the other leading candidates. South of the border, sure, but that’s where most Americans quite sensibly chose to live before central heating. These gods look good in Sun-Belt landscapes, just like a Chevy with ten heads and fifty bloody necks. Best of all, nobody has a clue what they were all about, beyond blood and more blood. That’s good. You want your pantheon a little mysterious, and the Aztec gods are guaranteed never to go all hippie-transparent on you.
Disadvantages: Unfortunately, that’s the only thing they’re guaranteed not to do. Approach one of these demons with a request for more rain on your cornfield and he’ll take your left eye and right testicle as a down payment on the spot—and no promise of rain is implied. They’re really only interested in dissection, whatever their official jobs, and always want to do nasty things to certain parts of your body where nerve endings and small blood vessels are concentrated, notably the tongue, genitals and fingertips.
The world is full of other candidates we’ve left out of this preliminary list, like the Celtic Boggymen, gods so inchoate and contradictory that nobody can even bet their names—and when they do, the names aren’t promising. Their god of light is named “Lugh,” as in “loogie,” for instance, and he overlaps with a bunch of other foggy half-beings who form not so much a pantheon as the checklist for a Haldol prescription. There are the mud-gods of Mesopotamia, the botano-deities of Amazonia, and perhaps most promising of all, the genteel, lithe and malign deities of Haiti. And it may well be that Mormonism, an American-made cult that put Christ in a rust-belt hobbit hole and has been writhing its way out of the monotheist straitjacket since its inception, deserves a shot at the title too, it it can only find the guts to drop Yahweh and proclaim its true creed: “Every dad a deity!”
Only one thing is certain: any pantheon we choose will be an improvement on the present middle-eastern monopolists. Before we can break OPEC, we need to break That Guy.
Read more: america, religion, John Dolan, Fatwah
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13 Comments
Add your own1. aleke | December 17th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
How about the Slav gods? Werewolves, weird bird women, Dragon gods. Maybe I am biased, but this is the eXile afterall. I’d love to see a followup article.
2. farmer iggy | December 17th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Didn’t The Exiled canonize The Simpsons? Let’s just worship them.
3. rick | December 17th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
This is as funny as anything, disregarding generationally-resonant geniuses like David Sedaris and Chuck Klosterman…or, oh man, I forgot P.J. O’Rourke, when he’s making those incredibly funny points, aw shucks, about supporting the Republicans, how, ha! They intregrate the contradictions of the world and human nature into their, can’t stop laughing, philosophy!
4. Rosewater | December 17th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
For someone who blathers as much about Catholicism as Dolan does, he doesn’t seem to appreciate one of it’s greatest strengths: in a lot of instances it basically is polytheism. I’m guessing this is because he’s from the West Coast (they’re a little slow out there), surrounded by Protestants and their religious descendants, but over here everyone has old aunts who’ve never prayed to God but pray every day to Saint Anthony b/c he helps out finding the car keys. Take a look at the street festivals the Italians put on in New York, too, for the assorted saints’ days. Nothing meaningfully monotheistic about it.
5. rick | December 17th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Oh man, I guess Catholics are awesome!
I was once writing “religious” prose, and found bubbling up from my subconscious shit about “hanging” on a flat surface, being painfully suspended there, to death, metaphorically.
The Catholics are brilliant, that way, but David Lynch makes them look like amateurs. Come on. That’s like saying you invented the chick with three tits from Total Recall. Or, for that matter, the Hindu broad with a thousand arms, which I also found bubbling up out of me, when writing another work of fiction.
This is just shit that pours out of people lamely grasping for existential metaphors, it’s lost on the vast majority of the populace, and all you do is invent a hell for nonbelievers to go to, to make it mean anything. I’m not that smart, there were like 800,000 people living when the Bible were written: they were all probably idiots, and I’m not that bright either, nobody cares.
6. Carpenter | December 18th, 2008 at 2:58 am
Dude, Christianity is already polytheist! What is the definition of a god? Someone who stands outside the laws of nature and holds some sway over them. The angels in Christianity are by definition gods, and all those patron saints in Catholicism, oh boy, they are far more powerful gods than many smaller deitists in older pantheons.
But if we want more, how about elevating the Washington gang to god status. All the Christians would swoon and cheer, so that part would be easy: instant backing from millions of eager believers. Make Rumsfeld the god of war, make Cheney the god of war, make Wolfowitz the god of war, make Richard Perle and Douglas Feith gods of war, make Obama the African god of war and rename Hillary as Lesbos, goddess of war. Method of worship: blood sacrifice of a million Iraqis – already done!
7. Nestor | December 18th, 2008 at 4:24 am
Japanese mythology can be cool too, and all the kids are into it already via Anime so it’s an easy sell
8. kotek besar | December 18th, 2008 at 6:44 am
But Hindus have massacred plenty of people before they started on the Bible spreaders! The 2002 Gujarat riots are a recent example. The destruction of the Babri Mosque at the hands of a Hindu mob was also pretty violent. The Hindu LTTE have been fighting a long and bloody (and perhaps soon to end) civil war with the mostly Buddhist Sri Lankan government. Religion also played a part in the 19th century Indian Mutiny, so it’s not much more peace-loving than the other major religions.
9. incredible Crustacean | December 19th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
If that’s the best you can do against the Mesoamerican gods, sign me up.
I vote as well for Temple of Set brand Satanism. Uses Egyptian gods and is less fanatically social darwinist than the Church of Satan. Let’s have some fun!
10. burbl | December 20th, 2008 at 9:42 am
“it’s clear America needs a new religion.”
Not sure, some are doing fine with the old one, keeping only the good parts…
Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?
11. Bardamu | December 22nd, 2008 at 11:47 pm
Some of the responses to this post seem to prove his point: American religion as it stands now is incapable of promoting anything remotely fun. And Americans seem to like it that way. All this ultra-serious pontificating about how angels are gods and some protestant inspired nonsense about how Catholics are polytheist (from the exiled crowd no less, who you would tend to think of as a fun bunch) is a sure sign of what a humorless country we are. I’m pretty grim myself but you people are killing me.
12. Jack Boot | March 19th, 2009 at 11:41 am
I recall that, sometime in the 19th Century, the US Congress passed a law granting Jesus US citizenship. Only Churchill has ever been similarly honoured. Why not do likewise for Gautama, Quetzalcoatl, Muhammad (piss be upon him) and all the rest? Be fair…
But, the strangest of the strange is the phenomenon of gay Christians, Jews and Muslims. Worshipping a God who explicitly wants them killed – how self-loathing is that?
Hey, poofs; go Greek!
13. xxx | November 29th, 2009 at 12:17 am
if one change his religion then usa award him visa??
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