Editor’s note: Today’s column mentions body horror, the ongoing trauma of coronavirus pandemic, and forays into theology that some may find uncomfortable. Reader discretion is advised.
My days have been full of strange gods.
Making breakfast, I listen to stories of the Trawlerman, who drives the plot of the The Silt Verses through devotees of the drowned and crawling things that fill a polluted river. After work, I write about Samael, the goddess that is interpreted and misinterpreted throughout the Silent Hill franchise as a mistress of death, resurrection, fire, murder, and mortification of the flesh. In quiet moments, I think through the gods of The Magnus Archives, and their gods of fear that reshape the world around their followers’ worst imaginings. There is a whole genre of fiction that focuses on this sort of deity – angry, inhuman, demanding gods.
I’ve got no problem with angry. As Mr. Nancy said in a speech that played through my mind for most of last summer, “angry gets shit done.” Plenty of the gods I work with have reputations as dangerous, and I’ve written about their holy anger before. But as time has gone on this year, as we passed through Second March and into another Spring, I have been surprised to find myself compelled by fiction that focuses on the terror that comes with experiencing gods that veer out of human understanding and into the truly horrific.
It’s hard to pin down the distinction I feel here, where I draw the line between the sometimes painful transformation that my gods challenge me with and the stories I’m reading. I would say that my gods make me more myself – but any Cthulian cultist might say the same, their eyes shining with a knowledge that has driven them past earlier definitions and into the arms of a writhing divine, uninterested in the minutia of humanity.
There are a lot of uneasy lines here, definitions I’m clinging to more for my own comfort than because I think there’s anything solid beneath them. Take the word “fictional”, for example. It’s easy for me to listen to these stories and treat them like interesting exercises, wild tales of impossible ecstasies of faith. Surely, I think, nobody would commit atrocities like this in the name of faith. Surely, gods like this would never gain followers. Surely, the gods I work with are a different kind of thing.
These are the lies I tell myself, but I know that fiction has only ever been a way to talk about realities that are too difficult to look at directly. The news is full of stories where these lines blur, and people do terrible things that they think are holy. If my theology allows for spirits of every type, how can I be sure that these things are not driven by real divine experiences? On the other hand, who am I to say that the gods writers “imagine” don’t exist in some way? I know pop culture Pagans who work with The Doctor.
Can I be sure that nothing resembling The Trawlerman exists, blessing his followers with the chitinous life of the water?
At the center of all of this, I think about Our Lady Corona, the new, international, goddess of death.
An image of a spiderweb weaved over an open mouth [Cdd20, Pixabay]
I used to hate being afraid. I have vague memories from second grade of breaking into tears because we read The Teacher From The Black Lagoon. I was suddenly, shudderingly sure that Mrs. Bleeker had the ability, and maybe even the right, to “unexist” me if I was bad in class. Gripped by the sudden fear of my own mortality – or at least, of not being able to play dodgeball at recess – I was inconsolable.
That was about standard for my childhood. I took even the slightest scare with deadly seriousness, and avoided anything spooky at all costs. Things were hard enough.
I have only started to really enjoy horror in the last three years, diving into the long backlog of genre classics as though I had any chance of catching up for lost time. Two years ago, I would have said that I enjoyed the way they wrestle with issues that culture can’t look at directly just yet. My favorite horror films are thoughtful character studies, thinly veiled allegories, the sorts of movies that sit with discomfort and make it impossible for the viewer to look away from things that they would rather avoid.
In the last year, though, horror stories have felt like a relief. My friends and I have talked about how good it is to have something to distract ourselves, how helpful it has been as the world around us feels further and further out of our grasp. There have been days when death has felt ever-present, and our fear has been too big for us to look at directly – but horror, that we know how to handle. Like a ritual, horror keeps us grounded, makes the more mundane unkindness of the world bearable, at least for a while.
Sometimes it feels like a sacrament. The first time I saw The Lighthouse, I left the theater confused but sure, in my core, that for me it was a movie about Odin. Like many in my generation, I was introduced to The Wicker Man as one of the few excellent Pagan movies. This year I drew sigils on my skin as I played With Those We Love Alive, and thought about how we change ourselves for love of the gods, and how that love can go wrong.
I was raised hearing about how I should fear the Christian god, and pushing back against the idea of a divinity that enforced his will by scaring his followers. Later I met gods who it felt right to be a little afraid of, in the same way I’d be scared of a well-intentioned forest fire. This year, fear itself has been a gift, a way to feel anything at all when the world has seemed like too much.
Which brings me back to the goddess.
A coronavirus, wearing a mask, floating above a human face [Cdd20, Pixabay]
There are many gods of disease, but 2020 was the first year I started to think of diseases as gods in and of themselves. As the situation in America started to get bad, my friends started to talk about the different sorts of spirits that cause people harm – thurses, trolls, landwights – and the best deities to call in as protection from them. Long conversations on what COVID-19 might be pulled in references to folk charms, sagas, and modern magical practice. These talks petered out as the numbers of infections grew. By the end of the year, we all had our own strategies for protecting ourselves in place, and I started to hear a slow change in the conversations. COVID-19 had been an “it.” Coronavirus was, more and more often, a “her.” “Our Lady of COVID” someone said, as though it was a joke, and I laughed. Then, a week later, I heard it from someone else.
I don’t believe there’s a meaningful difference between worship and appeasement, not when it comes to the gods. Recent evidence shows us that people in Iceland traveled huge distances, built holy spaces, and conducted rituals for almost a hundred years in a cave dedicated to Surtr, one of the spirits that stands against the Aesir at Ragnarok. It’s no coincidence that these rituals were conducted in a volcanic cave, but long standing claims that these sorts of rituals are propitiatory seem too simple. Modern volcanic eruptions are tourist attractions that bring people in droves, excited to see something deadly and beautiful up close. We know that other volcanic gods are seen as creators and deeply beloved by their followers. Offerings are offerings, and they create relationships between the spirits and the community. If I want to ask something to leave me alone, I first have to talk to it.
Our Lady, I thought, looking out the window of my apartment. I remembered learning about medieval anchorites, walled into their cells so that they could better contemplate God. I thought about Sokushinbutsu, and stories of mellified man, and all of the ways holy people have died hungry, isolated, with nobody but their gods for companionship. I thought about the bodies across the nation, left in their homes because officials couldn’t process the dead fast enough. I wanted those deaths to be holy, in some way, to mean something other than mismanagement, neglect, and loss.
Wanting it felt wrong. Whether her actions were fate, or a goddess, or the thoughtless chemical life of a virus, none of that could excuse the way we reacted to her. Needless deaths piled up because my country allowed them to, and I was not going to look away from that. But as the pressure built, and things got worse, transformation followed. I watched the protests that followed the fever of summer and felt something like hope that we might start moving towards justice, and I thought about all of the people in my country who could not breathe.
Lady, I thought, undirected. I’m glad – I’m glad there’s some forward motion. But did it really have to get this bad before we did something?
A drawing of a human face overlaid a human skull [Cdd20, Pixabay]
Once I started to look for her, many parts of my life started to look like signs. The dreams that have followed me through this year echoed in updates from my friends. “I went out without a mask,” they say, or “I was the only one in a crowd with my mask on,” the images repeated like reflections in each others’ eyes. The small stack of masks beside my door started to seem like talismans, protection spells, symbols of the faithful.
Then there was the vaccine itself. Older vaccines work by introducing a virus into the system in a safe way, so that the body learns how to combat it if a real infection occurs. Our Lady Corona’s vaccine, on the other hand, teaches the body how to make cells that look like her, without ever touching her directly, building votives in the body that wear her form. This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant of my blood, I thought, amused, as the needle went into my arm. Do you not know that your body is a temple?
As I shivered the next day, processing the ichor of the goddess that moved inside of me, I thought about the many people that are afraid that the vaccine will do something terrible to them. I knew that the aches in my joints were harbingers of safety, protection constructed in the flesh, but for the first time their fear made sense to me. Who, having seen a goddess in all of her terror, would not be afraid?
There are goddesses of death that I love dearly, consider almost family. She is not one of them. She is too bloody for that, takes too much, offers too few promises, cares too little for those she chooses. But, as scientists are increasingly sure, she does not appear to be going anywhere. I take some comfort in thinking of her as someone, a spirit in her own right, however horrifying she is. Even the most terrible of spirits can have a part in a story. I can make more sense of her, like this.
Sometimes, I wonder if that counts as worship.
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