Beelzebub’s Dodge Caravan and Other Discontents

Men need a god. Otherwise they get confused and start worshiping themselves. They climb into a booster seat in the back of Beelzebub’s Dodge Caravan and think they’re driving.

When I was young they taught us history. The nuns patiently trooped through the ages while we followed along closely by staring out the window half the time, and doodling Big Daddy Ed Roth Rat Fink cartoons in our marble notebooks the rest of the hours. Some of it must have seeped into my adolescent corpse somehow. They always started with Mesopotamia, mentioned their balcony gardening skills, hopped the Nile to explain that the pyramids were more than a pile of rocks built by shirtless dudes with two left hands, then dogpaddled the Hellespont to belabor the Greeks for a bit longer than the others. Greece was the first thing they could point to that really looked like our kinda civilization, so they pointed hard. The Parthenon wouldn’t look weird if it was a post office in Poughkeepsie. Abu Simbel would.

We’d hop skip and jump through the ages after that. Romans roaming around Europe, guys who wore HVAC ducts into battle, the Britishers showing up everywhere brandishing the awesome firepower of a swagger stick and Greek and Latin lessons. We’d get about as far as the battle of Yorktown into America’s trail of broken pottery, and then run out of school year before we ran out of history book pages. No matter. You could watch Gunsmoke and The Untouchables reruns to fill in everything from the Civil War to Prohibition, and our uncles would fill us in on dropping bombs on Japanese, or Germans, to taste. As you know, the Fifties never happened, and if it did, which it didn’t, it was all bad, so we didn’t need to look into that any deeper than Fonzie. From then on, we could look out the car window while dad drove and see what was going on for ourselves.

Lingering on the Greeks meant learning their Pantheon of Gods. Babylon wasn’t interesting, really, in that department, so the nuns skipped it. I mean, have you read The Gilgamesh? He dives to the bottom of the ocean to retrieve a head of cabbage or something, if I recall correctly, which I don’t. Then he swims back up and gives it to Gumby, or Pokey, or Spreitel or Chim Chim, I really can’t remember who now, and they live happily ever after, or everyone dies. It’s usually one way or the other with these people. Moving on, the Egyptians were plain weird.

Mount Olympus was more our speed. A toga party in the clouds with recognizable human forms. Wings on your heels are less confusing than a bird’s head on your shoulders. The Olympians were just superhuman humans. They might be the god of water, or thunder, or love, or table tennis or whatever, but they were usually depicted in human form. They weren’t simply abstractions, or concepts. They had agency in our world.

You could go shopping for your own personal deity at the Greek Pantheon Stripmall. One for this, one for that, some covering a bunch of Olympian bases. Officially, there were only twelve of them that had membership cards in the Champagne Room at Olympus. That number is interesting. Keeps popping up all over the place, from Norsemen to apostles. We didn’t need as many Marvel comics as the generations that came after us because we still had Greek and Roman legends to amuse ourselves.

Of course, nuns were involved, so we had the tale of the Christ as a standalone subject. The saints stood in for the various gods they replaced when you needed a leg up with something. Praying to a unitary god for everything can seem futile. He’s got a lot on his plate, and is usually busy elsewhere. If you were drilling holes in west Texas, I imagine there’s a patron saint of oil refineries or something that might have more time to take your call than the head honcho.

I’m on perfectly good terms with the Big Guy. I don’t need a refresher on the catechism or anything, although it sounds like the pope could use one. I’m not talking about needing THE God now. But I do need A god in my life. Gods didn’t used to be all powerful and remote. They drifted in and out of humanity, and meddled. This led to amusing Golden Fleece All-Inclusive Travel brochures and so forth. That’s the type of god I’m currently looking for. A dread god that I can stand up to.

This was perfectly normal back in the mists of time when Demosthenes was still annoying his neighbors in the agora, and Nancy Pelosi was still in grammar school. You might worship gods, but you were allowed do more than thank them or shake your tiny fist at them. You could measure yourself against them. You’re not a passive worshipper. You’re an active participant in a system where the gods set limits, and the meaning of your life is how well you confront those limits. If you beat the gods at their own game, sometimes they sorta adopted you, and give you a day pass to Olympus, or a peek at Hera’s ankle or something. Other times, they chain you to a rock, and you get your liver plucked out daily. It’s all in good fun, either way.

A while back, I moved my family to the edge of the map in To-Hell-And-Gone Maine, to shake my tiny fist at Boreas, and test myself against him. Boreas was the Greek god of the north wind. He brought winter, arctic air, and sixteen inches of partly cloudy you had to shovel every couple of days. When we first lived in Maine, the thermometer touched 22-below zero. We didn’t have central heat. Around midnight that night, I went out the front door and stood in the middle of the street, with moonlight my only companion. I looked at the desultory column of smoke rising from my chimney, and dared Boreas to kick me again, harder. Then I realized I was standing in the middle of the street at midnight in the winter and this might cause comment down at the local grange hall, if there had been someone there to witness it, even though there wasn’t, because no one does anything like that in Maine very often and lives to procreate. Boreas was a worthy adversary, but we beat him. We found an abandoned house without a heating system, and left it with air conditioning and a pile of wampum in our pocket. Take that, Boreas.

So I was in the market for a new god so I could murmur, “You’re not so tough” under my breath after he kicked sand in my face and walked away. I thought, why not go the other way? Who’s the sun god?

Oh, right. Apollo. We got all bollixed up when we learned the Roman Pantheon after the Greek. Honestly, can you remember which was which between Ares and Mars? They mostly had the same portfolios, so it didn’t matter much. The only name shared by both pantheons was Apollo, the god of the sun, among a lot of other things. Apparently he fit the bill for Mediterranean vibe, no matter whether you were a hoplite or a legionary.

There’s a problem. Apollo is a bit, er, flouncy.

I’m getting on in years and can’t be seen using my old man strength to beat up stringy teenaged looking dudes like Apollo. Naked in sandals is a good look for Playboy models, but it doesn’t fill out the divine male wardrobe very well. I knew I needed to go shopping for a harder dude than Apollo. After all, I just finished off Boreas, and look at him:

See, that’s what I’m talking about. A worthy opponent. He’s got wings, and unlike Apollo, he can grow a righteous beard. He’s kidnapping chicks and taking them north, just like I did. Apollo is minor league stuff. I need a worthier opponent.

We’ll have to shop around more. Hey, how about the Aztec Sun God Tonatiuh:

This is more like it. The Simpsons style drawings are kinda hard to decipher, but he looks fairly formidable compared to Apollo. What’s his story?

The Aztec sun god Tonatiuh was seen as the active force that drives the sun across the sky, and in the Aztec view, he required constant nourishment through human sacrifice to maintain his strength and ensure that the sun would continue to rise each day. As the ruler of the Fifth Sun, Tonatiuh embodied the idea that the universe depended on a reciprocal relationship between gods and humans, where people had to offer their blood in return for the gods’ self-sacrifice that created the world. Without these offerings, Tonatiuh would weaken, threatening the movement of the sun and the survival of the cosmos itself.

Hmm. Might have bitten off more than I can chew, there. Let’s try the Mayan version of a sun god, Kinich Ahau:

Not exactly Cary Grant, but he’s doesn’t have one of those heads with an extra set of teeth that pop out when they’re menacing Sigourney Weaver or anything. What’s his story?

Kinich Ahau was the Maya sun god associated with daylight, warmth, and the life-giving power of the sun, often depicted as a youthful figure with large, sometimes squinting or crossed eyes, jaguar-like features, and solar symbols marking his divine nature. He was closely linked to kingship, as Maya rulers were believed to embody or channel his power, and his role was tied to maintaining cosmic balance, agricultural fertility, and the orderly passage of time. Rituals in his honor did not center on large-scale human sacrifice but instead focused on symbolic offerings and bloodletting ceremonies, in which nobles and rulers would draw their own blood—often from the tongue or ears—to communicate with the gods and sustain the cosmos, reinforcing the idea that divine and human realms were interconnected.

So the Aztec sun god Tonatiuh wants your heart torn out and shown to you to keep the temples humming. The Yucatecan Mayan god only demands Curad cuts to guarantee the orderly passage of time. Mexico it is, but it looks like the Yucatan peninsula is more our speed.  Tonatiuh is the equivalent of a daily IRS audit. Kinich Ahau sounds more like an occasional bad currency exchange rate. We can handle that. Shine on!