[Linkspam] "Assembly of a lesser god"

[edenfalling]

I've been reading the winter issue of UU World, and I just ran across a fascinating article -- "Assembly of a lesser god," by Doug Muder. Here's a excerpt:

Lately I've been trying to invent the worship of a new god. He's a minor god—I've named him Olly—and he... Wait. Maybe Olly isn't the right place to start. Let me back up and begin somewhere else.

I have friends who worship the goddess Rita.

Now, Rita isn’t exactly a heavyweight among divinities—she didn’t create the world and doesn’t promise an eternity of bliss—but she does provide her worshipers with one very useful blessing: urban parking spaces.

My friends worship Rita by singing her hymn (the Beatles’ “Lovely Rita, Meter Maid”) and they give her offerings by putting coins into the expired parking meters of total strangers, saying “Praise Rita” as they turn the knob. In return, they can pray to her whenever they need parking in the city, and parking spaces appear.

Or so they claim.

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It goes on from there, and it's a lovely, thoughtful bit of prose.

I mention this because I have, half-seriously, done the same thing: created a god. (I do it very seriously all the time, but in the context of secondary worlds, and I don't believe in those gods at all. Well. Not much.)

But I have a pantheon of traffic gods, and I do ask their blessings before I rent a car and go on a trip, and I do almost mean it when I dedicate a candle to them.

The great goddesses of the highway are the twins, Constructa and Constricta -- I ask them to spare me from their wrath and to smooth and speed my journey. Trilitus is the god of city driving; I pray to him when I need the light to change right now. Wayland is the god of gas stations, service plazas, rest areas, and convenience stores.

I suspect there are also deities in charge of potholes and accidents and slippery roads (minions of the twins), and of course one must always consider weather gods when setting out on a journey, but I haven't worked out the pantheon that far down the ladder. (I also keep meaning to extend the pantheon to airplanes, but so far flying has not been an urgent enough part of my life. *grin*)

...

It's kind of weird, though, to say, "Here are some gods who are fairly silly on the face of it, and I made them up more or less as a joke, and yet I do treat them as seriously in worship as any other deity. Possibly more so, since I actually pay attention to these ones, even while I know (logically) that this is all nonsense."

Do you do anything like that?

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ETA, 1/1/09: I mentioned this pantheon to my dad while driving through Ohio in the middle of the night, and he said that the weather was, of course, the baliwick of Meteora. Which is so obviously true that I wonder how I failed to discover her years ago. I love my dad. :-)

Comments

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

My mom has a parking goddess. Everytime we get an amazing parking space we look up and go 'thank you parking goddess!'

It works.

[dameruth.livejournal.com]

LOL! Reminds me of my fave Shriekback song, "Hymn to the Local Gods." (http://www.lyricsmania.com/lyrics/shriekback_lyrics_34612/other_lyrics_65498/hymn_to_the_local_gods_lyrics_644819.html)

Also, once my then-SO and I burned frankincense and myrrh in an old hubcap placed on the hood of his (dead) car to try and get it to start again . . . and it did. How cool is that? :D

[annearchy.livejournal.com]

I don't invent gods. I'm agnostic!

However, I am actually semi-acquianted with Doug Muder. Long ago (mid-90s) I was on the UUs-L listserv, and Doug was one of its many members too. He passed along a story he wrote, called Sidney and God, and I got permission from him to turn Sidney into a one-act play, which was actually presented at my church in October 1998. I'll definitely have to read that UU World article.

[edenfalling]

So Rita does exist! :-)

[edenfalling]

Very cool! (Most likely a coincidence, but it makes a much nicer story if it's not, and humans are, above all, storytelling animals. *grin*)

[edenfalling]

It's a small world! (Or rather, a small denomination, but whatever.)

[missmurchison.livejournal.com]

I love this post, and I am dedicating my comment to the god Consensus, who, when he is in a good mood, keeps conference calls from degenerating into endless arguments over petty differences of opinion or lengthy speculation based on non-existent information.

[edenfalling]

Oooh! Does his purview extend to internet comment threads?

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Most certainly.