Dede Ege, man, and the
art of gods by Immanuel James Ibe-Anyanwu
I have seen a lot of
foolish gods. Grandmother once told me about one who complained that teenagers
that often played around his shrine gave off smelly farts, to his eternal
suffocation. Poor, lazy dude, he wouldn't move an inch. Another wiped out an
entire family for the sin of a member he left unhurt! There is no category of foolishness
that has not been practised by some god somewhere, even in ancient Rome and
Greece.
I have seen a lot of
gods--and that is because, to read Homer, Herodotus, or Plutarch, ancient
purveyors of the Greek and Roman gods gist--to read them is to be an
eye-witness seated cross-legged at the scene of the event. Ancient Greece
probably had more gods than humans, some of them thoroughly silly--and I shall
not attend to your lingering suspicion that perhaps man, often unwise, made the
gods in his own image; that the foolishness of the gods can be explained in the
social genetics between man and what he created--I shall not attempt such a
sacrilegious thinking, gods forbid!
