Read an Excerpt
I lost a God once. It’s easier done than people think. Forget a prayer once in a while or simply grow grief in your kitchen window along with the basil and rosemary. Somewhere inside my heart, I misplaced my faith, misunderstood my own origin story, became a person half tragedy, more misery, and I started to relish it. I revelled in this losing of everything that I thought I was, the lack of self-care; the drowning becomes such a needful thing when you think there is nothing left to look forward to. When my faith came back to me, like the forgiving water of a river to the pebbles that it smooths by constant weather and wear, I asked myself, what happens to the Gods when their people forget how to know them? What happens to their fearsome might when the fervent belief fades?
Do you think they are still powerful when they become less than a memory?
Or do you think without the power of prayer everything that makes them immortal is nothing but a façade?
The Primordial Goddesses
‘Verily at the first Khaos (Chaos, the Chasm) [Air] came to be, but next wide-bosomed Gaia (Gaea, Earth), the ever-sure foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympos . . .’
—Hesiod,Theogony 116
Chaos
Edward Lorenz, the mathematician,
father of chaos theory, defines chaos as:
‘When the present determines the future,
but the approximate present does not
approximately determine the future.’
Which loosely translated means:
No one knows how the consequences
of our actions will truly play out,
and try as we might, we will never
be the masters of our destiny.
And Chaos, who has been listening, as she
always does to each of her creations,
laughs because what else does the Ancient Being
Who Created Creation do when a small, impatient
primitive species that insists on quantifying everything
tries to quantify the unfathomable by their small terms?
And as she laughs, the cosmos ripples,
And whole galaxies fall apart.
Eurynome: The Mother of All Things
This is a lesser known story.
It is a genesis entirely woman-whispered
in the shadows when we meet
in secret, plotting escapes
from unwanted marriages or to untangle
darker devil-deemed desires.
They murmur, in the beginning of everything;
from the bones of Chaos, rose a girl
who built the universe, the stars,
the planets, all because she was looking
for a place to dance. And she waltzed
the earth awake and the rhythm of her feet
fermented the stars alive,
the synchronised sorcery of her fingers
brought the solar system to life,
and the flow of her arms looped
aro
