Our multi-millennial myth-making mind

Let us commence this particular flight of ours into ‘thought-sphere’ by recalling two powerful falsehoods as respectively articulated by two anonymous provokers. One: that ‘if God was not there, man would have invented him’. Two: that ‘if God had not created man, man would have evolved himself into being’.

This current intellectual flight of ours is a continuation of the one reported in Sunday Monitor of July 30. In summary, we discovered during that excursion into European antiquity – that Greek and Roman civilisations had their gods and goddesses, whose sexual conduct included marriages, procreation, lust, and rape between the immortals themselves; or even between the said immortals and the sons and daughters of men. Our examples were Zeus ‘the king of gods’ who raped human Queen Leda of Sparta; and the goddess Aphrodite who married a human prince, Anchises of Troy.

Back in our mother Africa of antiquity, we are not short of our own gods and goddesses. The Yoruba of Nigeria, for a supreme instance, are famed to have had/to still have a pantheon of more than one thousand gods for the consumption of their one ethnic community! Among them are: Obatala, chief of gods; Shango the god of lightning and thunder; and Ogun the god of iron, other metals, and metallurgy. 

Ah, that ugly Ogun, the in-charge of all the metallic boxes on wheels that ply the roads and cause all the accidents that kill countless humans, and dogs, and other animals – so that he may drink their blood!

However, the naughtiest and most malicious of all the Yoruba gods is Eshu – the god of trickery, misfortune, and chaos. In one famous modern Nigerian play, Eshu disguises himself as a human being wearing a hat with two different colours on the right and left, respectively. 

After he passes by, two humans on either side of the path – each having seen only one colour of the hat –chaotically argue to no end between themselves that the colour of the hat was this and not that! 

Inside our own priceless motherland Uganda, each ethnic community could/or can proudly boast of having had /or presently having a handful of indigenous gods, or even a sizable pantheon of them. For instance, in Masaabaland (where ‘yours truly’ here hails from) every child of my generation grew up knowing that this world was full of gods, each responsible for one thing or the other inside or outside of us. 

There was god of the sky, god of the earth, god of thickets and jungles with his wild head of hair, god of this, god of that, and – god of the beautiful and terrible rainbow, such that if you went too near a spring, stream, or river when the rainbow had appeared in the sky, it would suck up both the water and your blood, leaving behind a withered corpse of what was you!

Furthest north in mother Africa, Egypt of antiquity had its famous god Osiris plus his wife Isis. Osiris came to Egypt (was it from ‘somewhere’ or ‘nowhere’?) to rule as king, brought the Egyptians new laws and taught them how to farm well and live peacefully. Killed by his very jealous brother Seth, Osiris was magically raised to life by his wife Isis. But he told Isis that he would not continue in the world of the living - choosing rather to travel to the world of the dead, where he would become the king of the afterlife.

And so, fellow anti-clockwise travellers, as we head back to the present on our return flight of the intellect, I hear you loudly probing the multi-millennial propensity of man’s mind for creating myths (or fictionalised graphic perceptions) out of natural phenomena and aspects of his own amazing interior.

But – whether it happens in Egypt or Jerusalem – I personally marvel at the notion of ‘the immortal god who dies’!

Prof Timothy Wangusa is a poet and novelist.

[email protected]