In These Days Of Post Modern Atheism

It is not the done thing to look too closely
at what Romans, Greeks, and Egytpians
might have believed, or the processes
by which those beliefs were made
to seem entirely natural and logical.

To modern minds those pagan gods,
with their complicated families lines
and love lives and erratic behaviour
have a lot to hide, seemed grotesque,
and lived lives as they were living out
some absurd revenge-driven soap opera.

But those old gods were not created out of nothing,
and were not created to merely amuse their followers.
The old gods were more than figures from history
where history was a hall of mirrors that was so ancient
and distorted we can't see from it what humans believed
about each other for how the gods were depicted as being.

There was an economic playbook that polytheism came with.

Statues and altars require skilled workmen to create them,
people who claim to prophesy the future require being paid.
Belief systems have to be integrated with economic systems,
and such integration required a playbook, to express in theatrical terms
the currency of belief. We ignore this playbook at our peril.

For when some modern demagogue rediscovers this playbook,
and reshapes how political power and modern finance works
according to it, the time for being reminded of the past will be gone:
we will be living it, barely recognising the we are the echo
of how it once worked. The near future of reliving the past
will be closer to us, and more part of how we live, than we thought it was.