Lili & Mimi – small gods of Walkies

[image description: A witch all in black robes with long flowing skirt and sleeves with the typical pointed hat walks down a winding forest path followed by little black cat. The scene is of a dark watercolor forest but with bright hints of colors. Text reads “Lili & Mimi, small gods of Walkies, 234”]

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Some people see her beckoning from the shadows of the trees or the park, or hear the swish of her skirts as she walks down the path, dodging bikers, stepping around potholes, walking with the smooth, unhurried stride of someone who has nowhere specific to be but is going to get there in her own sweet time no matter what.

Some people see the other half of her darting into the bushes or trotting down the sidewalk, tail held high, a banner inviting the bold to new adventure.

Some few—some lucky few—see them together.

They have no age. They are young and they are old and they are everywhere between, and they are always together and they are frequently apart, for a walk is a ramble with its manners front and center, and manners slip. No one is sure which is the woman and which the companion, but there are always two of them, the girl and her dog, the teen and her cat, the woman and her miniature horse, or iguana, or bright-winged parrot. Some people say they’ve seen her walking her octopus, or her alligator, or any number of other glorious oddities, and maybe they’re right and maybe they’re wrong, and maybe it doesn’t matter either way.

You can speak to her, if you like. You can ask her questions, and that is where the danger enters her worship. For most, she’s a god of fresh air and light exercise, of being a responsible pet owner and remaining connected to the natural world. But for those who speak to her directly, she can become a way of life. She can become an inducement to wander, a temptation to leave the beaten path behind.

Not all who wander are lost.
But not all are found again, either.

Follow her with caution. She will show you marvelous things, but one day she may show you the last things you will ever see, and you’ll fall with purring in your ears and dead leaves crunching underfoot, and Lili?

Lili will walk on.

TINK – SMALL GOD OF PANDEMIC PETS

A pyramid of precious toilet paper has been disrupted by an even more precious white and cream colored kitten who leans forward over a sideways roll. Text reads, “198, TINK, small god of PANDEMIC PETS”

For so many, the last two years have been a time of fear and unhappiness, outside forces conspiring to make the world smaller while the people we have always trusted to make that world larger and safer seem more focused on the pennies in their pockets than they are on the lives of the people who depend on them. It’s been difficult. People have been turning to whatever comfort they can find, and for some, that’s meant food, baking bread and perfecting recipes. For others, crafts, knitting the perfect sweater or painting the next great masterpiece.

And for many, it’s meant welcoming new lives into our families, bringing home sweet little bundles of wordless joy that we can nurture and tend to even when the days are at their darkest, helping them to thrive.

Enter Tink. Small god of pandemic pets.

Her role is a specialized one: she stands for the quarantine kittens and the pandemic puppies, the stay-at-home snakes and the furloughed fish. The pets people welcomed into their worlds when those worlds narrowed to what we’ve always offered to the majority of our companion animals. Their antics brightened our days, their plaintive cries for food reminded us to feed ourselves, and self-neglect is harder when there’s something counting on you.

And count on us they do. As restrictions loosen and the world begins to widen, bit by sometimes inadvisable bit, those pampered pandemic pets mirror the anxiety we felt when we were bringing them home: where are we going? Why are we leaving them? When will we be back? They don’t know how to live without us.

Our worlds have changed forever, but we are their worlds, and they were counting on us to stay the same.

Tink hears their cries, and she purrs for every one, tries to soothe and comfort them when their companion animals put on shoes and coats and leave them behind. She’s not as good at is as we are. She’s not the one they want.

But she’ll make sure they’re not alone.

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Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

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SUISEI XING, THE SMALL GOD OF SPEACEFARING

[image description: A young woman stands among a wild assortment of intergalactic travelers (including Barsoomians, Yithians, a robot, a tank of jellies, tiny translucent blob people, a professional Gnome, and… hey! Is that Jin Jin Jin’s tail I see there?). She wears a straw hat, carnation-colored shirt, black skirt with white polka dots, and black sandals. She holds a heavy black leather bag with several travel stickers (including a bumper sticker that reads ‘I <3 EARTH’) in both hands.   Text reads, “187, SUISEI XING, THE SMALL GOD OF SPACEFARING”]

Space. As the sages say, the final frontier. But not for everyone.

Wherever there is vacuum burn and the smell of ozone, wherever sapients don pressure suits to risk the frozen danger between stars, wherever there are those awesome Orion martinis, the ones with the pickled lichees instead of olives—because every civilization that has alcohol will have the martini eventually, in some form or other, as if brined fruit in clear liquor were the summit of social evolution—she is there, or has already been and gone, off seeking a new horizon, a truly final frontier. No one knows where she came from. Just that she always arrives exactly when she intends to, that her ticket is always in order, and that anyone who sails the stars belongs to her, at least for the length of their journey. She doesn’t challenge other gods for their worshippers. She gives them back as soon as the rocket lands. But while they’re in flight…while they’re in flight, they’re hers.

No matter what world she visits, her appearance is the same, only translated for the local biology, so that the sight of her is not alarming: she is always small, always slight and unassuming, attractive to the eye, and as close to female as their understanding of gender allows. She carries her own bags, talks quietly, smiles easily, and seems most comfortable when allowed to don a human skin. She is innocent and ancient, young and outside time, and she has seen things the rest of us can only dream of.

But she carries a camera, and if you can befriend her, if you can make her trust you, she’s always happy to share. She believes in curiosity without conquest, tourism without trauma, and she loves everyone she cradles in her arms of starlight and vacuum.

They say her true form is infinitely vast, the stretch of space itself, and that she is a small god by choice, limiting herself to avoid frightening the faithful she so adores.

They say her perfume smells like raspberries.

They say a lot of things.

Suisei herself says only “Have you been here before? Only I’m supposed to catch the next shuttle for Betelgeuse, and I’m afraid I may be on the wrong platform. Can you help?”
Always help her when she asks. Those she blesses always make their flights.

Trust her to be kind.

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Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

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Black Friday ~ Small God of False Profits

[image description: A massive serpent (so large that King Kong wouldn’t be big enough to fill its mouth. It looms over the city and coils around the Empire State Building creating – however briefly – the shape of a dollar sign. The top of the snake is gold, but its underbelly is ebon. Text reads, “151, BLACK FRIDAY ~ SMALL GOD: FALSE PROFITS”]

She slithers in through any opening she can find, so much smaller than she looks from the outside, so much larger than anyone wants her to be.  Her coils can constrict empires, her jaws encompass unions, and her venom can kill creatures so much larger than she is that it seems ridiculous.  What is the purpose of any single creature carrying so much potential to destroy?

Some say that she could slaughter gods, if she ever got it into her head to think there would be a benefit to her in the act, and so when she slides through heaven on her scaled belly, no one meets her eyes, and no one moves to attract her wrath, and no one lingers in her presence.

She must be very lonely, this serpent god of the unspent dollar and the unfinished deal.  She must yearn for the company of her kin.

But you wouldn’t know it to watch her moving through the world.  She thrives on the false belief that twenty dollars today is better than ten today and ten tomorrow, sparking the impossible belief that twenty today will mean twenty tomorrow, and not nothing tomorrow when every cent is spent, every dollar is divested.  She puffs herself up to seem threatening, and her faithful point and claim this proves that profit without end is possible, endless growth, endless expansion.

She will swallow the world, given room enough and time.

She will take both those things if no one intercedes.

But look: there’s a sale tomorrow.  And what beautiful things there are to buy, what wonders, what delights…

What a profit to be made.

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Artist Lee Moyer (13th Age, Cursed Court) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

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Autarch Erect – The Smell Good of Auto’Correct

[image description: A cell phone – open to a texting app – sits on an inlaid wooden table. An impish red character with a floating crown and long pointing tail rests at the bottom of the screen. Above it, a conversation between someone and their Dad (visible in a circle at the top of the screen). Text reads, “Dad: Have you seen your Mom anywhere? Reply: she can’t hear the phone she’s in the grave. Dad: WHAT? Reply: garage. duck. Dad: Always with the swearing.” 148, AUTARCH ERECT ~ the smell good of AUTO’CORRECT’”]

                  Every time you send a message that paints you as a wild duck enthusiast, she is there.  (Unless, of course, you’re a birder, or an ornithologist, and then every time you send a coworker or casual associate a message that paints you as a wild sexual enthusiast, he is there.)

                  Every time you misspell your own name, the name of a lover, the name of a dear friend, they are with you.  Ze is in every word, every syllable, every utterance, studying and dissecting, looking for the word you were most likely to have meant and discarding it.

                  Hey, Dom, are you coming to thinner tonight?  We’re having naked potatoes and barbequed rakes.

                  The only reason we haven’t collectively declared the need for an exorcism is that ze’s not a malicious god.  If anything, Autarch is a trickster god, dedicated to keeping us from taking ourselves too seriously through whatever means necessary, twisting our own words into parodies of themselves, making palindromes of poetry and poetry of palindromes.  How can we not laugh, when they are with us?  How can we not accept the glorious escape from accountability that ze provides?

                  How can we trust our own words in any context, when hey fight lave tin reformed while we weren’t paying attention?

                  Some gods are more trouble than they’re worth.

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Artist Lee Moyer (The Doom That Came to Atlantic City, Starstruck) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

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Simon, The Small God of Hairdos

[image description: A blue-eyed blonde in a scoop-neck black shirt, leather jacket, and blue tiger-eye necklace on a silver chain stands in front of a chart of classic hair/wig styles – many of which are named ‘Bob’. Text reads, “131, Simon ~ The Small God of Hairdos”]

​She will help you find your better self.

​Beauty is only skin deep, but hair is a form of art, and she is Michelangelo, she is DaVinci and O’Keefe and Franzetta.  She sits at the intersection of sculpture and painting and fabric art, spinning her transitory wonders, and as long as you think you look perfect, she knows that you are.  She knows that for all of us, looking into the mirror and seeing what we expect to see can be the most powerful sacrament in a universe filled with benedictions.

​She is in the bleach and the blow-dry, in the shampoo and the set, and she attends most open-casket funerals, to make sure that even on our way out of this world and into the next, we aren’t ashamed to be seen.  All she asks is that we find a way to be ourselves, that we breathe in deep of the setting chemicals and the salon air, sweet with chemical processes and bright with overhead lighting, and consider who we most desire to be.

​Hair is forever transitory.  Hair can change, and no style is inherently forever.  So wear it the way that makes you happiest, and know that you do so with Simon’s blessing.  She has changed before.  She will change again.  To live is to change, in ways both large and small.  Hair keeps growing, no matter how perfectly it may be styled in the moment, and she wants you to grow.  Even if you grow away from her, she wants you to grow.

​She takes coffee with Tesla Jefferson at least twice a week.  She spends her evenings looking over swatches with Polly Chrome.  And she is happy.  Never let anyone tell you otherwise.  Simon is a happy god, and she wants that same joy for you, whatever it costs.

​Whatever it takes.

Just trust your stylist.

………………….

Artist Lee Moyer (13th Age, Cursed Court) and author Seanan McGuire  (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you  icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from  the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

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Aestha Titian, Small God of Graven Images

[image description: A serious Black woman in a crimson cape (over a white shirt, crimson skirt, dark grey jacket, and red tie) holds the gold image-border in her left hand, and gestures over her shoulder with her right. Visible behind her, sculptures of ’No Escape’ Claus, Splunge, Elvis Parsley, Über Allium, Eschercargo, Galloping Gertie, Hedjet, and Beyoncé. Text reads, “130, Aestha Titian ~ Small God of Graven Images”]

Some people say that she shouldn’t be a god at all.

Some people say that she’s a demigod at best, and much more probably a muse of some sort, divine, yes, but not worthy of the admirations of godhood.

Aestha knows better.  She inspires nothing.  Her gifts are more prosaic ones.  Her faithful are by nature polytheistic: they go to other gods for inspiration, dally with demigods, marry muses.  They find their creations in other hands, and then they come to her with heads full of images and hands full of needing, and no idea how to put the two together.

She is a historian, of sorts, for in her name, sculptors call forth deities, pin them down in substance so that they may be seen and understood and yes, remembered.  Her hand guides the brush of our faithful illuminator, allowing him to set the images of her fellows—and even herself—down in line and color.  She stands with sculptors, shapes the clay of potters, even guides the needles in the hands of felt artists.  As long as the end result is an image of one of her kin and kind, her hand is there, and her need for worship is appeased.

Among all the gods of the arts, she is one of the least known, and the least appreciated.  The artist provides the talent and skill: neither of them come from her.  The gods themselves provide the inspiration: that is not her doing.  What she brings is the motivation to combine the two in the correct order, the ability to stand the completed work before the world and say “look, see?  This is my creation, behold.”

We are reasonably sure that our illuminator is her most loyal follower remaining in the modern world, outside of the eight dozen people doing illustrated retellings of Hades of Persephone.  But those are large gods, and large gods have less need of loyalty than the smaller kind.

The gods love her.  Her faithful loves her.  And for her, focused as she is upon the next statue for her garden, that has always been enough.

Medusa does not love her.

But that is a story for another scripture.

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Artist Lee Moyer (13th Age, Cursed Court) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

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No-Escape Claus, Small God of the Polar Vortex

[image description: A polar bear rides atop a whirling snow-filled whirlwind. Text reads, “129, ’No-Escape’ Claus, Small God of the Polar Vortex”]                 

Why are there so many divine polar bears?

I mean, really, that seems like the sort of question we ought to be asking.  After all, these hypercarnivorous predators (a real thing—when a creature eats 70% or more animal protein, it’s considered hypercarnivorous rather than just the normal level of carnivorous, and see if that helps you sleep at night) can run up to twenty-five miles per hour, and have a bite force of 1,200 pounds per square inch.  The human skull can be crushed by as little as 520 pounds per square inch.  So it would make sense for humans to fear polar bears, not to deify them.  And yet they keep showing up again and again, predators of the pantheon, stalking their prey from one side of the celestial line to the other.

Which is, quite frankly, bullshit.  We don’t need this many super-predators running around with divine powers!  It’s unsafe, and probably bad for some kind of heavenly ecosystem!  I don’t know!  I’m just the historian!  I’m just—

Right, sir.  Of course, sir.  Please don’t eat me, sir.

No Escape Claus is not as new a god as he might seem, having once driven ice ages across the world, devouring microclimes and driving entire species to extinction.  He grows in power once again, thanks to Anthropocene climate change and the furious ghosts of thousands of slaughtered polar bears hungry for revenge.  They come to take back what was always theirs, what should never have been taken away, and they have little mercy in their hearts.

When a cold wind blows out of season, remember that we put the guns into the hands of poachers, we put the lie of manifest destiny into the hearts of explorers, and we loosed them upon a world that had been doing perfectly fine before they came along.

The phantom polar bears come only to reclaim what’s theirs.

And they have the backing of a god.

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Artist Lee Moyer (13th Age, Cursed Court) and author Seanan McGuire  (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you  icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from  the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

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Eva Distraction – Small God of Hiding Behind Glasses

[image description: A thin green-shaded figure stands in a black tee shirt and jeans, adjusting their big round black-rimmed, rose-colored eyeglasses with their right hand (showing their painted red nails). Behind them, a stand of roseate deciduous trees. Text reads, “128, Eva Distraction ~ Small God of Hiding Behind Glasses”]

People assume that Eva is shy.  Eva isn’t shy.  Eva just wants to see the world without distortions or distractions.  When glasses get dirty, they can be wiped clean.  Eyes are more difficult.  Smudges on the eye tend to linger, tend to harden into schema and stereotype, and Eva doesn’t have time for that sort of bullshit.  Ze has places to go, things to do, and very little patience for the assumed.

Ze sees the world clearly, from behind a comfortable screen of shaped and polished glass, and ze likes it that way.

Eva stands with the shy, the ones who need something to hide behind in the literal sense, the faithful who desire to be obscured, to disappear, to be seen as an accessory and not as an entire person in their own right. Ze will help them vanish as much as they need to, and when zir works are not enough to make that possible, ze will try to find another way.  Eva is nothing if not forever merciful.

Eva stands with the smug, the ones who seek to cultivate an air of mystery or superiority, whether they watch the world from behind corrective lenses or on the other side of a screen of artificial darkness, and if they sometimes look a little smug, a little silly, well, Eva does zir best not to judge them.  Mortality is complicated in ways divinity will never be, and ze understands that the temporary may need to feel superior to their fellows from time to time.  They’ll find out soon enough that reality looks like with the screens stripped away, and then they can try to cope with the sight of it without their glasses.  Eva will shelter them until that day comes.

Ze cares for all zir faithful, and when they lose their glasses, ze is there with a prayer to St. Velma that their vision may clear and their shields be restored while there’s still time.

Time is always shorter than it seems.

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Artist Lee Moyer (13th Age, Cursed Court) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

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Eschercargo: Small God of Deconstructivism

[image description: A snail so gigantic that it breaks the golden card border, its shell is a strange geometry of curvilinear aluminum. Text reads, “73, ESCHERCARGO, THE SMALL GOD OF DECONSTRUCTIVISM”]

He did not come formally and fully into being until the 1980s, when he manifested first as an architectural style and then—after he was recognized and accepted as an independent entity—as a snail the size of a skyscraper, which seemed like a perfectly logical thing for a semiotic process codified by a French philosopher to become.  No one has ever asked Eschercargo what he thinks.  Even his faithful find it difficult to communicate with their god directly, finding his thought patterns and ideas difficult to follow, as they tend to break into shapes that the human mind has trouble comprehending.  They can worship him.  They can emulate him.  They can never truly understand him.

And that’s okay.  When you worship a snail who is also a city who is also a semiotic concept, understanding is somewhat secondary to the whole enterprise.

But we are the omniscient third.  This tense was chosen for a reason, and we can provide you with something no one else has ever possessed: a glimpse into the inner workings of Eschercargo, the massive small god of deconstructivism.  And what he is thinking right now, as he is thinking at almost all times, because he is, after all, a snail, is how much he would like to find a strawberry the size of a mountain.

All he does is to move him closer to the sweetness of the strawberry.  He oozes toward that bright ideal an inch at a time, and when he finds it, he will devour it, sucking it into his toothless maw and scraping it with his hard inner mandibles.  This is the dream of a god.  This is his deepest desire.  All your worship, all your prayers, cannot compare to the strawberry.

The strawberry is bliss.

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Artist Lee Moyer (13th Age, Cursed Court) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

Tumblr: https://smallgodseries.tumblr.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/smallgodseries

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Homepage: http://www.smallgodseries.com/