黄金の目 – small god of WABI-SABI

[image description: A being stands in front of a shimmering golden pool in an asymmetrical black, red, and gold robe. Her left arm sports a tracery of delicate tattoos, and her torso seem scriss-crossed with fine lines. Are they cracks? her fingernails are gold and black, as is the asymmetrical mask she wears. Her eyes are pools of gold. Text reads, “250, 黄金の目, small god of WABI-SABI”]

• • • • •

Nothing lasts forever.

Not you. Not me. Not the divine. Not this sentence. All things are born only to die one day; all things begin so that they can come to an end.

Wabi Sabi celebrates the period between that end and that beginning. Not the perfect finished product; the missed starts, the imperfect prototypes. The lumpy apples and the irregular cobblestones. And Wabi celebrates the changes brought on by time and entropy, the patina on metal, the way stone can discolor, the shift in fabric from stiff to soft or from soft to stiff. Wabi understands, more than anyone else in the heavens or on Earth, that we are all of us only here to go.

But at the same time, Wabi is not a god of entropy. Wabi celebrates beauty and serenity, the appreciation of the unappreciated, and the love of the unloved. Wabi is a god of beauty and of love, of learning to breathe more deeply when time is running out, to look around and savor the moments that never stay, the beauties that never endure exactly as they are, but change and transform, becoming something unique, becoming something more.

Wabi loves you, whether or not that love is welcome. Wabi always has.

Wabi always will.

Kirra – the Small God of Dietary Restrictions

[image description: A koala bear with a fuzzy nose looks holds a banana they cannot eat (the art style is cut paper and muppety fabric). Text reads, “Kirra the Small God of Dietary Restrictions 249”]

---

“Hey, are you really gonna eat that?”

“You know, your body needs nutrients. That doesn’t have any real nutrients in it. You should eat something that’s better for you.”

“You eat like a child.”

“You eat like a senior citizen.”

“Do you actually EAT?”

Oh, she’s heard them all. From the shame to the blame to the food’s not a game, people whose diets have never been complicated have so much to say about the way other people eat.

She’s a versatile god. She’s not just here for the people whose diets are restricted by physical medical needs. She’s here for the ones who can’t stand certain tastes or textures, who gag when they think about putting something off their very narrow lists into their mouth, for whom common foodstuffs sometimes register to the brain as “not food.” She’s here for the picky eaters and the voluntary restrictors, the ones who refuse certain things because they don’t feel right, or they don’t like the way their bodies react to those inputs.

She is not a god of disordered eating, but she shares some of her faithful with that god, whose name she will not speak, for to name him is to invoke him: some of hers come to her by way of him, their relationships with food shattered and thrown into disarray, their stomachs empty, their mouths full of rumors and lies. She does what she can to help her devotees find a healthy relationship with food that is healthy for them, and ways to answer the endless criticism of a world that doesn’t want to accept that nutrition is never one size fits all.

She does want people to drink more water, though.

There are very few diets not improved by drinking more water.

Zephyr – the small god of a cool breeze at the perfect moment

[image description: The profile of a faint smiling face forms briefly and a blue and orange-tinged Maxfield Parrish evening sky. Text reads, “248, Zephyr, the small god of a cool breeze at the perfect moment.”]

• • • • •

Most gods of wind and weather are very large. Overwhelming, even. They’re bombastic events that can fill a room with their glory, drowning out everything around them in with the sheer spectacle of their presence.

Not Zephyr.

Zephyr is very young, as a wind god goes, and very small, although these things are not necessarily connected; she has yet to give any indication that she might desire to grow larger, might one day wish to swell into a storm. She does not blow to crack her cheeks or freeze the world. She is the caressing hand at the back of your neck after a day has been long and hard. She is the breeze that knocks inspiration’s apple from the tree, that stirs the precise sheet of paper that tells the author how their tale unspools.

She is the gentle hand of spring against the cheek of a frightened child, and the cooling promise of fall in the sweltering heat of summer, and she loves us, loves us all, as only a still, small breeze is capable of loving.

When people ask her purpose or her portfolio, she only laughs, and blows herself away, for she sees no need in explaining to those who will not see. Zephyr is a god of wind, yes.

She is also a god of hope.

• • • • •

Please join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

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HALLE 9000 • SMALL GOD OF AUTOTUNE

[image description: A banjo player on a rooftop against an aged-looking copper green sky.. Well, not a human player exactly. And not a banjo. a robot with an instrument that’s got no strings over its clock-dial body. Both have a glowing ‘eye’ (as does the robot’s… heart?).  Text reads, “HALLE 9000 • SMALL GOD OF AUTOTUNE”]

• • • • •

Sing. Sing a song. Sing out loud, sing out long, and if you can’t sing that song in any note the world would recognize, that’s all right, because Halle is there for you. Halle is a very new god, recently born from the tumbling chaos behind the veneer of sweet melody that is the cosmos. Halle depends on a very specific technology that, now that it exists, is likely to continue existing for the remainder of human history, or at least until some sort of crisis drops us all back into prehistory, where the stories told around the fire will include a time when every singer had the voice of an angel, and no melody was too complicated to be carried on the wind.

One day, perhaps, Halle will be the small god of voice manipulation as a whole, may even take the entire category of deep fakes and sounding like someone you’re not. But here and now, today, Halle is the small god of autotune, taking your songs and turning them into something that’s been deemed sweet by the ear of a listener, something marketable, something that can be passed along and profited from.

Is Halle a good god? We don’t really know.

Is Halle a god made for human abuses?

Of that, we are absolutely sure.

• • • • •

Please join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

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Dark Alley – small god of Survived Hardships

[image description: Twilight. A single lamp glows as the sun sets on this challenging part of town. Upshot of an imposing anthropomorphic cat in rough clothing that might suggest a buccaneer, one hand a fist, the other holding a long knife or short sword in a manner that suggests comfort. The cat bears an eyepatch over their left eye, and wicked scars are visible wherever their skin and fur are exposed. They have a prosthetic below their left knee. Text reads, “246, Dark Alley, small god of Survived Hardships”]

• • • • •

They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but that’s not always true. Sometimes what doesn’t kill you just makes you harder and more brittle, scarred and stiffened by the unwanted agonies of a world too big and too cruel for any single person to understand. Dark Alley understands that very well. Alley is the small god of the ones who survive. Not the ones who thrive, not the ones who pass unbroken, just the ones who somehow manage to keep standing.

She loves her brittle, bruised, brutalized faithful, and does what she can to protect them from a world that never sees a single dance with suffering as sufficient, a world that would be more than willing to come at them again and again and again, never giving them the opportunity to heal. She isn’t the small god of healing, not the keeper of the kintsugi either literal or metaphorical. When the shelves come crashing down, she’s not the one who has the glue. But she’s the one who might keep you breathing long enough to reach the helpers. She’s the one who’s got your back, even when you feel broken, even when you feel like breaking down.

She has a soft spot for Trinette, who has survived hardship, but never known it, because she never noticed. For her, hardship is just one more beautiful thing in the path to tomorrow, and Alley wants to keep it that way. Alley is, in the end, a god of innocence; she knows that many never have the chance to preserve their own, but she’ll fight for it when she can, and she never gives up before she has to, and she never surrenders.

Alley herself has known hardship, but she doesn’t speak of it often; those gods of kintsugi, she’s been to see them, she’s been shattered and stitched back together, and what’s in the past is in the past, now and forever. She wants to help her followers. She wants to see some forms of suffering lost forever.

She wants you to be safe, in whatever way you can be, now and evermore.

• • • • •

Please join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

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Trinette- small god of Naiveté

[image description: Watercolour and ink painting of a wide-eyed little mouse with a wreath of stars and a graphic gold star on her long shift. Text reads, “245, Trinette, small god of Naiveté”]

• • • • •

There have always been some people—some lucky, shining people—who walk through the world unbruised and untarnished by its many trials, who can continue to see the goodness in everything around them. They aren’t oblivious, these lucky few, and they aren’t foolish: they’re simply capable of believing that things will always be better, that the arc of the universe will always bend toward improvement.

Trinette walks with them. She wishes there were more of them, but her faithful are born, not made. Few of them ever know her by name; many of them believe they serve other gods exclusively, and wouldn’t know her if she stood before them with hands outspread and filled with stars. They’re hers because of the sweetness they maintain in the face of adversity, and not because of any pledge or promise that might have bound them. She loves them, those unwitting followers of hers, and she wishes them only ever the best in all they dream of or desire.

Trinette’s world is a beautiful one, because she can’t imagine it any other way. She believes there is good in everyone, mortal or divine, and that even the worst of us only need the time to prove themselves better than their worst desires. Alley, Small God of Survived Hardships, follows close behind her, and warns anyone who might take advantage of Trinette’s willingness to believe the best about people that they won’t enjoy the consequences.

Too many of Trinette’s faithful never find an Alley of their own, mice in a world of predators without a devoted cat to follow where they lead and keep them safe. Those who do, thrive. The world needs balance, after all.

Which means the world will always need Trinette.

• • • • •

Please join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

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unknown – small god of ego death

[image description: A well-dressed being in a dark turquoise suit and collar and tie is seen against a golden parchment background. But things are not as one might expect, as a cloud of steam (smoke?) rises from their collar. Their face is smoking (steaming?) in front of their waistcoat. Text reads, “243, unknown, small god of ego death”]

• • • • •

The worst of it is that so many people assume he’s a male god.  And to be fair, sometimes he is; being swept aside and forgotten has no gender, and every gender, all at the same time.  But even he finds it offensive—as much as he finds anything offensive—that people would make that assumption, as if only men have ever created anything worth preserving.

If anything, across the great march of history, Unknown is a female god, she who wrote stories or made discoveries and was then shoved briskly to the side, so that men could claim the things she’d made as their own, attaching their own names to something that was never theirs to hold.  Or they’re an aggregate god, singular they and plural at the same time, filled with stones thrown by people outside and inside the binary both.

Unknown accepts all pronouns, as long as there’s no insult implied.  They would like a little dignity for once, having been denied it for so very long.

They are the shadow behind the story, the inspiration behind the invention, the intellect behind the idea.  They are nothing and they are everything, and they are forgotten, means and motive and all.  Sometimes they are intentional: sometimes they set a thing free, unclaimed, to become the property of everyone and no one at the same time.  But all too often, they are erased, the clever words stolen from their mouths and turned into a quip that “everyone just knows,” the striking innovation transformed into common practice.

It’s not that they want compensation, necessarily.  It’s just that sometimes, a little credit would be nice.  Sometimes, being remembered would be nice.

Sometimes having a name would be nice.

So the worst of it is that people make things up about them, decide things on his behalf when she’s not available to contradict.  But all they want is to be remembered.

All they want is a little respect.

• • • • •

Please join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

WordPress: https://leemoyer.wordpress.com/

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Homepage: http://smallgodseries.com

Mastodon: @SmallGods@mastodon.world

Slash_Borden – small god of fanfic

[image description: A smiling and laughing young woman with black hair and large glass taking up much of her face is drawn in soft watercolor strokes and colors. Text reads “Slash_Borden, small god of fanfic, 240”]

• • • • • 

She used to be the small god of retellings, and sometimes she wishes she still were.  But she was born by firelight, the first time a storyteller, fumbling for a tale, grabbed hold of something they had heard and made it their own.

Then, for a long while, she was a small god of the oral tradition, and for a short, hot-blooded time after the dawn of the printing press, the god of knockoff narratives.  But then came copyright and ideas of intellectual ownership, and she was forced more to the fringes, a once-respectable god remade into a source of shame.

Which she refuses to carry.  She is, always and indisputably, a god of the imagination, and she is glorious.  She encourages her believers to remake fictional worlds in infinite diversity and glory, in cascades of yes-and, what-if, and might-have-been.  She nurtures epics and understated cozy dramas, and she treats them all the same.

She is a god for everyone who has ever wanted to tell a story, who has ever dreamt a world more perfectly tailored to their own desires.  She claims ownership over everything and nothing, and she teaches her faithful whether they realize it or not, because education comes through action, and she hones them into some of the finest scribes of their time, forcing them to understand how settling words into a line can change the world.

She changes worlds.  She is a small god of literature, no matter how much people try to dismiss her, and scholars understand how much she has her hooks in human nature, how much she’s always been a part of this story, how impossible it is to extract her from the narrative.   They no longer try.

You do not need to eat the fruits of her garden, but don’t try to tear it down.  What she plants will always grow back: all you’ll gain is the anger of a god.

Auld Veg – small god of heirloom plants

[image description: An old watercolor botanical illustration of a grumpy green plant creature in a metal pot. Text reads “Auld Veg, small god of heirloom plants, 239”]

• • • • •

Ever had a tomato?  No, a real tomato, one that tastes like something, like summer and lysine, like the sun itself trapped inside a papyrus skin, ready to run down your chin in a river of nurturing goodness?  Not everyone likes tomatoes, that’s true.  Maybe you’ve had the good stuff and found that it’s still not for you, and that’s okay, no one’s here to judge.  But have you ever had a tomato?

If you’re thinking of grocery store shelves and bright, sterile lighting when I ask you that question, the answer’s no, by the way.  You’ve never had a tomato, not in any way that counts.  See, when trucking fruits and veggies around to make sure people could have them all throughout the year became commonplace, clever people started breeding that same produce for what they called “shelf stability.”  They wanted it to last longer.  An admirable goal!

They also wanted it to look the same, every carrot like every other, every stalk of celery interchangeable.  They wanted so much.  The gods of progress demanded a sacrifice, and they made it without hesitation.

But what they sacrificed was flavor.

Heirloom plants have survived because they had value their cultured cousins can’t deny.  They taste of summer and soil, of all good things distilled down to the bite of chemical sweetness on the tongue, the feeling of crunching between the teeth.  They’re hardy, too, and often ugly; they thrive where the show ponies of the produce world fall and fail.

Auld has been watching over them all this time, and over their keepers, the strange man at the farmer’s market with his two hundred varieties of apple, the woman who raves about the subtle differences in breeds of acorn squash.  The people who care passionately about things many of us don’t notice at all.  They’re his, as much as the tomatoes are.

But at the end of the season, he cares more about the tomatoes, as well he should.  They’re history preserved, and as the climate changes, as the world reorients itself, they become the future, too.

Taq E. Cardia – the… challenging small god of Polymerase Chain Reactions

[image description: Over a glass chemistry Erlenmeyer flask filled with an oily black and lava mixture hovers a large glowing eye. The eye is set in a triangular black stem with its optic nerve, in glowing lava colors, spiraling behind it. Text reads “238, Taq E. Cardia, the… challenging small god of Polymerase Chain Reactions”]

• • • • •

Okay. I gotta be honest here.
I have no idea what’s going on anymore.
Why is there a god for this? I don’t know. You don’t know. Taq, presumably, doesn’t know. We don’t even know Taq’s pronouns. I tried to ask. I got a bubbling sound and a few random strings of DNA in response.
Is Taq actually the god, or is Taq the sequencing engine for a god yet to be revealed?
I HAVE NO IDEA.
The worst part is…I don’t think Taq does either.
All hail the great gods of science, I suppose.
Maybe they’ll save us.
Maybe not.
Maybe we should run.