[image description: A faded art nouveau poster with difficult-to-read type showing the portrait of a mustachioed man with a very full beard made of pickles. His eyebrows and hair are green, and he wears a little small top hat with a pickle on (for?) its band. Text reads “GÜNTHER GHERKIN small god of Pickles 237”]
• • • • •
He’s not a joke god.
People sometimes assume he must be a joke, because they think pickles are funny, and don’t understand the complex history of food preservation and keeping people alive through the long winters; they don’t see how essential pickles and pickling were to proper nutrition, to babies seeing the spring still hale and hearty, to mothers who lived. They don’t know.
He knows. That’s enough.
His faithful also know. They may not have been there when the brine was bottled, when the rules were written, but they’ve read the holy scriptures, the cookbooks and instruction manuals, and they understand what he is to them, and what they are to him. They keep his practices. They remember his traditions. And they pickle, and they pickle, and endure.
[Image description: A portrait in blood red. The figure of a woman rises over a silhouetted cityscape – a white dress, a smoking gun and bright red lipstick. Her pupils bright red under a wide-brimmed hat. Red flames rise from the black city and her brief reflection lights the docks and barges in the river below. Text reads “252 • EVA • small god of FEMMES FATALE.”]
• • • • •
She walked into my theology like a queen walks into a throne room, or like a knife slides into a wound; making her own space even as she was stepping into it, absolutely certain that the world would yield before her, and she swung that certainty like a sword, guaranteeing her own ascension. She leaned up against my desk, all red lips and dangerous curves and legs that went all the way up to the promised land, and she whispered, “You’ll be fair, won’t you?”
I think I promised that I’d do my best, and I think she laughed that husky, whiskey river laugh of hers, and said, “That’ll do, doll, that’ll do.”
And then she was gone, and I was here, anchorite in her scriptorium, trying to write out the lives and lessons of all the small gods without getting myself condemned by any one of them, and Eva’s kiss was burning on my brow, and I had a tale to tell.
Sometimes a girl gets tired of nocturnal visits from unspeakable powers.
She’s not just a god of women, although most of her followers are female: she’s the god of a space inside the story, a specific role to be fulfilled. Her people are mysterious, beautiful, seductive, alluring; they lay traps, planting poisoned seeds throughout the soil of their narratives. They enchant and enthrall with a look, a kiss, the scent of their perfume. And all too often, their redemption comes in the form of dying to save the hero, the poor sap who followed them into danger to begin with.
Eva comes for the femmes fatale who choose that role, who select their lipsticks with their heads high and their hearts proud, and she comes for the ones who don’t, the ones who blossom beautifully but without understanding it, the ones who would rather be overlooked and left alone. She understands that beauty can be just as painful to carry as ugliness, when heaped in too much towering profusion, and she weeps for them, the ones who’ll never know a moment’s peace, the ones who will always be called upon to play the role of instigator in someone else’s story.
Eva loves the ones who call on her, and she smiles with her metaphors painted plainly on her face, and she tries to keep them safe.
[image description: A bride walks out of an old, dark and threatening home into a beautiful autumn day. She leaves behind a bilious green space inhabited by threatening shadows and fiery red light pouring through stained glass. She leaves a bouquet of flowers on the floor behind her. Text reads, “251, Naja, the small god of Getting Out”]
• • • • •
People want things.
They want things that are good for them and things that are bad for them, and most of all, they want the things they’re told to want by the people they trust and believe in, the things that seem like such a good idea from any sort of a distance. They want what they’re told to want, until the moment they don’t want them anymore.
When that moment arrives, Naja is there, one hand extended, no judgment in her heart. She knows that not every faith is a fit for every heart, and that sometimes even the things we truly believe will be with us forever—our names, our families, our genders—are the right things for us to carry. She knows we need the chance to change, and she knows that sometimes what we need more than anything else is an exit.
If you go back far enough in the annals of her faithful, you’ll find that once, she wasn’t Naja, Small God of Getting Out. She was Naja, Small God of Marriage and Eternal Loyalty. The day she broke and ran was a small war in the heavens, lightning and thunder. The clouds wept saltwater for a week, and she took shelter with the gods she trusted until her black eye faded into memory and the cast came off her arm.
She knows, better than most, that sometimes the only true act of faith is getting out, and believing that you can survive without the things you were told you had to want forever.
She believes in you, and she believes in me, and she’ll be there when we need her.
[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.
[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.
[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:
[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:
[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:
[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:
[image description: A well-dressed anthropomorphic red panda (or red fox?) bids you welcome you through an oval window. Behind them, a lush and florid hobbity landscape featuring many burrows which contain other (instances of?) your host. The largest bears the address 244. Text reads, “Firefoxen, the small god of internet rabbit holes”]
• • • • •
Come in come in come in. Come warm yourself by the fire. There’s cookies and cocoa and chamomile tea, and we’ll have cucumber and chicken salad sandwiches in a little while. You don’t need to worry here, don’t need to be afraid. You’re safe.
You can hide here for as long as you like.
Oh, the cottage? Well, we began as a website, Geocities self-build. All our HTML was hand-done, real rustic stuff, and we’ve maintained it ever since. Most of our web rings are defunct now, but we keep them as decoration, and besides, nothing on the network is ever truly gone forever. They could reactivate any day now. Why, we got back the Siamese Rescue Ring just last year, when the moderators finally realized that the book of faces was a walled garden and they couldn’t thrive there any longer. So we keep the rings. Their creators might yet come home.
So we were a website, but as the ‘net’s grown, so have we. The gardens we have are ones we planted on our own. There are many forms of rabbit hole. There are the ones that spiral you down into the depths of conspiracy theory and lies, never letting go once they get their thorny brambles into your skin. There are the ones that only reinforce what you already believe. And technically we own those too, we just don’t nurture them. Sadly, they don’t need us to, and they won’t die away due to neglect.
No, this is the sort of rabbit hole we like to think of as the best kind: the sort that keeps you warm and safe and lets you focus on what interests you, what you love and long to know more about. Ursula’s in the garden, and she’ll glad tell you about ten thousand types of potato, while Kate will show you how to cast a stitch, and Amy is always welcoming more members in her life drawing class. Whatever holds your heart, we have it here, and we’re happy to share for as long as you need to rest with us.
So rest. Have a cookie, and take a breath, and be safe and home, and here.
• • • • •
Please join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:
Lee Moyer 