Once none dared blaspheme their names—
Isis enthroned, Osiris of the underworld,
Amun-Ra blazing in the noon,
Zeus the thunderer, Hera august,
Athena who struck with spear,
Apollo of the lyre and light,
Artemis who loosed her arrows in the shadows of the wood.
Marduk who shattered the dragon,
Ishtar of love and war,
Baal the rider of clouds,
Dagon of the harvest, Chemosh of battle.
All received blood and incense,
bore the weight of kingdoms,
demanded fear.
But now—
their names are ink upon a scholar’s page,
cartoons in a schoolboy’s jest.
Their temples gape as hollow mouths,
stones tumbled like teeth in the earth.
Their rites are rumor,
their mysteries reconstruction,
their fires ashes, their echoes gone.
Behold Karnak, roofless to the sky;
Delphi, once the navel of the world,
silent but for the wind in the laurel.
Eleusis, where mysteries bound gods and men,
is rubble, its rites reduced to speculation.
Uruk, the wall-girt city,
mute in the desert.
Tenochtitlan, where once the sun fed on blood,
now paved by another empire’s stones.
Thus is man mocked by memory:
he built to house the eternal,
yet what he named eternal is gone.
The priest is forgotten with the god,
the hymn with the idol,
the worship with the fear.
All that was called everlasting—
proved mortal as dust.
Yet from these scattered stones, a truth emerges:
temples fall, names fade,
but the hunger endures.
Not the idol, but the yearning;
not the revelation carved in stone,
but the silence men cannot bear.
The divine was never in the image,
but in the need that made it.
This is the immortal truth:
that man longs,
and in the longing is closer to the eternal
than any god he made.
Yet beware:
for the gods that fed on blood
still feed—
only now in other names,
with other temples,
upon the lives of men.
Northcoast Antiquarian 