Sum by David Eagleman

here for eternity. Only rarely is there a local resurgence of belief in an old god, a small clumping of fans, but such bursts are always short-lived. The gods recognize that they are stuck here with their dealt hand of cards: a vengeful personality, fire for eyes, dysfunctional kin, and eternity on their hands.
    When you begin to look around, you’ll discover thousands of them. The Aztec Mictlantecuhtli, the Chinese Monkey King Sun Wukong, the Norse Odin. In afterlife phone books you can find the Rainbow Serpent of the Aboriginal Australians, the Prussian Zempat, the Wendish Berstuk, the Algonquian Gitche Manitou, the Sardinian Maymon, the Thracian Zibelthiurdos. At a restaurant you might eavesdrop on the still-cold relationship between the Babylonian sea goddess Tiamat and the storm god Marduk who once split her in two. She picks at her food and only gives curt replies to his attempts at conversation.
    Some of the gods are related to one another; others have untraceable genealogies. What they have in common is a proclivity to refuse the free housing offered in the afterlife, although no one is sure why. Most likely it is because they are having a difficult time coming to terms with the idea of sinking to the level of their onetime genuflectors.
    Instead, at night, lonely and homeless, they cluster in one another’s company on the far edge of the city, lying down to sleep in large grassy meadows. If you’re interested in history and theology, you’ll enjoy walking these fields of gods, this quiet horizontal spectacle of abandoned deities laid in uneven rows to the vanishing point. Here you might run across Bathalang Maykapal of the Tagalogs, and his main enemy, the Lizard God Bakonawa; having no one who cares about their fights anymore, they now share a lonely bottle of wine. Here you see the god of light, Atea, from the Tuamotu Archipelago, and his son Tane, who in his heyday hurled the patricidal lightning bolts of his ancestor Fatu-tiri; now the whole family sits around, their vendettas withered and difficult to reinvigorate. Look: here’s the Maori Tāwhirimātea, the god of storms and winds, who spent his lifetime punishing his brother deities for separating his parents, Rangi and Papatuanuku; with no more audience, his winds are spent and he plays cards with his brothers under calm skies. Over there you can see Khonvoum, supreme god of the Bambuti Pygmy, clutching his bow made of two snakes, which he still believes might appear to mortals as a rainbow. Here is the Shinto fire god Kagu-tsuchi, whose birth burned his mother to death; now the only evidence of his former blaze is a light smoky smell.
    Like a museum, these fields of gods, this pastoral encyclopedia of mythology, is a testament to human creativity and reification. The old gods are used to watching us here; the new gods are stung by how quickly they slipped from reverence and martyrdom to desertion and tourism.
    Although the gods choose to congregate together out here, the truth is that they cannot stand one another. They are confused because they have found themselves here in the afterlife, but they still, deep down, believe they are in charge. They have typically risen to the top because of their aggression, and they still want to claim supremacy over the others. But here they no longer enjoy the peak of a hierarchy; instead, they suffer side by side in a fellowship of abandonment.
    There is only one thing they appreciate about this afterlife. Because of their famed vengefulness and creativity in the arts of torture, they find themselves impressed by this version of Hell.

 
    Apostasy
    In the afterlife you meet God. To your surprise and delight, She is like no god that humans have conceived. She shares qualities with all religions’ descriptions, but commands a deific grandeur that was captured in the net of none. She is the elephant described by blind men: all partial descriptions with no understanding of the whole.
    You can see in Her glittering eyes