| Death Gods | Funerary Rites | Afterlives |
1 | The Big Dad. Didn't build heaven large enough, asks newcomers to help put together their own accommodations. | Body cremated, ashes baked into bread and/or smoked with hashish, reoccurrences of kuru having led to the decline of traditional cannibalism. | One hundred years hard labour in the heavenly workcamps, keeping the world alive for your progeny. |
2 | Ghost Wolf. Scares the soul out of your body when you die, then chases it around trying to eat it. Stops for flattery, back scratches, howling contests. | Classic stories about the deceased told again and again through the night, exaggerated until they become a mythic figure fit to join the gods. | Become the quarry of the wild hunt. If you escape, you can become a hunter. If caught, reincarnation. |
3 | Sheep Herd. Not really supposed to be looking after people, forgets they're sentient. Keeps ushering souls out of the right afterlives, onto 'greener pastures'. | A night of bacchanal followed by a day of terrible hangovers, everyone encouraged to start fights, call names and otherwise purge. | Sent back in time to haunt your own life and cause your own misfortunes. Very fun. |
4 | Counter of Beans. Makes you account for every action in life. Happy to hear arguments. Line of souls runs out the door and 3000 years down the hall. | Casting bones, measuring stars, ritual conversations. Careful reorchestration of planting calendars, holiday plans, personal cosmologies and horoscopes. | Reincarnation as a new island. Take care of your ecology! Human life was a practice run, this is the one that counts. |
5 | Remother. Warm, red cheeks, swollen belly full of crying, babyfaced souls. Sucks you up her vagina and turns you into ectoplasm (in a good way). | Body nestled into a midden, covered in layers of the local grain and scraps from a feast in their honour. Dug up in a year to check if they made it to heaven | Wander the earth pondering the 700 heavenly riddles. If you solve three or four they'll let you be a deva. |
6 | The Boneyman. Looks just like someone you know with a skull painted badly on their face. If you laugh at their antics they will take you to hell. | After cursory mummification, the body is placed in an out of the way corner and ignored until everyone has genuinely forgotten its there. Buried properly once rediscovered. | Come straight back to the time and place of your death, at one thousandth the size. |
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