by D.W. Roach, Marauder
I. Firelight and the First Questions
Since the dawn of firelight, humanity has told stories to make sense of the darkness. We have named the thunder and given it a temper, called the sea a jealous lover, and painted the stars as the eyes of forgotten gods. Every myth, every religion, every whispered legend around a hearth or altar, is a mirror — reflecting not heaven, but ourselves.
Across continents and centuries, the same tales repeat: chaos births order, a flood renews the world, the gods rise and fall as men do. The patterns persist because their author is not divine — it is human. In our myths, we have always sought to explain not only the world, but the beating heart within it.
“Every myth begins with a question, and every answer reveals more about man than the gods he invents.”
Long before philosophy or science, there was wonder. The early human looked upon the sky and asked, Why? Why does the sun rise? Why do we die? Why do the heavens rage? To live without answers is to live in fear — and so, we made answers.
We shaped them in story, wrapped in symbols, draped in divinity. Myth was our first science, our first psychology, and our first poetry.
II. Order from Chaos
The creation stories of the world — Norse, Babylonian, Greek, Hebrew — are astonishingly similar. In the beginning, there is chaos, void, or darkness. From this emptiness, something stirs — a god, a word, a spark. The cosmos is born through struggle or sacrifice: Ymir’s flesh becomes the earth, Tiamat’s body the heavens, God’s word the light.
Over and over, we find that order emerges from chaos, life from death, structure from sacrifice. We tell this story not because it descends from the heavens, but because it rises from the human heart. We are creatures of conflict and creation, and every life echoes that first divine act — chaos shaped into meaning.
“Our gods bled so that we might live, because we bleed for every new thing we create.”
III. The Flood and the Fire
When the world grows wicked or weary, the flood comes. Whether Noah on his ark, Utnapishtim upon his boat, Deucalion casting stones to repopulate the earth, or Manu clinging to the horn of a fish — humanity remembers the cleansing waters.
These tales rise like the tide itself, as though some deep instinct knows that creation demands destruction. Floods are not just about rain — they are about renewal. They remind us that corruption seeps into every age, and sometimes, the world must be washed clean before life can begin anew.
Even now, we tell the same story in different guises: the apocalypse, the end times, the collapse and rebirth of worlds. Every vision of ruin and resurgence is another echo of that ancient truth — the world must end, so it can begin again.
IV. The Gods in Our Image
It is often said that humanity was made in the image of the divine. Yet it may be truer to say that the divine was made in the image of humanity.
Zeus is powerful but unfaithful. Odin is wise yet cruel. Yahweh is merciful and wrathful in the same breath. The pantheons of old overflow with love, jealousy, vengeance, compassion — not because the divine is petty, but because the divine is us.
When early man looked inward and saw ambition, rage, lust, and grief, he cast them outward into the heavens. The gods became vessels for our emotions, personifications of our inner storms. We could blame them for misfortune and praise them for triumph. They were our teachers and scapegoats, our aspirations and our excuses.
Carl Jung wrote of archetypes — the hero, the mother, the trickster, the wise old man — eternal figures rising from the collective human mind. Myths, he said, are not inventions but expressions of our shared psyche. When we speak to gods, we are speaking to those archetypes — to the ancient human truths carved into our very souls.
V. The Sacred Mirror
Myth and religion serve more than explanation. They are our moral cartography — maps of right and wrong, courage and cowardice, pride and humility.
Prometheus warns of defiance, Lucifer of pride, Fenrir of fear. These tales endure not as history but as truth — the kind that cannot be measured, only felt. They remind us of our capacity for creation and destruction, of the fragile balance between the two.
Myth becomes religion when we forget we wrote it. When the metaphor hardens into dogma, the mirror becomes an idol. Yet even then, beneath doctrine and ritual, the story remains — still whispering its human origin.
“The sacred is not born of gods — it is born of meaning.”
VI. The Space Between Belief
When I was younger, I was certain the gods were lies — comforting illusions crafted to keep humanity docile and blind. I wore my disbelief like armor, a shield against what I saw as superstition. But time, as it does, carved its lessons deep.
Now, when I look upon the night sky and see the countless fires burning in the void, when I consider galaxies upon galaxies spinning endlessly, I feel that old certainty begin to unravel. The vastness humbles me. The deeper I peer into the fabric of reality, the more I sense how little we truly perceive.
I no longer believe in gods as they were told to me, yet I cannot deny that in a universe this immense — infinite in both scale and mystery — the probability of something beyond our comprehension cannot possibly be zero. Perhaps divinity is not a being at all, but a force — a pattern too great for the human eye to discern, existing beyond the narrow bands of our perception.
We see only a sliver of the spectrum, a single thread in a vast tapestry, and yet we are quick to claim understanding of the whole. I am no longer militant in disbelief. I am simply open — to mystery, to possibility, to the thought that perhaps what we once called “god” is merely the name we gave to all we could not yet comprehend.
VII. The Human Source
If the gods are mirrors, then to study them is to study ourselves. In every myth we see the blueprint of the human heart: the chaos and the order, the longing and the fear. We are the storytellers of our own creation, reaching always toward the divine and finding only ourselves reflected back.
Perhaps that is the truth of myth — not revelation, but reflection. These stories endure not because they came from beyond, but because they came from within.
So when we look to the heavens for meaning, perhaps we are really looking inward. The gods we make are not above us; they are of us.
And if we listen closely to their stories, we may find they have been telling us who we are all along.
— D.W. Roach, Marauder
“To know the gods is to know man — for we have never dreamed of anything we did not first carry in our own hearts.”
D.W. Roach "Marauder" 