Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes: A No-Bullshit Guide to World Mythology (21 page)

So there’s this guy Xenu, right? He is this seriously bad dude

who also happens to be the emperor of a MASSIVE GALACTIC EMPIRE.

The empire is made up of like twenty-six stars and seventy-six planets

one of which is Earth

except we can’t call it Earth because that doesn’t sound dumb enough.

No

let’s call it Teegeeack.

So this galactic civilization is pretty much like Earth from the ’50s and ’60s

in fact, it is basically exactly the same.

Everyone wears the same clothes and they have cars and buses and stuff.

Not a very advanced galactic civilization, actually.

BUT WAIT:

Xenu is about to get deposed

for being a seriously bad dude all the time

but then he realizes

that if he just kills all the dudes who want to depose him, he can’t get deposed!

Here is the problem with that plan, though:

EVERYONE WANTS TO DEPOSE XENU.

So he’s like “Well, I guess I’d better kill everyone.

But I’m going to need some help.

HEY, PSYCHIATRISTS?

I need you to trick all these people

or rather, all these THETANS

(because that is what these guys are called)

into showing up to my place for a tax audit or something.”

And the psychiatrists are like “We have no problem with this, because we are evil.”

So all the Thetans show up to get their taxes audited . . .

Actually, hold on.

Why is it

that everyone in the galaxy shows up

for an INCOME TAX AUDIT?

Especially if we are postulating that these guys have the technology of the 1950s

which did not include faster-than-light travel as far as I can tell

so people are traveling HUNDREDS OF YEARS

in their shitty, explosion-prone spacecraft

for an INCOME TAX AUDIT.

Now if it had been a free-puppies-and-cotton-candy audit, maybe I could see this working

but if you want to depose a guy

and then he is suddenly like “HEY HOW ’BOUT THOSE INCOME TAXES.”

Your response should not be “RIGHT AWAY, SIR, CAN I CRADLE YOUR BALLS AS WELL?”

Where were we?

Oh yeah.

As might be expected, this whole thing turns out really badly for the Thetans.

I mean, as soon as they show up

Xenu freezes them in alcohol and takes their souls

and then he puts them in some spaceships and takes them to Earth

wait, wait, no . . . sorry . . .

TEEGEEACK

and he stacks them around active volcanoes.

But active volcanoes are not naturally dangerous enough for Xenu.

so he drops HYDROGEN BOMBS in all of the volcanoes

vaporizing all these Thetans but . . . keeping their souls intact?

Then Xenu forces all these Thetan souls into a massive 3-D movie theater

where they watch a thirty-six-hour movie encompassing all future religious symbolism.

And where is this movie theater located exactly?

Hawaii.

OBVIOUSLY.

Only a true evil mastermind would stage a massive campaign of subliminal mind torture

in the future birthplace of PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA.

All right, you with me so far?

Good.

So when the Thetans get let out of the movie theater they are so crazy disoriented

that they just start grab-assing at any body they can find

turning perfectly functional human beings

into worthless sadness engines bent on self-destruction

and THAT’S why we all suck so bad, see?

It is because a supervillain put bombs in volcanoes and then evil spirits laid eggs in our minds.

This is an actual religion, guys

made up by an actual dude.

His name is L. Ron Hubbard and he is actually a science-fiction writer

and he calls this religion SCIENTOLOGY

and this religion makes something like five hundred million dollars a year.

But the worst part is that if you try and learn all this stuff

without first preparing yourself to learn it by paying a lot of money again and again

the shock will be so great that you will get pneumonia.

So the moral is

don’t read this myth unless you want to get pneumonia.

The Prevailing Creation Myth

Here’s one more to go out on:

So back in the back in the back in the back in the back in the day

there was this tiiiiny ball of all the matter in the universe, and that’s ALL there was.

But don’t be fooled by its size, my friends.

This matter

was DENSE.

Denser than the beats issuing from the most legitimate of subwoofers.

Denser than the skull of world headbutt champion Maxx “The Russian Concussion” Headbutts

Denser than the cream of a coconut banana cream pie

on the face of a clown who is going for the world record for most pies to the face.

This matter was DENSE.

Where did it come from?

Who knows!

That’s not important right now.

What’s important is that at some point

all this matter gets REALLY sick of hanging out with the same matter all the time

so it does what matter does best

or at least, most awesomely:

IT EXPLOOOODES.

Now, friends

I have seen some explosions in my life.

All of them were sweet.

Some of them I might even call DOUBLE SWEET

but nothing can top an explosion SO INTENSE

that it is still going on ALMOST FOURTEEN BILLION YEARS LATER.

That is why, to this day, if you look through a telescope

you are going to see the rest of the universe hauling ass away from you.

Anyway, lemme backtrack a little.

So after exploding as hard as it can for a real long time

all the matter turns into particles called electrons, protons, and neutrons

and all these particles get a little lonely and start looking for other particles to hook up with.

And when they get together

they pull some Voltron shit and turn into ELEMENTS

like hydrogen and helium and stuff.

Then all the hydrogen gets together and is like “Hey

I know we were all just exploding as hard as possible a minute ago

but you know what would be cool?

If we exploded EVEN HARDER.”

So they turn into STARS

and then their explosions produce a bunch of other elements, which form big clouds around them

and then those clouds get hit by MORE explosions

from when other stars became TOO EXTREME

and they start spinning so fast

that the elements get all frisky with each other and turn into less explode-y balls of stuff

like planets, mainly

and one of those planets is EARTH.

But Earth was not always sweet beach parties and rock-and-roll music, my friends.

No, Earth used to be 100 percent MAGMA

with volcanoes going off ALL THE TIME

AND THEN AN ASTEROID SLAMS INTO IT

AND RIPS A BIG CHUNK OF IT OFF INTO SPACE

AND THAT is where the moon comes from.

But then Earth gets older and chills out a little

and forms an atmosphere out of steam and volcano spit

and it gets a bunch of water by being constantly bombarded by GIANT BALLS OF ICE

and for some reason, all of this adds up to make it a hospitable place for things to live.

So little things start living there

they come from space, or from Earth depending on who you ask.

They mainly start out in the big water parts

(which cover most of everything

just like in the Native American creation myths

and the Egyptian creation myth

and that part in the Bible where God gets real pissed)

And these little things learn this really neat trick

which is how to make more of themselves using CHEMICAL REACTIONS

except . . . chemical reactions aren’t always accurate

so sometimes they make really gross, messed-up versions of themselves

and sometimes they make PROTOZOIC SUPERHEROES.

So the messed-up versions die and the superheroes get to make more superheroes

and eventually someone figures out how to have legs

and then they get curious about this whole land thing and they crawl onto it

and then there are DINOSAURS, but they die

and then later, people!

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking:

You’re probably thinking “Wait a second, this isn’t a myth.

This is science!”

Well, yes and no.

See, this

is a story

and like most stories, the most important thing isn’t whether it’s true or not

the most important thing is whether it gives us a satisfying explanation of what we see in the world

and maybe some rudimentary means of predicting what will happen next.

That’s all any of these myths have been trying to do:

to take a huge, terrifying phenomenon

something you can only stare at and go “whoa”

and turn it into something more our size

something we can fit inside our puny brains.

Something really cool, even:

a story.

Me, I don’t see much of a difference between Science and Religion.

First off, in order to successfully
apply
science

there are always going to be certain things that you’re taking on faith

like that the universe behaves rationally or that the accumulation of knowledge is a good thing.

Without those assumptions you end up like that Descartes dude

unable to prove anything except that you exist which is just boring.

And I mean, the first natural philosophers

(the Greek dudes who are widely credited with getting the whole science thing rolling)

were offering theories that sounded a lot like myths.

“The world is a bunch of islands floating on water!”

“We live on the back of a space turtle, in space!”

And those explanations were discarded as more satisfying ones came along

just like how no one really worships Zeus anymore

because they’ve found gods more compelling than a big adulterer who shoots lightning.

Some people say that it’s that willingness to reject discredited views

that willingness to
change

that makes science different from religion.

I’d say that that willingness to change is just a tenet of the religion of science.

Hell, voodoo’s gone through an awful lot of changes too

and a Taoist monk systematically unlearns his world knowledge

as fast as any scientist can learn it.

Now, I’m not trying to undermine the importance of science

personally, I’m all about it.

And I’m not saying I think Creationism and Evolution should be taught side by side in schools.

Largely because Creation Science is taught as an aggressive argument against evolution

as opposed to something that stands on its own.

Plus it misuses a lot of the methodology of science in a very misleading way

without accepting most of the founding principles

which would be a lot like coming up with a basic theory of Christianity

based on the assumption that God doesn’t exist and that anyone who thinks he does is an asshole.

No, see what I’m trying to say is that I watch people organizing themselves

into these neat little conflicts:

Atheists versus Christians

Jews versus Muslims

Fundamentalists versus basically everybody

and I feel like a kid in a broken home who can’t get Mom and Dad to stop fighting.

The assumption that every one of these groups is making—

and I think it’s important to acknowledge that
every group
, from scientist to Sikh, assumes this—is that they are right. That they are somehow
behaving
rationally.

But the fact that we can get so angry about this stuff means that it’s
not
rational

and I think we could get a hell of a lot further by synthesizing these beliefs

than by finding more and more nuanced ways to call each other dicks.

So I guess the moral of the story

is that all you religious people need to stop hating on the scientists, and vice versa

because at the end of the day, we are all united

by our desire for sweet explosions.

THE END.

Cory O’Brien
(aka Ovid Naso)

is a dude who likes myths a whole lot.

When he’s not writing them in books

he is usually yelling them at people in bars

or posting them on his website bettermyths.com.

He grew up on top of a hill in Los Angeles, California

where there are basically no myths at all

but where one time a guy got shot in the leg outside his friend’s house

and broke in to use the telephone.

Now he lives in Chicago, Illinois where it is much colder

but on the other hand no injured people have broken into his house. Yet.

He is currently doing an MFA in writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

not that it shows.

Also, birds really freak him out.

They’re like tiny, winged sociopaths.

Seriously, have you ever looked at those things?