Many years ago, I started catching fleeting impressions of a Power that defied my attempts to identify. Always, the impressions accompanied natural disasters- yet the Entity in question didn’t seem to be any of the many, many deities known to wield such disasters as part of their mysteries. If anything, They are too close to humans compared to this Power. By this, I don’t mean they are weak or limited like humans, rather that the known and named deities have well-established “faces” or “masks” by which they can and do interact with humans.
This Entity did not.
There is an alieness, a vastness, a remoteness to said Power. I once described this Being as “Cthulhu with a conscience”, a feeble attempt at encapsulating both the Entity’s awful, inhuman wrath and paradoxically strange lack of malice.
Early on, I nicknamed this Entity “Godzilla” because that was the closest metaphor I could think of for “Him”. I decided on that pronoun (though a gender is probably meaningless) because our culture tends to associate projection of force with maleness, as do the pantheons I’m more familiar with. These are, of course, humanocentric reference points, not actual facts.
“The map is not the territory.” – Alfred Korzybski
Over time, I accepted that “Power” was an insufficient word, that said Divinity is a full-fledged God, though one mysterious and remote from human experience. I consulted others, including a well-regarded diviner experienced in numerous systems and oracular work.
The closest anyone could come was that “Godzilla” was a previously unknown deity, probably of a class that the ancient Greeks would have considered a Primordial or Titan- had they known of His existence.
This makes sense, as from a human perspective, His works would generally appear to flow from others- Poseidon, Zeus, Hephaestos, and so on. Indeed, it’s quite probable that He works with whatever God(s) most closely match the needs of the moment.
I apologize for the rambling nature of this article. I’m summarizing years of experiences, exploration, and frustration.
Let me take a step backward. While I had early inklings of “Godzilla” in the late 2000s, there was an event in 2012 that cemented my impression that He was much greater than a storm spirit.
Some time in late October, I got a “ping” from a hurricane headed for the Caribbean. By October 26, the storm had faltered and turned out to sea- it looked set to dissipate.
Yet, I kept feeling an emotional longing about the storm, a destructive sense of will, of purpose. I felt a strong, terribly strong gravitas of wrath directed at New York City- at Wall Street in particular. It wasn’t anger, per se, nor hatred or malice. There was almost a “more in sadness than in anger” tone to the whole thing. But wrath it most certainly was.
Days earlier, unbeknownst to me, certain meteorologists and their models suggested that something unusual was about to happen. A winter storm known as a cold-core low (basically the inverse of a hot-core hurricane) would merge with the storm. This “frankenstorm” would then intensify and turn back towards the coast.
On October 29, a date I’d already come to associate with Him (because of other events), “Superstorm” Sandy plowed into the New Jersey coast. More importantly, the storm surge flooded lower Manhattan– including parts of Wall Street and the Financial District. New York city experienced its worst natural disaster in generations. All of the Financial District is now considered an evacuation zone for severe hurricanes.
A couple of years ago, I read “Green Earth”- a collected trilogy of novels by Kim Stanley Robinson called “Science in the Capital”. The first novel, “Forty Signs of Rain” was published in 2004- a year before Hurricane Katrina and eight years before Hurricane Sandy. In it, an Atlantic hurricane interacts with a winter storm and the resulting storm surge floods Washington, DC and many other parts of the eastern United States.
In the original version of the book, the storm’s name was Sandy.
After Sandy, I didn’t feel a lot from Him for a long time. I’d feel ripples, hints that perhaps some typhoon, eruption, or earthquake was His, but nothing with the intense certainty I’d felt with Sandy.
Until 2017. One night, I felt a ping around a Tropical Depression far out into the Atlantic. It felt very important for some reason, and late on August 17, that storm strengthened into Tropical Storm Harvey. Two days later, Harvey disappeared from the tracking maps.
I kept watching that small area of rain on the doppler maps, but I was mystified as to why I’d felt like this particular blip of a storm was important.
To much of the world, Harvey seemed to magically reappear off the Yucatan Peninsula on August 23. Even I was shocked by the storm’s rapid regrowth, going from an afterthought to a Major Hurricane in a fairly short distance.
As Harvey strengthened, I could feel that same wrath I’d felt with Sandy echoing across the world. Not at Corpus Christi, its presumed landfall target, rather at the “Chemical Coast” around Houston. Harvey was aimed at the beating heart of American petrochemical industry.
When Harvey came ashore and headed for Austin, I told some of my close friends that the storm wasn’t done- its real target was Houston.
While I expected the storm to head back to sea, I’ll admit that I badly underestimated His plans for Harvey. The storm headed back into the Gulf of Mexico, alright. For a period of about five days, Harvey basically parked in a position that would channel the heaviest rains and strongest winds directly into the Chemical Coast.
I mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson earlier because I want to disclaim any sense of having a special relationship with “Godzilla”. While the author chalked his prophecy up to coincidence, I firmly believe that some intermediary deity like Apollo sent him that information so that open-minded people could make the connection.
My point is that I’m not a prophet or priest of this Deity. From time to time, I feel the will or emotion behind certain disasters I associate with Him, but that’s all.
To be honest, I don’t get the impression that He wants veneration, worship, praise, or what-have-you.
I get the impression that He wants us to stop getting in the way of His work- that’s all. What work? I’ll come back to that.
The main reason that I chose “Godzilla” as a nickname for this God has to do with the way that Toho’s portrayal of the fictional character evolved over time.
While the original kaiju or giant monster was primarily a stand-in for nuclear weapons, even in the earliest film he had a mystical air. The name “Gojira” came from a fictional sea kami (divinity) that the locals sometimes made sacrifices to in exchange for good fishing and fair weather. When outsiders witnessed a giant lizard rampaging through that village, they appropriated the kami’s name to describe the monster.
Over the course of many, many films, the Gojira (Godzilla) character took on an antiheroic tone as a defender of proper natural order. If the threat was aliens or pollution monsters, Godzilla would fight them (and accidentally destroy Tokyo). If the threat was human-caused, Godzilla would destroy Tokyo intentionally.
A whole cast of giant monster characters emerged, with different personalities and allegiances. All of them, with the exception of Mosura (Mothra), fit the mold of what Shinto calls “rough kami”. These are divinities that are largely indifferent to humans unless specifically placated or angered by our actions.
For instance, a river kami might flood, destroying homes, but also fertilizing fields. In Shinto, humans would try to placate this river divinity in the hopes of minimizing the flood damage and maximizing the fertility- but the river was never “on our side”.
This characterization fit my impressions of the God we’ve been talking about, which is why I chose the particular nickname of “Godzilla”.
Obviously, I’ve a bit of a soft spot for Godzilla movies. I haven’t seen all of the Toho films, but I’ve seen quite a few and I’ve gone out of my way to see the ones released theatrically in the U.S..
So, of course I saw the 2014 Gareth Edwards film. I was shocked that someone had finally carried the underlying message of Toho’s fictional mythology to a Hollywood film.
This line in particular was a central theme to the film:
“Nature has an order. A Power to restore balance.”
The film implies that humanity has spent the last 60 years trying to destroy that balancing force, to no avail.
“The arrogance of Man is thinking that Nature is in our control, and not the other way around.”
While Toho’s characters are fictional, it is important that we recognize that they have created a legitimate mythology. That is to say that their stories are not literal truth, but they carry an ethical or spiritual Truth inside them.
“Godzilla”, perhaps through an intermediary with closer ties to humanity, is using Godzilla as a face by which we can understand Him and His work.
We can understand that He has a role in maintaining some kind of natural balance, but what?
When we consider His penchant for sending hurricanes and typhoons against specific targets, this becomes clearer. Hurricanes are driven by heat and they dissipate tremendous amounts of heat energy. Generally speaking, the hotter the seawater underneath the storm, the more powerful the storm and the more hot air it sends upward towards the stratosphere.
In other words, “Godzilla” is the God in charge of keeping Earth’s temperature in the range that can support life. That’s probably not everything He does, but it’s our point of intersection with Him.
Of course, the ancients wouldn’t have had direct experience of Him. In their time, His work took place exclusively over vast time periods at levels far beyond human comprehension. Even a comparatively minor action might have spanned several human generations!
He wasn’t paying attention to us (except as life in general) and we had no reason to think about Him at all.
Until our species managed to upset the balance that our Gods had arranged for us.
Of course, our world was much warmer in the past, despite a less intense sun. He has had a lot of time to perfect His craft, which I suspect includes not just oceanic and atmospheric temperature, but that of the lithosphere, asthenosphere, and perhaps part of the mantle as well.
If so, He might also be considered a God of Plate Tectonics- another area ancient humans would not really have much reason to consider.
It would also mean that several of Earth’s mass extinction events might have fallen within His purview. For instance, the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event or “Great Dying” was likely caused by greenhouse gasses unleashed through natural volcanism on a mind-boggling scale.
Understanding this can help us recognize the crazy scale on which this God works. Of course, many other Gods do so as well, some on even larger ones. But, in many cases those Gods have long been known to humans because of intersectionalities between Their work and our own interests and understanding of the world.
It falls to our generation to recognize and establish right relation with this God.
I propose that He should be offered an epithet aside from “Godzilla”. While the mask of Godzilla is still potentially useful for conveying His nature and work, the use of a fictional character ultimately limits humans’ ability to deal seriously with Him in His glory.
I suggest Εὔθερμικος, “Euthermikos” – from the Greek for optimal temperature.
While such a name cannot convey all that He is or does, it gives us another lens or doorway for approaching this God whose work is so vital to our survival.
-In Deos Confidimus
