Mobi Morality

Even before I showed Ma the sculpture of Mobi, I knew I had failed. It was a representation of Mobi goddess of transport, death and putrefication. Her symbol is the bottom feeding fish, and of old she received child sacrifice. Her delight was in the fingernails and toenails of babies because she had no nails (or babies) of her own. She is a death goddess worshipped by the Solahnese people in the fantasy I’m working on.

So when Ma said that the sculpture was cute, I knew I’d failed.

This new image is what Mobi ought to be. Ma was violently opposed to it. “I don’t like it. The old Mobi was cuter.”

Which is how I KNEw I struck gold with this new image.
Which is why I am dismantling the old Mobi.

Reading various scriptures and mythologies it becomes clear to me that we have not only left a mythic view of the world behind for a moral one, but substituted the moral one (good versus evil) for pleasant versus not pleasant. Cute versus ugly.

I think the problem the West has with God (gods, divinity, the universe) is that if it is not pretty, it is not right. If it is not cute or convenient, it is wrong. When I hear an atheist say he doesn’t believe in God because if God were real the world wouldn’t have so much trouble in it, I wonder what kind of divinity he was promised. I come from a mythic tradition where there is no promise of a cute God or a nice life. There is struggle, weariness, and the glimpse of a sublime and terrible power. Goodness is only one of its aspects. You have only to gaze at a Hindu goddess to see how in the East they understand this perfectly. You have only to read a few chapters from a King James Bible to realize that once we understood it too.