Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes: A No-Bullshit Guide to World Mythology

by Cory O'Brien

  and God is like “Abraham! Abraham! Hey!”

  Abraham is like “Chill out, I’m right here. What do you want?”

  And God is like “You know your son?”

  And Abraham is like “My only son? Yeah, you could say I know him.”

  And God is like “Okay, here’s what I want you to do:

  I want you to take your son

  up to a mountain that I’m gonna show you

  and I want you to kill him and set him on fire for me.”

  And Abraham is like “Okay, well I guess you know what you’re doing.”

  So Abraham goes and gets his son

  and he’s like “Come on, son, let’s go on a nice father-son trip to a mountain that God will show us.

  We are going to make a blood sacrifice it will be a great bonding experience.”

  So they start going to the mountain

  along with some donkeys, and some slaves which God is apparently cool with

  and Abraham makes his son carry the wood

  and he carries the fire and the knife

  and halfway there, his son is like

  “Uhh, Dad?”

  And Abraham is like “What?”

  And his son is like “Dad where is the lamb we’re gonna sacrifice?”

  And Abraham is like “Uh . . . well . . . God is going to provide a lamb for us, son.”

  HE IS REMARKABLY CALM ABOUT THIS WHOLE THING.

  PERHAPS FOR ABRAHAM

  ONE SON IS TOO MANY SONS.

  So anyway, they get to the mountain

  and Abraham straps his son down

  and his son doesn’t say anything

  presumably because the level of shitty parenting going on here has rendered him speechless

  and Abraham raises up the knife

  and God is like “WHOA, WHOA, ABRAHAM!!!!”

  and Abraham is like “WHAT?!

  I’m kind of in the middle of something right now.”

  And God is like “Haha, PSYCH!

  I was totally just kidding about the whole sacrificing your son thing.

  But, dude, that was HARD-CORE.

  Tell you what, man

  I like a man with big balls

  so how about I make it so that your children WILL OUTNUMBER THE STARS IN THE SKY.”

  And Abraham is like “WHAT

  THAT IS TOO MANY KIDS.”

  and God is like “Haha, no need to thank me, buddy.

  Your thoughtless attempted sacrifice of your own son is all the thanks I need.”

  And then Abraham finds a ram

  which he sacrifices to God instead of his son

  and then I guess the two of them go home

  or actually, they go to a place called Beersheba

  which is clearly the party city of ancient times

  and I like to imagine that they partied so hard

  that afterward they had to go to Bathsheba just to wash the stank off

  and things are pretty awkward between Abraham and his son from then on

  but it’s okay, because Abraham has a ton more kids.

  So the moral of the story

  is that it’s never a bad idea

  to try to set your kids on fire

  as long as the voices tell you so.

  NOAH IS ON A BOAT

  So God makes a bunch of people

  they fuck up and kill each other

  but then they feel bad about it

  so they have, like, CRAZY makeup sex

  and the next NINE THOUSAND PAGES OF THE BIBLE

  (depending on how big you make the text)

  are about all the babies people made

  because the Bible predates condoms

  and I think we should all remember this.

  So everyone has a bunch of kids

  but it doesn’t matter

  because apparently they all suck

  and God decides he’s had enough of this shit.

  He’s just gonna kill everybody

  kinda like that other god in that Mayan myth.

  See what I mean about how all this junk starts to run together after a while?

  And he totally rips off Quetzalcoatl even harder

  because his method of choice for killing everyone

  is a GIANT FLOOD

  (P.S.:

  Did you know that whenever H. P. Lovecraft uses the word “antediluvian”

  what he means is “predating the biblical flood?”

  Because yeah

  apparently H. P. Lovecraft knows EXACTLY WHEN THIS HAPPENED.)

  But God can’t just kill EVERYONE

  because he put a lot of work into this whole humanity thing

  so he picks the least sucky dude in the world

  whose name is Noah

  and he’s like “YO, NOAH!

  EVERYBODY’S GOING TO DIE, EXCEPT YOU

  CONGRATULATIONS.

  HOPE YOU DON’T HAVE ANY FRIENDS.

  GONNA NEED YOU TO BUILD A REAL BIG BOAT, BUDDY

  BUT NO FRIENDS ALLOWED ON THIS BOAT

  JUST ANIMALS

  SEVEN PAIRS OF EVERY KID OF ANIMAL

  (unless they are really filthy in which case you can just get one pair)

  ’CAUSE YEAH, I SPENT A LOT OF TIME ON THOSE ANIMALS

  BUT I FORGOT TO MAKE THEM SMART ENOUGH TO BUILD BOATS

  SO THAT IS YOUR JOB NOW.”

  So this sounds like a lot of work to Noah

  but hey, it’s better than dying

  so he gets some lumber and he gets to work

  and somehow he manages to pull it off in time

  with all his neighbors showing up at his house and calling him an idiot all day.

  Well, joke’s on them.

  They all die.

  But then, joke’s on Noah

  because now he has to live on a boat full of nothing but animals and his wife.

  Nobody wins except for God

  who is playing a game called “Do Whatever the Hell I Want Because I’m God”

  So anyway, the whole world stays flooded for FORTY DAYS

  which is actually just Bible speak for AN ARBITRARILY LONG TIME

  but Noah is patient

  because, oh yeah, I forgot to tell you:

  NOAH IS SIX HUNDRED YEARS OLD.

  Okay, now I’m super impressed.

  This six-hundred-year-old dude managed to build a massive boat in just a couple months

  AND

  MORE IMPRESSIVELY

  he managed to live six hundred years on Earth without committing ANY MORTAL SINS.

  So anyway, the rain stops eventually

  and Noah’s family and all the animals are getting pretty antsy

  no pun intended

  because only some of them are actually ants

  but anyway, Noah’s solution is to send birds out to find land.

  First he tries sending out a raven

  but that’s useless.

  The raven pretty much just flies back and forth a lot.

  So Noah sends out a dove

  and the dove fails to find land

  so Noah KEEPS sending it out

  until on the third try it finally brings back an olive branch

  indicating that it found a tree somewhere

  and this somehow became an international symbol for peace

  when what it SHOULD symbolize is “HOORAY WE ARE NO LONGER COVERED IN WATER.”

  So yeah, after that everything is pretty straightforward.

  They find some land

  and Noah makes an altar

  and God makes a rainbow

  which is his way of saying “Sorry, dudes won’t happen again.”

  And he has kept that promise

  SO FAR.

  So the moral of the story

  is that if you are planning on being a terrible person your whole life

  you can just keep a big boat in your garage and you’ll be totally safe.

  KING SOLOMON AND THE DISPOSABLE BABY

  So
there’s this king named Solomon.

  It doesn’t really matter what he’s king of.

  You know how it was in Bible times.

  Kings all over the place.

  But the thing about Solomon

  is that unlike most of the kings who were all over the place in Bible times

  Solomon is INCREDIBLY WISE.

  Observe:

  So one of the things a king used to have to do

  was to sit in a room while people shouted their problems at him

  and then solve the problems using his king powers.

  So one day, Solomon is doing this

  and two ladies walk in with a dead baby, a live baby and a SERIOUS DOOZY OF A PROBLEM.

  One woman is like “Hey, Solomon I gave birth to this healthy baby five days ago

  but then my bitch of a roommate gave birth to a DEAD baby two days later

  and she thought it would be a good idea

  to pull some Indiana Jones shit

  and switch my live baby for her dead one.

  Make her give me my baby back.”

  And the other woman is like “Nuh-uh! This is totally my baby

  your baby DIED because you are a terrible parent.”

  So Solomon is like “Hmm, this is a tough one.

  Oh wait, no, it’s not. I have swords.

  Hey, guards

  cut the baby in half give a piece to each of these ladies.

  PROBLEM SOLVED.”

  And the first lady is like “Jesus Christ just give her the baby.

  What is wrong with you?”

  And the second woman is like “DIBS ON THE TOP HALF.”

  And Solomon is like “Ah-HAH!

  The baby must belong to the first lady

  because mothering instincts generally prevent people from agreeing to bisect their babies

  and even if the first lady ISN’T the mother

  the baby should still probably go to the woman who is NOT WILLING TO CUT IT WITH SWORDS.

  Seriously, lady

  what were you even planning on doing with the top half of a baby?

  You’ve already got 100 percent of a dead baby no questions asked.

  What are you, making a casserole?

  Case dismissed.”

  So the moral of the story

  is you should always do a background check on all your potential roommates.

  HINDU

  No culture before or since

  has so flawlessly combined the disparate realms

  of brutal murder

  and epic dance battles

  as did the ancient Hindus

  which I suppose makes sense coming from the nation that gave us Bollywood.

  People in Hindu myths are ready to cut a rug at the drop of a hat

  and they are also ready to cut other things

  and in fact, maybe the reason that the hat dropped in the first place

  was that someone cut off the head it was resting on

  and then ate it

  because that’s how the Hindu gods roll

  but it is not all decapitation and bump ’n’ grind, my friends

  Hindu mythology gets up to some seriously cosmic shit as well.

  Observe:

  THE HINDUS LIKE TO CHOP DUDES UP

  So back in the days before there was stuff and things there was a dude.

  Just this one dude, as far as the eye could see

  spanning the entire breadth of the universe, plus like ten extra feet for good measure.

  His name

  was the Dude

  but not the Dude from The Big Lebowski.

  This is a significantly Bigger Lebowski we are talking about here.

  This is a Lebowski as Big as the entirety of creation.

  He is so big that he exists at all times both before and after his birth

  and like a quarter of his body is made up of all the animals ever

  and the other three-fourths is all the gods

  and he actually gives birth to a dude named Virj

  who then gives birth to HIM.

  WHAT.

  So obviously the gods get tired of trying to conceptualize this universal dude

  and they’re like “Screw this, let’s sacrifice him.”

  So they tie him down and cut him up

  and just start flinging pieces of his body ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE

  and all the giblets start turning into things

  like all the tasty clarified butter they boil off him turns into ANIMALS

  even though I thought animals were already a quarter of his body.

  I guess a quarter of his body was butter?

  Fatty.

  Anyway, the gods are pretty much making up ceremonies as they go along

  so those kind of get written down and preserved for all eternity.

  Also, I gotta hand it to these gods

  it takes some serious effort/cojones

  to kill and butcher someting that is 75 percent COMPOSED OF YOU.

  But anyway, his mouths become priests

  and his arms become nobles

  and his thighs become the general rabble

  and his feet become the slaves.

  His brain turns into the moon and his eyeballs are the sun

  and the sky comes out of his ears and the ground forms under his peasant feet

  and the gods make sure to start a whole assload of fires

  because if you’re gonna butcher the universe it might as well also be on fire

  and those fires turn into the IDEAL SOCIAL ORDER somehow.

  No one mentions what happens to the Dude’s dong or his chest actually.

  My guess is that some creeper god stole that shit and built himself a pan-galactic RealDoll.

  So the moral of the story

  is next time you are getting sexed up

  just remember that both you and your honey are made out of the same dude

  so basically

  everybody is gay.

  SHIVA CANNOT BE STOPPED

  Okay, so there is this dude Brahma, right?

  He is the creator of everything.

  So one day

  he takes his mind

  and makes a hot chick come out of it.

  This hot chick is his daughter.

  But as soon as he pops out this brainbaby

  Brahma is like “OH DAMN.

  I WANT TO DO THINGS TO THAT

  THAT HAVEN’T EVEN BEEN INVENTED YET.

  GOOD THING I AM THE CREATOR

  AND CAN INVENT THOSE THINGS RIGHT AWAY.”

  And then he goes ahead and gives himself THREE EXTRA HEADS

  so he can check out his daughter from all angles

  thus causing the world to get divided into four directions

  because the creator suddenly desires something that is outside himself.

  BUT ENOUGH SPIRITUALITY.

  BACK TO TITS AND BAD DECISIONS.

  Okay, so Brahma’s daughter gets wind of all this exquisite voyeurism going down

  and she gets pretty embarrassed

  and since she can’t stop being hot

  she decides to stop being on Earth instead

  and she goes up to heaven.

  So now Brahma is like “AUGH.

  I WANT TO CONTINUE TO LOOK AT TITS

  BUT MY HEADS ONLY LOOK DOWN.

  LOOKS LIKE I NEED ANOTHER HEAD.”

  See this is the thing about being the creator.

  You do not consider options such as

  oh, I don’t know

  moving your neck.

  NO.

  You grow an extra fucking head

  looking STRAIGHT UP

  and then you send it shooting toward heaven

  all like “NOM NOM NOM, TITS TIME.”

  So at this point

  Brahma’s daughter is up in heaven

  like “What am I going to do about this encroaching molester head?”

  and this is when Shiva steps up to the plate

>   like “THAT IS ENOUGH BULLSHIT, BRAHMA.”

  Then he chops off Brahma’s head

  USING ONLY HIS THUMBNAIL.

  But instead of a hearty thank-you

  and maybe some victory poontang

  Shiva gets Brahma’s gross skull stuck to his hand

  and he is like “AW BALLS.

  THIS IS MY JERKIN’-IT HAND”

  And he transforms into Bhairava

  aka THE SHIVA OF ULTIMATE RAGE

  and he is like “HERE IS WHAT I AM GOING TO DO:

  I AM GOING TO WRECK SOME SHIT

  AND THEN I AM GOING TO WRECK SOME SHIT.”

  And Brahma is like “Oh no you are not, son.

  You are going to get banished all the way on out of here that is what you are going to do

  and then you are going to roam around the land as a mad beggar

  until you get arbitrarily forgiven.”

  So this is exactly what Shiva does

  until one day he stumbles upon a group of sages

  all sitting around praying the bajeezus out of themselves

  and Shiva rolls up

  like “HEY HEY, OOGA-BOOGA CRAZY HOMELESS GUY HERE, WHAT’S UP?”

  And the sages are like “What.”

  And the sages’ wives are like “OH MAN, I WANNA TAP THAT LIKE A KEG O’ BONERS.”

  and they all go dance the crazy wango-bango tango with Shiva

  and the sages are like “WHAT.”

  So obviously they send a tiger after Shiva

  and Shiva responds by TAKING OFF THE TIGER’S SKIN

  and WEARING IT AS A SKIRT.

  So then they send a poisonous snake after Shiva

  and Shiva picks up the snake

  and WEARS IT AS A GODDAMN NECKLACE.

  So then they send an evil dwarf after Shiva

  rightly assuming that there is probably no way for Shiva to wear a dwarf.

  (That’s right, guys.

  They have fuckable gold in India too.)

  But Shiva just sort of kicks the dwarf over

  stands on his face

  and takes his club.

  Then he turns around like “COME ON, HOT BITCHES.

  FOLLOW ME INTO THE FOREST.”

  So they do

  and then Shiva (aka Bhairava, remember)

  goes to Vishnu’s crib

  like “Hey, Vishnu, lemme in”

  and Vishnu’s bouncer is like “Who are you? You’re not on the list.”

  And Bhairava is like “I AM THE GUY WHO IS STABBING YOU TO DEATH WITH A TRIDENT.”

  And then Vishnu jumps out of the back room like “OH SNAP

  I WILL SHOOT BLOOD OUT OF MY FACE AT YOU UNTIL YOU GO AWAY.”