CHAPTER ONE, THE COSMOLOGY OF RALPH... Page 2 of 2
One Million, two hundred thousand, four hundred and twenty seven years ago, a group of hunter gatherers were on the run from another, more aggressive tribe; chased from their traditional stomping grounds, they faced many perils out in the unknown wilderness; lost good friends and family to beasts human and otherwise on their sojourn through the hostile societies of yore... after nearly a year of barely scavanging up an existence and seeing the very young and old die off, they came to a fertile plane of rich, black dirt; their elders searched the nearby creeks and woods and finding dung from deer and bear and beavers a' plenty (and, more importantly, no signs that other men were living in the valley), they decided to settle there and start planting corn and beans and raising dogs and cattle.
Near where they settled, in a grove of majestic Cedar trees on a small hill on the otherwise flat plane of a valley, there lived a god, Ralph. The villagers discovered him one day when they tried to cut down the cedars, and suddenly found themselves being hit by lightening. After the initial shock of losing a few men to Ralph's wrath over the villagers attempt to cut down his favorite trees (gods can of course talk to trees, and Ralph had grown particularly close to the trees), their elder's got together and decided their best course of action was to win the god over... they knew that other tribes had gods, and they had always wanted one, but, purely by the odd whims of chance, they had never found a god who wasn't already surrounded by a larger tribe.
As was the way of people back then, they were used to the gods who inhabited various streams, rivers, mountains, animals, and etc... so they started worshiping Ralph without too much protest. Ralph himself was somewhat uncomfortable with the situation until the villager's turned him onto a type of moonshine that they made out of whatever local fruit they could scavange. Ralph, like all gods, loved getting a good buzz on and the idea of humans bringing him booze on a daily basis was too much for him to pass up.
The world was filled with a lot of gods back then. Most of them were vying for the attention of humans, and then making them do stuff for their amusement -- for some reason, back then, they could never get enough of seeing humans sacrificed... Most gods, being basically like needy performers with, for lack of a better term, 'god complexes,' were always trying to one up one another by smitting this and that follower of another god, or making someone else a saint . . . Ralph, being one of the few gods who really didn't have much ambition, stayed out of all of this tomfoolery.
As will happen when power is splashing around the ethereal plane, a few gods rose to the top of the heap, like Allah and Yahew and Morton Smeed (the latter who is now forgotten, though he was once worshiped all across the planet in complex call and response ceremonies that were made up entirely of 'burps,' which are known to historians to have been not only quite transcendent, but also cured warts on or about the left toes).
Ralph thought the gods who were scrambling around gathering worshipers' were wasting thier lives... in fact, he was kind of a slacker when it came to Godding. He really didn't care if he had a lot of followers or not. God's need only a few followers to exist on this plane as well as their own, and Ralph had enough for his purposes, and would have lived and let live if the other, nastier gods, would only let him.
He simply wasn't into all the blood and gore that the other god's seemed to get off on. In fact, he was the original pascifist god. Jesus took a lot of Ralph's drunken sermons and peiced together the Sermon on The Mount -- which is why they are so oddly peaceful when compared with the curses Jesus was known for throwing on people for the slightest of slights -- you did not want to serve him cold soup, oh no... that was leprosy, at least). No, Ralph did not care for domination at all, though his ideas on pacifism did change after the human population explosion. In fact, as more and more species became extinct around the globe, the god Ralph grew more and more mysanthropic and partial towards killing for whims, like most gods.
Ralph was not big on speculation, either.. The other god's couldn't get enough of making up laws about this and that, and sometimes they even thought they were doing the right thing, but way more than half the time when a priest asked Ralph a question about the after life or whatever, he would just kind of shrug, and then make it out like 'man wasn't read to know,' though anyone who knew him well knew they were just being blown off because Ralph was bored with the conversation.
Ralph could see a bit of the future, of course, like all God's,
and he knew that he would be marginalized, that the small village he called his own with it's small populace of peaceful people, would be taken over by one of the blood thirsty armies of human's that the other, power-tripping gods were always putting together in their never ending need to enlarge their audiences, and thus feel more loved and worthwhile and powerful in the earthly realm. The material earth existed on the only plane not actually created by a god. A chance event that none of them had foreseen, because before earth they had forever lived in planes of their own creation. Come together here, on what is essentially neutral ground, the gods were only as powerful as how many human entities they could draw energy from during prayers and other, sometimes surprising, human activity -- such as bowel movements.
Ralph liked earth because he didn't have to make everything up himself. In the forever time, he had grown a little bored with concentrating on keeping a universe together, and when the earthly plane appeared to them, during the event humans call the Big Bang, he had welcomed a chance to watchy something besides what was essentially his navel. He also liked having someone to talk to. Gods had never thought to talk to each other. They started doing so only on earth. Ralph was in fact the first god to inhabit the earthly plane, and was the first to learn that making freinds with creatures like trees would let him reamain on the planet. It was a small step from there for a god to look into a human and see the implications of the dawning consciousness for an answer to the question that had begun to haunt them in apehood --- why do we die?
For his followers -- and soon Mugily, and everyone in the entire apartment building, Ralph's slacker ways were both a good and a bad traite in a god. Early on, some years he would get behind on the harvest and the villager's would literally spend days in prayer getting him to come down and make their fields grow, yet on the hand he never asked for sacrifices or really much of anything beyond the occasional dinner invitions and to be present at all parties. Hardly any of the villagers seriously even considered converting.
The day came when the inevitable army of men covered in steel rode stallions down into the village and began cutting down the men, raping the women, and stealing the children and wealth, as the christian and muslim god's had them doing a lot back then -- as well many, many gods long forgotten by man. Ralph did what he could, but he wasn't very powerful when compared to the other prayer inflated gods. He gathered up one family and took them into an astral plane, keeping them there until the maurader's had all passed, and then landed them in a safe village afterwards, where he was able to conjour up a job for the father.
Ralph followed that family then, all down the eons, to present day... part of their secrecy was to keep all knowledge of Ralph from the children, who were only told on their eighteenth birthday about their god, Ralph. Ralph tried to make a good impression at such times, usually would shave and tuck in his shirt and make himself smell like something pleasent, like sandalwood. He had a hard time keeping a straight face through all the mumbo jumbo that the various preists had built into the ceremony over the years, and this seemed to endear the new recruits to him. He would give them a few miracles to seal their faith.
Something of a guardian angel, and something of a smelly houseguest, the God Ralph has all the normal tenants and rules of any religion, but Ralph could seldom be bothered to remember them in the best of times, and in the last few hundred years he had been smoking weed around the clock.
Ralph requires one person in the family to write down his exploits, as must be done for god's, so that when he gets bored he can read back on his accomplishments (god's do this a lot more than they ever admit). He chose Mugully Foolip for no other reason than illiteration.
Everyone told Mugully that there was an honor that went with being the scribe of a god... But Migully was not so sure... there was the practicality's of bunking with Ralph, -- who could be meddlesome. He also refused to pick up after himself or clean the bathroom -- and for a god like him to do a task like cleaning required about as much effort as half a human thought. He could just think, 'make it clean.'
Mugully bitched at him at first... but bitching at a god is a tricky thing. Ralph was known to lash out and give people an extra arm, or make one of their eyes explode. Migully learned his lesson the day he tried to get Ralph to clean up after his nine cats and was turned into a large turd for the day. It was not a mistake he made again. Like most human's, he just ignored his god when he could, and dealt with him when he had to... which was more than he liked, because of the scribe thing.
"Someone is at the door, Migully." Ralph didn't like the sound of the doorbell, and it was an annoyance that he blamed entirely on his scribe.
"Who is it?"
"Okay, I'll check... fucking Mormon."
"That's like the third this summer. Don't you think it's about time that you smite one of them? You zapped those scientologists on their first trip here."
"Man, can't this wait until there's a commercial?"
"He's going to ring that doorbell again in a second."
"Okay, okay... there, I just made him spontaneously combust. His fellow missionary is on the lawn right now hysterically wetting himself. Shit, I deserve Nachos or something like that when I answer prayers."
"Really?"
"Yes, that is a tenant."
"It is not."
"Sure... something like, Verily bring unto my altars nachos slathered in near-cheese."
"I've been your scribe like less than a week, and already... well, your tempting my faith, Ralph. God's aren't supposed to lie."
"We don't lie, we change the truth. It's really all the difference in the world. Remember that day that I made you into a cat terd?"
"I still gag when I think about the inside of my mouth being cat terd."
"Unless I get some nachos, you are going to be terded out for like the next week. You can write that up in your scriptures and preach it, man."
"Really?"
"What did they tell you?"
"Anything you want me to write down, I write down."
"It's scripture now, baby."
"Are all the god's as... cavalier as you?"
"The ones who care, do only so because they like to cause you pain. I'm the exception, because of the kind of grove that I originally inhabited."
"Cedar, right?"
"No, we just put that in after that movie Reefer Madness came out. It was a grove of pot. Nice red, hairy buds."
"Really?"
"No. But that sure would help the taste of those nachos. Put that in there, too -- verily, nachos must... something like, come with holy weed and some sort of smoking device that is not a pop can and a bit of aluminum foil poked with holes."
"Look, I'm sorry about that, okay?"
"Tell you what, get the nachos and put a bong on my altar, and I'll forgive you."
"Okay."
