“I really love the last line in Soliloquy 6. Have you written about the Gray God concept in more detail at some point? I like it and can infer some of the meaning but am curious. Take care.”

-Electric Dan

Dan, the concept comes from Robert E. Howard’s view of masculine divinity as waxing and waning, ebbing and surging and ultimately dying at twilight. He expresses this eloquently in his version of the Gaelic Crom, the God of the mythic Conan hero, a power of unaligned strength above human affairs other than to breathe life into a Man.

Where Howard does his best work on this is in a version of his story Spears of Clontarf, which did not sell, about the 1013 battle between Gaels and Norse in Ireland. He wrote this story also as The Grey God Passes, with Clontarf on earth reflecting a battle in heaven, in which Odin passes from power. The protagonist is Conn the Thrall, a Gaelic slave of the Norse who slays his Norse master, takes up the sword, and then is blessed by Odin, the very god of his enemies, as having liberated himself from bondage by the way held up by the old gods, by heroism, rather than by being rescued by a sacrificing deity taking pity on man, or by some mystery god initiating the man into the lowest rungs of illumination.

I like this concept as a metaphor that fits neatly into our own ragged time, where the terms Blue Pill for delusion, Red-Pill for harsh illumination, taken from a pretty gay movie, have been used as effective shorthand for man caught in a twilight of kind, as the “veil is being rent” as Howard would write in another work, when the powers can be seen by some as they spill into the human sphere. To this has been added Black-Pill, the realization of doom and the angel of depression and Grey-Pill, the realization that we do not live in a world in which “good guys” struggle against “bad guys” but a world ruled by evil powers cloaked in vestments of good and bad, leading their various hordes of un-thought and delusion against one another, each and every one of them convinced that they are the good guy and the other is the bag guy.

Now, I am not religious. But I do believe that the Powers declared in the ancient epics and in the Scripture and Gospel where real and in some cases remain in interaction with the human sphere. I see most of these powers as being immortal on the human scale but not on the divine. As Virgil declares, “Jove” is “the reaper of gods and men” he alone being “eternal.” Likewise, the scriptural books declare clearly that God is not alone in heaven and has agents of immortal kind on earth as well.

I am also an advocate of the idea that millions of believers, even in something as base as money, as socialism, as hundreds of millions of human souls believing in something, can result in the generation or reawakening of a power.

It is a suspicion of mine that powers fall into slumber and can be reawakened. For instance, the phony shamdemic, obvious to anyone with open eyes and minimal intelligence as something mostly contrived by man to terrorize his fellows, might that not summon true disease, something like the 1919 plague that slew tens of millions?

In my indistinctly superstitious mind, this stands as a possibility. For me, although I do not crawl, and kneel and beg powers for favor or salvation [for no other reason than this is the nature of my being] I do not try and comfort myself that they do not exist.

I fully expect to be devoured by some supra-natural fiend when I pass from my body, and perhaps even before. For one of such a worldview as this, the idea of a Grey God, surging back into power to wash the filthy soul-stink of our degenerate kind from the earth—an ideal at the base of many of our ancestral traditions, especially the ones we borrowed from the Middle East—is spiritually cleansing. This is the basis for my novel Uprising.