Stand aside and indulge your joe, sweet graverobber, I’ll handle this inquiry… as delicately as I know how.
You want to know when a god stops being a God, and starts being a fun little story we tell children before bed. There was one who could clear a field of men with no weapon nor voice, only the sudden certainty that the emptiness around them was looking back. The ancients didn’t consider that sudden panic in the forest a nervous misfire. They knew it as visitation, and it came often enough, and to enough of them, that they gave the feeling his name, because naming terror is the first bargain humans make with it: a shape for the shapeless, a culprit you can flatter before he comes around doing his bullshit again. Now he’s just a nice boy in green with big saucer eyes who won’t grow up. Same forest, same name, tooth and claws filed down, all very nice and family friendly, a fairy tale. That is our clue, though, not yet the answer. The transition isn’t so much a matter of belief, which the thinking mind can decide as easily as it can undecide about any silly thing. It is in the curious numbing of that involuntary reflex that used to fire before you had time to consider whether you believe in anything at all. A living god doesn't wait for your permission to frighten you. He arrives ahead of thought, and the body answers before the mind understands there is a question.
The day a person can walk into that same woodland dark and feel nothing… no goosebumps, no chill, that’s when we can demote the god to myth. Legends remain, no verse of the stories changes, the idols may keep their old posture just as crafted, maybe even their devotees, but something essential has gone out of it all, the way a house feels different the day after someone dies in it, even before anyone starts moving their things out. Mythology is what religion becomes once it can no longer touch the animal part of you and wrench obedience out of the body despite all your high-minded objectivity, your happy nonchalance enjoyed from a safe distance. This wire running from the symbol to the spine isn’t cut all at once; it frays through a repetition that sees no consequence. A child is warned, disobeys, and survives. A village blasphemes and nothing happens. The sacred grove becomes a picnic spot and then a parking lot. The body learns that this particular realm no longer has an officer assigned to it. So the link is severed, and our symbol only hangs there, loose and decorative, a nice ornament to be admired, instead of a power you arrange your life around.
But I am not so sure that the dead stay dead, not least of all due to my time moonlighting as a kind of nec-romancer. We did not become less afraid when Pan faded, did we? We only became embarrassed by the old recipient. I’d wager that dread is living now in the places that would be insulted to be called religious: in the market’s daily verdict, in that glowing rectangle everyone checks before their eyes have adjusted to wakefulness, in the words everyone knows and everyone knows not to say. Have you felt that old current pass through you, graverobber? Have you let out an involuntary prayer when the plane sputtered and dipped, offered to no one you’d have admitted, before boarding, to believing in? Call the sleeping gods mythology if that word lets you rest easier. I’d call them live wires, and be careful, if I were you, what bare conductor you mistake for a dead relic.
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