The Last In Line of the Divine

Taken from the Discordia Obscura, Chapter 4 – Ironia

Years after the ordeal with the apple, Eris roamed the Earth, far away from those megalomaniacal pricks on Olympus who never had the good sense to appreciate her contributions to the divine scheme. Other than the occasional run-in with Pan, she hadn’t seen any of her kind in over a decade. Then one day when she was making sasquatch shadows in the forest to bring some mystery to the nearby villagers, she came across the exiled Momus, who quickly joined her game by making a second sasquatch shadow. Things quickly took a turn towards excessive bawdiness, and villagers rushed their children indoors as the two shadow sasquatches appeared to have aggressive sex, accompanied by a cacophony of moans and grunts and screams that could be heard from many miles away.

After their little improvised drama, the two shunned deities replicated their performance with their own godly forms. So aroused were their passions that they spent three whole days fulfilling vacuums of lust that neither realized had grown so hungry since they had given up on their own kind. But as the frantic desire of their libidos began to wane, the two found that they didn’t actually like each other very much. The goddess of chaos found Momus to be a vain buzzkill, and the god of satire and mockery was frankly terrified of Eris. It was long after they parted ways that Eris realized that she was pregnant.

At the moment that she realized this she came to two conclusions. First of all, there was no way that anybody else would ever know that she had given birth to a new divine being, immortal or otherwise. Secondly, it was clear to her that the child she gave birth to would be a daughter, and that she would also be the divine torch of irony among mortals long after all the other Greek gods and goddesses were long gone. She would name her Ironia, obviously.

Eris raised Ironia in total secrecy, and when the young woman was strong enough to fend for herself, Eris instructed her to hide in the far north while the old ones met their fate. And so it came to be that, over the next few centuries, the former tenants of Mt. Olympus succumbed to the lack of belief in them by humanity. Once the divine have been recognized by mortals, continued belief becomes necessary to their survival. While Christianity ravaged the old religions, the Greek gods and goddesses disappeared into the event horizon of their own irrelevancy. *pop*

Ironia was unknown to all but her mother, and so she did not perish. At night she would whisper the name of her mother into the ears of sleeping plebeians to remind them of her existence so that Eris could join her on Mt. Olympus, where together they would keep humanity on its toes so that it could eventually transcend its mortality, or end in a punchline so funny that the whole of existence would laugh itself to death. Her preference varied over the years.

The hand of Ironia is in almost everything. Whenever you say something that is followed by the thought, “Oh fugk, I shouldn’t have said that,” Ironia is right there to insure that you do in fact eventually regret saying whatever it is that you said. Whenever some politician decries the evils of homosexuality, it is Ironia that later leads the cameraman to the airport bathroom where he is getting a blowjob from a handsome young actor. And when a naïve young musician writes a song about irony that ironically misuses the concept of irony, it was Ironia whispering those lyrics into her ear.

Her crowning achievement did not come until the middle of the 20th century, when she inspired two young men in a bowling alley to invent a religion centered around her mother. That religion, Discordianism, used Eris as a metaphor for why humanity needed to accept and embrace chaos, rather than swim against its inevitable currents until they drowned in their futile fatigue. But being the divine force of irony, she also knew that most people who came to call themselves Discordians would miss the point. They would instead literally idolize Eris and attempt to become ‘agents of chaos’, ironically unaware that attempts to create chaos is identical to a game of order. And this is exactly what occurred, especially after she and her mother invented the internet. Discordianism became an appropriated identity for those least capable of understanding the actual wisdom dispensed by Discordianism. It was a breath-taking masterpiece of irony and chaos and satire all at once, a complete artistic statement of her very existence.

However, what goes up must come down. One of her favorite prank subjects had said that, Sir Ike Newton. She had convinced him, with an apple – of course, that this was because of a strange omnipotent, omnipresent force called gravity. Total bullshit, but he really believed it, and this started a whole new habit of humans attributing phenomena to mysterious divine forces who ruled over them everywhere at all times. But in fact, the reason that things which went up eventually came back down was to prevent mortals and their excrement and pollution from drifting up into the heavens. The vile ape stink was the god’s and goddesses biggest regret about their creation, and a lot of care had been taken to keep it from permeating into their realm. Gravity was just a sanitation protocol. Yet the point is that the fruits of Ironia’s labor were rapidly unraveling the tapestry of existence, and Ironia realized she had brought upon her own downfall with her superior work ethic and attention to detail.

That the hijinks of the divine force of irony will eventually be the undoing of her own existence, as well as everything else, might actually be her greatest masterpiece – even though nobody will be around to appreciate it for a long time. The beauty is that each one one of us stink apes are a hand of her divine will, crafting the means of stupefaction and destruction against one another under the guise of utopia-building. By fooling ourselves that our petty hatred and intolerance is justice and progress, something that seemed totally hilarious to Ironia at the time she conceived of it, we are helping the last in line of the divine to finally put this absurdity to rest so the void can come in and clean up before the next round of assholes eventually appear to play out some long-winded existential drama for the amusement of nobody but themselves and whatever gods and goddesses they are fool enough to create.