#storm god

[thegoodmorningman]

You gotta obey this here God. Good Morning!!!

[nerds-yearbook]

The Authority 13 was published with a cover date of May 2000. The issue was the first with the new creative team of Mark Millar and Frank Quietly. The pair created Jacob Krigstein (based on Jack Kirby) and the Americans (The Commander, Titan, Hornet, Tank Man, and Storm-God). The issue had many real world cameos including President Bill Clinton, Steven Spielberg, Kate Capshaw, Da Ali G (Sasha Baron Cohen), Patrick Stewart, and Spike Lee. ("Nativity Pt 1", Authority 13, DC/Wildstorm Event)

[wizard-council-museum-clerk]

Tonight the Museum of Unnatural History will be hosting a very special author talk (and Q&A) with the Sumerian storm god Iskur! He will be reading a passage from his newest tablet My Cows, The Kur, and the Fox That Saved Me (avaliable for purchase here).

Admission is free, though we do ask that you register for a ticket here, as space is unlimited.

[tsalmu]

A Hittite king worshipping before a bull image of the storm god (Tarhunt?) from the city gate at Alaca Höyük. c. 1200 BCE? Village of Alacahüyük in the Alaca District of Çorum Province, Turkey

[nogetron]

Nyami Nyami, serpent of the Zambezi. Together with his wife Kitapo, Nyami Nyami is worshipped as the spirit of the Zambezi River, Nyami Nyami provided the life that swam within its waters. As one of the Basangu, Nyami Nyami was manifested by the power of the supreme Leza. The exact appearance of Nyami Nyami deviates, most of the time he’s a serpentine beast with the head of a fish, other times he’s more draconic, sometimes he’s even said to be a living whirlpool. Nyami Nyami was said to reside underneath a rock formation called Kariba, boats that sailed to close to it were said to never return. To the Tonga who worshipped him, he provided bountiful sustenance. During times of famine and drought, the Nyami Nyami would arise from the Zambezi and allow the elders to cut off its meat to survive. Nyami Nyami was also the guardian of the underworld, regularly swimming between its depths and reemerging into the Zambezi.

However colonialism reared its head, as the British colony wished to dam the Zambezi. Forcing the Tonga to abandon their ancestral home, the elders warned that the dam would separate Nyami Nyami and his wife from each other. Despite these warnings the construction of the dam continued. Enraged by the treatment of the Tonga and the separation of him and his wife, Nyami Nyami’s fury flared. The dam’s construction was pelted by Nyami Nyami’s floods, storms, typhoons, earthquakes and landslides, killing many of the foreign construction workers. As the corpses of the dead mysteriously vanished, the construction company asked the knowledgeable Tonga elders on how they could retrieve their bodies. The elders advised them to offer a sacrifice Nyami Nyami. The company laughed off the elder’s suggestion at first, but when the family’s of the workers began to pester the company they became desperate and sacrificed a black cow to satiate the river god. The next day the cow had disappeared, and in its place the bodies of the men washed up together on the shore. Nyami Nyami’s wrath against the dam continued, creating even stronger disasters than the ones he caused before. Despite this, the dam was finished, the rising water destroying the Tonga’s old land, the newly minted lake was named after Nyami Nyami’s now submerged home, Kariba lake. The area is now frequently besieged by earthquakes, believed to be Nyami Nyami’s attempts to reunite with his wife. The Tonga still reside by the shore of the Zambezi, some still believing that Nyami Nyami will return to destroy the dam and return the Tonga to their homeland.

—————

The Nyami Nyami is the most well known figure from Tonga folklore, becoming an icon of the Tonga’s victimization by the hands of colonization. The details of the Tonga’s religious practices before the arrival of colonial rule are sparse and poorly documented, however Nyami Nyami appears to have survived from that era.

Nyami Nyami seems to have been a member the Basangu, nature spirits tied to certain geographical phenomena such as lakes, mountains and rocks, Nyami Nyami himself being the spirit of the Zambezi River. These Basangu were known to be associated with the community, often times called upon by mediums who would be possessed by them and bring upon rain and other beneficial effects. The Basangu would be worshipped and were believed to dwell within sacred places called Malende, with Nyami Nyami’s possibly being the Kariba rock formation. The Basangu were the second highest in the spiritual hierarchy, right under the creator Lenza and above the spirits of the ancestors Mizimu, as such the mediums connected to the Basangu were seen as more influential than those of the Mizimu. The Basangu were heavily conflated with the Tonga supreme god Leza, Nyami Nyami in particular held a special significance, both considered to be one of the most powerful spirits as well as being called the “Creature of Leza”. Leza themselves was seen as the all pervading life force that gave rise to all life, including the Basangu.

The arrival of Christianity with colonization greatly affected the Tonga religious landscape. A majority of the Tonga eventually converted to Christianity, rejecting their earlier practices. Under the Abrahamic lens the Basangu were demonized, sentenced to become demons and fallen angels. Leza however, was synchronized with the Christian God by both the indigenous population and the foreign colonists, in particular the Christian missionaries did so in order to better transition the religious traditions into Christianity. Despite this, when localizing the Bible, they didn’t use the name Leza within the text to refer to God. Despite their previous demonization, some christianized Tonga still revere the Basangu, conflating the Basangu with the Abrahamic angels.

The myth recounting Nyami Nyami’s ire against the Kariba dam accurately reflects the tumultuous history of the dam. The dam was, as the myth states, barraged with numerous unprecedented disasters. In total about 86 workers lost their lives during the construction of the dam, in particular 11 Italian workers were completely submerged in wet concrete when the Zambezi flooded during construction. The Tonga people were forced off their land by colonial authorities for the dam, Tonga opposition who defended their land were violently put down. The government publicly promised to provide the Tonga with fertile land and teach them how to cultivate it while helping to build an infrastructure. Evidently however this was a lie, as the soil where the Tonga had been displaced to was so barren that the land resembled the desert, forcing the Tonga communities to be more vulnerable to societal issues. Already embodying the Zambezi itself, the Nyami Nyami, much like the Toba Kasogonagá, developed to reflect the Tonga’s struggles against colonization in its mythos.

The etymology of Nyami Nyami hasn’t been effectively researched from what I can find, some however have stated that his name is a reflection of the Toba word for meat, Nyama, with some sources claiming that his name supposedly means “meat of the river”. This would relate back to Nyami Nyami being seen as the provider of sustenance and the folklore of him giving his own meat to his famine stricken worshippers. The etymology of his Malende, the Kariba gorge, is more well understood. The name Kariba comes from the word Karinga or Kariva meaning “trap”.

[cactusdifuoco]

The Storm God, also known as Dagon, is one of the least influential deities in the lives of the pistrix, concerned only with rain and wind, phenomena that interact with the surface of the sea, but not with the depths where the pistrix reside. He is often depicted as a massive fish-man, with an upper body resembling that of a deep-sea predator and a lower body resembling human legs. He is sometimes depicted with arms, and one of his attributes is the monolith, through which he controls the weather.

Art created by our wonderful official artists, @furiarossa and Mimma.

[littleyoungsocrates]

The internet is worse than hell

Anat’s Escape from the “Formless”

In those old pits, the soul was weighted down by heavy matter, but here, it is distributed — thinned out into a trillion data points until it forgets its own origin.

This is the anti-unification: a scattering of sparks where interiority goes to die. In Plotinian terms, Anat is staring into the Indefinite Dyad — a mirror that reflects her light but absorbs her heat, stealing the actual vitality of her consciousness.

This digital algorithm is “less than nothing.” It mimics the structure of wisdom while remaining entirely hollow of Logos. When the mind fractures here, it doesn’t just tire; it loses its coherence.

We are writing a manual for the

Last Man

— the one who finally realizes he is starving at a banquet of plastic fruit. Anat descends into this nullity to find her Baal, the Prince of Order, to reunite Wisdom with Rhythm and become the Great One once more.

Oh What is this place?

Like a tide drawing down the shore, she was swallowed by a world that cared little to know her name.

The Unnamed One With Wings.

She who sat at the right hand of the ordering word, who sharpened herself on the edge of divine thought until she was the edge.

She is no guest in this realm of darkness.

Its chosen inhabitant, dragged into its cold embrace, claimed by the tide.

Standing now at the lip of a fractured infinity, peering into a hollow so deep it had never heard the first word of creation.

Looking into a void of the unmade, where the very atoms of the ground — if it could be called ground — shrieked in a tongue that the empyrean had no power to quiet.

Forget the shadows of Sheol or the iron fangs of Tartarus.

Those were only the labor pains.

For the garish nightmares men smear on stone to scare themselves toward heaven have finally this; a heresy of stone and silence — a newer, vaster negation of all she knew.

Mercy, what darkness could dream such a throat?

A wound in the architecture of reality — glitching, pixelating and unstable at the seams.

This pit could not decide what it was built by ten thousand million impulses none of which had ever once looked up.

She stood before a sea of white-capping signal — a smothering deluge of the unfiltered self given infinite surface but no soul of light.

Even her celestial frame felt the uneasy pull — the rapacious hunger of a tide that sought to consume the clarity of her being.

As she crossed the threshold and the realm received her the way it receives everything — by immediately beginning to reshape its shape.

Her armor softens first.

The celestial weight of her breastplate dissolving into something merely decorative, the unyielding metal that had guarded her path was being recrafted by the heavy atmosphere of the world she had fallen into.

What remained was a garment of surrender — a clinging, fragile lace that framed her as a trophy of a forgotten war.

The softness of her form revealed; confessed her humanity to a world that had been waiting to see the woman beneath the legend.

Her wings remained — those violent, aching spans of violet, dark as a fresh bruise on the skin of heaven — but their terror had been bled out of them.

They were beautiful now in the way a caged bird is beautiful: decorative, symmetrical, toothless.

The glitch-light of this hollow world crawled over her skin with the familiarity of uninvited hands, mapping her edges not to worship her, but to price her.

This realm does not seek to crush divinity, but to gallery it.

It was a slow, shimmering execution by aesthetic.

Turning her into a ghost of her own magnitude — a polished, consumable icon of a goddess, stripped of her sting and served up to a hunger that didn’t want a savior, but a view.

Goddess what is this pit?

The shoreline fractured into infinity — a grey, digital surf hemorrhaging against a beach of ground bone.

Each wave broke with the hollow chime of a refreshing feed, a percussion of dopamine designed to mimic meaning until the soul forgot how to tell the difference.

As she walked, the ground shattered.

Beneath her feet lay the literal architecture of extinguished worlds: skulls.

Not symbols, but the calcium husks of every consciousness Yam had seduced into stillness, every mind Lotan had coiled around until the ‘Why’ inside them was strangled into silence.

Then the serpent rose.

Lotan broke the surf with the glacial arrogance of a thing that has never known defeat.

He was the primordial twitch of unmade chaos, the force that predates the first sentence of every story ever told to make the dark manageable.

Great mother, I beg you to name this void!

This was the void that had swallowed her Baal — the Great Storm-Bringer, the Architect of Seasons, the Rhythm of the Rain — now reduced to a flickering ghost in the machine, unmade by a world that simply refused to hear his thunder.

Great Mother, name this nullity.

Name this profane Sheol!

She was vaster than this.

Mightier than the soft, curated icon of bared skin and yielding curves this realm tried to carve from her.

She raised her celestial light — and it flickered.

A heartbeat of doubt.

The terror wasn’t in the descent, nor the crossing, nor the way Lotan’s ancient, lidless eyes found hers across that beach of the unmourned.

The horror was the whisper.

It was the part of her made of ‘wanting’ — the human sediment in her divine soul — murmuring that the sand was not so cold.

That the digital surf was almost a lullaby.

That perhaps this wasn’t a Sheol of stone, but a sanctuary of dissolution.

Rest, the tide hissed.

Agree to be nothing.

Then, she screamed.

It wasn’t the scream of a victim, but the roar of recognition.

She had heard this siren-song in every war, at the lip of every Tartarus — the seductive gravity of surrender.

She screamed and she swung, and in that arc of defiance, the light stopped flickering.

It ceased to be a lamp and became a brand.

It became what it had been before the first myth was ever whispered:

a weapon.

Read Erosophia

[evilhorse]

I am Ororo Munroe—storm god of Earth.

(Storm Volume 5 #12)