They're Just Like Us, Only Worse.
Chapter 1 from Holy Fuck: An Irreverent Look at Reverence
Humans are horny idiots. We all know this has always been true. Before we had science, condoms, and dating apps, we had mythology, which was just horny storytelling. Porn for the imagination. When ancient people sat around wondering, Why are we here?, they didn’t come up with gravity or evolution. Instead, they imagined a sky daddy, as horny as they were, who immediately started fucking everything. That’s where the gods come from, our sexual desires and yearning to live forever.
From Zeus, a power hungry sex addict, to his buddy Pan, the goat-legged musician who thought his flute playing would get him laid. Or Inanna, the first woman to get slut-shamed by a bitter blue-balled priest. We’ll cover them and dozens of other deities as we see that the gods we imagined were just as messy, horny, jealous, and petty as the humans who made this shit up.
These weren't just any stories. They were tales of divine sex freaks whose drama made the Kardashians look like Sesame Street, with just a few less sweaty hands shoved up asses. Before we had weather forecasts and biology textbooks, these stories were our way of understanding everything from why the wind blows to why we can't resist a handsomely pretty face at the local well.
In their wildest, wettest imaginations, humans crafted myths of vengeful, lustful, narcissistic gods whose sex lives were justifications for their own fucked up decisions. The gods of these stories often used sex for control, creation, and destruction, an experience which the storytellers understood as they saw it play out all around them, every day.
As we journey through these outrageous, horny tales keep in mind: they were written to be echoes of human nature with the volume turned all the way up to ear-shattering 11. The storytellers looked to the heavens and saw extensions of themselves, only more powerful, with more freedom, and fantastical consequences of cosmic significance. Just like our comic book superheroes are never responsible for the destruction they caused, the gods were above it all and could get away with anything the storyteller wanted to tell. Rule number one: You never question the gods.
Of all the divine chaos machines, none personified horny power dynamics more than Zeus, the big boss Greek god. For starters, Zeus was born from the sliced-open testicle juices of a primordial force known as Uranus. (WTF, right? We’ll come back to this!) In the stories that we’ll explore, Zeus wasn’t chasing after every nymph and mortal because it was fun, he was a product of a world where domination and power were inextricably linked.
For the ancients, sex was rarely an act of intimacy. Unfortunately it was, and still is in many places around the world, a way to establish control and dominance. Of course our gods would reflect that and Zeus didn’t seduce merely for lust, he did it because that’s what kings and ‘powerful’ men do. They take and get what they want. “Grab ‘em by the pussy, when you're famous they just let you do it.” to quote a modern piece of shit storyteller. In a world where leaders were all-powerful, writing Zeus into a thousand sexual conquests wasn’t a stretch; it was simply validating the status quo power dynamics of their time and telling the masses to fall in line.
It wasn’t all kings and rulers letting their kink flags fly, sex is everywhere. It is a natural, ever-present force like the wind and rain and they needed stories to help explain its vice grip on everyone's dicks. The ancient heroic gods were their answer with Zeus and his global peers representing the chaos and passion of sexual desire. With stories of even the all-mighty gods giving into their uncontrollable urges, who could blame a fella for doing the same?
Our myths covered the gamut of our sexual experiences and desires. While Zeus embodied the alpha-male chaos of divine desire, his buddy Pan gave us the opposite end of the spectrum: the awkward band geek of Olympus, bumbling his way through unrequited love. Pan, a half-goat, half-man god of the wilds was out in the woods trying, and mostly failing, to seduce nymphs and other woodland spirits. If we assume Zeus’s conquests were about sexual prowess and power, Pan’s were more about nerdy desperation and dealing with love that isn’t returned.
Pan was known for his insatiable sexual appetite, after all he was half of a horny goat. And, like all musicians, he believed his music could lure the ladies. So he’d play Wonderwall on his flute and get frustrated and neckbeardy after their inevitable rejection. One of the nymphs, those sexy nature ghosts of ancient lore, turned herself into a bed of river reeds to avoid his hairy embrace. Unfortunately, even turning into a wet, floppy plant didn’t stop the writer of Pan’s story from being a creepy ‘romantic.’ The storyteller had Pan DIY those reeds into a set of windpipes so he could ‘play’ her every day. Gods, our gods are fucking creeps, eh?
All over the world, societies were dealing with fucked up power dynamics and nowhere was that more evident than in humanities sexual relationships. Nowadays we can just hop onto pornhub and find our kink but back then they had to project their own fears and desires onto divine beings to help them make sense of it all. And as all religions are just fantasies, that included insane stories like turning a woman who said “No, thank you” into a toy for Pan’s amusement.
If Pan’s story shows us the awkward desperation of male lust, over in Mesopotamia, the storytellers took things to an even darker place, projecting their frustrations and fears onto Inanna, the original femme fatale of the divine world.
Let’s take a look back through our magic time travel window: There’s a horny man walking through ancient Mesopotamia. He’s been stuck inside and bored for a few days, he thought stretching his legs might give him some inspiration. He sees a stone cold fox filling her water skin at the town well. Through his bored and horny gaze, he mistakes her bending over to retrieve the bucket to be a seductive move. Suddenly, he wants her. He wants her so fucking bad, his chub starts scratching against his robe in an uncomfortable way. He swaggers up and she dismisses him like last week's goat soup. She claims she was just getting water for her family. Dejected, but still swollen in his panties, he wanders off down an alley and angrily releases his pent up sexual tension, jerking it while swearing and calling her names under his breath.
After his angry yank, he returns to the temple, where he’s a celebrated priest, and sits down at a tablet to chisel out his sexual frustration. From getting turned down at the well, he carves out this fucked up shit about the goddess, Inanna, to tell at this weeks sermon. As he chisels, he thinks “Who is she to turn me down, what a load of bullshit. Women need to learn their place and what better way than using the gods to teach them.” Spoiler alert, this dude’s an asshole.
Inanna, known as Ishtar in later religions, is an old deity. She was worshiped for nearly four thousand years across most of the religions in the region. The Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Caananites, and a bunch of other tiny tribes that time forgot, they all held her up as the Queen Bee. In Sumerian tales she was the Queen of Heaven and Earth, kind of a big deal and just so sexy, “like that woman getting water at the well” thinks the priest. So, he gets to thinking how best to teach that woman a lesson and decides to send the goddess Inanna off on a journey to visit her sister in the Underworld.
As she throws on an apron, Inanna takes a pie out of the oven to bring her favorite sibling. (We actually don’t know why Inanna went to visit her sister, so let’s assume it was a pie delivery yeah?) As she approaches the first of the gates, the story takes an unexpected turn and it’s hard to deny it wasn’t written by a vengeful, horny dude. As Inanna descends through the seven gates of the Underworld, at each gate she has to take off a piece of clothing or jewelry. This is the world’s first strip poker game and Inanna kept losing. By the end of the story this brave, revered, gorgeous goddess is stripped naked in front of her sister, with only a pie to hide behind.
Any guesses on what happens next?
If you guessed that they eat the pie, you’re fucking wrong.
Inanna’s sister hates the pie and apparently hates Innana. She murders her sister and throws her naked body on meat hooks as the worlds most fucked up wall decoration. The writer of this story, our proverbial priest dude, was sick in the head, post-nut clarity he did not have.
As Inanna is also the goddess of fertility, her death means that all procreation on Earth ceases too. Which means no sex for anyone! Obviously, the priest can’t leave the story there, he likes sex and doesn’t think his audience will stand for the death of their favorite goddess. So poor, dead, naked, meat-hooked Inanna eventually gets revived and returns to the land of the living.
Happy ending! Well almost, Innana only gets revived when her lover, (fill in for the women at the well's husband), trades places and goes on the meat hook instead. If you can’t have her, kill her lover.
Here’s the truth about Zeus, Pan, Inanna, and all the other deities we’re going to cover in this book, someone wrote these stories, they didn’t just poof into existence. While we will never know for sure what that storyteller was going through, it’s easy to see that early humans were wrestling with their own anxieties about gender roles, power, and who they could and couldn’t fuck. Inanna was more than a goddess, they made her into a divine expression of everything they feared and wanted to control about a woman's sexuality, namely the inherent power in its ability to disrupt the male brain.
And it’s like this in every religious story ever told, all over the world. While Inanna’s strip poker nightmare reflected personal and societal anxieties, the Hindu storytellers elevated sex to a cosmic balancing act, literally holding the universe together through divine coupling. In India, where Hinduism has been the dominant religion for over 4,000 years, the storytellers shaped their narratives in familiar ways but subtly added deeper meaning to the raw sex.
In their tales, sex is the two dualities of nature, creative and destructive, and in this they saw their gods. When Shiva, the god of destruction, and Parvati, the goddess of fertility and nurturing, hooked up it was so their sex could hold the universe together. According to the storytellers, they had to fuck or everything would unravel. They even upped the ante, if they didn’t have sex a demon would have taken over the world. No one should question why sex needs to happen, just get on top and save the world, let’s go baby! Sex was a critical component to how they saw the natural balance of the cosmos.
Another Hindu god, Indra, king of the heavens, couldn’t keep his desires in check and was made to be an example of what happens when you don’t respect other men’s property. Indra seduced the wife of the sage Gautama, and like most gods, he thought he could get away with it. But like Shaggy, he got caught in the act, banging on the sofa, in the shower, even caught him on camera. The sage, Gautama, caught Indra red handed banging his wife. He cursed Indra and caused him to be covered in a thousand vaginas all over his body. One thousand vaginas, all over his body, what a fantastic visual that is. That writer's mind was definitely not in horny jail when he was making this shit up.
Anyway, Indra was absolutely horrified to be a walking UTI and begged for forgiveness. Gautama transformed the vajayjays into eyes, which turned Indra into the ‘thousand-eyed god.’ The storytellers used gods to really hammer in the consequences of being a bad human. If even the king of heavens can get turned into a walking sex toy, think how much worse it could be for a human who sticks his dick where it doesn’t belong.
As we continue to get deeper into these myths, we’ll keep seeing that for them sex was more than a biological function, it was a cosmic force, something that could hold together or rip apart reality itself. The opposite natures of life, creation and atrophy, is bridged by sex and is a critical part of maintaining balance.
Though, even that wasn’t always the case. Sometimes sex wasn’t about creation or balance, sometimes it was just for the chaos of a good story. In the Nordics, it was yet another completely different take on the sex lives of the gods. Up in the great white north, where food was sparse and winters were long, sex was a disruptive force that created chaos and unpredictability. An extra mouth to feed could mean the difference between surviving the winter or burying a loved one. No god embodied this chaos and unpredictability more than that trickster Loki, who never seemed to fit into any norms, sexual or otherwise.
While the current pop-culture version of Loki is more famous for his comic relief and strong Hiddlestonian sexiness, ancient Loki was a gender-bending shape-shifter that represented everything humans feared and couldn’t control. Loki did crazy shit, like the time he stopped a giant from building a wall in the weirdest way possible. The Norse gods of the celestial city of Asgard had promised the giant the sun, the moon, and the cute goddess Freyja for building a wall around their majestic city.
As the giant got close to finishing his construction project, the gods decided they didn’t really want to pay the price they agreed to. The king of the Norse gods, Odin, who is Loki and Thor’s dad, aka the All Father, tasked Loki with stopping his construction progress, to cheat the giant out of his payment like a Trump contract. Did Loki go talk to the giant, bring him a coffee, or offer him a different construction contract? No, of course not, the gods weren’t there for boring fucking stories, they were there for crazy fucking stories.
Naturally, Loki goes and turns himself into a mare to seduce the giant’s horse. Let me spell that out for you again, Loki turns into a female horse to fuck a stallion in order to distract the horse’s owner from building a wall. In a time when your word was your bond and your integrity was the most important thing you had, Loki represented the chaos and potential punishments of not following through on your contracts. As punishment for breaking the contract, Loki gets pregnant and gives birth to an eight-legged colt. Daddy Odin claims the colt as his own mount. Giddy up, kiddo, grandpappy wants a ride.
Loki’s role in the old stories was to challenge the rules, our sexual fluidity, the gods themselves, and the unknowns of the endless winter. His stories were more than the wild tales of a naughty Asgardian princeling, they were warnings and reminders that sex, when it refused to conform to the familiar, could have terrifying results.
“Don’t stick your dick in crazy”, is what that giant’s horse realized far too late.
While Loki’s chaotic seductions birthed eight-legged monstrosities, other gods, like the Yoruba Orishas of Africa, turned their erotic dramas into literal storms and floods. Over in West Africa, the Yoruba Orishas, aka divine spirits, were no strangers to messy love triangles and erotic rivalries. The story goes that Oshun, the goddess of love and rivers, got into a relationship with Shango, the god of thunder. However, Shango was a bit of a player and had another lover, Oya, the goddess of storms.
Oya caught Shango giving it to Oshun and lost her literal shit. The ensuing fight of the mistresses, Oya and Oshun, was blamed for devastating thunderstorms and floods. Because the Orisha's love lives were just as unreliable as our own human lives, their messy drama spilled over into the human realms, influencing everything from the weather to political alliances. When we can’t explain the weather, we throw a few gods into an orgy blender and just hit PULSE.
While the Orishas turned their erotic rivalries into storms and floods, the Abrahamic traditions traded divine bedroom drama for human players. Even when gods step out of the spotlight, lust and chaos take center stage in our myths. The drama of divine desire isn’t confined to polytheistic tales, the Bible actually has more than its fair share of horniness disguised as moral lessons. While the tales found there were less focused on the lives of gods getting it on, they didn’t shy away from using sex for control. Most of the sexual misadventures in the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are of the humans chosen by God. But, like the other religious pantheons, the Abrahamic myths had a menagerie of characters to fit every archetype. One of the most famous of these characters is King David of the Israelites.
David was a beloved king and was known to be a ‘man after God’s own heart’, which did not stop him at all from getting freaky whenever he could. Our gods, and their chosen humans, are reflections of our own desires and horniness. And oh boy, the Bible does go rock hard on horniness but not in the way modern Christianity wants us to think it does. Turns out, God actually loves killing babies, he does it like all the fucking time in the Bible, it’s bananas to see their picket lines at the abortion clinic and then read this story about rape, murder, and baby killing in their holy book.
The story goes like this: King David was chilling on the roof of his palace and, being a man after God’s own heart, he was looking down creepily from above. Peeping David spots this sexy lady taking a bath and immediately gets a hard on for her. This bathing lady, who the storyteller creatively named Bathsheba, is commanded to the palace where David abuses his power and takes sexual advantage of the pretty lady.
David’s forbidden desire would’ve been a familiar one to these storytellers, not dissimilar from that old horny priest who told the story about Inanna, but the Biblical tales played out with less cosmic chaos and more on-the-nose human consequences.
David knocks up BathingSheba but there’s an issue, turns out she’s married. The story skips over Bathsheba’s point of view on this one, not surprising that women’s rights and thoughts didn’t get a lot of screen time in the Bible, and based on what we know of history, we can guess that she wasn’t much more than a child.
To cover up his likely rape of another man’s wife, David has her husband murdered in battle. He tells his generals to charge but to fall back at the last second. Her husband, Uriah, is on the front line and ignorant of the plan to withdraw. He dies quickly, as David’s plan plays out perfectly, a man after God’s own heart indeed.
It’s a tale of lust, power, and abuse that in many ways reflects the same patterns we see in other mythologies: a powerful figure, seduced by desire, who bends morality and laws to suit their sexual needs.
Unlike other mythos where David might have directly paid the price of his kingly cowardice, the Biblical storytellers almost always punish the protagonists family and friends instead. In this instance it’s not David that pays the price, no, God sends a priest to chastise David and kill the infant. God kills the infant.
[FUCKNOTE: Where the FUCK do they get off telling us abortion is murder when their god is off performing ‘after-birth abortion’ all over the old testament? Very few of these hypocrites have read their own book.]
While this story served as a cautionary tale to the ancient Hebrews about not even kings escaping the consequences of their actions, it was never about David’s abuse of Bathsheba, they could care less about that. Women were merely property to be traded. It was because he murdered another man, Uriah, and took his stuff. Bathsheba became another of his harem, the storytellers telling their people that women are sidenotes in the story and sex is for men’s whims.
At the same time God was killing the infant, he promised David another son from Bathsheba, one that would become the next king. This kid, Solomon, grows up and God tells him he can ask for anything and He’ll give it to him. Solomon thinks about it and asks for wisdom, which God grants, making him the wisest man to ever live.
What does the wisest man who ever lived, one who communes with God, do with his infinite acuity? He fucks over 700 wives and 300 concubines. A harem of more than a thousand women to service his every sexual desire and appetite. This is the Biblical canon for the son of a man after God’s own heart and one gifted by God with infinite wisdom.
Across every mythos we see again and again man’s insatiable horniness and the twisted ways they used their gods and heroes to justify their abuse.
From Zeus to David, one thing is clear: humans have always needed stories to justify the messy, horny chaos of power and desire. These stories, while being great celestial porn for ancient audiences, are also a reflection of the chaotic nature of what it means to be human. By making our gods lustful, vengeful, and out of control, our storytellers were making sense of why humans behaved the way they did. If the gods couldn’t keep it in their pants or avoid total destruction over heartbreak, why should humanity be held to a higher standard? Each of our myths served as a cautionary tale and a justification that reinforced what we believed about ourselves.
Why did storytellers write the gods and heroes into these stories of lust and chaos? Because they were dumb as fuck and needed answers. We’re still the same in many ways, we just have the benefit of being able to look back on their stupidity to laugh and hopefully learn something. Thank fuck for the internet, right?
Our ancestors, from Mesopotamia to Norway to Greece, India and beyond, were all up against the same mysteries of the power behind desire and sex that we still sweatily romp in the sheets with today. These stories were the equivalent of modern movies and we used them for millennia to project our own anxieties, insecurities, and struggles while also providing justification and acceptance for our darker desires of power and abuse. With the gods having the same primal urges that we have, humans were able to justify the power structures and unfairness they lived in while exploring their fears, and sometimes challenging the norms.
In the tales of horny gods, we found explanations for the messy, uncontrollable and dangerous nature of sex and power. Their stories gave us permission to fuck up, lust, and rage, while reassuring us that even the gods struggle and lose in love and war. As we dive deeper into these mythos, we’ll explore how the stories we told turned on us, how our gods that once explained the mysteries of the universe became puppets of greedy men, and how we can take it all back.
We might still just be a bunch of horny apes but unlike our woodland cousins, we can learn from our mistakes and create a brighter future. Maybe this time it could be one not built on foundations of sexual conquest and incestuous fucking? Is that too much to hope for?