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“God” is not the word I’d use. But it is the only one that suffices. There are all kinds of gods: the old and the new; the useful, the useless; the capricious and the dependable; the wrathful and the meek. They all had one thing in common—whether they were created at the dawn of time when hunter-gatherers huddled in caves and cowered at the crack of thunder, or they were engineered by men in frocks, or worse, born of minds harvested by modern technology—all gods were born starving.

That was the predominant thought on my mind as I headed home to create my first god. Egregore is a better word, but no one knows what that means. Yeye always said it was better to create a new god from scratch . . . rather than repurpose an ancient one that had lost its believers. But new gods took work, more work than I was willing to give . . . and time. I did not have time. I had to be careful: The forgotten gods bore the dangerous desperation of drowning men, their hunger an anchor to pull one down to murky depths— a risk I was willing to take. I did not have the bandwidth to nurture a newborn god, give it its powers, create its sigil, or its food source. I needed to convince Yeye to find me an ancient. One that was dying. Starving.

• • • •

At the end of the sixteen-hour journey home to my ancestral village in the hills of Idanre, Yeye greeted me at the bus stop. She always knew when I was coming home. For people like her, telephones were a redundancy. Seeing my grandmother brought me relief, like the years away from her I was holding my breath and only exhaled when we reunited. She was a smallish woman with the too-large, too-white eyes of a child, and small pinpoint pupils like a leopard. She had old-time tattoos running along her inner forearms in a script no one could read now, not even her. It was one of the first written languages, earlier even than the hieroglyphs or the Meriotic scripts of Kush, passed on—not on tombs and sarcophagi—but on the bodies of the descendants of the first people.

“Kilo’n wa kaa?” She asked after I had settled into the cool interior of her hut. I looked around the room, at the various things I had bought for her over the years: a digital wall clock that had stopped at 3:33; a small solar-powered fridge to keep her food fresh; pairs of tennis shoes to protect her feet at the farm. They were as new as the first day I bought them, and the fridge made no hum. It sat silent, like an upright coffin.

“I want to make a god,” I told her.

She picked up one large brown hen that had sashayed into the room and tossed it out. “God-making is not what it was in the past. Things have changed . . .”

“How can things change? The nature of reality has and will always remain the same.”

She was silent for a moment. My eyes trailed the eloquently curved broom marks on the floor, as beautiful as any calligraphy.

“Why do you need one?”

I hesitated, and her eyes darted in my direction. But as I opened my mouth, she raised a palm.

“Don’t tell me.”

I understood. Sometimes, just knowing made you complicit.

“This god. How strong?” Yeye asked.

“I want it to outlive me.”

She leaned back, eyebrows raised.

“I will need a church, won’t I? Congregants?” I asked.

“In the old days, yes. But things have changed. There are different ways of worship now.”

Yeye had helped me create a few gods in the past, servitors really, and only for specific tasks; most of these she killed after their work was done. “To protect you from their hunger,” I remember her saying as she held the last one under volcanic lava where it thrashed and clawed till it died.

“We can hunt,” I said. “Like you taught me. Find one of the ancients, ensnare it and put it to work.”

“How about we hunt the one whose sigil is the cross?” she joked.

I blinked. Then laughed. The god of the cross was one of the biggest, baddest. Grown fat on conquest and evangelism and conflict and wars and time and enslavement, a bazillion followers and those followers’ descendants—all the way down for 2000 years. Impossible to wield by one (wo)man. A god’s god.

She sucked teeth. To Yeye, it did not matter who created the gods. Especially the ones whose sigils were publicly available. Like the cross, or the star, or the half moon. I could see she would have liked to try. To harness such a god: It would have been like riding a chariot drawn by dragons.

“You want a hungry god,” she peered at me with her too-bright eyes.

“I want a functional god.”

A smile danced at the corner of her lips. To hunt new gods. Something that reminded her of the old days. It was a proposition she could not refuse.

“When do we go?” I asked, unable to conceal my excitement.

“Tonight.”

• • • •

God-making was a difficult skill to learn. The first step was understanding the fundamental nature of reality: that everything was connected, that consciousness was prior to matter. That if you knew the way, you could descend into the miasma that was the collective mind—a place that had had many names: the astral plane, Akashik, the dream world. Yeye, like monks of Tibet, could achieve this enlightenment in a few minutes of shutting her eyes. I couldn’t. I needed psychedelics.

The mushroom tasted bitter and sickly sweet, and I rode the wave of nausea into the kaleidoscope of startling colors that was waiting for me. Then, the world around me congealed into form. It was like taking off a VR headset and finding my essence.

Little suckling thought-forms that had been feeding on me screeched and scurried away when they saw I had awoken. How long have these fed? How much have they cost me? They were rudimentary godforms that all people create unconsciously from unexamined minds.

It didn’t take long for Yeye to find me. She looked around at the world I had synthesised—a cold sterile room—and at the human body I was wearing. She smirked. She was a wisp of light as weightless as the feather of Ma’at. True form. No matter how much I practiced, I could never achieve that level of freedom. In any case, I knew I was freer than most.

“You still have not learned to dissolve the ego?” She asked.

“Who am I without the ego?”

“You are the formless, the thing before matter, the thing at the beginning of time . . .”

The word that was God and the word that was with God.

I could not fully conceptualise that. I could understand the ego, my ego: I was a maths teacher, husband, friend. Not this wisp of photons that she had become.

“I wish you could taste this.”

“Maybe one day I will.”

Turning to current issues, she said: “We will find the one they call the middleman.”

She peeled back the room, almost disdainfully, birthing us into true mind.

“The middleman?”

“I told you things have changed. And we must adapt. If you won’t do it the old way, then we must try the new.”

And as we moved through the landscape, I could not help but feel sorry for the six billion human souls who together made the patchwork of this world, most of whom would be asleep their entire lives, true “bodies” covered in feeding vermin. Most of whom would never find true freedom, not in churches or mosques or temples where their souls search to find them, but only accidentally in dreams, near-death experiences, or brief forays into meditative practice. I watched and listened to the smacking feeding of the unexamined thought-forms they created, big and small, and the gods that ruled over them made from the constructive interference of shared beliefs.

• • • •

We found the middleman easily in a lavish mansion hewn out of a mountainside, and founded on the shoulders of giant stone statues. Inside, its pillars and balustrades were made of the purest gold, and acrobatic dancers, naked as babes, spun on long strips of colorful fabric—a party in full swing. Drunken gods splashed in the natural spring that ran through the edifice, and as we passed its many rooms, we glimpsed orgies, sweating bodies glistening under garish lights.

“What an interesting perspective,” Yeye chuckled. She could see my rudimentary point of view, but I couldn’t see hers. Hers was probably closer to the truth.

“What do you see?”

“Just light,” she said. “Different colors of light, joyous, revelling . . . feeding.”

The middleman was a suave gentleman in a purple pinstriped suit. He had an angular face, fit for a model, and his long manicured fingers constantly moved across a device. I recognised him immediately. The one my grandmother called the middleman was no other than the “Algorithm.” A new kind of god borne of modern technology. Not worshipped per se, but one who created the marketplace where gods and believers could come together without the need for a church.

“The gods give me my share,” he said, reading my thoughts. “And in return I give them people, believers . . . I give them food.”

“Through virtual places of worship.”

The Algorithm had the signature of a god I had encountered once before, but I couldn’t place it. Like us, gods changed, evolved. Became something new. Reinvented themselves.

“Anansi, the trickster,” Yeye whispered to me. “This Algorithm was once Anansi.”

A bewitching woman dressed in a loose-fitting dress approached and licked the Algorithm’s ear, her piercing green eyes on me. Her red lips parted, and she whispered something to him before walking off into a cathedral with high arched ceilings and painted windows. Her garment dropped to the ground to reveal full breasts and dimples above perfectly round buttocks.

“That’s Porn,” the Algorithm said. “Formerly Hedone, Priapus, Se’kuse. She has many worshippers, but she hungers for more.” His fingers danced on a mobile device, suggestive images deploying to millions of Instagram and X feeds. “All you need is a subtle suggestion. Then more. Then more. I lead them down the rabbit hole till they can take it no more.” He twirled around, smiling. A maestro in full flourish. “Watch them come to church.”

And millions of souls floated down, faces illuminated by devices, hands in crotches. And the god called pornography screeched in ecstasy, becoming a formless thing made of horns and shadows, hooves and fangs; a thing as old as time, hideously famished, and it fed and fed and fed.

“I am the new purveyor of souls. The new gods all come to me because I have access. And now so have you.”

I could recognise them all, the reveler gods: Gambling, and his children, Trading, Crypto, Lottery, and Casino; Capitalism, Misogyny, Racism in all its forms. I saw even the relatively benign ones, Halloween, Easter, and Coca-Cola. All of them came now to the Algorithm.

“Do not blame them,” Yeye interrupted my thoughts. “If they seem autonomous, remember that most of them were created by people for money and power. She feeds, but someone in the physical world is getting paid from this harvest of attention. They might not have originally or consciously created her, but they wield her like a weapon.”

“What a waste,” I said, watching as the feeding ended and the light of the souls had dimmed to a whisper. Porn, though, was burning brightly, cackling in orgasmic glee.

“The answer to why you’ve come is a big fat YES,” the Algorithm said. “I never turn away people, and I am honoured to have true gods in our midst. So yes, when you create it, I will find believers for it to feed on. My share is only 20%.”

The red-lipped woman reappeared. She clutched the Algorithm’s hair, jerking his head back. From her open mouth, cascading waterfalls of bright energy poured into his.

• • • •

We descended into the lower worlds. We watched countless dreamers float by in the skies, chortling with their brief aliveness, and saw soulmates clash in exploding supernovas over and over.

We went into the valley of forgotten gods—a living cemetery. Mountains of thought-forms cannibalised one another in an endless quest for energy and survival. This is where all old gods came to die: from Sango to Zeus, Mithras to Amadioha. Bereft of enough believers to sustain them, they gravitated here to find food to survive. In the gutters, we found one. Shriveled and dying, gasping for air like a fish out of water.

“Do you want to live?” Yeye asked it.

“A drop of belief,” it begged. “Please . . .”

It was dangerous to feed a dying god.

“What kind of god are you?”

“I don’t know . . . I don’t remember . . .”

A good candidate. I did not want a god that had served cruel masters. I wanted a good god, a benevolent one.

“We will find you believers,” Grandmother said, drawing its new sigil in the sand. Two circles like eyes and a line joining them. A barbell. “And you will bear a name unlike any other.”

Grandmother’s finger lingered on the crooked barbell she had drawn in the sand. The dying god stared at it, and though it had no eyes, its whole form quivered as though the shape called something back to it.

Grandmother tilted her head. “Name it, then.”

“Tatū,” I said.

At the sound, the air shuddered. Something in the trough between waves caught fire. The god dragged itself toward it and swallowed.

“I feel . . .” it whispered, “hunger.”

“You’ll feel more than that,” Yeye cautioned. “If you wish to live, you must give yourself to us. You must come now, away from this forsaken place.”

I suddenly felt the pull of the physical world—my mushroom was wearing out—millions of living minds flickering like neon, all that raw belief waiting for a new god.

“You will feed me,” it said. “But what will I feed you?”

Grandmother’s eyes flickered toward mine.

I took the god’s hand quickly as I soared up to the skies, back to the physical world. Its grip was wet and cold, but strong and sure, a single talon piercing my skin like a hypodermic needle and drawing blood. It was feeding already. Hungry bastard.

Up and up we went, to the land of the sleeping, to the land of all who dream.