“Well, I hope they’re better than the old variety,” Zeus said. “It’s not creative at all to be stuck in the same old roles. Maybe the new gods will have more sense, so that we can really make something out of them. Christ didn’t grow at all, for example. Neither did I, for that matter. But a new magnificent god role that we could really sink our teeth into … now, wouldn’t that be something?”

“Wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?” The question was taken up by all of the assembled gods; wonderingly, yearningly.

“Impossible, I suppose,” murmured Pegasus, sadly.

Hera said, “We can’t force people to recognize us as we are.”

“Sometimes I think it would serve them right if we could,” Zeus said, laughing.

“But if they could perceive us apart from the roles …” Christ said dreamily. “I mean, if we didn’t have to conform to their ideas about us! But if we don’t conform, they don’t perceive us at all. And all in all, each of us had some excellent qualities. The trouble is that people insist on their idea of specifics, I suppose. To imagine us as superhuman, in terms of their species alone, is understandable enough at their level. But to define us by their ideas of sexuality or race is ridiculous even by their standards.”

“They’re really quite unbelievable,” Buddha said, arriving late as usual. He looked like an Indian guru, a situation he remedied at once by turning into a tree. Quarrelsomely he said, “They twist around everything a god says. If only they could perceive us as we really are …”

“Just what I was saying,” Christ said triumphantly. “But it’s a lost cause, I’m afraid.”

“Except for nature,” Zeus replied. “And that’s my favorite materialization.”

“Mine, too. Let’s not forget that,” Mohammed cried.

“It’s ever so much more rewarding and creative,” Pegasus agreed.

“But why isn’t nature enough for them?” Buddha asked. “They keep misquoting me as saying that nature is unsavory; or that the point of earth life is to get over it, like a disease. And then they rant about annihilating desire, and I never said a thing like that.”

Hera turned into the Virgin and said, “I probably understand humans better than any of you, and my miraculous conception told the whole tale. They just don’t trust nature. They don’t like the death part and they’ve never been able to see beyond it, really; it obsesses them. All of nature shouts of new births, yet humans have the greatest difficulty imagining any divinity in nature. I don’t understand how they can be that way, but they are.”

“They don’t see any divinity in themselves, either,” Zeus said. “At least the Olympian gods were in and out of nature—and human nature all the time. But Christ was born into nature just once, and yanked out fast.”