(The Divine) 1. Voracious Life (Khepri)

I thought my first piece in this series would be about Obaluaye, Orisa of infectious disease, because truly, when I think of the smalls and the deification of their relationship with humanity – I think of him. But it turns out the first topic of celebration here is going to be the sun, and all the sacred and honored ones who associate therewith.

Since this is the first foray into this topic, though, I guess I should set it up a bit. My main concern in writing about deities is that I’m not, and there’s no way I could become, a scholar of all the ones I’m going to include in this collection. I’m not a scholar of any single deity, even: I’m a very humble student. While I’m sure that’s obvious to most of the folks reading this, this statement will hopefully serve to qualify the work a bit. I’m acutely aware I’m operating in near total ignorance here and my intention is not to misrepresent or claim any kind of expertise in any pantheon or goddess or otherwise holy being. The information I’ll be presenting in regard to the divine personality of things is going to be, largely, surface-level. Please forgive me if I dramatically fuck anything up, and please let me know in the comments where there’s room to correct said fuck-ups.

What I can offer with an increased level of confidence and some authority, is information from the microbial aspects of the universe. This series is my attempt to stitch together and present facets of the divine (the very, very macrobial), and facets of the microbial, where they weave together.

Our sun obviously has so many mystical connections to humanity It’s quite difficult to pick a place to start. It would be valid, even, to just highlight the parallels of death and rebirth between the nature of the smalls, and the nature of the sun rising every morning. That the sun is such a life-giving quantity for human beings is clear to us, and has been clear to us since the beginning of time. Recognition for that quality in our microbial associates is not, however, so readily apparent in mammalian thinking – and rather, the opposite. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that, as I write this in February of 2022, most humans associate microorganisms with illness, suffering, and death, and possibly that’s true even without the influence of a global pandemic. While that’s sad, because it negates access for many of us to some of the absolute glories of the small world, it’s also valid. The relationship between humanity and all living things with infectious disease is a powerful, complex bridge. But this kind of binary thinking is not generally helpful, as we know, and the Sun, life-giving and benevolent as we may sometimes regard it has a role to play in the development of pathology and decay, just as much as microbial lives support our lives gently and peacefully every single day.

Khepri, the scarab-headed god, and the morning manifestation of Ra, represents the rising sun in Ancient Egyptian religion. The life-giving, renewing qualities of the star, by extension. As the god of resurrection, one of Khepri’s roles was to renew the sun every morning, and the good people who revered him associated him with the scarab in this sense also. When laid as eggs in dung, emerging baby beetles appear to be created from nothing – Khepri’s name is derived from the verb meaning ‘to come into being’.

The dung beetle is an excellent navigator, and uses the sun as a guide while performing its earthly duties. This is a more literal manifestation of the way the living world uses the sun as a guide. More often, organisms align with our most imposing celestial body through the development of circadian rhythms, and microbes are no different. Examination of circadian rhythms has revealed that the majority of Life with a capital ‘L’ is in sync with the rotation of the earth via relationships to sunlight. Clock proteins, in organisms with life spans longer than a day, are made and broken down in 24 hour iterations. Plants seem to exist much more slowly than we do, but to them, an hour is still an hour, a second is still a second: there is temporal succession.

Within the microbial universe, these ideas are nuanced. In many cases the ability to track biological time imparts evolutionary fitness, but in others — why follow a 24 hour clock if you don’t even live that long? Still, they do, and so we as scientists consider the smalls and their sun-powered cycles. Circadian rhythms, then, are another link between the sun gods and the smalls - and that most mysterious conduit between the sun and humanity: photosynthesis. Arguably, the original microbe-brokered deal between a heavenly body and the rest of our planet. The smallest of organs inside plant cells that perform the biochemistry of photosynthesis, and produce the pollutant oxygen which allows so many of us to continue paying taxes and eating tofu, were originally bacteria, or some other kind of microbe. Ancestrally speaking, they probably looked similar to contemporary cyanobacteria, and at some point took up residency inside larger cells. The photons delivered by the sun are collected herein, and processed into food and oxygen via a cascade of energy flowing through different energy states.

Daily generation of the sun, or even baby dung beetles, from nothing, can be disproved rationally. But still, they bring to mind the experiments of Pasteur who demonstrated that spontaneous generation was not the reason why clear broth becomes cloudy if you leave it out on the counter for long enough (n.b. I wish there was enough scope here to talk about the tobacco mosaic virus’ neat trick of self-assembly). But I’ll be obtuse and muddy the waters here by discussing a scientific process in poetic terms. Some genera of bacteria, under extreme stress or duress, are able to enter a state of suspended animation via the production of endospores. Essentially, vegetative cells form a very tough cuticle from within themselves, which contains only a kernel of genetic information – no longer productive and functional, spores contain only the potential of a bacterial cell.

In this state, these ones are resistant to desiccation, to pressure, to heat, to chemical interference, to radioactive interference, even – extremely so. It’s very difficult to destroy bacterial spores, but even then, it’s difficult to describe them as being alive. Technically, they’re not, until some primal, vestigial indicator is satisfied and the kernel of bacterial potential is motivated back into activity, producing a new vegetative cell. This cell doubles, and those cells double, and all of those cells double again until…a new community is formed. Voracious life, seemingly from nothing, seemingly completely new, derived from nothing. But - not. Derived from everything.