Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes: A No-Bullshit Guide to World Mythology

by O'Brien, Cory

  and then he goes boom again

  and there is some land

  but this is still pretty lame because what is the point of being able to do this kind of shit

  if there is no one around to get freaked out by how cool it is?

  Now, this may sound pretty familiar so far

  but here’s where it gets crazy:

  Quetzalcoatl’s master plan for getting worshippers

  is to invent JAGUARS.

  And then he’s like “WHOA, JAGUARS LOOK, I JUST FUCKING MADE YOU.

  PRETTY NEAT, HUH?”

  And the jaguars are all “Rarrrr, we are jaguars.

  We can’t talk or be impressed.”

  So Quetzalcoatl is like “Aww, fuck you guys.

  I’m gonna make some way more awesome creatures

  and they are going to worship me

  and you are going to be their SLAVES.”

  So he gets some dirt

  and he makes dirt-people

  but the dirt-people really suck

  because first of all, they are made out of dirt

  second of all, they only speak gibberish

  and third of all, they dissolve in water

  so Quetzalcoatl figures that even if they COULD worship him

  he would get pretty embarrassed

  so he kills all of them by dumping water on them

  and then he calls these two other dudes

  Xmucane and Xpiacoc

  who have names that sound like prescription drugs

  designed to treat nasal congestion and erectile dysfunction respectively

  and he’s like “Hey, is it a good idea for me to make people out of wood?”

  And they say “Yeah, go for it.”

  So he makes people out of wood

  like a whole bunch of wooden robots, basically

  and they can speak and walk around

  and they don’t dissolve in water

  but they are TREMENDOUS assholes.

  One might even say they have a STICK up their asses.

  Get it? Get it?

  Aw, screw you guys.

  Anyway, they totally forget to worship Quetzalcoatl even a little bit

  and he’s getting pretty pissed at this point

  because he has seriously made EVERYTHING THAT EXISTS

  and no one is giving him ANY CREDIT

  so he kind of freaks out a little

  and causes fire to rain from the sky

  and burns everything to cinders

  and then makes all of the wood-people’s cookware come alive and kill them

  and all the animals move into their houses and eat them

  even though they are made of wood and totally not tasty

  and meanwhile Quetzalcoatl makes a bunch of ACTUALLY delicious people out of tortillas

  and those people are supposedly us

  and as soon as Quetzalcoatl gets bored he is going to make us into burritos

  and then feed us to jaguars or whatever

  and this story was apparently plausible enough

  to freak out THE ENTIRE GODDAMN WORLD ALL THE WAY THROUGH 2012.

  But anyway, everyone lives happily ever after

  except the wood-people

  who get chased into the woods and turned into monkeys.

  So the moral of the story is

  never set fire to a monkey

  because it is made out of wood

  and you will start a forest fire.

  HUNAHPÚ AND XBALANQUÉ: ULTIMATE BALLERS

  So there are these two dudes

  Hun Hunapú and Vucub Hunapú.

  They are twins, or at least brothers.

  Anyway, they piss off the gods of the underworld with their constant ball playing.

  Yes, that is right

  they play sports SO HARD

  that it upsets MAYAN SATAN.

  Anyway, the gods summon them down to the underworld

  (which is called Xibalbá

  because no Mayan story is complete

  without about six thousand proper nouns beginning with the letter “X”)

  and the gods are all “Hey, guys we heard you like ball playing

  GET IT?

  WE HEARD.

  BECAUSE YOU ARE SO LOUD.”

  And the twins are like “What of it?”

  And the gods are like “Well if you like ball games so much

  how about you play ball with us

  FOR YOUR LIIIIVES?!?!”

  And the twins are like “This sounds like THE ULTIMATE RUSH.”

  Now, if this was a Greek myth

  the twins would use some kind of mad skill or insane trickery to beat the gods.

  But this is a Mayan myth.

  The dudes get killed before the game even starts for smoking a cigar the wrong way

  and then they get decapitated and buried under the ball court

  except for Hun’s head which they put that on a calabash tree for some reason.

  This turns out to be a bad idea

  because some chick named Xquic walks by

  and Hun spits in her hand

  and he is such a true man that this causes her to get pregnant and she gives birth to TWINS.

  Fellas

  think you’re hot shit because your penis is one and a half inch longer than the national average?

  try impregnating a random chick in her hand

  with your saliva

  from a tree

  on which someone has deposited YOUR SEVERED HEAD.

  Wait, wait, I went and read it again

  it wasn’t even his head

  it was just his skull.

  Skulls don’t even MAKE saliva

  so . . . I guess when he still had skin and stuff he just collected a big glob of spit in there

  and he HELD IT.

  WAITING.

  I want that shit on one of those posters that says “HANG IN THERE.”

  So yeah, Xquic gives birth to twins

  they are called Hunahpú and Xbalanqué

  and these two guys are alive for like five minutes

  before they discover their dad’s ball-playing gear

  and start playing ball SO GODDAMN HARD

  that they piss off the underworld AGAIN

  and THEY get summoned down there

  and the gods are like “Hey

  you may have noticed that severed head hanging from that tree by your house.

  That was the last dude who kept us awake with his ball playing.

  That was also your dad, FYI.

  Why the hell do you guys even like playing ball this much?

  Okay, look, do you want to play ball for your lives?”

  and the twins are like “THE ULTIMATE RUSH.”

  So they play ball

  and see, if this was a Roman myth

  or maybe like a Norse myth

  these guys would totally have won and avenged their father(s)

  but like I said, Mayans are assholes

  so the gods win again

  and they kill the twins and bury them under the ball court.

  But there is a TWIST

  because it turns out the twins are IMMORTAL SOMEHOW

  so they dig themselves up and sneak away

  and they come up with a crafty plan

  which is to come directly back to the underworld, dressed as traveling performers

  and the gods are like “SWEEEET”

  because it is boring in Xibalbá without the constant noise of ball playing.

  So Hunahpú and Xbalanqué put on a fantastic show full of amazing feats.

  Maybe they even do an asto
nishing magic trick

  where they make their names easier to fucking type.

  But anyway, for the finale

  one of them cuts off the other’s head and then puts it back on without any problems.

  So all the gods are like “AAAAWESOME!

  DO ME DO ME DO ME.”

  And the twins are like “Sure, okay.”

  And just go and chop off the gods’ heads without any resistance whatsoever

  because that is how slick they are

  and then they go dig up their dads and resurrect them

  and none of them ever forget how lucky they are

  to be able to use their DICKS to get women pregnant.

  So the moral of the story

  is to ball so hard

  mothafuckas wanna murder you and bury you under the ball court.

  ZIPACNA AND THE FOUR HUNDRED BOYS

  No, this is not the title of a hard-core Mayan gangbang porno.

  This is an honest-to-goodness myth from the Popol Vuh

  that just HAPPENS to have four hundred boys in it.

  Let’s do this:

  So Zipacna is the son of this guy named Seven Macaw

  who is basically a rogue sun god who hangs out on Earth and causes problems.

  Zipacna is responsible for making all the mountains

  and he has a bro named Earthquake who is responsible for

  PUPPIES.

  Wait, no, it’s earthquakes.

  Sorry, I read that wrong.

  Look, none of that is really that important

  except to establish that Zipacna is the sort of dude who CAUSES MOUNTAINS.

  So Zipacna is taking a bath in the river one day

  and these four hundred boys waltz by

  carrying a big tree they just chopped down to make their house with.

  They had to chop down a big tree, you see because there are four hundred of them.

  They are having some trouble, though

  because I guess their eyes were bigger than their biceps.

  They are just dropping this tree all over the place

  and Zipacna sees them and he’s like “Dudes let me help you with that.”

  And then he just picks up the tree all by himself and takes it to the boys’ crib-in-progress

  and doesn’t even ask for a tip or anything.

  Zipacna is a pretty nice dude.

  He is the only one.

  ’Cause see, then what happens

  is the four hundred boys have a meeting

  and they’re all like “Guys

  Zipacna just did us a major solid.

  How should we reward him for his altruism?

  Oh

  how about WITH MURDER?

  Seriously, we cannot have any really strong dudes running around being stronger than us.

  We have an inferiority complex!

  Or rather

  we have FOUR HUNDRED INFERIORITY COMPLEXES.”

  So they come up with this brilliant plan

  which is that they call up Zipacna and they’re like “Hey, man

  thanks for all your help with that big log

  but we have another problem now

  we need a really big hole for some reason.

  We need you to come dig us a really big hole and then stay in it while we bury you alive.

  Okay?”

  And Zipacna is like “Anything I can do to help.”

  But Zipacna is too crafty for their clever ploy!

  I mean he digs the hole, sure

  but he also digs a special SIDE HOLE to hide in when the four hundred boys try to bury him.

  Actually they don’t even try to bury him

  they just try to drop a big-ass log down the hole and crush him

  which is dumb, because he just lifted one of those for them

  and that is why they wanted to kill him in the first place.

  But either way, it doesn’t matter because Zipacna is safe in his side hole.

  So the boys are all up on the surface celebrating their dumb plan

  but then they’re like “Wait!

  If Zipacna was really dead we would have heard his death cry just now!”

  And Zipacna is like “Oh, uh . . .

  Owwww, I’m dead now.”

  And the boys are like “PERFECT.

  But WAIT!

  If Zipacna is really dead

  then a bunch of ants will probably show up the day after tomorrow to eat his tasty corpse.

  Let’s wait for that to happen so we can make sure he’s really dead.”

  So Zipacna just chops off all his hair and bites off all his fingernails

  and when the ants show up

  he just gives all his hair and fingernails to the ants

  and they all scamper all over the place carrying his body stuff

  because I guess ants think hair is delicious?

  Reason number a million not to be an ant.

  Anyway, then the boys are TOTALLY CONVINCED.

  So obviously they all go get trashed to celebrate their totally bogus victory

  and meanwhile Zipacna tunnels out of his hole

  and then he crushes all four hundred boys inside the house he helped them build.

  So the moral of the story

  is that I don’t care what your mom says

  biting your fingernails may just save your life.

  JUDEO-CHRISTIAN

  So here’s a religion you may have heard of.

  In fact, I am willing to bet that nine out of ten of you

  when you hear the word “religion”

  think of this one first.

  But did you know

  that this popular high-school jock of religions

  is JUST AS SUPREMELY MESSED UP as all the other ones?

  Yeah, no foolin’.

  And it’s even crazier

  because what masquerades as a single holy book

  is actually more like a short-story collection by like a million crazy desert dudes!

  I’m mainly gonna focus on the Old Testament in this section

  because the Old Testament God gets up to some seriously brutal shit

  but the New Testament

  (the one with Jesus in it and stuff)

  is messed up in a whole other way.

  OKAY, ENOUGH TALK

  LET THE FIASCOS BEGIN!

  GOD MAKES A LOT OF STUFF

  Okay so God, right?

  No, I didn’t leave out any letters up there.

  That is not a typo.

  No, see, in this pantheon

  THERE IS ONLY ONE GOD.

  I KNOW.

  PRETTY LAME.

  But anyway, this God guy is facing a problem that you should be pretty familiar with at this point.

  The problem is that there is water AND NOTHING ELSE.

  ALSO IT’S SUPER DARK.

  So BAM, he invents light, day one

  and then he misses the dark part so he invents night too

  and then he’s like “Oh, looks like it’s nighttime.

  Better go to sleep.”

  DAY TWO:

  God basically just makes a big divider right in the middle of the water

  and all the water below the line is earth

  and all the water above the line is heaven.

  (This is why angels are traditionally depicted wearing scuba gear.)

  Day three is when God finally gets around to inventing dry land.

  Seriously?

  It took Ra like all of thirty seconds

  to invent dry land AND HIMSELF.

  Is this just not something that occurred to God until he had two ni
ghts to sleep on it?

  Oh, and he makes plants too.

  On day four God invents the sun and the moon and the stars

  which begs the question

  WHERE WAS THE LIGHT COMING FROM BEFORE?

  And then he’s like “Oh shit, the moon.

  Better go to sleep.”

  This dude needs an awful lot of sleep for an omnipotent dude

  which may explain why wars happen.

  So on day five, God invents animals.

  ESPECIALLY WHALES.

  The Bible is very specific on this point.

  By day six, God is pretty pleased.

  He’s like “Wow, this is awesome.

  How can I ruin it?”

  So he invents mankind

  and also cows

  because he forgot about cows.

  Then he gets real hammered to celebrate

  and he passes out on Saturday

  and doesn’t wake up until MONDAY.

  In fact he sleeps through Sunday SO HARD

  that NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO DO WORK ON SUNDAY EVER AGAIN.

  That is a true power nap.

  So when he finally wakes up

  he makes this garden called the Garden of Eden

  and he puts the guy he made in there

  and the man (whose name is Adam) is like “God, I’m bored.”

  and God is like “Ooh, I know a great game we can play.

  It’s called name all the animals.

  Ready? Go.”

  So Adam falls for this transparent ruse to get him to do God’s work for him

  and he names all the animals

  but then he gets done doing that and he is like “Still bored, God.”

  And God is like “Okay, I got this.”

  And BAM

  knocks him out and steals one of his ribs.

  This is some straight-up Tijuana shit is what this is.

  So Adam wakes up in a bathtub full of ice

  like “Whaaaat happened?”

  and God is like “Look, dude, I made you a chick.

  She is made of your rib, so she might be kinda dumb

  I tried just making one out of clay, like how I made you

  but she was harboring all these problematic delusions of equality

  so I had to find a workaround

  anyway, she’s totally hot, so don’t worry about it.

  Oh, by the way, I should warn you guys

  you can totally eat from any tree in the garden

  EXCEPT FOR THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL

  THAT ONE OVER THERE

  THE TOTALLY UNGUARDED ONE WITH THE DELICIOUS-LOOKING APPLES”