Fear the Reaper?

Alex: It’s always been fairly clear that death is, thematically speaking, the (un)beating heart of The Wicked + The Divine. So much so that it was the topic of the very first instalment of Tim + Alex Get TWATD, three long years ago. 

The book is dedicated to examining what death means, both for those sentenced to it and for those left behind. The latter I’ll save for another time – it’s a big topic, given half the cast are grieving the loss of a loved someone. 

The former was what interested the Alex of 2014, back when the gods’ deaths were a hypothetical. At the time, our guide to mortality and what it meant to the gods was Amaterasu. With issue #31, that’s cast in a very different light.

Because Amaterasu is no longer talking in the abstract about one day being dead – she’s living the reality. Or, rather, she isn’t.

A quick note on the death scene itself, which has a different feel to the many that have come before. In WicDiv, death is sudden. In #31, the act itself – the slashing of a throat – certainly is unexpected, and so quick that we never actually see it, as the moment happens on a page turn, between panels. 

But Amaterasu’s actual death? Unlike the exploded heads we’ve gotten used to as the book’s main way of dispatching its cast, it isn’t instantaneous. The way that she’s killed means we get to see her reaction. Lucky us.

In that first extreme close-up, McKelvie fills Amaterasu’s eyes with surprise, fear, and sudden understanding. The moment is even more horrific than the gore which follows, a panel later. The idea of understanding that you are about to blink out of existence? However well you think you’ve come to terms with your own mortality, that’s terrifying.

For me, it also functioned as a kind of flashback – not on the page, but inside my own head – to that first Amaterasu talked about her death sentence as part of the Pantheon.

Cassandra, still sceptical that it’s all a hoax, asks Amaterasu how she can be so calm, given she’ll be dead before she turns twenty. There’s a painful pause, and then McKelvie pushes in, closer and closer, to Amaterasu’s eyes, not in the total-eclipse-of-the-heart god mode we first saw but back to their natural hazel – a decision he repeats, hence the flashback, at the moment of her death.

Over the past thirty issues, we’ve seen more or less all of the gods’ answers to this same question. For Baphomet, it’s a curse. For Woden, it’s license to behave as he wilt. For Sahkmet, it’s another feeling to lock away. For Dionysus, it’s a time limit to make as much of as he can. For Amaterasu, at least as she tells it in this first scene, it’s just part of the deal. Hazel’s extreme short-term mortality is worth it, in exchange for Amaterasu’s immortality.

There’s another part of this deal, that seems to help comfort some of the gods about their impending dooms. As Amaterasu puts it, in characteristic childlike fashion, in that first interview: “We go away for a while.”

For the gods, unlike for you or me, death isn’t permanent. Each new recurrence is a chance for resurrection. Maybe they won’t be picked this time, maybe Susanoo will get a turn in the spotlight instead, but they’ve at least got a chance of coming back in ninety years’ time – which is a lot more than we get.

Or at least, that’s the promise. The evidence given by our brief glimpses of past pantheons suggests otherwise. 

Take Lucifer, for example. Between the 2015, 1831 and 455 recurrences, we’ve met three Lucifers. They have shared traits, but you’d struggle to describe them as the same character. Or, for a starker contrast, look at the Woden of the 1830s – one of the few gods we’ve met who seems to have their shit together – and her modern counterpart.

Look at it the other way. We’ve seen gods change their divine identity – from Nergal to Baphomet, Lucifer to Julius – without changing their personality. In the latter case, even, we’ve specifically seen that assuming a new identity doesn’t free a god from the two-year cycle. 

And the other, other way round, too. For, say, Amaterasu to be a consistent identity across centuries, they’d have to be possessing their human host, totally erasing the person they were before. In that case, we should be grieving their moment of ascension, Amaterasu having murdered Hazel before the two-year countdown even began.

This evidently isn’t true. The Morrigan and Baphomet have the same relationship and issues they did as Marian and Cameron. Meanwhile, Cassandra insists on sticking with her pre-godhood name, and is clearly the same character we met back in #1.

This isn’t reincarnation in any meaningful sense, it’s just recycled branding.

It’s interesting to note that this idea of a next life most often comes up when the gods are mourning another member of the Pantheon. Amaterasu, again, after Luci dies: “The only comfort is that I know I’ll be seeing her again soon.” Baal, grieving for Inanna: “There’s a next life. That’s what I keep telling myself.” It feels like the thing we tell each other at funerals – they’ve gone to a better place. Even if you don’t believe in an afterlife, it’s an easy lie to fall back on.

Amaterasu clearly believed. But looking again into her eyes in that final moment, I have to ask: What kind of succour did it provide as she breathed her sticky last?

The only way for the gods to achieve immortality, as far as I can tell, is the same one we have in this world – creating something that outlives us. This is pretty much the stated purpose of the Pantheon, but it seems that, by the time of their next recurrence, their miracles are all but forgotten. For his attempt to live past the allotted two years, Ananke explicitly makes sure that the Roman Lucifer isn’t remembered.

In the 1831 special, we see two attempts to break free of this loop. On one hand, the pregnant Inanna; on the other, Woden, who gave life to that story’s creature. Inanna’s attempt isn’t successful. Woden’s is more ambiguous. Two centuries on, we haven’t seen any references to her creation, but Inanna more or less closes the story by telling us: “my sister’s great is out there, somewhere. The creature lives…”

Woden’s creature is an allegory for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which famously originated out of the Villa Diodati trip being retold, with a WicDiv twist, in the special. Frankenstein’s legacy has endured, far beyond Shelley’s lifetime – not just in terms of the titular character, or all the ‘um actually’ arguments about the monster not actually being the titular character, but as the launch pad for basically the entire genre of science fiction.

That feels particularly telling, having seen Gillen mention on Twitter recently that in the event of his death, WicDiv could now be finished by someone else, and that he had similar contingency plans for the first two volumes of Phonogram. This is WicDiv’s approach to mortality, and seemingly his too – rejecting the fiction of an afterlife, in favour of the afterlife offered by creating fiction.