Steve’s Note: This piece was originally written for a Pittsburgh audience.

Februus was the Etruscan god of death, which is why he’s given reign over this time of year.
(I know that, as you’re reading this, the month is calling itself March. No matter. Februus’ reign extends backward into the last weeks of January and through March all the way to the Equinox. He is a greedy god.)

Think about it. Or rather, feel about it. He’s everywhere, now, in this miserable year of our lord, 2005. Look out your window into the sunless streets of Oakland and see him.

Last week, he killed Hunter S. Thompson. Februus held a gun to his head and fired a single bullet that passed through his brain and lodged in my stomach, a bitterness telling not only of the death of a man but the death of an age.

It’s now two years and one month since he struck down one of my closest friends in the exact same manner. Hunter’s bullet landed beside a much larger still-raw wound that will probably never heal. In my mind, the Decrepit God is laughing.

I can see him. Can I describe him to you? He’s a lumbering, misshapen creature with an enormous head like a big spiky boulder, and glowing piss-yellow eyes.

He seems rather powerful and frightening. Look closer: He is rotten. The stink of decay surrounds him like a cloud, his only clothing; by spring he will have rotted away to nothing.

During these bleak months I used to turn to the Catholic Church for comfort. No longer. Disconnected from the rhythm of the seasons, maladapted to the experience of life in the Pennsylvanian clime, the Church can provide little solace against the darkness — little, indeed, besides a cross of ashes.

The exuberance of autumn, the rising crescendo of darkness and joyful snow — it’s gone now. It lasts until the Solstice, when the Sun is reborn, then slowly, it fades. Joyful young Winter becomes a bitter old king who foresees in the lengthening days the end of his frosty reign, and so Februus comes, and Winter pays him no mind as he casts despair across the land.

How could the venerable Church, the religion of the imaginary place beyond the sky, offer any solace to those of us living in this real physical world? Born half a world away, it cannot live with meaning for us in the here and the now.

That’s not to say it’s worthless. Mythologically, it’s the richest, most interesting and even magical of all the Christian religions: the only one with a proper respect for relic and ritual; with a place for polytheism and feminine divinity (even if the saints and the Blessed Mother aren’t officially gods).

But my ability to experience it as a lived reality that could ward away the darkness of middle-winter time is long gone. My remaining Faith was destroyed by the Church’s misanthropy (and misogyny, Mary or no Mary); its hatred of the Earth; its use of guilt to manipulate the minds of its adherents.

Februus is come for me. He is all around me now. There will be no Jesus, no Holy Virgin Mary, no patron saint of sadness (if there is such a saint) to drive away the Rotten God as he reaches out to close his fist around my heart.

Where is there comfort for us, the forsaken children of the endless nights?

Only, maybe, in the hope of Spring. In the nations of soft breezes and singing insects; in the laughing thunderstorms; in the youthful Sun’s return from his secret childhood beyond the clouds.

What arrogance, to assume Spring will come every year, just because our scientist-priests have decreed that she must! It is the conqueror’s arrogance, and I will have none of it. In this ashen season let us offer Spring our prayers, that she may find it in her wild heart to return from the other side of the world and deliver us here from the bleakness.