There are Gods, and there are gods. Deities have been around since before time, creation and anything. For as long as thereβs been a semi-complex arrangements of cells thatβs created the first semi-conscious organisms, there has been gods and tales of worship, creation, beginnings and ends of time. We have all heard of the great ones in various mythologies. Zeus, Gaia, Odin, Ra, Hera, Manitou are all well known examples of great Devine beings with incredible powers of both creation and destruction. But there are of course all the βsmallerβ gods. There are a myriad of them. Too many to count through history. But there are also another tier of even smaller gods. They are rarely remembered through history, and after the civilisation that first came to worship them passed from this world. One of these minor gods is Selph.
He has been left out of – or most likely forgotten – from pretty much any religious writings since the concept of letter appeared thousands of years ago. Heβs been remembered in a few areas and been named occasionally by someoneβs grandmothers grandmother as a very obscure and minor curse when certain things has not happened as intended.
Selph was one of these minor gods. He was the god of misplaced intentions. He loved doing good and right for others, but always managed to mess things up worse had he just sit down, kept to himself and whittled a flute or something in the woods. (He did actually do so once. And proud and pleased he was by this, gave it as a gift to a little kid who looked at it with big eyes. The kid took it home and played it until the rest of the family almost went insane from the constant, single tone whistling and sought Selph out and took away his knife, threatened to βshiv you with a rusty shank should you ever make another flute again!β and cursed him for his horrible deed. He never whittled a flute again.
Another time he tried to help out, it was a farmer who despaired because there was a drought and his crops were dying.
βI will dam up this river, make a canal for the water and help the poor farmer irrigate his crops!”
He got to work and the next day – being a god, he could do these things in no time at all – he looked with pride as the water started to flow towards the field. The farmer rejoicing in the sudden arrival of water thanked the gods and the crops were saved. Until the drought was over, and the river again reached its natural state. That state was a lot bigger than it had been when Selph had dammed it up. This resulted firstly in the flooding of the farmer’s fields and house, ruining it all. The dam he had built wasnβt strong enough to keep back the now much bigger river, and it burst asunder, sending a massive tidal wave down to the village lying below. The village and all its crops were ruined, and to top it off, the new swamp-ish landscape made it a perfect area for mosquitoes to flourish in the tame after. Yet again, Selph was blamed and again was he cursed and asked to stop helping.
There are a thousand stories about Selph and his actions who led to smaller and bigger disasters. Luckily, only a handful of them -still an impressive number considering it all – contains disasters like the village. But all deeds that were meant as good but turned into worse had nothing been done or turned into anything but intended, is a relic of the Devine power that once roamed the mortal realm as Selph. Though he is not walking among us in his corporal form any more, he is still there trying to help out, wanting and wishing everything to get better than it is and how it ends up.
A little tale about the long forgotten god for misplaced intentions: Selph.
