When the world splits open, we look up.
Not down at the fault line, not into the science. Up. Toward gods and devils, ghosts and karma, angry fathers and watchful mothers. If the planet shakes, surely someone meant it to.
This isn’t just theology. It’s history.
From Mesopotamia’s Enlil unleashing floods, to Poseidon cracking the Aegean with his trident, early humans turned to the heavens not out of superstition—but survival. If crops failed, it wasn’t pH balance. It was penance. If lightning struck, it wasn’t weather. It was a warning.
We saw agency in every rumble. A volcano didn’t erupt; it erupted at us. Earthquakes were indictments. Droughts were verdicts. Floods, divine corrections.
The Bible carried that tradition forward with smiting and brimstone, and it wasn’t alone. In Norse mythology, Ragnarok—apocalypse itself—was a storm of earthquakes, wolves, and floods. The ancient Chinese blamed celestial dragons. The Hindus, cycles of cosmic rebirth. The world never just broke. It broke on purpose.
Even today, that impulse survives.
After 9/11, some said it was God’s punishment for decadence. After Hurricane Katrina, they said the same. COVID-19? Judgment. Wildfires? Retribution. Famine, flood, virus, fire—modern plagues still wear old clothes.
Because randomness terrifies us. A God, even a furious one, is at least a plan.
We would rather believe a cruel deity is at the wheel than admit there’s no driver at all.
That was the question I asked: How long have we been blaming the gods for the planet’s convulsions?
The answer: around 4,000 years. As early as the Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2100 BCE), humanity was scripting disasters as divine justice. The Greeks did it. The Babylonians. The Hindus. The Vikings. Nearly every culture gave disasters a face—and a reason.
And how long have we not done that?
Roughly 200 years.
Two centuries out of forty. That’s 5% of recorded time. Which means 95% of our history has looked at a trembling earth and seen not geology, but guilt.
That’s not a fringe view. That’s the tradition.
And the tradition morphs.
Where ancient people saw gods, modern ones see cabals. We traded Olympus for the algorithm, prophecy for Q drops, temples for Fox News studios. But the pattern remains: explain disaster through design. Climate change? A hoax. Vaccines? Poison. Elections? Rigged. Something must be behind the chaos. We refuse coincidence. We hunger for conspiracy.
Because if nothing is in control, we’re alone with the truth: that the earth does not love us, does not hate us, does not even notice us. It spins, and sometimes shakes.
And in those moments—buildings down, waters rising—we still whisper the oldest prayer we know: Who did this to us?
The answer may lie not in tablets or scripture, but mirrors.
