March 27, 2026
On Forgotten Gods
How the myths we no longer tell still shape the stories we choose.
There is a particular kind of god I keep coming back to in my writing: the one nobody remembers anymore.
Not the dead god. The forgotten one. The one who is still, technically, around — still bound to the place that built temples to her, still slow-walking the streets that used to be her city — but whose name has slipped out of the language. Whose temples have been turned into nightclubs. Whose festivals have been rebranded as something more marketable.
What forgetting does
In Neon Cathedral, the goddess at the centre of the book has been forgotten for almost three hundred years. She does not know that. She doesn’t even know she’s a goddess; she only knows she keeps waking up in places she didn’t go to sleep, and the rain stops when she walks through it.
The thing I find fascinating, as a writer, is what forgetting does to a god — versus what killing one does.
A dead god is a tragedy. A forgotten god is a question.
The forgotten god is still, in some half-functional way, performing the job they were made for. They just don’t remember the job, and the people they’re doing it for don’t remember asking. So everything gets a little sideways. Crops grow in the wrong season. Promises hold for longer than they should. A city refuses, very gently, to let certain people leave.
The romance angle
This is where the romance comes in, for me. The thing that wakes a forgotten god back up is, almost always, somebody who sees them. Not somebody who worships them — worship requires a name, and the name has been lost. Somebody who looks at them properly, and treats them like a person, and waits.
It’s the same logic as a slow-burn romance. The whole structure of the trope is: here is a person who is uncared-for in a specific way, and another person who is, by sheer attention, going to undo that.
Forgotten gods and slow burns are running the same play.
What I’m reading on this
If you want a rabbit hole, start here:
- American Gods, of course — but you knew that
- Madeline Miller’s Circe and Galatea
- Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising (especially the Hunter and the Lady)
- The Greek Hymns (Homeric, Orphic — both worth a slow afternoon)
- Rachel Pollack’s Forerunner Foray for the version where the forgotten god is us
I’ll have more on this in the newsletter next month. Until then: keep an eye out for the gods you don’t remember inviting. They’re probably the ones doing the most.