I Think We're Worshipping the Wrong Sumerian Blood God

We should have picked a different blood god to serve

Feb 11, 2025

This is literally all he does, all the time. (Wikimedia Commons)

When we first started worshipping Ùš-huldìm the Merciless, Ravager of Flesh, Scorge of Natéšbi, Blood God of the ālu Aššur, I thought, “This is great. This is just what our village needed. A fresh Sumerian blood god to really shake things up in the deific wars of ascendance.”

But now that he’s been waging his apocalyptic purge on mankind for a couple years, I have to admit I might have been wrong: I think we’ve been worshipping the wrong Sumerian blood god.

When his quasi-corporeal form arose from the ashes of Dur-Šharru’ukin, he looked like he would offer an original take on gods-worship in our little region. And we needed someone to upset the status quo. We’d been worshipping the same boring sun gods, and river goddesses, and forest sprites that our ancestors had worshipped since the fall of Shurrupak.

But now I’m starting to miss those boring gods and goddesses.

For one thing, they let me keep my eyes. Yeah, they still enslaved us and exploited our weak earthly bodies to bolster their divine egos, but it was a much more laid-back enslaving. If you forgot to offer your morning oblations they would blight your crops for a season or two and that was the end of it. It was the kind of enslaving where, as long as you performed the sacrificial rites properly on the morning of the Oxen Festival, your lord’s bronze effigy would spew fresh beer all winter long.

But with Ùš-huldìm the Merciless, if you so much as think of another god he’ll accurse your soul to an eternity of inconceivable torment. I’ve seen him do it. Not to mention he doesn’t let us drink beer at all unless it has blood and bile in it.

When he came to me in my nightmares promising me a role as his lieutenant in the Great Cataclysm if I would only bring him human supplicants to bow as thralls before his wrath, I figured, “Yeah, I can get on board with that.” Little did I know he made the same offer to everyone in their nightmares. If you can’t trust your own blood god to be honest with you about your role in the Ruination of Namlú’u, who can you trust?

Maybe it’s our fault. We weren’t content with the blood gods we had. In our insatiable lust for more and better gods we sought out the terrors of Ùš-huldìm, and he happily obliged.

It’s not like there weren’t plenty of other blood gods to choose from. Remember Gírungal the Skull-cleaver? Everybody wrote him off because of one unsuccessful spelt harvest, but he would have made a perfectly worshippable blood god.

We were so smitten by Ùš-huldìm’s ambitious promises of turning our cities and our overlords into smouldering rubble and giving us all free hats, we failed to see that he would turn us into smouldering rubble as well (and, some of us, into hats. Which is not to critique the quality of his hats, which are by all accounts the finest in the heavens and earth).

Well, anyway, it’s too late now. Ùš-huldìm is in charge, and the old gods are dead. It is time for me to go. My quill seems to be running dry, and my mind turning to dust. Ah yes, here is the Ravager of Flesh now, come to eviscerate me with his golden scimitar as punishment for writing this.