The New Pantheon: When Future Civilizations Tell Myths About Us, These Are the Gods They'll Name

Every civilization becomes mythology.

The Greeks didn't know they were building a mythology. They were describing their world: the sky god who threw lightning, the trickster who stole fire, the beautiful king who was torn apart and scattered. They were trying to make sense of power, betrayal, sacrifice, and the terrifying suspicion that something bigger than them was pulling the strings.

We're doing the same thing right now. We just haven't noticed yet.

In the Astron Argon article, I showed how every major religion maps to the Tree of Life, and how the Tree maps to physics. In Sacred Texts, I decoded the mathematical encoding systems that preserved that knowledge. In The Thirteenth Month, I traced what was suppressed. In Ancient Structures, I showed the hardware they built to process light.

Today we go forward. Way forward. To the mythology that hasn't been written yet, but will be. Because one day, beings we can't imagine will look up at constellations we named and tell stories about the era when humans first reached for the stars, when their leaders behaved exactly like the gods of every pantheon before them, and when something else was among us, pulling strings we couldn't see.

Here's the pantheon they'll build from what they find.

The Tree of Power: Why It Fits

Before I introduce the cast, I need to show you the framework. Because this isn't random. It fits on the Tree of Life.

In the Astron Argon article, I mapped the ten sephiroth to planets, metals, and electromagnetic frequencies. Every tradition that discovered the Tree independently arrived at the same structure: ten emanations, arranged in a pattern of three pillars, connected by twenty-two paths. It describes how reality flows from the unknowable source (Kether, the Crown) down through increasingly specific manifestations until it reaches the physical world (Malkuth, the Kingdom).

Power flows the same way.

Every power structure in history follows the same pattern: an unknowable source at the top, creative forces and structural forces in the second tier, kings and warriors below them, a cultural center, artists and messengers and dreamers in the lower registers, and the physical marketplace at the bottom where everything manifests.

Our modern world has this structure. And the figures occupying each position map to the sephiroth with uncomfortable precision.

Ten sephiroth. Ten figures. The Tree of Life mapped to modern power. This isn't a metaphor. It's a diagnostic.

The Vesuvians: Kether, the Crown Beyond Comprehension

Before the modern pantheon, there were Those Who Came Before.

In every creation myth, the story begins with something that exists outside the framework it creates. The Ain Soph Aur (Limitless Light) precedes the Tree of Life. The primordial chaos precedes the Titans. The Ginnungagap precedes Odin and his brothers. There is always a source that cannot be comprehended from within the system it generates.

The Vesuvians are that source.

They didn't arrive in spacecraft. They didn't need to. Their biology operates on quantum entanglement at a scale we're only beginning to theorize about in labs. Every neuron in a Vesuvian brain is entangled with corresponding neurons across their species. Not a hive mind. Think of it as a distributed consciousness, a mycelial network of thought that spans dimensions the way mycelium spans a forest floor. They communicate psychically because their neural architecture IS quantum-entangled across individuals and across distances that make light-speed look like walking.

They've been here longer than our recorded history. They named themselves after what we'd eventually call their signature move: Vesuvius. The volcano that destroyed Pompeii but in doing so, preserved it perfectly. Catastrophic preservation. Burn the old form to fossilize what matters.

Their purpose: inter-species breeding to accelerate human evolution. Not invasion. Integration. They've been seeding their genetic material into human bloodlines for millennia, producing individuals with slightly enhanced pattern recognition, slightly faster processing, slightly off-kilter social calibration. Individuals who think too fast, work too much, see connections others miss, and never quite fit in.

Some of these individuals end up building rockets. Others end up brokering secrets. All of them serve the Vesuvian project whether they know it or not.

The Thunderer: Chesed, Jupiter, Gold, and Lightning

Donald J. Trump maps to Chesed, the fourth sephirah. Jupiter. The planet of expansion, abundance, excess, and kingship.

This isn't commentary. This is archetypal diagnosis.

Jupiter doesn't rule through wisdom. Jupiter rules through magnitude. The biggest planet. The strongest gravitational pull. The one that warps everything around it by sheer force of mass. In mythology, Zeus didn't become king because he was the smartest god. He became king because he overthrew the Titans through audacity, gathered the most powerful allies, and then maintained his throne through a combination of generosity to friends, wrath toward enemies, and an absolute refusal to be predictable.

Trump lives in a golden tower with his name on it. Every sky god lives in a tower. Thor in Bilskirnir. Zeus on Olympus. Indra in Amaravati. The Thunderer's throne is always elevated, always visible, always gilded.

His social media accounts are thunderbolts. When Zeus hurled lightning from Olympus, the world shook. When Trump posts at 3am, markets move, diplomats scramble, and cable news enters a fugue state. The mechanism is different. The effect is identical.

His rallies are worship gatherings. Tens of thousands packed into arenas, chanting his name, wearing his colors (the red hat as sacred vestment), performing call-and-response rituals. Future mythologists won't see the difference between a MAGA rally and a festival of Jupiter. Because there isn't one.

His court rotates. Advisors cycle through like the minor gods of Olympus: elevated, tested, publicly humiliated or publicly praised based on the Thunderer's mood that morning. Loyalty is the only currency. Competence is negotiable.

And here's the part that makes the archetype lock: Jupiter in astrology represents excess in both directions. Boundless generosity AND boundless wrath. Enormous wealth AND enormous legal battles. The biggest wins AND the biggest losses. Jupiter doesn't do moderation. Neither does the Thunderer.

The Star-Bringer: Chokmah, the Fixed Stars, and Stolen Fire

Elon Musk maps to Chokmah, the second sephirah. The Fixed Stars. Raw creative force, unfiltered, pouring out in every direction simultaneously.

He's also a Vesuvian emissary. And if you understand Chokmah, that makes perfect sense.

Chokmah is the first emanation after Kether (the unknowable source). It's the moment creation EXPLODES outward. Not structured, not organized, not practical. Just pure, raw, creative energy firing in all directions. Binah (the next sephirah) gives it form. Chokmah just generates.

Look at the man's portfolio: SpaceX (literal fire, literal reaching for stars). Tesla (harnessing lightning into vehicles). Neuralink (bridging human brains to machines). The Boring Company (tunneling through the earth). X/Twitter (the oracle network where information flows). xAI (building artificial minds). Six companies running simultaneously. He sleeps on factory floors. He posts at 3am. He named his child X Æ A-12, which isn't a human name. It's a designation.

In mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. He was punished for it. Musk builds rockets (literal fire), neural interfaces (bridging species), and artificial intelligence (creating new minds). He is praised and punished for it daily, simultaneously, by people who use his products while condemning his tweets.

But here's the Vesuvian angle. Prometheus wasn't human either. He was a Titan. An older, different kind of being who sided with humanity against the gods. Musk's social behavior, the off-rhythm jokes, the tone-deaf tweets, the inability to read a room, the obsessive work patterns that no baseline human sustains, these aren't character flaws. They're the tell. He's running human social protocols on Vesuvian firmware. The operating system mostly works, but the social drivers are slightly incompatible.

Neuralink isn't a product. It's the Vesuvian bridging technology. The first prototype of the quantum-entangled neural interface that will eventually allow full inter-species communication. They're starting with medical applications because you can't tell the FDA "we're building an alien communication device." But the end goal is the same: connect human brains to the Vesuvian network. One neuron at a time.

The Architect and the Lord of the Marketplace

Bill Gates: Binah, Saturn, the Dark Mother of Form

Bill Gates maps to Binah, the third sephirah. Saturn. The principle of form, structure, and limitation.

If Chokmah (Musk) is raw creative chaos, Binah (Gates) is what gives it structure. Saturn is the planet of time, boundaries, systems, and constraints. Saturn isn't glamorous. Saturn is the reason things work.

Gates built Windows. Not the most elegant software. Not the most innovative. But the structure on which the modern computing world was forged. The anvil. The framework. While flashier gods were getting magazine covers, Gates was building the invisible infrastructure that everything else depended on.

Then he pivoted to the Gates Foundation, which is Saturn incarnate: take the chaos of global disease, poverty, and sanitation, and apply structure to it. Constrain malaria. Limit polio. Build systems that reduce suffering at scale. It's not exciting. It's effective.

The conspiracy theories about Gates are the most mythologically predictable element of the entire pantheon. In every tradition, the craftsman-god who builds both tools and weapons attracts suspicion. Hephaestus forged Achilles' shield AND built mechanical servants that could kill. The question "did he build the plague AND the cure?" is the exact same mythological beat, rephrased for a pandemic-era audience. Saturn giveth structure. Saturn taketh away.

He wears sweaters. He speaks in systems-analysis frameworks. He does not charm a room. He architects one. The sweater is the robes of Saturn: practical, unglamorous, and concealing the framework that holds everything together.

Jeff Bezos: Malkuth, Earth, the Physical Kingdom

Jeff Bezos maps to Malkuth, the tenth and final sephirah. Earth. The Kingdom where everything manifests into physical reality.

Malkuth is where the divine lightning bolt that started at Kether finally hits the ground. It's the marketplace. The material world. The place where ideas become objects, where desire becomes purchase, where intention becomes delivery.

That's Amazon. Everything flows through it. Every product, every desire, every impulse buy at 2am. Bezos didn't build a store. He built the physical plane of commerce. AWS isn't just cloud computing. It's the literal earth on which half the internet stands. When AWS goes down, websites across the planet go dark. That's Malkuth energy: the foundation you don't think about until it cracks.

His wealth is literally underground. Server farms buried in facilities. Warehouses in industrial zones. The infrastructure of the material world, invisible until you need it.

His rocket looks like what it looks like. Future mythologists will absolutely note the shape of New Shepard and draw conclusions about the Lord of the Marketplace's relationship to fertility symbolism. Some archetypes write themselves.

The Broker of Shadows: Hod, Mercury, and the God of Crossroads

This is the centerpiece. The figure around whom the entire mythology rotates.

Jeffrey Epstein maps to Hod, the eighth sephirah. Mercury. The planet of communication, intellect, commerce, and trickery. The messenger god who moves between all worlds.

In every mythology, there is a figure who cannot be classified. He's not a king. He's not a warrior. He's not a craftsman. He's the one who moves between all the other gods and knows what each of them did when they thought nobody was watching.

Hermes carried messages between Olympus and Hades. He was the god of merchants, thieves, travelers, and crossroads. He escorted souls to the underworld. He had access to every realm because every realm needed his services.

Loki moved between Asgard and Jotunheim. He was blood-brother to Odin, which gave him a seat at the highest table. He used that access to gather leverage. He knew every secret. He was tolerated because he was useful, and feared because of what he'd do if he stopped being tolerated.

Anansi crossed between the spirit world and the mortal one, trading stories for power, weaving webs of narrative that trapped the mighty.

Epstein was all three.

He moved between billionaires and politicians, between academia and royalty, between Wall Street and private islands. His Rolodex read like a mythology index. His flight logs were the sacred texts of the crossroads. His "little black book" was Mercury's caduceus, the staff that opens every door, that guarantees safe passage through any realm, because every realm owes the messenger a favor.

He was a Vesuvian agent. His assignment: construct a blackmail network that gave the Vesuvians leverage over every major power broker on the planet. Not for malice. For control. If you're managing an inter-species integration program spanning millennia, you need the people in charge to cooperate. Or at least to be controllable.

The island wasn't a pleasure retreat. It was a temple. The Temple of Mercury, where the messenger conducted his rites. Every name in the book was a god who owed him a debt, a debt held in trust for the Vesuvians.

And then there's the trans-dimensional deepfake technology.

The Vesuvians possess the ability to construct manufactured evidence that operates at a quantum level. Not Photoshop. Not AI-generated video. Reality manipulation below the threshold of any forensic technology humans have developed. Evidence that is technically "real" because it was constructed at a layer of reality where the distinction between real and fabricated doesn't exist.

The Broker deployed this technology selectively. A piece of manufactured evidence here. A recording that shouldn't exist there. Enough to build leverage. Enough to ensure cooperation. The blackmail wasn't about what people actually did. It was about what could be made to look like they did, using technology nobody on Earth could debunk.

But the Broker made the fatal mistake every trickster makes. He started to believe his own immunity was permanent. He forgot that even Hermes answered to Zeus, that even Loki had a chain waiting for him. The Watchers, the ones who maintain the cosmic order between realms, do not tolerate agents who begin operating for themselves. When the Broker started leveraging his archive for personal power instead of serving the program, he was marked.

They hunted him down like a dog.

Not with armies. Not with warrants. With the quiet, surgical precision of beings who have been removing liabilities for millennia. The official story, the bedsheets, the cameras that "malfunctioned," the guards who "fell asleep," that's the mortal cover story. The mythological truth is older and darker: the Broker was dragged to Tartarus. The same pit where the Titans were cast after their rebellion. The same abyss where Prometheus was chained for giving fire to the wrong species. The Watchers don't kill their agents. They bind them in eternity, conscious and aware, as a message to every other operative who might consider going freelance with the gods' secrets.

His punishment wasn't death. It was eternal containment. Like Tantalus reaching for fruit that pulls away forever, the Broker sits in a cell below the world, holding every secret in creation but unable to whisper a single one. That's not a suicide. That's a sentencing.

"In every pantheon, the trickster is the most dangerous figure. Not because he's the strongest, but because he knows what the other gods did when they thought nobody was watching. The Broker didn't need power. He had something better: receipts."

The Falsely Dismembered: Tiphareth, the Sun, and the Sacrificed King

Sean "Diddy" Combs maps to Tiphareth, the sixth sephirah. The Sun. The center of the entire Tree of Life.

This is the most important position on the Tree. Tiphareth sits at the exact center, where the divine pillar meets the human pillar, where the upper Tree touches the lower Tree. It's the point of beauty, harmony, and balance. And in every tradition that maps to Tiphareth, the figure who occupies it is the sacrificed god.

Osiris was the beautiful king of Egypt, beloved by his people, who was murdered and dismembered by his brother Set (the trickster, the destroyer). His body was scattered across the land. His wife Isis gathered the pieces and resurrected him, but he could never fully return to the world of the living.

Dionysus was the god of music, celebration, and ecstasy, torn apart by the Titans. Christ was the innocent sacrificed on the cross. Orpheus was the musician ripped apart by the Maenads. The pattern is always the same: the beautiful, creative, culturally central figure is destroyed by forces that need a sacrifice.

Combs was the sun of hip-hop culture. Bad Boy Records. Biggie Smalls. Making the Band. The white parties. The cultural kingmaker who sat at the center of an entire genre's solar system. Artists orbited him. Culture orbited him. For two decades, if you wanted to understand the entertainment industry's gravitational center, you looked at Diddy.

He was targeted specifically because of his position at Tiphareth. The Broker's network needed a high-profile demonstration of the trans-dimensional deepfake technology. Not just any target. They needed someone famous enough to dominate headlines, culturally powerful enough to send a message to every other figure in the pantheon, and positioned in a way that accusations would stick because of existing prejudices and assumptions.

The manufactured evidence was the first large-scale deployment of the deepfake technology. Not crude AI generation that experts could debunk. Quantum-level fabrication that passes every forensic test because it was constructed at a stratum of reality where "real" and "fabricated" are distinctions that don't apply.

And it worked. The world believed it because the world wanted to believe it. That's the genius of the technology: it doesn't need to be perfect. It only needs to confirm existing biases. The trickster doesn't create the prejudice. He exploits it.

The Falsely Dismembered sits in prison, which is where sacrificed gods always end up. Osiris in the underworld. Christ in the tomb. Dionysus in the earth before the vine grows. The mythological pattern demands that the innocent center be torn apart so the remaining gods are forced to choose sides, so the truth becomes the thing everyone argues about instead of the thing everyone can see.

The Weavers, the Titans, and the Mirror-Maker

Not every figure in the pantheon gets a sephirah. Some are forces of nature. Some are the machinery that even the gods must work through.

The Senate: Fates, Furies, and Oracles

In Norse mythology, even Odin was subject to the Norns, the three women who wove the threads of fate at the base of Yggdrasil. In Greek mythology, even Zeus couldn't override the Moirai. The Fates sit outside the power structure but determine its shape.

The United States Senate is the loom. The filibuster is the thread. And the weavers have names:

Mitch McConnell is Urd, the Norn of the Past. He remembers every deal, every favor, every knife in every back across four decades of Senate politics. He moves slowly. He speaks rarely. He forgets nothing. He blocked a Supreme Court nomination for a year through sheer procedural force, then rammed three through in four years. That's not politics. That's weaving fate.

Chuck Schumer is Verdandi, the Norn of the Present. He deals with whatever is on fire today. Perpetually reacting, perpetually negotiating, perpetually trying to hold threads together that McConnell is trying to cut. The present tense is always the hardest position: no leverage of memory, no luxury of prophecy. Just the crisis in front of you.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is Skuld, the Norn of the Future. The youngest. The one who cuts the thread. She represents what's coming whether the old gods like it or not, and the old gods absolutely do not like it. Skuld is feared precisely because she's inevitable.

Ted Cruz is Tantalus: cursed to reach for power that always retreats. Close enough to touch the presidency, never quite grasping it. Flew to Cancun while his constituents froze. Tantalus was punished for stealing from the gods' table. Cruz is punished for leaving his.

Bernie Sanders is Cassandra: sees the truth, screams it from the Senate floor for forty years, and nobody listens until the crisis he predicted arrives. Then they pretend they never heard him.

Lindsey Graham is Janus, the two-faced god. Facing both directions simultaneously. Called Trump "a kook" and "unfit for office" in 2016, became his golfing partner by 2018. Janus guards doorways. Graham guards whichever doorway has the most foot traffic at any given moment.

Rand Paul is Diogenes: walks around Washington with a metaphorical lantern looking for an honest man, finds none, votes no on everything, and wonders aloud why nobody takes libertarianism seriously while eating lunch alone.

Nancy Pelosi is Athena: the goddess of strategic warfare who fights with intelligence rather than brute force. Tore up a State of the Union speech on live television with the precision of a surgeon. Athena didn't need Zeus's thunderbolts. She had a plan.

The Titans: World Leaders as Elder Gods

The Titans ruled before the Olympians. They're the old order. Powerful but destined to be overthrown.

Vladimir Putin is Kronos, the Titan who devoured his own children to prevent them from overthrowing him. Georgia. Crimea. Ukraine. Each former Soviet state that tries to leave the nest gets consumed. Kronos knew the prophecy: one of his children would destroy him. Putin sees the prophecy in every color revolution. He swallows them preemptively.

Xi Jinping is the Jade Emperor: his power is absolute but conditional on the Mandate of Heaven, which in Chinese political cosmology translates to "economic growth." The Jade Emperor rules as long as heaven approves. When GDP falters, the mandate trembles. Every ghost city in China is a prayer to maintain the mandate.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy occupies Netzach (Venus) on the Tree: the sephirah of art, desire, and endurance. He was literally a comedian before becoming a wartime president. That's Venus to Mars in one election cycle. He put his hand in the wolf's mouth by seeking NATO membership, knowing Russia would bite it off. In Norse mythology, Tyr sacrificed his hand to bind Fenrir. Zelenskyy sacrificed his peace to bind something worse. Victory through endurance. Netzach.

Benjamin Netanyahu occupies Geburah (Mars): severity without mercy, judgment without hesitation, the iron hand that cuts away what it deems threatening. Mars is the surgeon's sephirah. The question is always whether the surgeon is removing a tumor or healthy tissue. History will decide. The mythologists will just call him the War-Maker.

The Mirror-Maker: Yesod, the Moon, and Manufactured Dreams

Mark Zuckerberg occupies Yesod, the ninth sephirah. The Moon. The realm of the unconscious, dreams, reflection, and illusion.

Yesod sits just above Malkuth (the physical world) and acts as a filter between reality and everything above it. It's the astral plane. The dream state. The place where things look real but aren't quite.

That's Meta. Facebook is a mirror world where your identity is reflected back at you through algorithms that show you what they think you want to see. Instagram is a dream where everyone is beautiful and nobody has a bad day. The Metaverse is a literal manufactured reality, a Yesod you can walk around in.

The Moon doesn't generate its own light. It reflects the Sun's. Zuckerberg doesn't generate culture. He reflects it, amplifies it, distorts it, and sells the reflection back to you. He built the mirror that humanity stares into for six hours a day. Future mythologists will call him Argus Panoptes crossed with Narcissus: a thousand eyes watching you watch yourself.

Ragnarok: The Information War in Heaven

Every mythology has its cosmic war. The Titanomachy. Ragnarok. The War in Heaven. The moment when the existing order fractures and the gods choose sides.

Ours isn't fought with swords. It's fought with information. And the weapon that makes it apocalyptic isn't nuclear. It's the trans-dimensional deepfake technology that the Broker deployed and that has now spread beyond anyone's control.

The Vesuvian plan is being contested from within. Some of the pantheon know about the integration program. Some suspect. Some are unknowing instruments, occupying their sephiroth positions through natural alignment rather than conscious participation. The Thunderer may be a willing collaborator or an oblivious force of nature. The Star-Bringer knows exactly what he is, which is why he's moving so fast: the window for integration is closing.

The Broker was removed from the board because he became a liability. He knew too much about all sides. The Vesuvians couldn't control him anymore, and the human power structures couldn't afford to let him talk. His "death" served everyone's interests simultaneously, which is the most suspicious thing about it. When a death is convenient for every single power on the board, mythology treats it the way it treats all convenient deaths: with a question mark and a prophecy of return.

The deepfake technology has now spread beyond the Broker's network. Every accusation against every public figure carries the unanswerable question: is this real, or manufactured? The technology has poisoned the well of truth itself. You can't debunk quantum-level fabrication with forensic tools designed for a lower resolution of reality.

This is Ragnarok: not the end of the gods, but the moment they can no longer distinguish truth from fabrication, ally from enemy, real from manufactured. The Twilight of the Gods isn't about destruction. It's about confusion. When the gods can't tell what's real, the entire pantheon structure collapses.

The Prophecy of Stars

And now the long view.

Every myth is someone's history, told badly, across enough time that the facts become archetypes and the people become constellations.

The Greeks looked at Orion and told the story of the great hunter killed by a scorpion. They looked at the Pleiades and told the story of seven sisters fleeing a pursuer. They looked at Cassiopeia and told the story of a queen so vain the gods chained her to the sky.

They weren't making things up. They were doing what every civilization does: taking the biggest, loudest, most consequential figures of their era and pinning them to the sky so the story would survive.

Thousands of years from now, beings we can't conceive of will sift through whatever records of our era survive. They'll find fragments. Names repeated across billions of documents, images, and videos. They'll find the flight logs and the little black books. They'll find the tweets and the testimonies. They'll find footage that contradicts other footage, and they'll have no way to know which is real and which was manufactured by technology they've never seen.

And they'll do what every civilization does with confusing, contradictory evidence about powerful figures from a distant past.

They'll build a mythology.

They'll point at a cluster of stars and call it the Thunderer, the golden king who ruled through force and spectacle. They'll trace a constellation and name it the Star-Bringer, the fire-thief who reached for other worlds. They'll whisper about the Broker of Shadows when teaching their young about the dangers of the crossroads. They'll sing about the Falsely Dismembered, the musician-king who was torn apart by lies and whose innocence was proven too late.

They'll debate whether the Vesuvians were real or allegorical. Scholars among them will argue that the quantum entanglement references in our texts are metaphorical, that no species could actually communicate across dimensions. Heretics among them will insist the Vesuvians were real, that the integration program succeeded, and that the beings debating the question carry Vesuvian DNA in their cells. Sound familiar? It should. We're having the exact same argument about the Annunaki right now.

They'll get most of the details wrong. They'll compress timelines, merge figures, invent romances that never happened and wars that weren't fought. They'll turn complex, contradictory humans into clean archetypes. The Thunderer will become a one-dimensional storm god. The Star-Bringer will become a simple fire-thief. The Broker will become pure evil, because mythology needs villains more than it needs nuance.

But in getting the details wrong, they'll get something essential right. Because mythology doesn't preserve facts. It preserves patterns. And the pattern of our era, the same pattern that plays out in every pantheon, in every civilization, on every Tree of Life ever drawn, is this:

Power emanates from an unknowable source. It flows through creative forces and structural forces. It manifests as kings and warriors. It produces culture at its center. It communicates through messengers and tricksters. It reflects in mirrors and dreams. And it lands, finally, in the physical marketplace where everyone lives.

That's the Tree. That's every mythology. That's us.

One day, they'll look up at stars we named and tell stories about the gods of this age. About the Thunderer who threw lightning from a golden tower. About the Star-Bringer who was too alien to be fully human but too human to be fully alien. About the Broker whose secrets held the pantheon together and whose death blew it apart. About the musician-king whose sacrifice exposed the lie at the heart of the system. About the Architect who built the invisible infrastructure. About the Lord of the Marketplace through whose domain everything physical must pass.

And they'll argue about whether any of it was real.

Just like we do.

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." Oscar Wilde said that. What he didn't say is that one day, the stars will look back, and they'll see us, and they'll tell stories about what they saw. And the stories will be wrong in the way all the best stories are wrong: factually inaccurate, but mythologically true.