Februus was the Etruscan god of death, which is why he’s given reign over this time of year…. Februus was the Etruscan god of death, which is why he’s given reign over this time of year.

(I know that, as you’re reading this, the month is calling itself March. No matter. Februus’ reign extends backward into the last weeks of January and through March all the way to the Equinox. He is a greedy god.)

Think about it. Or rather, feel about it. He’s everywhere, now, in this miserable year of our lord, 2005. Look out your window into the sunless streets of Oakland and see him.

Last week, he killed Hunter S. Thompson. Februus held a gun to his head and fired a single bullet that passed through his brain and lodged in my stomach, a bitter telling not only of the death of a man but the death of an age.

It’s now two years and one month since he struck down one of my closest friends in the exact same manner. Hunter’s bullet landed beside a much larger gaping wound that will probably never heal. In my mind, the Decrepit God is laughing.

I can see him. Can I describe him to you? He’s a lumbering, misshapen creature with an enormous head like a big spiky boulder, and glowing, urine-yellow eyes.

He seems rather powerful and frightening. Look closer: He is rotten. The stink of decay surrounds him like a cloud, his only clothing; by spring he will have rotted away to nothing.

During these bleak months I used to turn to the Catholic Church for comfort. No longer. Disconnected from the rhythm of the seasons, maladapted to the experience of life in the Pennsylvanian clime, the Church can provide little solace against the darkness — little, indeed, besides a cross of ashes.

The exuberance of autumn, the rising crescendo of darkness and joyful snow — it’s gone now. It lasts until Christmas, when the sun is reborn, then slowly, it fades. Joyful young Winter becomes a bitter old king who foresees in the lengthening days the end of his frosty reign, and so Februus comes, and Winter pays him no mind as he casts despair across the land.

How could the venerable Church, the religion of the imaginary place beyond the sky, offer any solace to those of us living in this real physical world? Born half a world away, it cannot live with meaning for us in the here and the now.

That’s not to say it’s worthless. Mythologically, it’s the richest, most interesting and even magical of all the Christian religions, the only one with a proper respect for relic and ritual,with a place for polytheism and feminine divinity, even if the saints and the Blessed Mother aren’t “officially” gods.

But my ability to experience it as a lived reality that could ward away the darkness of middle-winter time is long gone, destroyed by the Church’s misanthropy — and misogyny, Mary or no Mary — and its use of guilt to manipulate its adherents.

Februus is come for me. He is all around me now. There will be no Jesus, no Holy Virgin Mary, no patron saint of sadness (I don’t know who that would have been anyway) to drive away the Rotten God as he reaches out to close his fist around my heart.

Where is there comfort for us, the forsaken children of the endless nights?

Only, maybe, in the hope of spring. But not in Easter, resurrections or the hope of reconciliation between humans and God — as though we could ever be sundered, as though the imminence of divinity mattered a damn, having never saved us in the past.

It is in the nation of soft breezes and singing insects, the youthful Sun returned from his secret childhood beyond those omnipresent clouds.

What arrogance, it seems, to assume spring will come every year, just because our scientist-priests have decreed that she must. In this ashen season let us offer up our prayers to Spring, that she may find it in her wild heart to deliver us from the bleakness.

E-mail Steve Thomas at [email protected].