Pondering Tutelary Deities

[sdi]

What gods are there? Are there, for example, gods (or perhaps daimons) ruling over, say, dogs, pear trees, races, places?

I should think that the traditional answer is, "yes, of course," but then, where does one draw the line? Is a dog different from a wolf? Well, sure, dogs are domesticated, right? But is a dog or a wolf different than a coywolf? Not really, but if a dog isn't different from a coywolf, and a coywolf isn't different from a wolf, then can you really say a dog and a wolf are different? Difference becomes more a question of degree than a yes/no question, but then how different necessitates a different presiding deity? Is a human different enough from a neanderthal? a chimpanzee? a macaque? a rodent? a lizard? Who could say? I certainly couldn't.

But I jump back to distinctions being a material thing, while unity is a divine thing. Presumably, then, a "species" is a human concept. So I hesitate to think that gods work that way.

I wonder, rather, if the difference between a dog and a man is more like the difference between the numbers 30 and 42: both participate in 2 and 3, but only the former participates in 5 while only the latter participates in 7. That is to say, they share some gods in common, but not others. Maybe dogs are "man's best friend" because we share a lot of gods in common, and that presumably gives us many ways in which we can interact; perhaps a mushroom is more like 38, with which we have only 2 in common and thus few means of interaction. Perhaps there are beings which, like 55, a dog can interact with (having 5 in common) but we humans can't (being relatively prime). Perhaps there are beings like the number 41 which neither can interact with at all.

These numbers are very small and simple to reason about, but presumably the numbers properly analogous to a dog or a human would be mind-bogglingly large, involving many prime factors and many gods. In such a case, very fine distinctions are possible, admitting us to say that, while maybe there isn't a single god of "dogness," there are a collection of gods which, all together, constitute more-or-less the "fingerprint" which we generally recognize as a dog... but the pattern recognition and the label "dog" are both human: they come from within us, and are not part of any real ontological structure at all.