Even Cowgirls Get the Blues: A Novel

by Tom Robbins

“Oh, Sissy, this really is tiresome. Christianity, you ninny, is an Eastern religion. There are some wondrous truths in its teachings, as there are in Buddhism and Hinduism, truths that are universal, that is, truths that can speak to the hearts and spirits of all peoples everywhere. But Christianity came out of the East, its origins highly suspect, its dogma already grossly perverted by the time it set foot in the West. Do you think there was no supreme deity in the West prior to that Eastern alien Jehovah?. There was. From earliest Neolithic days, the peoples of Britain and Europe—the Anglos and Saxons and Latins—had venerated a deity. The Horned One. The Old God. A bawdy goat-man who provided rich harvests and bouncy babies; a hairy, merry deity who loved music and dancing and good food; a god of fields and woodlands and flesh; a fecund provider who could be evoked through fornication as well as meditation, who listened to songs as well as to prayers; a god much loved because he loved, because he put pleasure ahead of asceticism, because jealousy and vengeance were not in his character. The Old God's principal feast days were Walpurgisnacht (April thirtieth), Candlemas (February second), Lammas (August first) and Hallowe'en (October thirty-first). The holiday you now call Christmas was originally a winter revelry of the Old God (all historical evidence points toward Christ's having been born in July). These feasts were celebrated for thousands of years. And veneration o...