Story 4: How Beer Saved the World

(Adapted from The Legend of the Destruction of Mankind.)

The people started trash-talking the god Ra, saying "Ra is just old! He's got as much life in him as a statue!"

Ra heard this, so he called a top-secret meeting of the gods to decide what to do about it. "I made these people," Ra said to the gods, "and now they're trash-talking me. I really ought to just kill them all, but I want to know what you think about it first." Ra's father Nu said, "Well, it looks like the people who were really bitching about you got scared and ran off to the mountains and desert. Why don't you just kill them?"

Ra thought this was a good idea, so he sent the goddess Sekhmet to whack the trash-talkers. Sekhmet -- who had a woman's body with a lion's head -- went out to the mountains and desert and killed the men and women who had tried to hide there. When she was done, Ra said, "Good job! You can come back now."

But Sekhmet said, "This killing is pretty sweet! I like it!" So Sekhmet kept killing people, and she waded through their blood for three nights, but she still wasn't anywhere near ready to stop.  Although Ra was still pretty pissed at the people, he didn't want everyone wiped out. Sekhmet wouldn't stop when he told her to, so Ra had to figure out some way to trick her into cutting out the killing.

Ra ordered his servants to make 7000 jugs of beer. When they brewed it, they put in fruit juice that colored the beer red and enhanced its sleep-inducing quality. When Ra saw how much the beer looked like blood, he said, "With this beer I can save mankind." 

In the morning, Ra had the beer poured onto the fields where Sekhmet had been killing people. When Sekhmet got there, ready for more killing, she saw the flood of beer and thought it was blood. She laughed with the roar of a lioness, pretty damn pleased with herself for causing that much bloodshed! She started drinking and drinking. Sekhmet got totally wasted, passed out, and forgot all about killing folks. 

"Okay, sweety-pie," Ra said to Sekhmet. "Come home and go to bed." The lion-headed goddess rested, and mankind was saved.

And people celebrate by having parties where they drink beer and pass out.

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