Borborygmus

Also Known As: from the Greek borborygmos, the rumbling of the gut, a word built to imitate the sound it names
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Future Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Command over stench, over involuntary bodily noise, and over the slow rot that follows everything organic.
Role in Mythos: He is the divine face of the indignities the body inflicts without warning, and of the decay waiting at the end of them.
Relation to Humans: People fear him roughly as much as they laugh at him, which is the arrangement he depends on. He is invoked in jokes, in pranks, and in small unserious rituals performed when life turns unpleasant.

Somewhere under the floor of a quiet room, the pipes make a noise that is not the pipes. It travels the length of the boards, wet and low and in no hurry, and it stops precisely when the room turns to look. Nobody comments. Nobody meets anyone’s eye. That small unanimous silence is the only offering he has ever needed, and Borborygmus takes it warm.

He is the god of flatulence. Future mythology, the speculative faith that guesses at what people might one day get around to deifying, handed him the portfolio no older religion would touch: the noises a body makes without asking, the smell that fills a lift between the third floor and the ground, the slow soft chemistry that comes for meat and fruit and everything else. He has no weather. He has no harvest, no sea, no war. He owns the four seconds afterward, when everyone present decides together to pretend.

The name arrived before the god did. Borborygmus is an ordinary word with Greek underneath it, borborygmos, built from a verb invented to imitate the sound of a rumbling gut. Physicians have used it since roughly the 1720s as a way of writing down a bodily noise without lowering the tone. The future took the most dignified available word for the least dignified available event and grew a person inside it, which is as good an account of how gods get made as any.

To look at him is to stop being hungry. He is bloated well past any shape, and his skin hangs in heavy wet folds that slide over one another with a sound like sheets being turned in a warm bed. The face is a poor forgery of a human one. His eyes sit small and deep, almost lost, under a swollen red nose that weeps a thin clear secretion down toward a mouth that never closes all the way. The teeth behind it are black and going soft. He keeps the mouth open on purpose, because what climbs out of him is, to Borborygmus, music, and no musician muffles the instrument.

His hall suits him. The tellings put it underground or half under, a run of damp rooms where the air has weight and the walls sweat a film that never finishes drying. The heat in there is close and human, the heat of too many bodies and no window. Sound behaves strangely: every rumble comes back off the stone half a beat late, so the god seems forever to be answering himself, agreeing with himself, pleased with the exchange.

Nobody made him. That is the odd thing at the centre of his story, and the tellings keep circling back to it. He was not shaped by a creator or born to two older gods. He accumulated. Every held breath, every burning cheek, every person who coughed hard to cover a sound and then studied the wall with enormous interest added one grain to the pile, century after century, until the collected weight of human embarrassment stood up and learned to grin. He is what people built by trying very hard not to build anything at all.

The work happens at long tables. The plates are cleared, the talk has thinned, somebody is halfway through a story about their brother. Then the noise, brief and unmistakable, and the story continues a fraction too smoothly, and the god is already leaning in the doorway with his head tilted like a man enjoying an aria.

The best known tale about him is a contest, and it ends the way contests with gods generally end. A man of famous composure, loud about it, declared in company that he could stand in the god’s presence and outlast anything he had. Borborygmus accepted with indecent enthusiasm. It was not quick. The stench came up through the floor and thickened until it had a texture, the sound rolled on past what any body should be able to sustain, and the man held far longer than pride deserved, jaw set and eyes streaming, before he broke and ran retching into the open air. The god laughed after him. The laughing, by every account, made it worse.

He is not frightening. He is just unbearable.

For all that, he does no harm. He sends no plague, spoils no crop, takes no child. On the rare occasions anyone remembers him it is done gently and with a smirk: a muttered joke at a tense gathering, a prank between friends, some small private acknowledgment when the week turns sour. People reach for him the way they laugh at things too grim to look at straight. To name Borborygmus is to admit that the body is ridiculous and that it is going to fail, and to decide, for one breath, that this is funny rather than intolerable.

His powers are exactly the size of his domain and not an inch larger. He can call up a smell strong enough to empty a hall, or a sound that arrives like weather beneath the floorboards. A haze travels wherever he travels, thin and greenish and patient, settling into cloth and hair and the back of the throat, less a fog that spreads than one that soaks. Within the narrow borders of the unpleasant he is genuinely formidable. Outside them he has no reach and no interest whatsoever.

His weakness is cut from the cloth he was made of. He was assembled out of shame, and shame feeds him only for as long as it is taken seriously. The moment someone laughs at him openly, without flinching, the accumulated weight that holds him together begins to thin and drift. Mockery starves him. A god grown from people desperate to ignore their own bodies cannot survive being met head on with a grin, which makes the surest defence against the god of flatulence a plain refusal to be embarrassed. He needs the held breath and the averted eye. He loses a little of himself to every honest laugh.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Borborygmus the god of?

Borborygmus is the god of flatulence, foul smells and decay in future mythology. His domain covers the noises the body makes without permission and the slow rot that eventually claims anything organic. He has no authority over weather, harvest, war or the sea.

Where does Borborygmus come from?

Borborygmus had no creator and no divine parents. The stories say he accumulated, gathering across centuries out of human embarrassment itself, with every stifled laugh and burning cheek adding to the pile until the collected weight of it took on flesh. He is the one god that people made by trying not to make anything.

How do you weaken Borborygmus?

Laughing at Borborygmus openly is what weakens him. Because he is built out of shame and only feeds while that shame is taken seriously, honest mockery thins the weight holding him together. The most reliable defence against him is refusing to be embarrassed.

Is Borborygmus dangerous?

Borborygmus is repellent rather than dangerous. He sends no plague, ruins no crops and harms no one, and people invoke him mostly through jokes, pranks and small unserious rituals when life turns sour. Within his own narrow domain, however, he is formidable, and a smell he calls up can empty a room.

What does the name Borborygmus mean?

Borborygmus is a real English word for the rumbling of the gut, taken from the Greek borborygmos, which was itself built to imitate the sound. Physicians have used it since around the 1720s as a polite way of recording an impolite noise. Future mythology turned the word into a person.