Medicine Spirits

Coyote took over the tobacco snare.
We needed a major deity of North American origin
who could handle work that was seriously dirty.
Coyote got the job, because he could be killing mean
but wasn't usually malign to the human species.
Flame cured tobacco was his innovation.
Works great.
Tobacco Coyote is strong, he got teeth.

These American deities don't need to work much.
They're just too rich to retire.
Viracocha knotted the coca snare.
The way it works is that the tutelary plant deity
is just like eclipsed by the big boy
during the scaling up from local communities.
The divine founder of the Inca dynasty does work.
He's a knot tier.
He doesn't have to work much.
He owns the cocaine industry.
He moves money and people with the wave of a finger.
He ties up people's time in his knots.
The gods I know, they ain't nothing nice.

Scythia, marijuana goddess,
is the only benign one of the lot.
She's the only one that likes humans.
She is the real tutelary deity of her plant,
and her merger with its substance was wise
She tore up the first multinational empire,
just to show people how that trick was done.
She's about to do it again now,
a word to the wise.
Quite a peaceful deity, most millenia.
She rarely gets pissed, but then look out.
The goddesses I know, they don't fuck around.
Nothing I'd mention here, anyway.

Coffee is run by a djinn, the poppy by a dragon.
I'd rather not give their names, nor say why.
Though the latter must be the last relic
of the dinosaur divinities,
he considers himself lucky,
and doesn't dispute seniority
with the one who calls herself Eldest.
Wise choice, old worm.

Tea's spirit I bypass as a courtesy.
There really is a demon rum,
a demigod actually, Papa Legba.
He's a bad one.
A human who starts to feel his nails
should wiggle real hard to get away.
The god of the grape is of course a pan,
so has more of a sense of humor.
His humor, though, is kind of weird
by human standards.
His piping can freeze a person
right in front of his sex organ.
Dionysus is meaner than he seems.

The divinities of the drug plants are a bad lot.
Scythia, the Empire Smasher, is the sweetest of them.
Like Goatfoot, she's old enough age doesn't matter.
She is mellow as her people, almost all the time.
The rest of this crowd don't play games.
Viracocha cleverly ties urges from the olfactory lobes
into the brain command center,
making cocaine mimic true addiction,
even without tolerance or withdrawal symptoms.
Others are plain addictive with no excuses.
This posse don't worry bout no gangstas.

Whither?