Building Religions 11: Authority

Building Religions 11: Authority

My last few posts were a little light on the practical side for anyone designing a religion, so I thought I'd move back in the other direction and offer something that could be fit more easily into the worldbuilding process. It means going back to Max Weber's work again, particularly his discussion of how religious institutions develop over time. Most of this, I've drawn from Weber's The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, but a little is from Sociology of Religion.

Building Religions 10: Claude Lévi-Strauss

Building Religions 10: Claude Lévi-Strauss

This is less a post about how to write myths than about a way to read them, but it's a way that can be useful for those doing some research in their worldbuilding. It's not the only way, or necessarily even the best way, but when it works, it works well. It's the structuralist interpretation of myth, as formulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Building Religions 9: More Myth

Building Religions 9: More Myth

When considering the relationship between myth and culture, there is one thought to keep in mind: myths lie. I don't mean this in the basic sense that they describe historically untrue events, although that's certainly accurate. What I mean is that even the idea that they teach some timeless spiritual or psychological truth is deceptive, because myths are no less the products of history than any other human creation.

Building Religions 8: Myth

Building Religions 8: Myth

I've been reluctant to cover myth so far. It's such a massive category, and there are as many arguments about definitions of myth as there are about approaches to studying (or writing) it, so it's a little daunting to try to tackle. Still, let me try to give a quick overview, along with some of my more common complaints about how it's handled in fiction.

William Doty, in Mythography, offers what is perhaps the most thorough definition of myth: