Building Religions 13: Scripture

Building Religions 13: Scripture

There comes a time for most worldbuilders when they want to drop a passage from a sacred text into their world. It could be a bit of flavour text to open a chapter, an account of some significant myth, or the ever-popular prophecy fortelling the rise of dark forces, but whichever way you decide to use it, it's good to have a general understanding of how scripture is and how it works.

Fortunately, this is one of those areas where you have a lot of flexibility, because scripture can be whatever a religious community agrees to treat as scripture. There's no fixed content, structure, or style. Think about the Bible: it's a creation myth, a collection of legal precepts, history, poetry, moral advice, prophecy, devotional songs, letters, and more, produced by different authors in different time periods and different languages. It's like a religious scrapbook, held together by collective agreement that everything belongs there. (I'd say that it's atypical of sacred texts from around the world, but that would suggest that there's some sort of typical case against which to compare it, and there really isn't.)

There are a few characteristics of scripture, however, that can help you imagine how it might operate in a world of your creation. The first is the idea that it has an innate power: whether treated as direct communication from a god or a work transmitted through a divinely inspired mortal, it acts as a link to the sacred. Passages from it may be repeated in ritual and in prayer, inscribed on protective talismans and carved into the walls of temples. In some cases, it might be too sacred to write down at all, and be preserved strictly through memorization. If it does take a written form, the act of writing or copying it could itself be the focus of religious devotion.

The second common feature is related to the first, and is the perfection of the text. Once accepted as scripture, it becomes immutable. The idea might arise that the text itself is an embodiment of something eternal, something that has manifested in history but pre-existed it, but even if that's not the case, its status as the authoritative sacred word requires it to be resistant to change. Internal contradictions must be reconciled, apparent errors must be explained, and eclectic contents must be drawn together into a unified message. Doing so is part of the work of a society's professional interpreters of scripture, but I'm going to leave matters of interpretation for another post.

You'll notice that both of these qualities have less to do with the sacred text itself and more to do with the way that a community uses it. Anyone can write a suitably cryptic prophecy to use as a plot device, or have some sanctimonious character quote a passage or two--again, the content is enormously flexible--but if you want to make your imaginary scripture feel more authentic, you have to look outside the text.

Take a look at this handy collection of phrases that have entered the English language from the Bible and you'll see that the impact of a sacred text can go well beyond a strictly religious context. It can shape the language of the community, even when people forget the origin of the phrases they use. (As an aside, that website is also handy if you want to keep characters in your world away from using phrases with Biblical origins. You might not slip up and describe Zorthag the Unruly as being "as old as Methuselah," but having someone call him "as old as the hills" is easier to overlook.)

Religious themes and motifs can appear in a culture's art, its literature, and its music without the works where they appear necessarily being thought of as religious. Death and resurrection, fall and redemption, self-sacrifice for the salvation of others--these ideas are so deeply ingrained in Biblically-influenced Western culture that few people notice their origins. Once you've come up with an idea of what your fictional scripture's contents are, you can use them to shade other aspects of culture, which in turn can help the rest of the world feel more complete.

One final note: before you go wild thinking about all the influences that a sacred text could have on your world, keep in mind that there may also be works that aren't exactly scriptural but could have a similar status. Shakespeare has shaped English, too, and Homer's work certainly had an effect on Greek culture. No culture is ever guided by a single source; add in some classics and you add some complexity, which is always a good thing.