Building Religions 21: Phenomenology

One of the challenges in approaching the subject of religion, whether creatively or academically, is that of recognizing one's own presuppositions about what religion is. In my post on the work of J. Z. Smith, I brought up the example of Spanish explorers in the New World who failed to recognize signs of religious life among native islanders because they couldn't see anything resembling a temple. They took their own experiences with religions—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and perhaps some knowledge of Classical paganism—and used those as the map by which to interpret the new situation in which they found themselves.

It was an understandable mistake. When we wrestle with new phenomena, and especially when we try to communicate those phenomena to others, we often fall back on the simple question: "What's it like?" The broader the range of connections that we might make to what we've just encountered, the more likely we are to find a suitable description, but it's still easy to let some details slip simply because we weren't looking for them.

The branch of religious studies that's called the phenomenology of religion addresses this problem. I'm interested in it here because I think some of the questions that it raises can be useful to authors who want to explore forms of religion in their created worlds that they may previously have overlooked. Anyone who's met me and made the mistake of bringing up the question of religion in fantasy will have heard me grumble about settings that slap a polytheistic version of the mediaeval Catholic church in place without ever considering how many other social structures have to be in place for that to work. (If you haven't, go ahead and ask in the comments to this post, and I'll rant at length.) Once you set aside your assumptions about what religion should look like, you can open yourself up to imagine vastly different systems.

Phenomenology of religion concerns itself with two basic ideas: first, an emphasis on description over explanation; second, an attempt to find underlying categories by which to organize religious beliefs and practices. In some of its forms, it's an extension of philosophical phenomenology, but you don't need to delve too deep in that direction to put it to use for your own work. The only thing you need to do is set aside your presuppositions. That act of bracketing your own perspective is called epoché, the suspension of judgment.

Instead of starting from a definition of religion in general and then trying to fit particular religious activities into that definition, you start with what practitioners consider their religion to entail and focus on describing it. Don't think about what it "really means." Eliade believed that anything could be considered sacred, which gives you the freedom to put together any number of practices and call them religious.

Of course, Eliade also believed that there were certain commonalities among religions, patterns and archetypes that could be compared across cultural lines. You may agree with this, or you may not. You may decide, like he did, that water always represents regeneration and renewal, or you may imagine worlds in which water is a sign not of life, but of death. You wouldn't be wrong, either: however many religions there are that take one side of the archetypal divide, there are always those that take a different view. Don't try to translate your own symbolic attachments into the worldview of an alien culture.

I did, however, say that one of the features of the phenomenology of religion is the effort to uncover shared forms of religious experience. After all, if we can't narrow down at least some areas of life as those worthy of religion and others as not, how can we come up with a definition at all? This is the thing, though: there's no definition that holds in every case. Stepping back and acknowledging that some manifestations of religion are alien is not only expected, but encouraged. If you're creating your own religion, one place to start (if you don't want to go through the lengthy process of working out a history of your religion) is to come up with a group of beliefs and practices, and only then start to think about what binds them together into a worldview.

Finally, then, a question—one that you'll need to ask yourself before you deal with the subject of religion in your world. What is religion to you? What makes something religious rather than another part of the culture you're creating? Next time, I'll suggest some answers by offering up different definitions of religion, but keep in mind that none of these are perfect. When you're making your own world, religion is what you say it is.