Building Religions 32: Michel Foucault

There is nothing overtly religious about Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. It's primarily a history of penal systems, but although its focus is almost entirely secular, it enjoys some popularity among scholars of religion for the theories that he develops out of that history. Foucault's larger body of work does address religion more specifically (there's even a collection of his essays on the subject), but here, I would like to look at this one book as an example of how tangentially-connected material can inspire new ideas for worldbuilding.

Building Religions 31: Esotericism

I've written a few things here before about the Western magical traditions that often provide a foundation for the magical systems of fantasy settings. I am about to do so again, although this time from a different perspective. The study of Western esotericism (which I'll define below) has emerged over the past few decades as an academic discipline in its own right. Although its focus tends to be on modern (post-mediaeval) texts, those texts often look back to the past for inspiration and legitimation, making a consideration of esotericism useful for anyone interested in this particular strand of Western thought. What I plan to provide here is a brief survey of the subject, with the hope that it can clarify some ideas and introduce readers to others for the first time.

Building Religions 30: Relics

Only two of our world's major religions include relics as objects of devotion: Buddhism and Christianity. Despite that fact, however, they seem to appear in a number of fantasy settings as an unquestioned part of religious practice. What I would like to discuss here, following up on my post on how to deal with death and the dead, is an overview of what relics are, their perceived status in the religions that focus on them, and the kinds of religions that might incorporate their veneration into their rituals.

Building Religions 29: Handling the Dead

Tell me how you die and I will tell you who you are.
—Octavio Paz

When considering what rituals are found in the world you're creating, you may find those surrounding death to offer the most helpful snapshot of a culture. By describing how a community treats death, you are also providing your audience with insights into an entire worldview: the relationship of humans and gods, the purpose of life, the nature of the afterlife (if there is one), and so on; even questions about the handling of the dead can help illuminate ideas about family, social status, or religious purity. Today's post, then, is aimed at covering some of these issues, with the goal of inspiring authors to consider a broader range of possibilities in their representation of death.

Building Religions 28: Asceticism

We get the English word asceticism from Greek, where it referred to the training of athletes. How it became associated with practices of self-denial largely has to do with the ways that accounts of early Christian hermits described them: as athletes competing against the temptations of the world. That metaphor, in turn, may have been applied in response to the descriptions of the martyrdoms of certain saints, particularly those who died in the Roman arenas. Even though the narratives all ended with the deaths of the martyrs, they were often represented as defeating wave after wave of animal and human opponents before the Roman authorities finally had them executed. They were, in short, superior athletes.

Building Religions 27: Priesthood

A little while ago, my friend Mike asked if I'd go into a bit more detail here on the varieties of priesthood and how they might be used in created worlds. Since I'm always willing to take requests, here's my answer.

Because 'priest' is a word whose meaning is primarily drawn from European Christian experience, it can be difficult to apply completely to other religions without bringing along certain expectations and baggage. You can, though, establish a minimum definition and use that to decide whether or not it's the best word to use to describe a type of practitioner, so that's what I'd do here: a priest is a religious specialist whose primary function is the performance of ritual in a fixed location.

Building Religions 26: Secularization

To recap my last post: according to Peter Berger, the functions of religion are to legitimize social institutions, provide continuity, and create meaning by connecting the human nomos with the sacred cosmos. It's not a stretch, then, to argue that these functions work best in communities in which the religion in question operates as a monopoly. But what happens when that's not the case, and how could such a situation occur? The second half of The Sacred Canopy addresses these questions. By considering Berger's theories on secularization, you can not only add depth to secularized cultures that you create, but also develop some interesting ideas for more traditional fantasy worlds.

Building Religions 25: Peter Berger

This isn't the post on asceticism that I promised; that will have to wait until I can do a little more reading and dig up some good sources. In the meantime, I'd like to present another sociological interpretation of religion, namely that found in Peter Berger's The Sacred Canopy.

Berger is the scholar who (along with Thomas Luckmann) gave us the term "social construction," and with it, the idea that the world as we experience it is not simply a given, but perceived according to the rules and structures of society. In The Sacred Canopy, he focuses on examining the religious components of that idea, but before getting into those, it's best to go through some of his basic assumptions about how humans experience their world.

Building Religions 24: Orgy and Ecstasy

"There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstacies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell."—H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Building Religions 23: Sex and Gender

In my post on Mary Douglas, I described some of the ways that religious societies create and enforce categories of thought, as well as their reactions to phenomena that transgress the bounds of those categories. My post today, which examines how to approach questions of sexuality as a worldbuilder, is to some degree an extension of that. Obviously, it's an enormous topic, and one that I won't even attempt to cover completely; instead, I'd like to focus on a few basic ideas.

Building Religions 22: Defining Religion

When you're creating a world in which you want religion to play a significant part, it's good to take a moment to ask yourself what you mean by 'religion' to begin with. The definition of religion that you use as your starting point can help you shape the questions you want to ask about its role in your world, so what I'd like to do in this post is lay out some classic ways of defining it and consider what they could offer.

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.

Building Religions 20: Presenting the Past

I'm working my way through Sadakat Kadri's Heaven on Earth, which is a history of shari'a law from the beginning of Islam to the present day. While I'm still early on in the book, part of Kadri's thesis—that shari'a has never been monolithic, and has been shaped by numerous political and religious pressures—got me thinking about the idea of how religions present themselves.

Building Religions 19: Joseph Campbell

The long break between posts happened because I wanted to reread Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces before writing anything. It had been about twenty years since I opened it, and realized that I couldn't remember a thing about its contents. The impressions that I had of Campbell's work were intermingled with memories of his interviews with Bill Moyers, his televised lectures on myth, and references to his influence on George Lucas, so I went back to the source.

Building Religions 18: Mysticism, part 2

Having a definition for mysticism doesn't do much to help you incorporate it into your stories, unless you're planning to write The Untold Adventures of William James. This week, I'll cover some examples of the kinds of experiences that have traditionally been called mystical as well as a few ideas on how you might use mystics in your creations.

I've picked four basic examples: mystical union, cosmic perspective, divine love, and direct revelation. The first is a good example of the experience itself; the second, of an insight into the nature of the world that comes from mysticism; the third, of the experience of the mystic in relation to the deity; and the fourth, of visionary experience. These are my own categories rather than any academic arrangement, by the way. If you go looking for books on the subject, you'll likely find them organized differently.

Building Religions 17: Mysticism, part 1

If you want to see a religion scholar twitch, try using the adjective 'mystical' as a catch-all descriptor for anything vaguely religious. The effect is about the same as you'd get if you asked a physicist to listen to a New Age devotee talk about 'energy.'There's probably even a small crossover population that you could drive into complete fits by putting the two together as 'mystical energies.'

Mysticism, like religion, is a term that's both problematic and necessary. It's necessary because it does seem to describe a category of experiences and practices that appear in many religions. It's problematic because that category is fuzzy enough that authors have to spend a great deal of time explaining and defending the specific definition that they're using before they can go on to talk about the subject.

Building Religions 16: Interpreting Scripture, part 2

Let's say that you've decided that your fictional religion doesn't adhere to literal interpretations of its scripture, or at least that it doesn't only read its texts in a literal way. Your alternative is the allegorical approach, which takes the text as the starting point for moral, theological, or eschatological statements. If you do, you can open up a whole new range of options for yourself, as well as introducing new complications to the matter of interpretation.

Building Religions 15: Interpreting Scripture

If you've decided that a fictional scripture is going to be an important part of your world, the next set of questions to ask yourself has to do with the way that it's interpreted in that world. Is there a single reading of the text to which everyone agrees? Are there obscure passages that have given rise to conflicting interpretations, and if so, what are their effects on the way that the religion's followers act? Do the leaders of the religion teach multiple interpretations to different subgroups of followers, one for the masses and a different one for the initiates?

You're certainly not required to complicate scripture in your setting, but it shouldn't be any surprise by now that I'm a fan of making religions messy, so I'd like to spend the next few posts providing an overview of some historical approaches to scriptural interpretation.

Building Religions 14: Mary Douglas

In my last post, I wrote something that wasn't entirely true, namely that a society's categories are "arbitrary." That was not only inaccurate, but it gives the impression that people create systems without putting any thought into them, and that they only adhere to them out of some irrational attachment to tradition. It also does a disservice to the scholars who've put a great deal of work into explaining the internal logic of these systems. Consider this post to be an extended mea culpa.

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.