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:

Building Religions 7: Sacrifice

Building Religions 7: Sacrifice

In sword & sorcery fantasy and occult horror, human sacrifice ranks up there with the use of the words "thews" and "squamous," respectively, in terms of popularity. What I want to do with this little essay is consider some theories about the purpose of sacrifice in real-world religions, and see how those might translate into fictional worlds. As usual, I'm not going to cover all the possible approaches -- just the ones that I find interesting.

Building Religions 6: Ritual

Building Religions 6: Ritual

I haven't done much work in ritual studies, so I'm only going to cover a few scholars and their theories -- the classics, so to speak. Most of what I have to say will be applicable primarily to fantasy settings, which tend to be a bit more ritual-heavy, and they can apply equally well to descriptions of religious or magical rites. As I've mentioned before, the boundary between the two can be fluid. Let's start by running through the authors that I've covered already and what they have to say.

Building Religions 5: J.Z. Smith

Building Religions 5: J.Z. Smith

Jonathan Z. Smith doesn't have the same range of influence as the other authors that I've mentioned in these posts. Most of his work is on comparative religion as a discipline, so that even when he's dealing with primary sources, it's generally with the ultimate goal of using them to question the work of some earlier scholar. That said, however, there are a few of his that I think writers and gamers can get some mileage out of.

Building Religions 4: Religion and Magic

Building Religions 4: Religion & Magic

I'm going to take a detour here and focus on a theme rather than a single author. For the first several decades of the academic study of religion, it seemed like everyone had to, at some point, work out definitions of religion and magic that would make clear to their readers why the two were different. It's only been recently, however, that scholars have started to ask the question of why it was so important for that distinction to be made, and what the definitions were intended to do.

Building Religions 3: Émile Durkheim

Building Religions, part 3: Émile Durkheim

I'm not going to deal with all of Durkheim here -- just the parts that I consider fun, which can be found in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim was basically the founder of the field of the sociology of religion, so it should be no surprise that he examines religions as purely social phenomena. He makes the point early on in The Elementary Forms that there are no false religions, but gradually, it becomes clear that what he means by that is that they can all perform their social function properly, not that there's any underlying Truth to them.

Building Religions 2: Mircea Eliade

Building Religions 2: Mircea Eliade

There's a lot that can be pulled out of Eliade's work. He was a major influence on the field of comparative religion, and even now, anyone dealing with that field at least has to reckon with his theories even if they don't agree with them. For these little bits of writing, though, I'm not so concerned with whether or not a particular theorist is right in their ideas; just with what it would look like if they were applied to worldbuilding.

Building Religions 1: Max Weber

Building Religions 1: Max Weber

I've been thinking lately about religion in the Ingressa, which is leading me to muse about applying a few academic theories to the process of creating religions for fictional settings in general. If this is the sort of thing that interests you, read on and feel free to share this.