Stray feathers

I've written a few things here before about the Western magical traditions that often provide a foundation for the magical systems of ...

Only two of our world's major religions include relics as objects of devotion: Buddhism and Christianity. Despite that fact, however, t...

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 creati...

We get the English word asceticism from Greek, where it referred to the training of athletes. How it became associated with practices of s...

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 us...

To recap my last post: according to Peter Berger, the functions of religion are to legitimize social institutions, provide continuity, and ...

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 sou...

"There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source...

In my post on Mary Douglas , I described some of the ways that religious societies create and enforce categories of thought, as well as the...

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...

One of the challenges in approaching the subject of religion, whether creatively or academically, is that of recognizing one's own pres...

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 t...

I don't often write about my own work here, but the post on orientalism put me in the mood to discuss some practical worldbuilding. No...

It was Saladin Ahmed's article on the issue of race on Game of Thrones that made me think I should add Edward Said's Orientalism ...

The long break between posts happened because I wanted to reread Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces before writing anyth...

Having a definition for mysticism doesn't do much to help you incorporate it into your stories, unless you're planning to write The...

If you want to see a religion scholar twitch, try using the adjective 'mystical' as a catch-all descriptor for anything vaguely rel...

Mike McArtor's most recent post on telling stories in games over at the Story Papers blog have brought back to mind a worldbuilding te...

I generally don't include bibliographies, but for anyone who wants to follow up on my descriptions of mediaeval and Renaissance magic in...

This article has been on my mind for the past few days. It's not that different from any other piece of advice out there on how to mak...

Let's say that you've decided that your fictional religion doesn't adhere to literal interpretations of its scripture , or at l...

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...

I've been distracted for the past few weeks by something I half-remember reading two decades ago. It was a breakdown of the types of co...

Most of what I wrote in my last few posts was fairly abstract, and while that shouldn't be a tremendous shock for anyone who's been...

In my last post, I wrote something that wasn't entirely true, namely that a society's categories are "arbitrary." That wa...

Early on in Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life , there's a detour into philosophy as he considers the question of how hu...

Building Religions 13: Scripture There comes a time for most worldbuilders when they want to drop a passage from a sacred text into the...

Building Religions 12: New Religious Movements Whether you're writing about a secretive order pursuing occult mysteries, the discip...

Building Religions 11: Authority My last few posts were a little light on the practical side for anyone designing a religion, so I thought...

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 w...