bloodyrosemccoy | Creative Truths

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Creative Truths

I keep trying to write up a commentary about one of the most interesting fantasy tropes: the Religion Is True trope. Mostly because I've been fleshing out some of the mythological beliefs of OGYAFElanders,* although it's also because I just read Tamora Pierce's Battle Magic and realized that I've been ... slightly disappointed with the direction the Circleverse has been going in for the last couple of books (this one and Melting Stones) on account of this specific trope.

I always liked the Circleverse because the religion, while a central part of the story, was not indisputably, unambiguously true. You had the temple dedicates praying to and swearing by and honoring the gods, but unlike, say, Tortall or Lord of the Rings or David Eddings' books or the Young Wizards or even goddamn Zelda,** in this world they don't do it because the gods regularly drop by the local waffle house for a short stack or leave helpful voicemails for the heroes or bequeath Our Heroes with Mystical Crysticals. Hell, it's entirely possible that the Circle gods don't even exist, and it's just humans ascribing random occurrences to them.

Y'know, like this world.

And don't get me wrong. I fuckin' like all the Religion Is True examples I listed up there. You can tell some great stories with a premise like that. Hell, I'm even working on a Scatterstone installment featuring some True Animism. But even then, making folklore True actually removes an important aspect from the people in your story: their unbridled creativity.

Now, y'all may know I'm an atheist. I grew up an atheist. My big adolescent revelation wasn't so much that I was an atheist as it was the realization that other people weren't. And while that did lead to a good bit of WTFing on my part--wait, you all BELIEVE this?!--and I do think there is a lot of harm to be gotten out of religion, I also think that religious mythology is fascinating. You can learn a lot about people by the myths they come up with. The stories teach important ideals. You can see the way the mind works in magical thinking, anthropomorphism, spiritism, and just-so explanations. And of course, they're really damn inventive. It takes a lot more cognition to make up a story than to report it.***

I don't think I'm the only one who finds this a bit of a gap. Terry Pratchett (of course) explores it a lot. Discworld's got a sort of symbiotic nature of folklore and humanity--like in Hogfather or Small Gods, where the fairies and gods and Anthropomorphic Personifications are real and concrete, but were born of and fueled by collective human imagination. And even Tortall suggests that the Immortals have a similar backstory, though it seems once they're dreamed up they become independent of humans. But those all still have concrete representations of those concepts. The Circle books were the first time it felt like it really was like our world, where it really was all abstract.

And that was the model I used for OGYAFEland, where there are a bunch of different religions/folklores/mythos ... es ... that are not objectively True, but that influence the thoughts and actions of the humans. It looks like how I see the world. And while it's cool for Pierce to change that around, I'd be lying if I didn't say that I was a little disappointed when the Circle Religions started to leak into reality.

*And I just recently had a FABULOUS idea for a short story set in OGYAFEland, god DAMMIT who turned on the Inspiration Fire Hose?

**Or even His Dark Materials--weird, if you've read the book, but while the point is that religion is a construction, it's still not a human construction: angels are a Thing, and they are Messing With Us.

***When I was a kid, it frustrated the hell out of me that everyone was trying to figure out what might have inspired fantastical artworks. "Where could the idea of mermaids come from? Could it have been sailors seeing manatees?" I couldn't figure out why it never crossed their minds that maybe somebody just thought it'd be cool to give a human woman a fish tail. Yes, I know people had frames of reference to work with, but hell, they had fish and women. All it takes is one weirdo with a bit of abstract thinking.

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Yeah, when you think about things like griffons, you kind of figure out that some guys were bored one day and were sitting around going "You know what would be really cool??? A lion that could fly!!! That'd beat those guard dogs all to hell!!!"

I enjoy a good 'religion/folklore/random cultural oddity is true' story as well, but I don't necessarily think that a Religion is True premise is mutually exclusive to basic human imagination. There are plenty of divides in the real world over things that are True, people were splintering off from religions even when the founders were still around to explain True Stuff, humanity in general has never run short of creativity when dealing with our own True Things, like natural laws of the universe. I don't see why a world where Religion is True wouldn't have something similar going on in regards to its gods/magic/whatever. You may not be able to ignore the rules of the religion, but there will be an endless variety of views of and reactions to those rules.

The trouble with the Religion is True concept is when the author doesn't do a thorough job of worldbuilding and uses a single True Religion as a crutch without taking human variation and imagination into account. Then yes, Religion is True becomes extremely restrictive and exclusive to creativity.

erg, hope that makes sense, I'm up way too late right now...

That's a good point--there's still a lot of imaginative action going on in Religion Is True worlds, because the people are still human. (I especially like the ones where the god is baffled by what some of his/her followers have come up with.) There's still reinterpretation and misinterpretation and art and inspiration. But it still does feel to me like something is missing.

But partly that's actually requisite. On a meta level, True Religionland allows US to consider what interactions with gods would be like, since they are products of our own imaginations. So it all winds up a continuum. But I find it interesting how pleased I was to come across my own worldview in the Circle books. I would like to see that vision more often.

One of the interesting aspects of the ASOIAF books is the simultaneous existence of magic, quacks, and sceptics. All possible points on the spectrum (and combinations thereof) from religious fanatic to sober pragmatist, and indisputable magic to strange occurrences to outright fraud, are represented.

And Bujold's whole Chalion series is a fascinating example of doing Religion Is True in a really human and complex way. The gods themselves are demonstrably, vividly true. Every single person in the world is guaranteed a single specific miracle to mark their death. And yet there are still churches with their own structures and hierarchies and teachings and you even get religious wars over human interpretation of the gods. It is a really neat balancing act that I'd love to see more of in fantasy.

Here is my issue with Mercedes Lackey. Her 'no One True Way' philosophy handwaves all religious conflict (though Alberich still has to hide his faith in the Sunlord) except... there is a demonstrable Truth.

Have you read Elliott's Crown of Stars books? One major theme throughout is that religion is seriously entwined in politics and life. It isn't separated out at all. But one major religious issue is politically important, while the other-- I mean, seriously, the *other*, I love it-- is not on anyone's radar.

For some reason it's still easier for me to look the other way on universes where Religion Is True, but it's an open and acknowledged fact to most of society as part of the premise, than stories where one or a few characters know that Religion Is True but the rest of society doesn't and the premise is that they have to get all those fools to see the Truth before it's too late! Those are well-night unbearable to me.

My favourite thing about Pratchett's Disc World is that the gods exist, you can talk to them and they'll strike you with lightning, but even then, the religion isn't necessarily true.

Timely post is timely!

I'm working on fleshing out a comedic fantasy world for a story, and this is an issue I keep stumbling up against. One of my three main characters is a cleric of the God of Knowledge. I know various things about the religion -- their itinerant clerics are responsible for the surprisingly high literacy rate in fantasyland, for instance -- but I haven't decided whether their god (and other gods, by extrapolation) is True. I kind of like the idea of having it be a belief, not a truth, if only because it makes it easier to have a police investigation plot, but it's a tangle. The world is a start-from-stereotypes fantasyland, drawing heavily from things that come up in RPGs, esp. tabletop, where religious magic exists and works (and people generally assume the gods to be True, though I think it'd be pretty awesome to play a campaign where that wasn't the case).

Actually, my first D&D experience I went in thinking religion was like real-world religion with fringe magical benefits, only to discover that the gods weren't just True, they'd personally showed up in the story multiple times.
Paladin asks my character: "So, how do you stand with the gods?"
I answer, not having been given ANY background: "Oh, I'm not really sure about gods, really. Religion doesn't bother me, I don't bother with it."
Paladin responds, in shock: "Have you SEEN a god? THEY'RE HUGE!"

It's the best theological argument ever, as far as I'm concerned. :P

Oh, and I agree about the mermaids. I always thought "Dude, what if, like, there was a person, but with a FISH TAIL?" made more sense as an origin than "Ohhh, man, I'm so drunk that manatee looks hella sexy, and also kinda like a fish."

Pretty much how I always pictured it. "Dude, what if we crossed an EAGLE with a LION! It'd be, like, the best of two top predators! THAT WOULD BE AWESOME!"

I have not read them! Now I'm interested, though ...

Argh, yes. I suppose the problem is that so many religious people here in this world actually DO think that way, and it does, in fact, get super annoying.

I liked reading that his premise that, at least in the Witches' area of Discworld, ALL the folklore true, even if it contradicts itself. Because it's more about how it's dependent on people to make it true, too.

In somewhat that same vein, I've always wondered how much ancient writing on walls was teenagers painting obscenities like they do with spray cans these days. What archeologists interpret as a prayer to a god might very well be a statement that one team of athletes is better than the one from the next town over.

Yeah, I suspect at least SOME of those mystical shamanistic figures with ridiculously exaggerated genitalia and breasts and butts aren't so much about spirituality as they are about LOL BUTTS.

Epic fantasy set in a medieval world where the spheres are totally real and more than one humanoid species exists, plus different languages and secrets and dogs and Kate Elliott.

With spells like "Commune" and "Contact Other Plane" in D&D, it's kind of hard to not have gods. Actually, thinking about it, the type of magic you have available really has an impact. If you have level 20 wizards, there's a pretty good case for saying "Gods exist" because a level 20 wizard can create a plane of existence, summon life into it, etc... And if gods don't exist, then there's a power vacuum that will be filled.

Now, a relatively low magic world has the potential not to have anything that could fill the role of a god.

Seconding that rec! Kate Elliott is ace generally, but Crown of Stars is my absolute favourite.

I haven't reread Melting Stones since it came out- I like Evvy as a character but I found that book to be really irritating, for a lot of reasons- but I agree wrt the Religion Is Real fantasy trope. (That always bothered me about Tortall as well, mostly because it didn't seem to mak any sense Why would, say, the Banjiku worship the Great Mother Goddess in the same aspect as the Tortallans? Why does there seem to be one main pantheon for the whole world, with the occasional side deity?) Pretty much all the universes I write are either agnostic or straight-up atheistic; it just makes more sense to me, based on what I know about people and religion. I always appreciated that about the Circleverse, because as much as I enjoy Tamora Pierce, her Tortall books tend to lean a little heavy on the divine intervention/godlike powers/special destiny/Behold the Prophecy side for my liking.

I suppose you could always leave the gods as possibilities in your fantasy world and decide later! After all, even if they ARE True, they don't need to be particularly present--especially for Joe Cop's investigation. :)

One of my Maybe-Gonna-Write-It short story plots in the same OGYAFE world features a girl who imagines conversations with a few little spirits/gods she made up herself--and, in fact, the ideas she gets from them take her to some interesting places. It's a fun little examination of how folklore can inspire someone.

That is a pretty excellent theological argument, yes.

Yeah, if you take D&D strictly, that's very true! But it's totally possible to have a game with a lower-magic lower-divinity world where it isn't quite so obvious -- it's just a few spells. I totally agree on the wizard point, though -- eventually the wizard can become one themselves, albeit maybe of a different world.

Heh, I *would* decide later -- putting it off and letting it develop appeals to me! -- but one of my three main characters is a monk of the God of Knowledge, and as long as he's involved in an investigation... well, now I think of it, him being involved in the investigation is a pretty good argument for NOT having much divine intervention, 'cause otherwise the case is rather open-and-shut, isn't it? Maybe he'll have some simple "is this person telling the truth or not" religious 'gift'... but no one else knows whether it's real or not. :P

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