The topic of religion in fantasy settings is a vast one, and there are already many essays devoted to the subject for those that seek them. Rather than rehash what has already been said, I’m going to focus on what has been important to me as I have been crafting my recent fiction, and give some examples of how I apply them.
A major gripe that I often have with fantasy fiction is the treatment of polytheism. I have repeatedly encountered constructed polytheistic religions where the Gods are treated more like superheroes than religious institutions and concepts. They have conversations, plots, and grudges and show up to take care of things personally in a very direct way. I concede that is probably an easy way to construct fiction, but to me I feel that it moves a constructed world another step farther from the relationships that people have to the divine in the real world.
My personal religious experience has not been one of back-and-forth conversations with the divine or receiving direct and clear instruction. Instead, it has been mysterious, requiring reflection and soul-searching with conscious effort to understand or put into context. And whenever I believe that the divine has had a hand in something, it is always something very subtle… Nothing grand or obtuse, but odd chains of coincidences that seem to me beyond something that can be dismissed as the whims of random chance.
I want to replicate that feeling of presence and uncertainty in my fiction in addition to my love for history and mythology. These very personal things have merged and formed alliances as of late and found two forms of expression in the polytheistic religions within my creations.
The first is in my Burusian tales. In Burus, the Gods have history, tradition and myth that can and has changed, becoming reinterpreted like the historical Gods of our own world. They are points of culture and theology, and because the Gods are not superheroes that show up and made declarations personally, there are points of contention and debate about what they “want”. At best they might talk to an adherent in something akin to a dream, but even this is more like a vision than a conversation.
But, from my author’s vantage, the Gods are real. They have a whispering presence, something outside of words that they use to guide and advise the mortals they have relationships with, although such communication is never direct and requires the application of insight and wisdom. Although real, the Gods of Burus don’t show up in the world and muck-about with things directly. That task falls to their adherents, and it is they who work to further their values and goals. That’s not to say that there isn’t magic and artifacts connected to the Gods that get used and abused in my stories, but such things require the actions of mortals to be invoked. And any connection to a particular God could be debatable… Possibly an invention of the faithful lost to time and legend.
The divinities of Burus also don’t grant magical powers to their agents in a D&D sort of way, something that has always annoyed me. Connection with a holy order of a God or Goddess does not mean great magical powers, even for the greatest of any particular temple’s clergy. Instead those that hold magical talents are courted and welcomed into the ranks of the temples as rare individuals as they would be elsewhere in Burus. However, the magical religious organizations and fellowships of Burus often have knowledge and learning not found elsewhere.
In my other active work, Unsundered, the relationships between Gods and Men in its setting of Gora are very similar to those in Burus but there are some key differences. One is a major plot point of the story: in Gora, most of the Gods cannot interact with the world directly since they, and to varying extents all beings, were diminished from a primal, powerful state… An event called “The Sundering.” A fair portion of the Goran Gods are alien minds and ambivalent beings that couldn’t care less about humanity as a whole. These are not Gods that most people would venerate typically, but that does not brand them inherently as malevolent either. In that way one could see them as great spirits: intelligent, intangible but mostly uninterested in human adoration unless it serves one of their goals. They exist independent of worship or even mankind’s knowledge of them.
Other Goran Gods are downright Lovecraftian. They have goals and followers in such opposition to the normal desires of mankind that they can only be seen as malevolent. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there is a small host of benevolent Gods, friends to life and humanity who are at least aligned with upholding the current order of the cosmos in step with the goals or well-being of mankind.
The biggest difference between Burus and Gora is that in Gora, there are a bare handful of Gods (and more numerous lesser beings) that avoided the fate of becoming Sundered; they remained “whole” and by comparison are very potent in the “broken” world. These Gods can literally walk the earth and reap tremendous, possibly world-ending destruction without the need for intermediaries. Fortunately, they are extremely rare, and the last time such a sight was seen was over a thousand years before the start of Unsundered.
The Gods of Gora are beings that are vast, powerful and not at all human, even if they are benevolent. They have more in common with the unknowable Gods of H.P. Lovecraft’s mythologies than humanity, and thus, even if they act directly it is in a way that people often find hard to understand or is misjudged. The comparison to Lovecraftian Mythos is quite intentional here, as one of my inspirations in their creation was taking some of his concepts and using them to craft entities that were bizarre and unknowable, but at the same time benign to mankind.
I’ve put these principles into use already in my Burusian story, A Hymnal upon the Wind. Like anything for a work in progress or ideas in a conceptual stage, nothing is written is stone. But even if my ideas evolve, I’m hopeful that these two takes on Gods and religions will give my story settings a unique perspective, feeling and tone. Moreover, for the fantasy writer who might be reading this, I hope that this look into my notebook might help you with your own creations.
Aethereal Engineer 