MetaMythos - RPG Campaign and World Design

World Design/Multi-Cultural Fictional Settings/Mentality of Religion

The intellect alone is a lousy way to understand religion. Experience of Divine power is the only way to truly know how it feels to be religious. Because of the nature of the Web as a medium chances are that fewer religious than irReligious People will read these words. For those who are religious, those who know deep inside how radically religious experience transforms the soul, I apologize in advance. I am about to simplify and reduce religion in a most outrageous way, a way through which I hope those without deep religious training can begin to understand the mystical and experiential aspects of religion.

There are two central ideas which you have to grasp in order to understand religion. First, the idea of sacredness and sacred power is important. Religion is the sphere of mortal affairs where people constantly encounter the sacred. Second is worship, or the way that mortals communicate with the divine. Once you understand these two topics you'll have a pretty good grasp on what people of many different religious backgrounds believe and how they approach the world.

The Realm of the Sacred

The Mundane World is the meaningless everyday world of phenomena and experience, of instinct, moral ambiguity, greed, hunger, scientific experiment, and flesh. Time in the Mundane world treads forward daily, an all-powerful idiot carrying us into a future at which it stares with sightless eyes, all the while whispering insensibly at us from its formless mouth. Mundane space is likewise idiotic, smooth and undifferentiated, without value, possessing only magnitude. It tells us where we are in relation to something else, but it doesn't tell us where we are in the cosmos, and it doesn't tell us who or what we are, or why we are here instead of there.

The Sacred World is everything else. It is the source of value, morality, it measures right and wrong and Good and Evil.

The most important fact to understand about the religious mindset is the distinction between sacred and mundane. The easiest way to understand the Sacred is that it is not Mundane. It is intrinsically powerful. It is alien, unfathomable, inscrutable. It is meaningful in and of itself. The everyday world is ordinary, meaningless. The sacred world has meaning, it is intelligent and mighty.

The first difference between sacred and mundane is that sacred things are important and meaningful, while mundane things lack intrinsic meaning, they are only meaningful insofar as they may be used. A mundane tool such as a refrigerator is utilitarian, it may be used to store orange juice or any other task refrigerators do well. When the coolant drains out of the system and it can't be replaced, then it becomes useless and is discarded as so much junk. It is an ex-refrigerator. The situation with a mundane house, sewing machine, or road map is the same. If they become useless they are discarded. However, a sacred thing is sacred apart from its mundane usefulness. A refrigerator could become sacred if a prophet or saint or divinity used it to create miracles. As a holy object, the refrigerator would be meaningful even after it stopped working. The remnants of the cooling system would be valued, as would the door, the racks, the thermostat, and all the other pieces of the whole. Once the refrigerator becomes sacred, they are all parts of the sacred whole. Every piece partakes of its sacred nature.

Sacredness is not only meaning, it is also Power. Sacred things are powerful. If used wisely they can have enormous effects on the world. They can be wonderful boons to the wise society. If used imprudently they can backfire and cause terrible curses. In many societies Sacredness and Power are synonyms. They mean exactly the same thing. A person who is powerful may also be sacred. English Kings, for example, were thought to be not only the most powerful political individuals in the country, but also blessed by God and thus sacred. Because power implies a sacred nature, in a fantastic setting with powerful monsters many of the monsters will be understood to be sacred, holy, and blessed by the gods. This sacredness will be a further reason why people fear powerful monsters such as dragons, giants, ghosts, fairies, etc., in many roleplaying game settings.

Finally, sacred things are wholly unlike us. They are outside our experience in the everyday world. Not only don't we understand them, we can't understand them. This is apparent by their unpredictability. Sacred entities do not reason as mundane people do. By our standards they are mad or eccentric. But they know things beyond what we can know. Maybe they see many more dimensions of reality than we can. Maybe they value different things than we do, perhaps things we cannot even perceive. In any case it is futile to predict the influence of a sacred entity. They are as inscrutable to us as we would be to ants.

Sacred Time

Religious People see time in two ways.

The first way, and most natural to us, is to view time as linear. Linear time goes back straight into the past, and stretches forward into the future. It doesn't pause. It doesn't take rest breaks or backtrack. Linear time relentlessly treads on, making us older day by day, as waves beat on a beach and slowly erode the shore. This is a scientific way to look at time, as something which we may put into an equation and forget about.

The other way to look at time is as a cycle. Every year the earth goes around the sun. Every spring the flowers bloom and crops are planted. Every fall the crops are harvested. Every winter on December 25 the world celebrates Christmas. Once a week you are supposed to go to church or temple. Go to sleep at night. Wake up in the morning. Pass through the cycle of death and rebirth. Holidays, equinoxes, full moons, elections, this week's Top 40. Time and time again. Circular time, cyclical time--this is a perception of time that almost all religions and traditional cultures emphasize, but which is purposefully ignored by modern non-religious society. In order to properly roleplay religious characters you must understand cyclical time and how it is marked.

In addition to being cyclical and linear, Time can also be sacred and mundane. The difference between sacred and mundane time is the difference between Christmas and December 25. Christmas is a sacred day that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, the central figure in Christian religion. It happens yearly, but the celebration recreates the original event, and every year celebrants are taken from the mundane world and miraculously transported through time and space to a manger in Jerusalem to witness the birth of the divine child. December 25, on the other hand, is a day just like every other day. In traditionally Christian countries in Europe and the Americas, if it were not for the Christmas festival on that date then December 25 would be a day just like every other, a working day or a weekend day with no special meaning, just like the 25th day of every other month. Mundane time is usually linear, it travels on in a straight line from the past to the future, never deviating, never changing speed. Sacred time is cyclic. It repeats itself. The most common circuits of sacred time are: Yearly cycles, such as the astronomical cycles and the harvest cycle; Monthly cycles, such as the tides and women's internal rhythms; and Life cycles, which emphasize the essential unity of the same occurrence in every person's life. Other cycles are certainly possible. Mayan, Hindu, and Egyptians all had Great Years, many years in length, and festivals were celebrated at certain times along it.

Mythtime

Divine figures performed the primordial actions which defined the world in the Realm of Myth, at a time we will dub Mythtime. Mythtime is a "timeless" time, a time outside of Linear Time. The Realm of Myth is primordial, nascent. In it Linear Time has not begun its relentless, steady pace. The gods dwelt/dwell/will dwell in Mythtime. It is impossible to place their actions relative to the present because they performed their actions outside Linear Time. The gods' actions which are recalled in Myth and which serve as a pattern for all right actions within the flow of Linear Time happened in the Mythic Realm during Mythtime. As the gods' primordial actions provide a pattern for future actions, defining the proper way to do everything, so the Mythtime in which they performed those actions lends its pattern to all future time. As Linear Time advances, Mythtime moves with it. Imagine it as a huge wheel, repeatedly superimposing mythic patterns on our world in cycles which repeat monthly, yearly, with every new child that is born. Every day in Linear Time corresponds to a point on the wheel, thus every day is the same day during which something happens in the Realm of Myth, as measured on the wheels of Mythtime.

Myth and Ritual are directly tied to the rolling wheel of Mythtime. Religious Ritual invokes the Mythtime in which the gods first performed their definitive actions. Properly performed, ritual transports celebrants out of Linear Time and onto the wheel of Mythtime, so they can repeat their gods' original actions and by repeating them participate with their gods in the first actions. All barriers of time and space have been broken down and the celebrants are in there with the gods, traveling in the Mythic Realm simultaneously with the gods.

Festivals

The most important thing that ever happened was the creation. To a religious person, the form of the primal creation becomes the form for all other creations. Every other event and action, whether a mythic action of a god or the dedication of a new shrine, echoes the original creation of the world. Whenever something begins, commences, is born, a ritual which recalls and renews primal creation is due. Every year, at the beginning of the year however that society marks it, is the new year festival, which is a huge ritual celebration of the creation of the universe. Every year the best, most highly qualified people in society organize a ritual celebration which thrusts the participants into mythic events within the Mythtime. The quality of the performer's actions in the ritual will determine society's good or bad fortune during the coming year. This is no simple play, no job for amateurs, but is entrusted to society's finest.

The concept of sacred time is used in formal religion to specify the times for festivals. Festivals are important because they unite the community and they also re-establish the covenant, the union, between the community and the divine world. They must be repeated regularly or the mundane world risks losing all contact with the sacred world, the world of meaning. Ecofests are festivals which celebrate sacred times which are chosen by the natural world, either by astronomical objects or by the cyclic rhythms of life, monthly, annual, or multiyear cycles. An ecofest would consecrate a migration, full moon, new year, harvest, planting, or other natural phenomena. Theofests are festivals which celebrate an incident in the life of a god or hero. The hero's birth, achievements, and death would be likely times to celebrate a theofest, as would dates which a divinity declared to be sacred.

Sacred Space

For religious man, space is not homogeneous; he experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some parts of space are qualitatively different from others.

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane

Sacred space is meaningful space. Quantum mechanics teaches us that any place is just as good as any other space, that space is uniform and does not change. In fact with quantum mechanics a moving platform is indistinguishable from a still one. This is the ultimate description of mundane space. If all places are indistinguishable from each other so that you cannot tell whether you are at one place in the spatial continuum or at another, or at any of the infinite number of places in between the two, then the universe is mundane and meaningless. With a sacred understanding of space, however, specific points in space are different from other points in space. They are important. They have meaning. My home is intrinsically different from that of my neighbor, not because the houses are different, but because the places are different and their differences are important, meaningful. The earthly location 31 degrees 41 minutes north and 35 degrees 10 minutes east is mundane, ordinary, meaningless. But Jerusalem has meaning. It is a major holy city for three religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The Otherworld

Almost all cultures and peoples have a concept of another world, a sacred world, parallel to our mundane natural world, in which the gods and other beings live. This is reflected in various religions by the many Heavens and Hells to which people are fated to inhabit after death, and by the worlds which mystics visit in dreams and trances.

In the Otherworld every place is a sacred place. Every place has importance, both meaning and power. If a place appears to be ordinary, mundane, it is only because we don't know enough about it. For this reason the Otherworld can be dangerous. Those who enter into the Otherworld, whether they are the spirits of the dead who are there permanently, the figure of the divine who has always lived there, or the mystics, shamans, and religious specialists who travel there for specific tasks, take on the aura of sacredness. They all become sacred. They partake of the power and importance of everything sacred.

The Three-fold Otherworld

The most common idea of the Otherworld splits it up into three realms: Middleworld; Upperworld; and Underworld. We'll be using this division for the Otherworld later. If you want to further subdivide the Otherworld, perhaps into 9 or 25 or some other number of realms, go ahead and do it, but just about the simplest way to explain things is to use a three-fold division.

1. The Middleworld corresponds to earth, and travel between it and the earth is relatively easy. Occasionally, as with mortals who stumble into the land of Faerie, the border between earth and the Middleworld can be crossed unconsciously. Usually, however, the crossing requires special skills, such as the skills of shamans and mystics, or travel to distant places. The Middleworld is inhabited by some of the dead, by spirits of animals, by spirits of field and hearth, and by divinities who are a part of the land.
2. The Upperworld corresponds to the sky. Travel to the upperworld requires either special skills such as those possessed by shamans and mystics, who still retain some of the primordial abilities which mortals had in the dawn ages, before they lost their intrinsic sacred nature, or heroic travels. It would be almost impossible to accidentally enter the Upperworld. The Upperworld is inhabited by divinities who are closely associated with the sky, such as gods of the sun, stars, weather, and other cosmological phenomena. It's also inhabited by spirits of birds and other aerial animals, the spirits of the stars and other cosmic things, and by those of the dead who have some ties to the sky.
3. The Underworld corresponds to caves and the deep earth. Under the earth's surface is darkness and the danger that follows it. Large predatory animals haunt caves. Mines may collapse or miners may be overcome and suffocated by subterranean gas. The Underworld is the home of the dark gods, the gods which are no longer worshipped, and the gods of death. Nobody wants to go there, but occasionally shamans venture there to rescue lost souls or to ask a boon of one of the grim gods who dwell there. Other beings dwelling in the Underworld include the tortured or evil dead, monsters, and spirits of the deep earth such as dwarfs and mine spirits.

Holy Sites: Shrines and Temples

Sacred places are a focus for worship. No matter the architecture of a shrine or temple, the spot is chosen because it is in itself sacred. The building only commemorates the sacredness of the spot; it does not confer a sacred nature. This is why temples are built on top of the ruins of other temples, even temples to other religions. This is why abandoned temples are often believed to be dangerous, or haunted. The sacred power within them has not been properly worshipped, utilized, and controlled.

The sacred nature of a place is often discovered through its great beauty, a beauty which can stir the soul of the visitor. Other times a place's sacredness may be discovered when a sacred animal or monster is killed at a spot. For instance, according to medieval legend the Cathedral of xxxxx was founded where xxxxx stabbed a sleeping subterranean dragon through the head with his sword. [[[Can't find the reference right now. I'll look for it.]]] In medieval Europe important buildings, including churches, were often founded on sites that were determined by a hunt. An especially powerful animal was hunted, wounded with an arrow or spear thrust, and the spot where it fell was marked and the church was built there. The Babylonian legend of Marduk's combat with the primordial dragon Tiamat and his conquering and dismembering of her may have referred to the ritual by which the priests would find the sacred site for a new temple to Marduk. This could certainly add a new dimension to the roleplaying of battles with dragons and other powerful monsters.

Worship

Worship, v. 1. To treat with the reverence due to merit or worth; to respect; honor. Obs or R. 2. To pay divine honors to; to reverence with extreme respect and veneration; to perform religious exercises in honor of; to adore; venerate.

Worship is fairly easy to understand. When something excites our respect and in return we honor it, then the honor we give may loosely be termed worship. Respect may be earned by strength, beauty, intellect, spiritual fortitude, good deeds, popularity, or anything which an individual or culture values. Respect doesn't have anything to do with whether or not we like something. An enemy may be respected, though hated. Respect is merely an assessment of ability, not necessarily of moral quality. You can use quite a few words instead of worship if that word seems wrong for the circumstances. For instance, try veneration if you don't want to "worship" dead people and other entities that are not strictly divine. Other synonyms include honor, reverence, adoration, glorification, homage, regard, respect, and devotion.

Sacred Things and Worship

People worship that which is sacred. They distinguish the sacred many ways, by its power and importance, by its appearance, by the circumstances which surround it. They worship sacred entities, sacred people, and sacred things.

Ancestors, the Dead

When people die they are transported to the Otherworld, the sacred world inhabited by spirits and deities. Whether they are in the Upperworld, the Middleworld, or the Underworld is immaterial. Their presence in the otherworld gives them access to its sacred nature, and so they become in part sacred. Very ancient ancestors may be more sacred than newer ones, but all the members of the dead should be respected because they all have sacred abilities which most of the living do not have.

Sacred People

Some people, sacred people, can travel to the Otherworld. Religious specialists such as shamans know how to make this trip, and they do it to find the lost souls of sick people, to ask boons of the gods, and to escort the ghosts of the newly dead to their proper place in the Otherworld. Other untrained people such as mystics and visionaries may also visit the Otherworld. A person who can make this trip picks up some of the sacred nature of the Otherworld. Such a person becomes sacred and may be worshipped as such, while alive and after death.

Other people are sacred by rights of heredity. Some people are descended from the gods or from ancestors who became sacred through other means. These people are often leaders of their society, and are generically known as sacred rulers. The Egyptian God-King, the son of the sun, was one example of such a ruler, as was the head of the Austrian royal house of Hapsburg, whom the Priory of Sion claims is the holy and rightful king of the world because they can trace his bloodline through the Merovingian kings of France and back from there to Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene.

Sacred people are infused with sacred power and as a result are potent and unpredictable, just like everything else which is sacred. It is dangerous to be near sacred rulers and shamans. Not only do they face opposition from other beings out of the Otherworld, but their mundane rivals may also attempt direct action against them.

Most religious specialists are not sacred. Priests who are no more than temple functionaries, clericals who spend all their time in the scriptorium, and most warriors of holy orders are not infused with sacred power. On the other hand, prophets, heroes, saints, mystics, shamans, and rulers of states are often thought of as sacred. They have seen into the Otherworld and returned to tell. They have the power and insight of sacredness. In general, people with sacred power will be remembered as heroes or saints, to distinguish them from the vast horde of mundane people who live their lives in and around the religious organization.

Sacred Objects

Sacred objects are items which have been touched by someone or something who is sacred. A weapon wielded by a hero, the skull of a saint, the hem of a king's coronation gown, a work of art which evokes the same wonderment as divine experience, or a stone which fell from the sky, any of these may be a sacred object.

Monsters

Monsters are sacred. Their power and unpredictability is proof that they are sacred, or if it isn't sufficient proof, at least their power is proof that they aren't mundane. Since they aren't mundane, they're pretty close to being sacred. Since only a sacred entity can deal with another sacred entity, a hero who kills monsters will partake of their sacred nature and also become somewhat sacred. This is why dragon-killers are revered, because by defeating a sacred monster they have proved their own sacred nature.

Deities

Deities and divinities are sacred. Gods, philosophies, forces, they are powerful, unpredictable, and meaningful. They are the very essence of sacredness. Everything about them is sacred. Deities are the most sacred entities in the world. Whether a deity is friendly, an enemy, or neutral, it is worthy of worship if only to keep it from being offended.

Manner of Worship

What are the different ways of worshipping or honoring those things that people respect? There are only a few reasons for religious worship. People worship friendly divinities in hopes that these divine patrons will continue to give them advantages, or treat them better, and so that the patron divinities don't turn against them with curses.

Appeasement

Some worship is motivated out of fear or guilt, and is called appeasement. This is the first example not because it is the most important, but because it is the easiest to explain. It's easy to understand why people would want to appease powerful things whose attitudes and opinions are not known with offerings.

Role Models

Why do you think people so often complain that there are no more heroes? Role models, or archetypes, may be the focus of a sort of worship. Someone who acts just like Apollo, who perfects his Apollonian self, worships Apollo by doing so. It is the same with many divine and heroic figures. People want to be like them, because they want to be as powerful, as well loved, or as well known as their role models. Throughout history, people have emulated Caesar, Dionysos, Abraham, Zeus, Saint George, Thor, Esther, Odin, Lancelot, Jesus, Freyr, Osiris, Arthur, Heracles, Indra, Saint Joan D'Arc, Hercules, Prometheus, Set, Guinivere, Amun-Ra, Solomon, Shiva, Moses, Rama, Mohammed, Ishtar, Baal, and many other heroes and divine figures. People may use any sacred person or entity as a role model, though they most often use ancestors, gods, and heroes as role models.

Ancestor Worship

Ancestors are often worshipped. The nature of this worship, whether it is hostile or friendly, depending on how the ancestors behave. If ghosts of the dead are a plague upon the living, always trying to lure people into the land of death and otherwise cursing their descendants, then the focus of ancestor worship will be to appease them and to drive them away. As the ancestors are dead, and the living are not, there is also the possibility that the ancestors may feel victimized and blame the living for this inequity. If the dead are friendly, and bless their descendants with wealth and knowledge, then the living are likely to ask favors of them and give them honest praise, mixed with a healthy helping of appeasement so they don't suddenly turn mean like those nasty ghosts over the hill.

Worshipping the Gods

Finally, people worship divinities, deities, gods, philosophies, whatever you call them. A deity is a powerful, sacred entity which participated in the mythical events which created and organized time and space, and which is constantly or occasionally worthy of mortal worship. That's probably the best definition that can be made for a deity in the real world. Sometimes the categories for deities, angels, demons, and monsters get mixed up. It's hard to be sure when drawing the lines between different categories. In any case, people worship deities. They may be pantheists who worship the world, seeing it as perfused by a single divine being. They may be polytheists who worship all the deities, hoping not to miss any that might be important. They may be monotheists who worship only one and claim that any other beings which appear to be divine are illusory and false. They may be Henotheists who worship only one god as divine and claim that other powerful beings which partake of the divine nature are angels or demons or otherwise technically not deities and thus unworthy of worship. There are plenty of other ways in which Religious People may classify deities (duotheism, dualism, philosophy, etc.) which will be discussed in Divinities.

Those who worship the gods mix the different types of worship, offering appeasement, taking role models, giving sacrifices, and performing other ritual acts. It's important to give sacrifices and perform rituals, for the gods somehow take their sustenance from this kind of worship. Those who use the gods as role models help the gods to impose the primordial patterns they established in the Mythtime in the world within time and thus strengthen the gods by reinforcing their patterns. Finally, appeasement is an important part of any religion that involves powerful divinities. The gods are powerful and eccentric. Who can tell what they like or dislike? Sometimes they will be offended even if people do everything they are supposed to do. Appeasement is offered so that the gods may not be so angry at their mortal worshippers, even though transgressions are impossible to avoid. After all, if a god is not often appeased, if sacrifices are not offered often, it may turn against its worshippers.