Worship This
Shooting Star © Nicc Balce (Used with permission)
Much of worldbuilding in epic speculative fiction involves constructing new cosmologies. It’s fun, it can flavor the text memorably, and deities can provide easy justifications for a lot of character motives (just like in real life).
That said, I have some questions:
-With an obvious, active pantheon, how is monotheism possible?
-Are holy wars more or less likely when you know your enemy’s deities are as real as your own?
-With deities directly influencing events in the world, who needs prophets or messiahs?
-What of missionaries? Would conversion practices work where people could expect very real retribution from scorned deities?
-For that matter, what’s the point of priesthood? If gods and goddesses can intervene in anybody’s affairs, why would anybody deal with an intermediary when they wish to intervene in deific affairs?
-After all, in these worlds, isn’t prayer just another form of magic use?
-Moreover, is faith even possible in worlds where religious cosmology is fact? Or would stubborn atheism there be the parallel of religious fundamentalism here on Earth?
Sure, magic is fun, but this is a science blog. Let’s do science to the deific.
-Cultures evolve and species evolve, but can immortal individuals evolve? Or is that an ‘All Power’ reserved for deities associated with rebirth and transformation?
-As technology advances and societies progress, how do adaptable deities keep themselves relevant?
-What do star-faring people worship? Does sun-worship get revived as ‘stellar-worship’?
-Would real, hard sci-fi gods and goddesses even be interested in worship? Or would they be keener on invention and novelty than on rote tradition?
-For that matter, how could followers of progressive, science-loving deities reconcile themselves with the paradox of embracing the directives of entities of unquantifiable existence?
Your thoughts?
In a technologically advanced society, I think gods would remain relevant as guides to personal conduct and ideology, rather than the embodiment or ruler of natural phenomena. Although I wouldn’t want to annoy the god of gravity or the goddess of electromagnetism!
But gods of peace versus war, stoicism versus indulgence, rebellion versus obedience, freedom versus equality, etc. would remain highly relevant, assuming human beings continue to be human beings and have personal problems at this level.
Great post, each question merits a tome of answers. You might consider making it a sticky! Let’s just consider the first one, “With an obvious, active pantheon, how is monotheism possible?” A very partial answer is that this is essentially the struggle described in the old testament.
When you read it, it’s obvious that many deities are in people’s collective thoughts, some coexisting, some (notably Jahweh) fighting for supremacy. The way monotheism prevailed in that case is the covenant, which is kinda like traditional marriage: the people become the wife (restricted to labor and re/produce for one husband), the deity becomes the husband, who is free to bestow both favors and blows at his whim as long as he guarantees some protection and resources.
The Metamor Keep shared fantasy universe has a monotheistic religion that is essentially Christianity, and a polytheistic faith whose gods can be summoned and spoken to directly. Though Metamor’s high priestess suspects that the gods she pays homage to are merely immortals with an obscene amount of magical ability who trade worship (and other favors) for blessings and miracles.
http://metamorkeep.com/
Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light was based on a very similar premise: a once-spacefaring society has lost most technology except for a small group (I think descendants of the bridge crew) who have become quasi-immortal and are lording it over the rest.
Come to think of it I know why priests are necessary in high fantasy. Because the gods are too lazy to personally show up for every little thing the mortals want divine assistance for, so they allow certain followers to use miniscule fractions of their power and act as their proxies. If there’s a greater demon attacking a village their patron deity might send an avatar but don’t expect him to leave the outer planes until Ragnarok.
I’ve also noticed that polytheistic faiths often don’t have messiahs or prophets, there are human-god hybrids but they tend to be adventurers or rulers.
Polytheistic religions of old tended to be non-proselytizing because they were syncretic. When they met a new religion, they found equivalents between the new and old deities. This worked well until they bumped into the Abrahamic “convert or die” trio.
Another major point about the latter is that they disadvantage women by definition. Women’s social status varied wildly in polytheistic cultures, but they had representations of all genders in the deities, which meant that women could be/come gods. In monotheistic religions, the equation of god with maleness is explicit. This has significantly deranged the social discourse. I for one would love to have seen a secular democracy that still follows an enlightenment version of syncretic polytheism.
I have seen a number of “hybrid” religions in science-fiction, unfortunately the only examples I can think of are Futurama’s First Amalgated Church and Omniquantism from the webcomic Freefall ( http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1400/fc01386.htm ).
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Shiva is not only known to the Hindus and he is well loved all over the world under other names. It is normal for Gods to have stoires about their unorthodox adventures etc the Sumerians did too and if the physical manifestation of Shiva entity appeared to be defective in there might be a reason. We are in the physical plane what can we know about hyperdimensional beings.. Gods they are much more evolved. Naturally we might not understand 100% why something is a certain way.
Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun also has gods-that-used-to-be-mortal-beings. His live on in the computer system of a generation ship, only appearing occasionally to the population. There are priests whose job, at least in part, is to regulate access to the screens where the gods appear (and to preside over sacrifices to placate/beseech them to appear).
While there were many gods on the ship, each city-state had their own patron god, which may be the first step to monotheistic practices (“I shall have no other gods before you”).