Schaubert's Laws of Fantasy Religions

A formalized schema for imagining and understanding religion in fantasy, science fiction, and other speculative works.

I’ve thought about religions in fantasy, scifi, and speculative fiction more and more over the past year. It has started to bug me that I’m not finding a more formalized piece on how to make fantasy religions out there — religions in fantasy and science fiction worlds. One author asked me if I did a catalog search on the Cambridge University Press intro to fantasy, the Strange Horizons roundtable, the PhD theses, etc. — yes, I'm aware. And yes, I'm aware of the DnD guide on how to make one. None of these are giving me what I want: I want a formalized schema on how to make one. As is often the rule in all creative acts, when you cannot find it, make it yourself off the scraps of what you find. I humbly offer the collage that follows. Outlines of specific religions of specific worlds exist, but not outlines for how they work in any meta sense. These are the kinds of questions I ask here regularly, so make sure you have shared them with a friend and subscribed:

Photo by Robert Lukeman on Unsplash

Part of the problem is that so few people, up until recently at least, have written lovingly about religion in the genre outside of, say, Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz or something like Anathem by Neil Stephenson. These days, Sanderson has written voluminously about many, many types of invented religions and he seems to understand that religion is fundamentally human. There are others, but he seems to be taking up a standard that has lain mostly unwielded on the landscape of the genre for some time. Another post for another day will survey the field, but other titles come to mind (negatively and positively) like Heinlein’s “Methuselah’s Children” and Stranger in a Strange Land (though this can be argued as anti-religion), James Blish’s “A Case of Conscience,” Lord of the World by Hugh Benson, M.P. Shiel’s Lord of the Sea, C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, “The Man” by Ray Bradbury, “Fool’s Errand” by Paul L. Payne, Believers’ World by Robert Lowndes.

I wanted to create a taxonomy that would work no matter what you run through it, sort of a philosophical grid for making these sorts of systems analogous to Sanderson’s Laws of Magic (which works no matter the kind or scale of magic system). It works for me, that’s sufficient. I put a pretentious title to it just to make it easier for you to bookmark and find (only 300 people in the U.S. have my last name, so slapping it to the front of something guarantees obscurity). If you find it unhelpful, ignore this I suppose. If you find the title too presumptuous, I apologize: suggest a better title in the comments. Or rage in the comments tastefully and kindly and with civility: I’m a happy dialog partner.

One last note on tone because sometimes it’s difficult to parse over text: in case it’s unclear, I have dear friends who believe so, so many different things and practice so, so many different rites. Even Dawkins and Harris, whom I critique, I respect as having a generally civil voice on this platform and others and see them as neighbors with whom I would love to talk philosophy and politics over coffee (my body won’t process beer much anymore, though they’d be welcome to imbibe). So whatever else you read in this, let this be a love letter to friends and global neighbors who hold to a great plurality of philosophies and practice a great many rites as we all push one another to seek after truth, beauty, and goodness. As I sign my emails, I will say now: unconditional love, respect, and confidence to all of you.

On Religion.

I here use my broadest conceivable definition of the term “religion” — I mean corporate and individual habits flowing from an all encompassing worldview that may be more true or more false or even neutral according to actuality and reality when compared to other such worldview-habits. This worldview defines what it means to think, feel, act, and experience life and therefore governs and defines the group and individual choices and habits of those who hold it. These habits are often called “rites” or “rituals” or “religion” or “routine.” These worldviews are often called “theology” or “philosophy.”

This may seem, at first blush, too broad to some. I’ll remind naysayers that the term religio fundamentally means to bind oneself. Those “bonds” or obligations or references or vows imply one joins a set of beliefs, habits, and choices. One writer hinted at this when he said that everyone wants to tell me about free love but no one asks me if I’m free to bind myself. He was redefining his marital vows in terms of French libertarianism: a choice to bind to a set of restricted habits. Because of this he said a vow is a future appointment with myself saying this is the kind of person I want to be by X date. Such a vow exists in many, if not most all, of the mainline religions our planet has developed.

Of course it could go the other way. As David Bentley Hart and others have argued over and over again, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are high priests of a scientism religion. Not science, scientism. Their religion is not the same thing as the mere worldview of Darwinian evolution (nor of that earlier evolution posited by Augustine), nor even of science in general when you consider that Rev. John Polkinghorne was the Cambridge chair of physics or that Father Georges Lemaître formulated the Big Bang hypothesis. The list goes on.

Rather what

Richard Dawkins

and

Sam Harris

and their ilk have done is to take a rather mean version of atheism (atheism is, I’ll remind you, an entire genre of worldviews in both the modern and ancient eras with many, many different variants held by many happy and moral folk whom I still call friends) and turn that mean version of atheism into a stock set of memes, habits, rites, and bindings. In their vatic role, they and some others safeguard observances that according to and against which others — both inside and outside their community — are judged. This comes complete with their recent atheist conference here in Brooklyn that’s indistinguishable from Evangelical religious conferences and suffers therefore the identical twentieth-century British critiques of American hotels and conference centers leveled in (picking almost at random here) books like What I Saw in America.

Like them or loathe them or see them as happy dialog partners and neighbors as I do, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are religious leaders precisely in the way that John Polkinghorne wasn’t prior to his ordination. So I’m being careful when I say by religion I mean corporate and individual habits oriented around an all encompassing worldview that may be true or false. This worldview defines what it means to experience life and therefore governs and defines group and individual choices and habits. This is, of course, a much wider and inclusive and historically accurate articulation of the word “religion” than in the way that Dawkins and Harris themselves define religion, particularly when they say something so silly as being against Religion or as if they don’t follow Religion. No one follows capital-R Religion per se in the same way that no one speaks capital-L Language per se: we follow a religion (in the case of Dawkins, scientistic atheism, with its requisite rights and responsibilities) and speak a Language (in the case of Dawkins, English). Creating philosophical rites to advocate for the destruction of Religion is as silly as using English to advocate for the destruction of Language: it cannot be done. This is Aristotelian genre 101.

Again, my definition could apply to formalized institutional religions or to private beliefs with a congregation or a coven of one. After all, L. Ron Hubbard started with himself, though I’ll remind you he had neither his great grandson nor Harlan Ellison convinced. In fact, the Harlan link is a direct testimony from Harlan witnessing the moment Hubbard decided to found a religion. In final defense of Dawkins and Harris, it is precisely these kinds of cults of personality that are worthy of deconstruction. But in the case of Hubbard, they would be deconstructing a religion, not Religion per se.

Whatever you do when you make a fantasy or science fiction religion, just make sure you don’t install yourself as its figurehead. Pretty please?

On Worldview.

A worldview in the broadest sense is a κοσμοθεωρία — a theory of everything.

I’m using “world” in the old philosophical sense not to indicate Earth, but the universe or multiverse or omniverse of omnivores or whatever. Everything that is — creation, existence, universe — these big words indicate the cosmos / κοσμος.

Theoria, then, is speculation. And this is where speculative fiction is actually fun. It’s doing the work of philosophy and ethics by means of not only meditations on our own cosmos, but on those cosmous we invent. Plato, it could be argued, wrote one of the first speculative utopias in The Republic and that fantasy land Kallipolis (Καλλίπολις), as Tolkien would argue millennia later, had real effects on political policy. Therefore in the philosophical sense there is only one true vision of a given cosmos we invent, the true history of that cosmou that we may or may not reveal. (One that, if we’re being honest about the nature of authorial intent, is predicated upon our own cosmological history, which is the purview of philosophers and is therefore why philosophy often predicates art and sciences, the “syllogisms” and “realities” that ground and uphold and perhaps even enhypostasize both ends of the made thing, ars, or discovered knowledge, scientia). The characters have beliefs and habits that correspond to, cohere with, and pragmatically work alongside that actual reality of the world.

1. That is to say first we speculate the cosmos.

2. Then we speculate what characters believe about the cosmos.

3. Then we speculate how that governs their feelings and behavior and words (though feelings often come first).

These worldviews interact very differently, depending. Islam, for instance, works as a sort of Nabokovian parody of Catholicism that includes even a straight borrowing of the rosary in the Misbaha (مِسْبَحَة) beads. Most Muslims do not realize the three beads at the end of the Misbaha (مِسْبَحَة) originally represented the Trinity for they were arguably borrowed from the rosary, whatever hadiths say about counting on the fingers.¹ And my muslim friends, at least from their perspective, rightly reject the trinitarian doctrine for they are reacting to the, albeit misguided, assumption that Christians believe God slept with Mary to make the “Son of God” and so trinitarian beliefs would break monotheism. It’s a similar critique leveled from most Jews here in New York, reformed, conservative, and hassidic in mind. If they or their muslim cousins are right, by the logic of all the monotheistic creeds they have every right to level this critique at Christians. In this way a discussion about the nature of hypostasis can lead to a single necklace and that single necklace can lead to a discussion about the nature of hypostasis and include, within it, romances and wars, peacemaking and sea voyages, capers and discoveries for all of these happened in and around both the dialogues of مِسْبَحَة and rosary. Though Protestants seldom admit it, didn’t even Martin Luther pray the rosary?

And so for another interaction of worldviews both in and outside of house, you have various crusades that (in the case of the Dominicans) were bloody or (in the case of St Francis himself) were logical and pacifistic. Crusades that were the way of the world in a world of jihad. I’m a pacifist myself, taking after folks like Francis, but I suppose were I not in some alternate universe, I believe even then I’d much rather people go to war over ultimate reality and morality rather than, say, eugenics or economic theories of efficiency: war over morality, not machinery. In that medieval day of moral wars (an irony I refuse to concede other than to say that people went to war over their morals more often than for their money), it was forbidden almost seven months out of the year for people to fight. The only glimpse we have of this happening in the modern era is that overused anecdote of Americans and Germans stopping their fight in the trenches on the Christmas Truce of World War I. This story is often told as a heartwarming, “See? We can all get along.” But I view it as fundamentally tragic, for it was the last time in the west that fighting stopped during a high holiday. Granted, it still begs the question on why we ought to murder one another the other five months out of the year. But still, seven months of mandatory ceasefire? That kind of global morality is absolutely inconceivable in our mechanized, disenchanted epoch. So inconceivable that most people don’t even know the history of it. This is perhaps why there’s still an old joke that Dominicans tell where they say that the Dominicans were responsible for eradicating Albigensianism and the Jesuits were responsible for eradicating Protestantism: have you met any Albigensians? To which Jesuits often say, “The Dominicans had swords.”

The dark joke also neglects to understand that most Protestants these days are Albigensians in all but name: five point Calvinism is little more than the zombie resuscitation of neo-Manichæan ideals.

It’s complicated, in other words, when these systems interact. That’s what makes it fun.

And with merely those two examples, prayer beads and conflicts internal to Christendom, it reveals (1) the interaction of just two worldviews, back and forth in a given time slot, and (2) another one in relation to itself. I once someone try to publicly shame me on a college trip for daring to buy a vegan burrito in New York. She had no category for holy vegans in her life. I, however, had met several. She never stopped to think that I just thought it looked tasty. We never got to that part because I spent the time defending the vegans. That’s sort of a proxy battle that happens often with me simply because most people have this us-verses-them reaction to meeting other people of other beliefs and practices. I have a sort of humanizing reaction: I lean in towards the seemingly strange because it’s always human, deep down. I feel that Sanderson has this knee-jerk reaction as well, but even a book like Speaker for the Dead is built on this assumption. In fact, Speaker for the Dead fundamentally changed the way I do eulogies in real life precisely because of this humanizing factor.

This posture of humanizing my neighbor has sort of marked my life: one of a rather informal ambassador who, when he hears one friend insulting the life and rites and worldview of another, immediately rises up to defend them. That kind of proxy argument also shows how complicated these interactions can be: two people, neither of whom have a direct vested interest in the conflict of two ideas or rites, arguing about them over a frigging burrito.

Whatever the case may be, it seems the worldview of a given subset of a given people group (which is loosely defined by language and fashion and food and finance and a slew of other cultural motifs that arise in what we make from where we are in order to build community) should:

1. Be clearly defined institutionally in exact proportion to the age of the institution and in context of other institutions in which it is culturally born

2. Have different sects and schools that continue to branch as the worldview ages to varying degrees of orthodoxy

3. Be defined, whether explicitly or implicitly, in the mind of the individual who adheres to varying degrees to the given sect she has joined or been born inside

4. Come with requisite rights, responsibilities, rites, and habits

5. Conflict with other ideas and habits within the individual

6. And therefore the institution (consider prophets, martyrs, populists, etc.)

7. And therefore among and in dialog and even conflict with rival or neutral worldviews in a given space and time

8. This should scale based on the size and isolation of the given society, as well as to the degree that said worldview is fundamentalist (read: cult-like) in nature. Its willingness to engage in rational discourse will determine its rate of adaptability and, in some cases, longevity. Incest after a certain number of generations becomes literally self defeating.

On Truth.

Every worldview makes truth claims, but some are closer to the truth than others for the same reason that a statement in a court room may be truer or falser, an action for a dying man may be more or less good, a symphony might make more or less people experience beauty. Even the postmodern claim that “truth is relative” is an absolutist self-defeating statement that is weighed against other truth claims.

Because of this, multiple sects may well agree on the same true fact and respond wildly differently. Take the resurrection of Jesus, for instance. Most modern Christians of orthodox (or creedal) persuasion would follow (whether directly or indirectly) the Oxford don NT Wright’s 800-page tome defending the historicity of the resurrection. Most would make the claim that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead in the first century.

They would, however, give radically different weight to that. Some, in direct contradiction of the apostles and particularly Paul, would actually weight the crucifixion as more important than the resurrection. Others would use “life after death” instead of Wright’s configuration of resurrection being “life after ‘life after death’” as an excuse for embracing a culture of death and handguns. Still others would use it to be motivated towards Kingian and martyrological nonviolence (“If I’m going to rise from the dead anyways, what do I have to fear from death? Why defend myself?”)

My muslim friends, in fact, would affirm that Jesus, as a prophet, rose, but isn’t God.

I have a Buddhist friend who believes that Jesus was a bodhisattva (बोधिसत्त्व) who rose, but is not God. Others would call him an avatar. An avatar, I’ll remind you, is a radically different being from an Islamic prophet. The former is much closer to Gnostics of old, the latter much closer to how many Mormons treat Joseph Smith.

And so even this one historical event, assuming it happened observably within our cosmos, still bears out with wildly divergent beliefs and praxes among various religious communities.

Within the realm of the actual truth of your fantasy or science fiction world, you ought to know:

1. What happened (or didn’t) in history

2. What it means (or doesn’t) for a group

3. What it means (or doesn’t) the local manifestation to that group

4. What it means (or doesn’t) in contrast to others

5. What it means (or doesn’t) for me — or character in question

All five of these may be logically consistent or full of radical inconsistencies and cognitive dissonances as we often see with all of our political parties in the modern environment.

On habits (or rites).

The Latin word for habit simply means something I have. I have faithfulness or I have lust or I have fortitude. I have a morning routine of working out twice a week or I have a morning routine of hitting my alarm eighteen times because I’m depressed. Or lazy. Or both.

Definitely both if we’re talking about sophomore in high school Lancelot.

These habits define my life. Whether I schedule time to meet up with friends. Whether they call me back. Whether I encourage or discourage codependency. Whether I write fiction in the morning or not. Or weekly. Or, for crying out loud, monthly?!

But they also define my friends. Our writing group has met every other Saturday in Brooklyn for seven years now. I will go there immediately after posting this. That’s a long time to keep meeting. Longer than all but one that I’m aware of in the genre space in New York City. It’s encouraged and given accountability to all of us to finish work and submit it and publish it.

But also!

There are Jews, Buddhists, Atheists, agnostics, Christians, Muslims, wiccans, etc. who have all graced the group. There’s interplay for the various reasons we have the habit of writing and sharing it.

That interplay is fascinating to me because we all agree that we all should be putting out more and better and more beautiful fiction.

Why?

I don’t have the answer entirely, but what I can say is this:

1. Show me a man’s week and I’ll show you his life. Individual habits define individuals.

2. Show me a group’s month and I’ll show you their century. Small group habits define the group: culture runs laps around vision. Consider the Inklings or the Algonquin writers. Consider the differences between the Benedictine Rule of Life and the Franciscan Rule of Life. Compare both to Buddhist monks. Compare all three to a Silicon Valley singularity cult.

3. Show me a religion’s yearly liturgy and I’ll show you their millennium.

Habits can change, but it involves changing triggers for a person, a group, a religion. The bigger they are the harder they are to change course.

This covers everything from kneeling to incense to calling regularly for the banning of religion to pogroms to “non persons” to making your own clothing to artist guilds. It covers a VAST array of human behaviour.

Examples:

I want to speak to a couple of rights and beliefs in fantasy to show how this ends up being helpful in the narrative.

Mindful of the Cosmology of Tolkien's legendarium, the light of Ilúvatar is given to Frodo by Galadriel. Sam ends up, in faith, wielding that vial in the depth of Shelob’s darkness. Now Ilúvatar means, more or less, “All father” which indicates “the alone.” And Shelob, being a child of Ungoliant, is a lesser Maia. Sort of a fallen angel, an immortal spirit who feasts on light and spins it into her webs. It’s a statement about proximate good in the reality of Tolkien’s world, but it’s also a statement about the substance of light. And when the undiluted light is unveiled — perhaps even unknowingly — by Sam, it is too much for the demon spider.

So here you have an object, a rite, a belief, and the reality of the world playing at very different levels.

In Sanderson’s Yumi and the Night Painter, (mild spoilers) you have a girl who summons spirits by stacking rocks. She doesn’t know why she stacks rocks, but it seems to efficaciously help because these spirits can be coaxed into a kind of engineering system for this pre-industrial society. What she doesn’t know is that her entire purpose for doing this, the truth of why and how it’s done, and the very framework of her world is all a lie. So you end up with two things: real efficacy for the summoning of spirit mixed with a false belief as to the purpose of that efficacy.

In Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series (spoilers), you have three kids who stumble upon a magic system that works something like code. That code rewrites the fabric of the universe by changing the rules of how things work in a given moment. However, they’re contending with a sort of Judeo-Christian mythology of demons and, as such, end up changing in the first book the very nature of why a given demon is fallen. So you have a religious praxis (the habit of magic) that in collaboration with the community (the folks she’s working with) ends up changing the fundamental laws of reality. Granted, it didn’t change the very plot intent of Diane Duane herself and so the Sophia (as Bulgakov would call it) of the life of the mind of Duane is contained totally within that change, but from the perspective of the characters it changes what was real about the world so that they now live in an alternative reality.

What other examples can you think of? Drop them in the comments:

Schaubert’s Laws of Fantasy Religions:

A fantasy religion features corporate and individual habits oriented around an all encompassing worldview that may be true or false within its given cosmos. This worldview defines what it means to experience life and therefore governs and defines group and individual choices and habits.

As with Sanderson’s laws of magic, there is a corresponding law: the degree to which the fantasy religion resolves a plot is the degree to which a reader must understand the inner workings of said religion.

The worldview should:

1. Be clearly defined institutionally in exact proportion to the age of the institution and in context of other institutions in which it is culturally born

2. Have different sects and schools that continue to branch as the worldview ages to varying degrees of orthodoxy

3. Be defined, whether explicitly or implicitly, in the mind of the individual who adheres to varying degrees to the given sect she has joined or been born inside

4. Come with requisite rights, responsibilities, rites, and habits

5. Conflict with other ideas and habits within the individual

6. And therefore the institution (consider prophets, martyrs, populists, etc.)

7. And therefore among and in dialog and even conflict with rival or neutral worldviews in a given space and time

8. This should scale based on the size of the city and the isolation of the given society, as well as to the degree that said worldview is fundamentalist (read: cult-like) in nature. Its willingness to engage in rational discourse will determine its rate of adaptability and, in some cases, longevity. Incest after a certain number of generations becomes literally self defeating.

Its truth claims in respect to the actual history of phenomena and persons must speak to:

1. What happened (or didn’t) in history

2. What it means (or doesn’t) for our group

3. What it means (or doesn’t) locally

4. What it means (or doesn’t) in contrast to others

5. What it means (or doesn’t) for me

These truth claims result in the habits and rites of the individual and group:

1. Show me a man’s week and I’ll show you his life. Individual habits define individuals.

2. Show me a group’s month and I’ll show you their century. Small group habits define the group: culture runs laps around vision. Consider the Inklings or the Algonquin writers.

3. Show me a religion’s yearly liturgy and I’ll show you their millennium

From this, there is a corollary on magic (or tech) extrapolated from VERY old rules passed down from the father of modern fantasy, George MacDonald. I want to make a couple of quick points due to some misconceptions posted elsewhere: a religion's moral code is not the same thing as moral law, moral law is more or less basic ethical behavior like "love of kin (general beneficence) and love of enemy (special beneficence)" that show up in every moral code text we have access to, cited here.

If nothing else, though, I'm just formalizing what MacDonald said. So take it up with the dead author of Phantastes:

1. Moral law extrapolates on what is good and bad and is predicated on natural law (i.e. sex within a certain proximity in familial relations will result in certain deformities, humans can drown, etc).

2. Physical law is based on how objects and persons interact in spacetime.

3. A religion may define parameters for behaviour, but if an author calls an evil man good (except in parody or satire) readers will revolt.

4. Physical laws may change, goodness (the idea that some men have higher character than other men) does not.

5. In changing physical laws, you change the physics and metaphysics of the world in direct relation to our own.

6. This change in metaphysics changes in-world systematic philosophical and historical and scientific methodology or truths.

7. As these truths change, so changes what is believable and practicable within the various fantasy religions

8. Making the context in which goodness and evil, bliss and suffering, truth and lies manifest shift.

Therefore magic (the physics and natural law of the universe) will lead to the metaphysics of the author, from which is predicated various fantasy religions that are more or less true and good in relation to the ultimate reality — the first principles — of that system.

1. “that they should count them on fingers, for they (the fingers) will be questioned and asked to speak.” Book #8, Hadith #1496