I once worked with a guy who had been born in Cuba and raised in Haiti before coming to the U.S. He was agnostic with an conglomerated overlay of Judaism and Catholicism, plus more than a smidgen of Vodoun picked up from his Haitian nannies. He was wicked smart and possessed the deadly combination of a mean sense of humor and a razor-tongue. One evening, when my dear spouse kidded him about some of his Vodoun superstitions (I believe the catalyst was the presence of a conch in the house, which is a harbinger of death), he snapped back, “Yeah, well you think that’s weird? You grew up worshiping a god who was dead for three days, and you celebrate his zombie return by eating his flesh and drinking his blood. That’s right—you worship your zombie god with cannibalism!”
When you look at it from the outside, Christianity is pretty weird.
We can go into the history of religion—the progression from the killing of the God/Sacred King to the substitution of a “God/King for the Day” to the ritual killing of the god/king’s totem animal to a symbolic sacrificial representation, and Christianity signposts at every one of these stops. Christianity is a syncretic religion, meaning that it historically incorporated aspects of other religions when convenient (one reason Christians celebrate Christmas with evergreen trees and Easter with eggs and bunnies). Embedded in the Christian faith are the bones of various earlier religions, however fundamentalist Christians might wish to disagree. And that’s all rather beside the point. When you look at it from the outside, Christianity is pretty weird.
It’s that perspective, that of the outsider, that serves to introduce tonight’s topic: religion in fantasy.
Fantasy as Religion
C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books are our go-to example, and they pose problems. One: they’re children’s books, and we’re considering fantasy as an adult literary form. Two: they’re allegorical. They’re not exactly conversion texts, but I think that’s what Lewis was attempting when he wrote them. Despite the fact that they’re not perfect examples of fantasy as religion, they’re the books you’re likely to think of first when you think of the topic, so let’s do this.
Like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, Oxford don C.S. Lewis was a medievalist and was intimately familiar with the conversion narrative—a narrative in which the principal voice (or character or narrator, to use terms that post-date medieval paradigms) tells the story of his or her conversion to the faith. In the process of reading, ideally the reader, too, is converted.
Conversion texts were really popular in the Middle Ages. Hildegard von Bingen’s Scivias and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love are mystic conversion texts. Dante’s Divine Comedy is probably the most famous conversion text in World Literature. The Gawain-poet’s Pearl is another exquisite example. Piers Plowman starts out as a conversion text but gets lost along the way, and is unfinished.
I contend that Lewis meant for Narnia to be read as a conversion text. It’s not mere allegory; in allegory, one thing directly represents another. We read allegories like Pilgrim’s Progress or Chaucer’s Melibee or Spenser’s Faerie Queene with their straight one-to-one correspondences: Una represents the True Church, Archimago is the Pope (if memory serves) Gloriana is Queen Elizabeth, etc. The aim is edification and enlightenment but doesn’t go quite so far as inspiring belief. Allegories were also popular during the Middle Ages, and speaking as a medievalist who’s had to wade through more than my share of them, the Middle Ages can keep them.
Anyway, allegories and conversion texts are a distinction with a real difference. One can be a subset of the other, and Lewis uses allegorical devices in the Narnia books, but the correspondences are larger than that. We’re brought to believe in Aslan’s divinity, and only later do we learn that Aslan = Christ. The narrative leads the reader to belief, an invitation made explicit in The Last Battle, when Narnia and the Real World are bridged. (Do a quick search for “Narnia and religion” for about a half-million references about Christian themes in the Narnia books.)
It’s a good thing that the books stand on their own as stories, because readers in general tend to dislike being proselytized, and more than one fan of Narnia soured on the milk of True Faith. Neil Gaiman, who read and loved the Narnia series as a child, writes:
For good or ill the religious allegory, such as it was, went entirely over my head, and it was not until I was about twelve that I found myself realizing that there were Certain Parallels….I was personally offended: I felt that an author, whom I had trusted, had had a hidden agenda. I had nothing against religion, or religion in fiction....My upset was, I think, that it made less of Narnia for me, it made it less interesting a thing, less interesting a place. (1, p.34)
Putting fiction (any fiction, I would assert) in the service of religion is enormously risky. Religious witness in fiction can work well (and Lewis did it beautifully in The Screwtape Letters), but moving from witness to advocacy is far more dangerous (there’s a reason that conversion texts are no longer popular). It’s the nature of fiction in general that it can nod to many powers but serves only one master, and that master is truth—human truth, not religious truth but the truth of what it means to be a human being.
Fantasy Co-opts Religion
In those halcyon days of the 1970’s when there was no such thing as a Fantasy Religion Generator or advice columns like 12 Questions to Help You Develop Gods/Religion in Your Fantasy Novel or Creating God: Religion in Fantasy , Katherine Kurtz was trying to figure out how to do religion.
Kurtz had the misfortune of being one of the first major fantasy writers in the generation after Tolkien, and she came along when publishers were beginning to realize that there was a voracious market for fantasy. She was just out of college and happened to meet a guy at a convention who gave her a name of an editor at Ballantine. She roughed out a couple of chapters, pitched an idea, came out with a contract for a trilogy, and became one of the early superstar fantasy writers of the 1970’s.
Why do I say she was unfortunate? Because she was a beginning writer who got famous in a time when fantasy was still undefined; the rules were shaking out; she was working in a form that no one else had really done much with, and her writing is very different from earlier practitioners of fantasy. It owes more to Mary Stewart than it does J.R.R. Tolkien. Like Terry Brooks’ early Shannara novels, Kurtz’s early novels...shall we say, disappoint? Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. There’s some good stuff there, some not-so-good stuff. Like Brooks, she’s taken a fair amount of heat from other writers for her shortcomings and serves as a cautionary example of premature success.
Which is also beside the point but will serve as another marker of Things We’ll Get To Later. Kurtz’s first novels were, of course, the Deryni and the Camber books, which she calls “historical fantasy.” She defines her form as “fiction which is set in a universe which closely corresponds to our own history, so far as sociological and religious background is concerned” (2, p. 239). Kurtz doesn’t so much invent a secondary world as she borrows one, generally early medieval with anachronisms.
Which means she also borrows heavily from Catholicism. “When I ordained Camber in Saint Camber, I took the ordination from pre-tenth century ecclesiastical practices” (2, p. 239). And she takes more than established liturgy; she takes a historic language and uses it in her made-up world: “Most of the Latin used in the books is taken directly from the Latin Missal or other liturgical sources” (2, p. 241). Let us pass in silence over the fact that she swiped sacred liturgy for her alternate history and passed it off as original, and move on to the difficulty of inventing under a book contract and a short deadline what took Tolkien more than fourteen years to build.
At the time, remember—nobody else was world building. It’s easy to bash Kurtz for wholesale lifting of a religion and pressing it into an alternate reality, but is that much different from what Steampunk did with technology? (Of course, with Steampunk, your mileage may vary.)
Faith as a Part of Secondary Creation
Many other fantasy novelists of the 1970’s and 80’s solved the problem of religion in their invented worlds by ignoring it. The stereotypical fantasy of the time featured a man’s man as hero, who could sword-fight the bad guys all day and swyve the wenches all night, who never got hurt or tired, who never failed but to triumph bigger and badder and more gloriously by the end. The villains were one-dimensional embodiments of evil and the women were big-breasted cardboard sirens who exist to be rescued and then eagerly give themselves to the hero. Blech.
Even the better quality fantasies of those decades (the ones that haven’t been remaindered into oblivion yet) don’t offer much in the way of religion—not with their focus on High Adventure For Adolescent Males. Religion, if it’s addressed at all, is usually referenced by a sacrifice or a bumbling priest or some blessing offered in an arcane (made-up) tongue.
Still, religious faith is a necessary part of a secondary world, as became obvious as fantasy grew up. Along with political systems, economics, technology, geography, art and history, religion is a vital component of any created reality. Fantasy writers now (the good ones, anyway) recognize that you have to address all the prime motivators that drive human action and interaction. Politics, industry, history, etc.—they’re all relatively straightforward. Religion is a tougher go. To be believable, it has to be done well. And that can be very tricky.
As my beginning vignette demonstrates, when a religion is viewed from a perspective outside of that religion, without the numen of belief, its rites appear quaint and/or downright silly. A cannibal god, indeed—a far cry from the dignity of High Mass. How it’s done, and done without leaving room for the ridiculous to creep in, is a delicate matter. It must be woven carefully. Best done, I think, is when it’s mentioned but not explained. For instance: G.R.R. Martin: old gods, seven gods, a drowned god, a fire god—take your pick. Each one illuminates the world of its own believers but doesn’t try to convince the reader of its verity. Each one, treated with respect.
To be done well, a character’s religion informs that character’s actions, guides her ethics, buttresses her morals. R.A. Salvatore does this extremely well in his popular Drizzt series, wherein most of his characters have so thoroughly integrated the teachings of their various deities that, when we meet agnostic characters like Jarlaxle and Enteri, the effect of their situational ethics is striking.
We also have to recognize that religion is a part of the world but not the point of the story, a component of culture, sometimes an influencer of action, but it doesn’t drive the climax—if it does, you’re looking at a conversion text, and welcome to the Middle Ages. How to distinguish between a sine qua non and an absolute essential, hmmm….
In mainstream fiction, religion is absolutely integral in The Brothers Karamazov, which Pico is currently starting as a group read (and I highly recommend you check it out—the conversation will be amazing), but not so essential in, say, Les Miserables, even though redemption is the entire subtext to Jean Valjean’s story. Likewise, in fantasy, religion is an important part of the context in Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books, but far more essential in Seven Erikson’s Malazan series. In Deadhouse Gates we meet the followers of Sha’ik, a cult that bears more than a passing resemblance to contemporary jihadism, and the corollaries are pretty disquieting. In both examples, The Brothers Karamazov and The Malazan Book of the Fallen, religion—integral as it might be—serves a larger purpose, answers to a greater master: What does it mean to be human? Religion can take us part of the way, but it won’t get us to our destination. Only fiction can do that.
Notes:
1. Neil Gaiman, “Three Authors: On Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton; The MythCon 35 Guest of Honor Speech,” in A View from the Cheap Seats. NY: William Morrow, 2016, pp. 33-38.
2. Katherine Kurtz and Jeffrey M. Elliot, “Interview Essay,” in Fantasists on Fantasy: A Collection of Critical Reflections By Eighteen Masters of the Art. Robert H. Boyers and Kenneth J. Zahorski, eds. NY: Avon, 1984, pp. 235-260.