2 Chronicles 33
1.
Ancient people worshipped the stars as gods, and believed that they had control over their lives and destinies. This is something that modern people, at least in Western Europe and North America, have great difficulty understanding. They can hardly be blamed for it, of course. It is rarely easy to understand the people of a different time and place. Even when you feel a kinship of mind or feeling with an ancient person--and many who read their works do--you nevertheless stumble across things that are utterly foreign, that cut clean contrary to the ordinary intuitions of life, the common sense of your own age. The worship of the heavenly bodies is one of those things.
To the typical modern, raised (even if he never studied or understood it) on post-Classical physics and living in a city (as virtually everyone does now) where the night-time sky is almost invisible against the glare of man-made lamps, stars simply are balls of super-heated plasma and gas. The planets simply are giant rocks or balls of gas. Maybe, just maybe, they contain life, and writers and filmmakers imagine what might come to pass, if someday we did meet a person like us in mind and soul (whatever he or she or it looked like), but from outer space.
But neither stars nor planets are themselves alive. For the ancients, they were. Higher and brighter than the wet, dirty ball on which we ourselves dwell, the heavens were everlasting and unchanging, a perpetual order moving in perfect harmony with the providence that ruled the world. At once gods and the work of the supreme God, they regulated both heaven and earth, and bound man's life, character, and destiny to their dictates. To this, the science of astrology was dedicated.
I go too far, of course. Some ancient thinkers--most notably the Epicureans--flatly denied that there was a providence at all, let alone that the stars superintended over the fates of man. Others--most notably the writers of the Hebrew scriptures, and their Jewish and Christian heirs--utterly rejected the deification of the heavens. However, even the anonymous author of Chronicles, who deplored Manasseh's worship of the starry host, would have believed that there were 'lights in the firmament of the heaven ... for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years'. 'And I will shew wonders', another prophet wrote, 'in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.' The heavens were not gods, but they were still steered by the hand of God.
Some modern Westerners do still see the world, in part, as ancient people did. Belief in heavenly signs is not uncommon in Pentecostal circles, for example, or among some (perhaps rather more eclectic) inhabitants of the internet. But it is not the ordinary bent of our ways of thinking. Even those who do believe in heavenly signs still ordinarily speak of the movement of the heavens according to physical laws, not the will of Providence or, still less, the will of the heavenly bodies themselves. Our universe is fundamentally impersonal, not a Great Chain of Being extending (for Platonists) from earth to the ineffable One itself or (for Christians) to the highest created beings, who lie an infinite gulf below God.
2.
One of the attractions of fantasy literature is its ability to offer a vision of a world different--either objectively or in the understanding of its inhabitants--from our own. One need not, of course, believe that that vision is true, in order for it to hold its mythic power, and the older, more personal ways of viewing the universe have a great deal of mythic power. C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy recognised that squarely. Though heliocentric, the Field of Arbol is not really our Solar System as a scientist would describe it; it is our solar system, described in mystical terms borrowed from the medieval cosmology that Lewis described in The Discarded Image. That image was, as he recognised there, rightly discarded. Beautiful as it was, it was not really true; yet, appropriately updated, it made a potent setting for a 'fairy tale', as he called That Hideous Strength.
Both Lewis's trilogy and Tolkien's Silmarillion-stories (save in their very last revisions) put the human protagonists in something like the ancient universe, above the animals and beneath exceptionally great and powerful cosmic beings. Neither, of course, advanced anything like a religion of those beings, as I noted in Tolkien's case in the previous post. Yet cosmology, whatever its shape or inspiration, will inevitably leave an imprint on the religious thought-world of a people, including an invented people. Comets would cause a great deal more alarm among modern Americans of all religions, if they still believed them to be signs from God or the gods.
There is thus a great deal of room for an author to contemplate ways in which a world might be ordered--or in which a people might imagine their world to be ordered--and their influence on the thoughts and actions of the characters within a story. In my own writing, I have thus far largely adopted variations on ancient and more modern models. One could, however, imagine yet more exotic alternatives: a world in which astrology is true, for example, or in which every natural law really is carried out by a sentient spirit of some kind.
Whatever the case may be, it will bear upon the religion and worship of the people in the story. If the stars dictate your fate, expect many people to attempt to propitiate them by sacrifice or prayer--or to seek, as some ancient Gnostics did, greater powers that could transcend the evil will of those who seemed to have power over the universe. If the sun rises because its steerswoman makes it rise, expect her to be lauded in hymns and psalms for her dedication--unless, of course, she wishes you to direct your praises to a greater at whose pleasure she herself serves.
The key thing, I think, is simply to remember that your people may not view the world in the way you do, and that actions that seem irrational to us might well, within their world, be the right ones. Do not have a man pray silently to a quasi-divine hero present before him in the flesh, as one well-known fantasy-writer has done; still less have a man believe that the stars rule over him, and not try to gain their aid, or, if they are averse, at least to stand against them as bravely as he might. Your characters must truly live within their world, as its inhabitants and not as modern people disguised as natives.
3.
Most interesting, in my mind, is genuine disagreement over cosmology and divinity within a fantasy-world. In The Sign of the Sibyl, I have begun to sketch a contest between Newtonian mechanics (and a strand of allied in-world astronomy) and a kind of magic for self-willed supermen; this is, in story, part of a larger contest between God and the gods, both deified mortals and primordial beings of chaos and destruction.
That story involves the irruption of Christianity into another world, one only partially linked to our own. One could imagine a conflict that was entirely native to the invented world itself: a struggle, for example, between worshippers of many gods and strict dualists, or the overthrow of an inherited heliocentric system by a less intuitive, yet correct geocentric model (now there's a reversal of our ordinary presumptions!). Mark Rosenfelder's wonderful short story, The Multipliers, depicts something akin to this: a bitter social and political conflict between parties with different mathematical techniques. Such a controversy can involve all the things that we ordinarily differentiate as politics, academics, and religion--and lots of good, old ordinary conflict between the personalities of characters.
No one, maybe, wants to read a story about philosophy; a story about philosophers, on the other hand, may be a great deal more fun, and no less insightful for it. Tolkien, famously, abhorred allegory, but allegory is not the only way to make a story about ideas, nor the most effective, as story, at least for one raised on modern novels (we must never pretend, after all, that our ways of telling stories are the only ones). Religion in fantasy is not just a matter of inventing practices or pantheons, or transposing real-world religions to an invented setting; it, and the wider arrays of thought and practice of which it is part, can provide much of the actual material of a story itself.
Ancient people worshipped the stars as gods, and believed that they had control over their lives and destinies. This is something that modern people, at least in Western Europe and North America, have great difficulty understanding. They can hardly be blamed for it, of course. It is rarely easy to understand the people of a different time and place. Even when you feel a kinship of mind or feeling with an ancient person--and many who read their works do--you nevertheless stumble across things that are utterly foreign, that cut clean contrary to the ordinary intuitions of life, the common sense of your own age. The worship of the heavenly bodies is one of those things.
To the typical modern, raised (even if he never studied or understood it) on post-Classical physics and living in a city (as virtually everyone does now) where the night-time sky is almost invisible against the glare of man-made lamps, stars simply are balls of super-heated plasma and gas. The planets simply are giant rocks or balls of gas. Maybe, just maybe, they contain life, and writers and filmmakers imagine what might come to pass, if someday we did meet a person like us in mind and soul (whatever he or she or it looked like), but from outer space.
But neither stars nor planets are themselves alive. For the ancients, they were. Higher and brighter than the wet, dirty ball on which we ourselves dwell, the heavens were everlasting and unchanging, a perpetual order moving in perfect harmony with the providence that ruled the world. At once gods and the work of the supreme God, they regulated both heaven and earth, and bound man's life, character, and destiny to their dictates. To this, the science of astrology was dedicated.
I go too far, of course. Some ancient thinkers--most notably the Epicureans--flatly denied that there was a providence at all, let alone that the stars superintended over the fates of man. Others--most notably the writers of the Hebrew scriptures, and their Jewish and Christian heirs--utterly rejected the deification of the heavens. However, even the anonymous author of Chronicles, who deplored Manasseh's worship of the starry host, would have believed that there were 'lights in the firmament of the heaven ... for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years'. 'And I will shew wonders', another prophet wrote, 'in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.' The heavens were not gods, but they were still steered by the hand of God.
Some modern Westerners do still see the world, in part, as ancient people did. Belief in heavenly signs is not uncommon in Pentecostal circles, for example, or among some (perhaps rather more eclectic) inhabitants of the internet. But it is not the ordinary bent of our ways of thinking. Even those who do believe in heavenly signs still ordinarily speak of the movement of the heavens according to physical laws, not the will of Providence or, still less, the will of the heavenly bodies themselves. Our universe is fundamentally impersonal, not a Great Chain of Being extending (for Platonists) from earth to the ineffable One itself or (for Christians) to the highest created beings, who lie an infinite gulf below God.
2.
One of the attractions of fantasy literature is its ability to offer a vision of a world different--either objectively or in the understanding of its inhabitants--from our own. One need not, of course, believe that that vision is true, in order for it to hold its mythic power, and the older, more personal ways of viewing the universe have a great deal of mythic power. C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy recognised that squarely. Though heliocentric, the Field of Arbol is not really our Solar System as a scientist would describe it; it is our solar system, described in mystical terms borrowed from the medieval cosmology that Lewis described in The Discarded Image. That image was, as he recognised there, rightly discarded. Beautiful as it was, it was not really true; yet, appropriately updated, it made a potent setting for a 'fairy tale', as he called That Hideous Strength.
Both Lewis's trilogy and Tolkien's Silmarillion-stories (save in their very last revisions) put the human protagonists in something like the ancient universe, above the animals and beneath exceptionally great and powerful cosmic beings. Neither, of course, advanced anything like a religion of those beings, as I noted in Tolkien's case in the previous post. Yet cosmology, whatever its shape or inspiration, will inevitably leave an imprint on the religious thought-world of a people, including an invented people. Comets would cause a great deal more alarm among modern Americans of all religions, if they still believed them to be signs from God or the gods.
There is thus a great deal of room for an author to contemplate ways in which a world might be ordered--or in which a people might imagine their world to be ordered--and their influence on the thoughts and actions of the characters within a story. In my own writing, I have thus far largely adopted variations on ancient and more modern models. One could, however, imagine yet more exotic alternatives: a world in which astrology is true, for example, or in which every natural law really is carried out by a sentient spirit of some kind.
Whatever the case may be, it will bear upon the religion and worship of the people in the story. If the stars dictate your fate, expect many people to attempt to propitiate them by sacrifice or prayer--or to seek, as some ancient Gnostics did, greater powers that could transcend the evil will of those who seemed to have power over the universe. If the sun rises because its steerswoman makes it rise, expect her to be lauded in hymns and psalms for her dedication--unless, of course, she wishes you to direct your praises to a greater at whose pleasure she herself serves.
The key thing, I think, is simply to remember that your people may not view the world in the way you do, and that actions that seem irrational to us might well, within their world, be the right ones. Do not have a man pray silently to a quasi-divine hero present before him in the flesh, as one well-known fantasy-writer has done; still less have a man believe that the stars rule over him, and not try to gain their aid, or, if they are averse, at least to stand against them as bravely as he might. Your characters must truly live within their world, as its inhabitants and not as modern people disguised as natives.
3.
Most interesting, in my mind, is genuine disagreement over cosmology and divinity within a fantasy-world. In The Sign of the Sibyl, I have begun to sketch a contest between Newtonian mechanics (and a strand of allied in-world astronomy) and a kind of magic for self-willed supermen; this is, in story, part of a larger contest between God and the gods, both deified mortals and primordial beings of chaos and destruction.
That story involves the irruption of Christianity into another world, one only partially linked to our own. One could imagine a conflict that was entirely native to the invented world itself: a struggle, for example, between worshippers of many gods and strict dualists, or the overthrow of an inherited heliocentric system by a less intuitive, yet correct geocentric model (now there's a reversal of our ordinary presumptions!). Mark Rosenfelder's wonderful short story, The Multipliers, depicts something akin to this: a bitter social and political conflict between parties with different mathematical techniques. Such a controversy can involve all the things that we ordinarily differentiate as politics, academics, and religion--and lots of good, old ordinary conflict between the personalities of characters.
No one, maybe, wants to read a story about philosophy; a story about philosophers, on the other hand, may be a great deal more fun, and no less insightful for it. Tolkien, famously, abhorred allegory, but allegory is not the only way to make a story about ideas, nor the most effective, as story, at least for one raised on modern novels (we must never pretend, after all, that our ways of telling stories are the only ones). Religion in fantasy is not just a matter of inventing practices or pantheons, or transposing real-world religions to an invented setting; it, and the wider arrays of thought and practice of which it is part, can provide much of the actual material of a story itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment