# Making a religion...



## Varamyrr (Sep 11, 2012)

Hello,

In my current WIP I'd like to feature several religions. Now, I must admit that I'm not really into religion but I do believe that it can move people. Since I consider it as necessary in my story, I was wondering how you can make a religion believable. In other words: how do you make a religion?

kind regards,
Vara


----------



## Griffin (Sep 11, 2012)

There is a wide range of beliefs at there. You have to ask yourself numerous questions. Without knowing the society you are trying to design a religion for, I am just throwing out important questions.

1) Monotheistic or polytheistic? Typically, older civilizations and "uncivilized" societies follow polytheistic faiths to explain everything. With Greek lore, if a couple was trying to conceive a child, they would pray to Aphrodite for help. This is a great place to start.

2) Passive or Active God(s)? Does the divines sit back and intervene when necessary? Or are they involved every single aspect? 

3) Gender of Deities. In patriarchal societies, the god is typically male. But the god can be female, both, or neither. 

4) Da Rules. Christianity and Judaism have the Ten Commandments. Within most faiths, there are central rules. Murdering is a big no-no even within ancient Babylonia. Lying and stealing are also among those. Basically, anything that can cause a rift within the central society is seen as a "sin."

5) Rituals and Temples. There is always a place of worship and stuff to do. Sacrificing cows or dancing naked in the woods. This really depends on the deities themselves. Prayer and hymns have been around for over 4000 years [probably even longer]. 

6) Who's the boss? Is the head priest the central leader [like the Pope]? Or is the king chosen by divine right? 

That's all I got for now.


----------



## Chilari (Sep 11, 2012)

Think about what ground-level beliefs your society should have. These might be based on what you need in the story, or based on worldbuilding. For example, if your society is largely illiterate, there might be a belief that writing held magical properties. If there is no way for people to get justice against those who have stolen from them because there's nothing resembling a police force, they might believe in karma, or alternatively that they can call upon a supernatural force such as gods or the ghosts of the dead to deliver justice through curses or judicial prayers (which can be represented physically). This is the sort of stuff that'll be easiest to weave into the lives of the characters, unless you have a priest character, because it's the sort of thing they'll think about, use in their language and interactions, the sorts of things that are the core of belief. People really believed judicial prayers worked, for example; we've found written tablets proclaiming the power of a goddess who struck him down with fever as a curse for stealing a cloak, or proclaiming innocence of a crime on the basis that they've fallen ill so must be cursed (I wrote an article about it - see my sig)

Remember not all religions have rules. Societies often have rules; the various law tablets and legal procedings recorded from ancient Greece and Rome attest to this, but as far as their beliefs were concerned, the gods didn't forbid murder. They might take revenge on someone who murdered their favourite mortal, but they were equally likely to encourage their favourite to murder, in Greek legends anyway. Again, society forbade murder and various other crimes but often the gods did not. The Olympian gods were believed to be petty, uninterested in promoting love and harmony, changable and very capable of holding grudges. They were believed to get in fights amongst themselves and use mortals as pawns in their power struggles, careless of the effect it had on anyone else, even callous. It was a way of explaining the randomness of reality while still enabling the hope that a single person's actions could impact upon unpredictable events like whether a ship would survive bad weather at sea, by making dedications and offerings and sacrifices to the gods.

Gods are often linked to elements of the world - Apollo the sun god, the god of prophecy; Artemis the virgin goddess of the hunt; Poseidon god of the sea; Athena, a warrior goddess who also patronised feminine crafts, and so on. Some had anthropomorphic features like being represented as an animal, or having the head of a jackal, or being able to turn into an animal. Often thay had multiple facets - Apollo being a good example. So don't feel you need a new god for every aspect of the world. Use one that covers a variety of losely connected elements.

Also I'd recommend Karen Armstrong's _A History of God_. She looks at the three monotheistic religions of earth for the main part, but goes into the origins of these religions far back beyond their inception, at the roots of religious belief from thousands of years ago. A remarkable read.


----------



## Anders Ã„mting (Sep 11, 2012)

Don't focus too much on the deities and the structure of the religion - remember to also focus on what the religion means to the society, what purpose it serves and how people in general benefit from it. 

Not a lot of people know this these days, but back in the old days, the clergy was the closest thing to scientists. They were the people who could read and write and were actually encouraged to stop and contemplate the world. They were the teachers, the scholars and the philosophers. The first universities were established by the church, the early hospitals were founded by religious orders, most historians in medieval times were monks, etc. 

Also, don't confuse piety for supersticion - it's perfectly possible to combine religious faith with a healthy degree of common sense. Don't divide all religious characters into saints, hypocrites, closet agnostics or zealots. Write the characters as real human beings who just happen to have a god they believe in.


----------



## Shockley (Sep 11, 2012)

The most important thing, as far as I'm concerned, is whether the gods are personifications of nature (ie, mythopoeic) or outside of nature (transcendent). 

 Everything else can be built around the answer.


----------



## Ravana (Sep 11, 2012)

Rule #1: If the gods actually–and demonstrably–exist, the religion is _exactly the way they want it to be_.

Which means your first decision is whether or not the gods are real. Your second is whether or not they interact with the world and their followers on a regular basis in obvious, unmistakable ways.

Gods that are remote and impersonal may or may not have the same effect. But a god that, when angered at your behavior, can show up in front of you, grab you with two of her arms and start slapping you upside your head with two more, all the while running down your defects of piety, character, genetics, proclivities and hygiene in a voice that echoes throughout not only the temple but the entire city… yeah, you'd better believe the religion will follow the god's dictates. 

Which means, if you go this route, you need to decide what the god wants, based on the god's nature, personality and motives. 

If the gods are remote, non-interactive, or cannot be shown to exist (whether or not they _do_ exist thereby becoming irrelevant), then anything goes, as far as mortal practices are concerned. In the end, this route is a lot easier to cope with.


----------



## Astner (Sep 12, 2012)

*Step 0.*

Think of the how the religion is intertwined with the setting and how it will affect the story.

*Step 1.*

What kind of religion is it? Is it atheistic, monotheistic, or polytheistic?

*Step 1, a.*

If atheistic – like Buddhism – what distinguishing principles does it have to make it a religion? Does it feature demons or spirits?

*Step 1, b.*

If theistic, what deities are involved and what are their purpose? Are they associated to certain elements or other conceptual aspects? Are the gods real? If so; Where are they located? Do they communicate with man - if so, what way?

*Step 2.*

How does it answer the questions concerning the meaning of life?


Who am I?
Where did I come from?
Why am I here?
What awaits me after death?

*Step 3.*

What does the religion teach about the world; Is the moon a deity? What are dreams?

*Step 4.*

How is the religion imbedded in society; Who practices the religion - and what happens to those who don't? Who finances it - and why are people interested in financing it?

*Step 5.*

Is there any direct reward to the devote practitioners? Magic? Insight?

*Step 6.*

Are hallucinatory drugs used to enhance the experience of prayer during certain ceremonies and whatnot?

*Step 7.*

Does the religion solely focus on the spiritual or can the material be of absolute value? What about the bones of a saint or sage, or the first scroll of canon scripture?

__________________________________________________

When you've answered these questions then you've effectively created the religion. After that you can start designing it in terms of temples, priests, ranks, commandments, and so on.


----------



## gavintonks (Sep 12, 2012)

There are around 127 religions some quite obscure and verbal like Easter Island
Christianity has 35 000 ism within the umbrella as each person makes their own version

The premise of a religion is a belief in god and how god is represented
The pantheon of gods represent key management areas and the chief is always a thunder god
modern religion is about how many prophets and their lives and whether they are human or not

Most people understand religion as the aspect of recognition spring autumn birth and death and how they are celebrated, ceremony or some pre written manor in which it is planned
Our basic religion is about reigniting the sun, so a sacrifice is required to ensure the sun shines out of winter

creation is not really a religion nor are many people, as religion requires worship and request, give the gos something so he/she does something for you


----------



## Chilari (Sep 12, 2012)

gavintonks said:


> ...the chief is always a thunder god



Going to have to contest that one. I'll concede that some chief gods have been thunder gods - Zeus, Jupiter and Thor, for example, but given that Zeus and Jupiter are the same guy I'm not sure we can count them separately. Meanwhile various other pantheons exist - from Egyptian to Aztec to Hindu to pre-Roman Celtic and beyond. I don't recall there ever being any mention of thunder amongst those, that I am aware of. Many of them were heavily associated with animals in some way - snakes and jackals and crocodiles and bears.


----------



## Ireth (Sep 12, 2012)

Chilari said:


> Going to have to contest that one. I'll concede that some chief gods have been thunder gods - Zeus, Jupiter and Thor, for example, but given that Zeus and Jupiter are the same guy I'm not sure we can count them separately. Meanwhile various other pantheons exist - from Egyptian to Aztec to Hindu to pre-Roman Celtic and beyond. I don't recall there ever being any mention of thunder amongst those, that I am aware of. Many of them were heavily associated with animals in some way - snakes and jackals and crocodiles and bears.



Very true. Ra, for example, was a sun god rather than a thunder god. Can't recall who the chief Celtic god was... Cernunnos, possibly, Lord of the Forest? Also that's not even getting into any religions centered on a Mother Goddess, who are typically seen as more affiliated with earth and nature rather than air and thunder.


----------



## Shockley (Sep 13, 2012)

I can only think of three 'thunder' gods that actually lead their respective pantheons: Zeus, Jupiter and Perun. Agni is arguably an example of this, since his PIE roots indicate that he was, at one point, worshiped as the same divinity that would late come to be recognized as Perun, Thor, etc. Agni is, however, currently worshiped as a fire god. 

 A better simplification would be that a sky god is almost always the ruler. Sometimes this is manifested as thunder or storms or the sun, but the general theme of the sky is intact. 

 Some religions (for example, the Nordic variation of the IE mythos) took little time to supplant the original sky god with a new god who better suited their needs (in this case, the sky god Tyr was replaced by Odin - Tyr even loses the sky god position he maintains as Tyz and Tiu).

 As to who the chief god of the Celts was, most likely that would depend on tribe. It wasn't Cernunnos, as that is a mostly modern appellation to a motif *possibly* representing a god, not a complex concept of a god. Your best bet would be Lugus, who had many different names to many different people.


----------



## gavintonks (Sep 13, 2012)

even yawah is a thunder god, I have a table somewhere with all the gods from the beginning of the times we know of them, and the whole aspect of thunder/ lightening and sun is the power of creation from nothing


----------



## Androxine Vortex (Sep 13, 2012)

Everyone pretty much said everything I was going to but if you want your religion to be very "realistic" then try to use it to explain things. For example, take the Egyptians (or anyone really) who didn't have an understanding of the way the world/universe works. They looked up and saw the sun. They didn't realize it was a ball of gas burning billions of miles away, but instead thought it was a God. Cultures use deities to explain why things happen. Why does it rain? Gods. Why is there night? Gods. To quote a character from one of my novels, "What man does not understand, he creates a god for. Only when man truly understands everything will he then become a god."


----------



## Shockley (Sep 13, 2012)

gavintonks said:


> even yawah is a thunder god, I have a table somewhere with all the gods from the beginning of the times we know of them, and the whole aspect of thunder/ lightening and sun is the power of creation from nothing



 Depends on your interpretation of Yahweh, since there are several legitimate points of contention on that. I personally associate him more with Ea/El/Enlil, for several reasons: Linguistically, they all connect back to the 'il' of Enlil. Elohim, El-Shaddai, etc. The linguistic evidence tracks back. Secondly, the divinity was seen as (A) the god who brought the floods which almost destroyed humanity and (B) the god who confused the languages due to the pride of man. Mix that in with Amurru (which is also linguistically related to El-Shaddai, through his alternate name Bel Sade), who was a mountain god (explaining the importance of Sinai and a lot of the dialogue of Exodus), and you have a pretty clear picture of the origin of Yahweh without injecting the idea of a thunder god. 

 Either way, I still maintain that I can only produce three pantheons that have thunder gods at their head. If you have an example of one that isn't Jupiter, Zeus or Perun, I'd love to see it.


----------



## Ireth (Sep 13, 2012)

Shockley said:


> Either way, I still maintain that I can only produce three pantheons that have thunder gods at their head. If you have an example of one that isn't Jupiter, Zeus or Perun, I'd love to see it.



If a fictional example counts, there's Manwe from Tolkien's Silmarillion. He's the Lord of Winds, and governs the sky and clouds. Though not specifically a thunder god per se, he creates weather in collaboration with Ulmo, the Lord of Water (whose domain includes rain, snow, etc. as well as oceans, lakes and rivers). But again, they're not real-world deities, so yeah.


----------



## gavintonks (Sep 13, 2012)

For other uses, see God of Thunder (disambiguation).

Polytheistic peoples of many cultures have postulated a Thunder God, the personification or source of the forces of thunder and lightning; a lightning god does not have a typical depiction, and will vary based on the culture. Frequently, the Thunder God is known as the chief or king of the gods, e.g. Indra in Hinduism, Zeus in Greek mythology, and Perun in ancient Slavic religion; or a close relation thereof, e.g. Thor, son of Odin, in Norse mythology.

In Greek mythology, The Elysian Fields, or the Elysian Plains, the final resting places of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous, evolved from a designation of a place or person struck by lightning, enelysion, enelysios.[1] This could be a reference to Zeus, the god of lightning/Jupiter, so "lightning-struck" could be saying that the person was blessed (struck) by Zeus (/lightning/fortune). Egyptologist Jan Assmann has also suggested that Greek Elysion may have instead been derived from the Egyptian term ialu (older iaru), meaning "reeds," with specific reference to the "Reed fields" (Egyptian: sekhet iaru / ialu), a paradisiacal land of plenty where the dead hoped to spend eternity.[2]

The Egyptians gods are actually planets and the reeds are the milky way as in heaven so on earth, hence all the great religeous structures are represented on earth.


Ancient Near East

    Teshub (Hurrian mythology)
    Adad, Ishkur, Marduk (Babylonian-Assyrian mythology)
    Hadad (Levantine mythology)

Eurasia

    Tarhunt (Hittite/Luwian mythology)
    Zeus (Greek Mythology)
    Brontes (Greek mythology)
    Jupiter, Summanus (Roman mythology)
    Taranis (Pan-Celtic); Ambisagrus, Loucetios (Gaulish mythology)
    Ãžunraz (Germanic mythology; Anglo-Saxon Ãžunor, German Donar, Norse ÃžÃ³rr)
    Thor (Norse mythology)
    Perun (Slavic mythology)
    Perkūnas (Baltic mythology)
    PerÃ«ndi (Albanian mythology)
    Gebeleizis (Dacian mythology)
    Zibelthiurdos (Thracian mythology)
    Ukko or Perkele (Finnish mythology)
    Horagalles (Sami mythology)
    Indra, Parjanya (Hindu mythology)
    Aplu (Etruscan mythology)
    AtÃ¤mshkai (Moksha mythology)

East Asia

    Lei Gong (Chinese mythology)
    Ajisukitakahikone, Raijin (Raiden-sama, Kaminari-sama), Tenjin (kami) (Japanese mythology)
    Susanoo (Japanese mythology)

Americas

    Thunderbird (Native American mythology)
    Tlaloc (Aztec mythology)
    Chaac (Maya mythology)
    Apocatequil (Incan mythology)
    Cocijo (Zapotec mythology)
    Aktzin (Totonac mythology)
    Haokah (Lakota mythology)
    TupÃ£ (GuaranÃ­ mythology)

Africa

    Set (Egyptian mythology)
    Shango (YorÃ¹bÃ¡ religion)
    Oya (goddess of hurricanes, consort of Shango in YorÃ¹bÃ¡ religion)
    Azaka-Tonnerre (West African Vodun/Haitian Vodou)
    Mulungu
    Xevioso (alternately: Xewioso, Heviosso. Thunder god of the So region)
    Sango (Nigerian mythology)

Oceania

Polynesian mythology

    Haikili (Polynesian mythology)
    Tāwhaki (Polynesian mythology)
    Kaha'i (Polynesian mythology)
    Te Uira (Polynesian mythology)

Micronesian mythology

    Nan Sapwe (Pohnpeian mythology)

Australia

    Mamaragan (Aboriginal mythology)


----------



## gavintonks (Sep 13, 2012)

The Venus of lespugue is the coloured in milky way female side, the nascar lines are the dark spaces in the milky way, the ancients understanding of the cosmos is frightening in its complexity, the incas created a stone calender accurate for 26 000 years.
there are always 3  aspects to religion
1 - the common man / stuff done and said for them
2 - the priests and initiates
3 - the inner circle teachings and secrets

the egyptians were ruled by deceased spirits at times it is written in the history but we do not believe it possible, statues spoke to people when they made offerings and libations and ancestors still commune with their families as part of the belief structure in africa even now 

the african belief is god is so busy doing god things he has no time for humans
2 - he sent nature spirts to look after the weather and animals
3 your own deceased family has your best intentions at hear so discuss living tivia and who you should marry etc with them


----------



## gavintonks (Sep 13, 2012)

In Slavic mythology, Perun (Cyrillic: Перун) is the highest god of the pantheon and the god of thunder and lightning. His other attributes were fire, mountains, the oak, iris, eagle, firmament (in Indo-European languages, this was joined with the notion of the sky of stone), horses and carts, weapons (the hammer, axe (Axe of Perun) and arrow) and war. He was first associated with weapons made of stone and later with those of metal.

Like Germanic Thor,[citation needed] Perun is described as a rugged man with a copper beard. He rides in a chariot pulled by a goat buck and carries a mighty axe, or sometimes a hammer. The axe is hurled at evil people and spirits and will always return to his hand.

the horses are the clouds that carry the sun in the morning and evening, so a human embodiment is the sun / son riding a white horse but its true meaning is the empowered sun weather it will shine after winter and crops will grow


----------



## gavintonks (Sep 13, 2012)

there are thousands of false gods and prophets as well

The storm god, Baal, was a West Semitic import to Egypt. Late Bronze Age texts discovered at Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) on the Levantine coast, from which his cult spread, indicate that by 1400 BC, Baal had displaced the god El to become the most important god in the local pantheon.



However, the meaning of Baal is "owner" or "lord" and in the earliest of times it is questionable whether the word was used as a title for important local gods in general, or as a proper name to a specific god. Particularly at first, this name was probably given to completely different gods. Over time, the term seems to have been applied to agricultural gods in a variety of locations. There is a great confusion amongst scholars concerning the these deities called "Baal", or sometimes Bel, and their natures and origins. In fact, this god's survival through a vast period of time provides us with a complex trail marked by considerable theological difficulties.



Of the many "Baals" we find referenced, perhaps the most important, or at least the one most associated with Egypt, is the god who dwelt on Mount Sapan (hence Baal-Zaphon) in Northern Syria, and it should be noted that the following discussion relates to him more specifically then to some of his other identities. The equivalent of the Amorite deity Adad, or Hadad, he was a centrally important deity of the Canaanites. He was considered the son of a less well attested god named Dagan (others have identified him as the son of El), who was himself a god of agriculture and storms. Baal was the source of the winter rain storms, spring mist and summer dew which nourished the crops. However, Baal also became associated with the deity of other sites such as Baal Hazor in Palestine, Baal-Sidon and Baal of Tyre (Melkart) in Lebanon.


----------



## gavintonks (Sep 13, 2012)

this is an interesting site in relation to gods and their functions
Concordence: Middle Eastern Gods


----------



## gavintonks (Sep 13, 2012)

dad in Akkadian and Ishkur in Sumerian and Hadad in Aramaic are the names of the storm-god in the Babylonian-Assyrian pantheon. All three are usually written by the logogram dIM. The Akkadian god Adad is cognate in name and functions with northwest Semitic god Hadad.

In Akkadian, Adad is also known as Ramman ("Thunderer") cognate with Aramaic Rimmon which was a byname of the Aramaic Hadad. Ramman was formerly incorrectly taken by many scholars to be an independent Babylonian god later identified with the Amorite god Hadad.

The Sumerian Ishkur appears in the list of gods found at Fara but was of far less importance than the Akkadian Adad later became, probably partly because storms and rain are scarce in southern Babylonia and agriculture there depends on irrigation instead. Also, the gods Enlil and Ninurta also had storm god features which decreased Ishkur's distinctiveness. He sometimes appears as the assistant or companion of one or the other of the two.

When Enki distributed the destinies, he made Ishkur inspector of the cosmos. In one litany Ishkur is proclaimed again and again as "great radiant bull, your name is heaven" and also called son of An, lord of Karkara; twin-brother of Enki, lord of abundance, lord who rides the storm, lion of heaven.

In other texts Adad/Ishkur is sometimes son of the moon god Nanna/Sin by Ningal and brother of Utu/Shamash and Inana/Ishtar. He is also occasionally son of Enlil.

Adad/Ishkur's consort (both in early Sumerian and later Assyrian texts) was Shala, a goddess of grain, who is also sometimes associated with the god Dagan. She was also called Gubarra in the earliest texts. The fire god Gibil (named Gerra in Akkadian) is sometimes the son of Ishkur and Shala.


----------



## gavintonks (Sep 13, 2012)

Zu, also known as Anzu and Imdugud, in Sumerian, (from An "heaven" and Zu "to know", in the Sumerian language) is a lesser divinity of Akkadian mythology, and the son of the bird goddess Siris. He was conceived by the pure waters of the Apsu and the wide Earth.[1] Both Zu and Siris are seen as massive birds who can breathe fire and water, although Zu is alternately seen as a lion-headed eagle (cf: The Griffin).
Zu as a lion-headed eagle, ca. 2550–2500 BC, Louvre

Anzu was a servant of the chief sky god Enlil, guard of the throne in Enlil's sanctuary, (possibly previously a symbol of Anu), from whom Anzu stole the Tablet of Destinies, so hoping to determine the fate of all things. In one version of the legend, the gods sent Lugalbanda to retrieve the tablets, who in turn, killed Anzu. In another, Ea and Belet-Ili conceived Ninurta for the purpose of retrieving the tablets. In a third legend, found in The Hymn of Ashurbanipal, Marduk is said to have killed Anzu.
Mesopotamian myth

In Sumerian and Akkadian mythology, Zu is a divine storm-bird and the personification of the southern wind and the thunder clouds. This demon, half man and half bird, stole the "Tablets of Destiny" from Enlil and hid them on a mountaintop. Anu ordered the other gods to retrieve the tablets, even though they all feared the demon. According to one text, Marduk killed the bird, but in another text it died through the arrows of the god Ninurta. The bird is also referred to as Imdugud or Anzu.
Babylonian myth

A Babylonian deity associated with cosmogeny, represented as stripping the father of the gods of umsimi, usually translated "crown" but, as it was on the seat of Bel it was actually the "ideal creative organ." "Ham is the Chaldean Zu, and both are cursed for the same allegorically described crime," which parallels the mutilation of Uranos by Kronos and of Set by Horus.


----------



## gavintonks (Sep 13, 2012)

another link to literally every god
Thousands of NAMES OF GODS, GODDESSES, DEMIGODS, MONSTERS, SPIRITS, DEMONS Â  & DEITIES for your dog, horse, cat, pet or child - from Chinaroad Lowchens of Australia


----------



## Chilari (Sep 13, 2012)

Did you just copy a load of wikipedia pages into posts? Because that's how it reads. Doesn't read like your normal syntax in any case. Please avoid doing that as it creates a wall of text not everyone will want to read through; please instead provide links to relevant pages, explaining their relevance, in one concise post. In any case Wikipedia' reliablity is notoriously lax. From what I read there, it counds more like an argument that a lot of gods were thunder gods than an objective examination.

Also given that I spent four years studying ancient Greece and never once heard of any person or deity called Brontes, with or without an association with Thunder, I am rather dubious as to whether all of the listed thunder gods were chief gods, as you claim, let alone major gods.

In any case, there are plenty of chief gods who are not associated with thunder, and at least two named who are the same guy (Jupiter = Zeus, even to the point where classicists until about 1850 used the Roman names when translating Greek texts like the Iliad into English, French and so on).

Regardless of how many chief gods were linked in some way to a relatively uncommon meterological event (compared to, say, clear skies and sunshine), this is a worldbuilding thread about creating a religion; and religions are varied and they are about far more than just deities; they are about the way those deities are worshipped, what people believe they are capable of, what people believe about the world around them and what happens when they die and what's really happening up there in the sky with the sun rising and setting every day. Religion, if embedded deeply enough in a culture, is a medium through which people interact with the world around them. It need not involve praying or sacrificing bulls or eating funny coloured mushrooms, it may not have great architecture or sacred springs or shrines. It is about belief, about how people interact with belief and how they let that belief shape their lives and societies. And it's not always about thunder gods.

There wasn't a word for religion in ancient Greece. Why define something so deeply embedded in culture? And at the same time there's a very blurred line, or perhaps not a line at all, between ancient Greek "religion" and "magic". The gods were called upon in spells and curses, or to protect the recent dead from people seeking to place curse tablets in their graves. Items considered magical - like, in the late archaic and early classical periods, something with an adecedarium on (that's the letters of the alphabet in sequence) - were dedicated at shrines to the gods.


----------



## Shockley (Sep 13, 2012)

A religion debate touching on linguistics. I might just be dead. 



> If a fictional example counts, there's Manwe from Tolkien's Silmarillion. He's the Lord of Winds, and governs the sky and clouds. Though not specifically a thunder god per se, he creates weather in collaboration with Ulmo, the Lord of Water (whose domain includes rain, snow, etc. as well as oceans, lakes and rivers). But again, they're not real-world deities, so yeah.



 In most mythologies, there is a distinction between a 'weather god' and a 'thunder god.' That's not universal, but that's usually true. For example, Thor is the Norse thunder god, while Frey is the weather god. 



> Polytheistic peoples of many cultures have postulated a Thunder God, the personification or source of the forces of thunder and lightning; a lightning god does not have a typical depiction, and will vary based on the culture. Frequently, the Thunder God is known as the chief or king of the gods, e.g. Indra in Hinduism, Zeus in Greek mythology, and Perun in ancient Slavic religion; or a close relation thereof, e.g. Thor, son of Odin, in Norse mythology.



 Normally, I wouldn't respond to something so obviously cribbed from Wikipedia, but I'll do so. With the exception of Indra, I mentioned each of those figures. Still, that's substantially less than 1% of the polytheistic pantheons in existence. 



> In Greek mythology, The Elysian Fields, or the Elysian Plains, the final resting places of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous, evolved from a designation of a place or person struck by lightning, enelysion, enelysios.



 I hate to be the guy to do this, but this is one of those instances where a Wiki author found one source for something and only one. 

 The exact etymology of the term 'Elysian' is, as of this moment, undetermined. I went through my own books, did an internet search and even followed up on Walter Burkert, the claimed source of the etymology. Luckily, his book is in the public domain. Burkert himself says the word is, to quote, 'an obscure and mysterious name' and then repeats the above assertion that it derives from Enelysion. Looking at websites, his books seems to be the sole source of the claim. 



> Egyptologist Jan Assmann has also suggested that Greek Elysion may have instead been derived from the Egyptian term ialu (older iaru), meaning "reeds," with specific reference to the "Reed fields" (Egyptian: sekhet iaru / ialu), a paradisiacal land of plenty where the dead hoped to spend eternity.[2]
> 
> The Egyptians gods are actually planets and the reeds are the milky way as in heaven so on earth, hence all the great religeous structures are represented on earth.



Rule of thumb: Ignore Egyptologists. They are, quite possibly, the only academic group worse than anthropologists when it comes to making insane assertions about other fields. 

 I'll just go down the list of gods presented:

Teshub – Kumarbi is the chief god
 Adad, Ishkur, Marduk – This is an odd grouping. Adad and Ishkur are probably the same god, but Marduk is most certainly a distinct entity. Either way, Adad is not the head of his pantheon.

 In addition, the idea that Marduk is a thunder god is mistaken. He uses lightning to fight Tiamat (also fire, the four winds and a net), but that wasn't something he was ever associated with. He was a glorified fertility god.

 Hadad is Adad. They really botched this classification.

 Tarhunt is not the chief of that pantheon.

 Brontes is, obviously, not the chief god of the Greek pantheon – he is not even a god. He's a cyclops. 

 The term 'Pan-Celtic' should never be used for Taranis. He was a particularly popular Gallic god, with limited popularity in some German regions. Certainly not the head of his pantheon. You can't even say that Ambisagrus is a thunder god – we can't say anything about Ambisagrus, because all we know is the name. Loucetios is a war god.

 These guys are grouped together because the Celts had a habit of triad worship. Three gods, worshiped in conjunction to make a divine whole. The only argument that could be made for the latter two is that their 'divine whole' is approximately one third thunder god. 

 It's intellectually dishonest to devote two lines to regional names for Thor and two lines for regional names of Perun. Only the Perun from is recognized as a chief god. 

 A google search (I don't know anything about Illyrian myth) seems to indicate this is a match. You're at five. 

 A similar google search at Gebeleizis discredits that claim. Apparently, information on him was missing as far back as Classical Greece, so they just picked a god to tack him on. Zibelthiurdos seems to be in the same boat but, knowing that Dacian comes from PIE and that being my best language, I could see how that would be a thunder god (thiur and dos are big giveaways). That said, none of that indicates that he was a chief god (your chief god, more than likely, would have a name with an -eos or -ios ending) (Addendum: Google search indicates that the chief Dacian god was Sabazios.) 

 Ukko/Perkele is a sad story, as it has the same problems as the Nordic gods. We only learn of it, extensively, through Christian sources and their own biases. We can say that Ukko (of which Perkele is just another name) was a god of weather, but whether he was a thunder god or that said portfolio was tacked on to justify him to an audience used to Olympic gods we have no real clue.

 I didn't know Horagalles, but a quick google search indicates it's just a regional name for Thor. Ergo, probably not the chief god. 

 'Aplu,' I'm assuming, is there attempt at remembering 'Apulu.' I'm betting you can guess which 'Classic' god this is and why he's neither a thunder god nor a chief god. 

 As for the last name on the European list, I don't know it. So off to google. After reading a full article on the mythology (which seems fairly basic and tribal, with strong PIE influences giving me a good idea as to how it would have developed), I didn't even see the name listed, though Verdan Skai is listed as their supreme deity.

 I don't have the expertise to comment on the other areas, but it's obvious that your list (Wikipedia's list) is of thunder gods/gods that kind of sort of had something vaguely to do with weather doesn't even address the idea of them being the chief god, which was the point of contention.



> The Venus of lespugue is the coloured in milky way female side, the nascar lines are the dark spaces in the milky way, the ancients understanding of the cosmos is frightening in its complexity, the incas created a stone calender accurate for 26 000 years.



 Uh, dafuq just happened?


----------



## Snowpoint (Sep 14, 2012)

Game of Thrones handles this well. We only see enough detail of a single religion to say "that is animist" or "that is catholic" A story is about people, not theology. We don't need any details about the religion itself. The only important part is, "How does this motivate my character to action?"

When we see Ned Stark praying in the godswood, we don't really know the rules of his religion. All we know is that Ned is a true believer and being there gives him comfort. That is all we need to know.


----------



## Varamyrr (Sep 14, 2012)

wow, I didn't expect the start a discussion this large 
Anyway, thanks for the input guys.

But I'm still trying to figure out how a religion can be interpreted in different ways. For instance, in The hunchback of Notre Dame you see Frollo on one side and Esmeralda on the other side. The way is it captured is sublime and is something to which I aim for.


----------



## gavintonks (Sep 14, 2012)

I copied some of the text for convenience which I apologize but I have also studied religions for my book and have spent hours in libraries and tracking down old documents and concepts to get to the root causes of what religion is. I have also studied the 5major publications on Greek and roman mythology and religion and their are hundreds of lesser known localized religions and sects. 
Every town literally had its own story and wars and conquest forced people into changing belief. Even with all the written data that we have on the Romans we still find lost towns . It is also naive to pronounce that we know everything, their are hundreds of bibles many suppressed by major religions to keep people in the dark, Their are books like the Oasphe, the trimegestus hermetic, the devils bible and the list goes on and on, I think brin had a list of esoteric books in one of his novels and every one of them was a well documented manuscript of relative information.


----------



## gavintonks (Sep 14, 2012)

I think we are lost in the woods the man wants to design a religion nit nit pick that we know what the religion meant 3500 years ago, the main point is that thunder and lightning are creations from nothing and are the most powerful natural forces in the belief of man. When you need to eat and food is related to the weather, having a weather god you can pray to to assist dying a slow and horrible death is a good reason to have a god. When the sun wanes and it gets cold and freezing and you give up hope sacrifice something on the equinox, preferably a few humans who  there is no food for in any case and hey presto the sun gets stronger again


----------



## gavintonks (Sep 14, 2012)

Christianity is a collection of 35 000 religions as each church grabs some specific piece of information and bases their faith on it, from the virgin Mary to how many times you are born


----------



## Chilari (Sep 14, 2012)

gavintonks said:


> I think we are lost in the woods the man wants to design a religion nit nit pick that we know what the religion meant 3500 years ago, the main point is that thunder and lightning are creations from nothing and are the most powerful natural forces in the belief of man. When you need to eat and food is related to the weather, having a weather god you can pray to to assist dying a slow and horrible death is a good reason to have a god. When the sun wanes and it gets cold and freezing and you give up hope sacrifice something on the equinox, preferably a few humans who  there is no food for in any case and hey presto the sun gets stronger again



It sounds to me like you've fixated on a conclusion and are researching for data to support it. Not the way to do, well, anything really, from science to history to politics.

In any case, this thread remains a Worldbuilding thread about how one should go about creating a religion, not a Research thread about real world religions.


----------



## Lucipher (Sep 14, 2012)

just base it off another religion


----------



## gavintonks (Sep 14, 2012)

Chilari said:


> It sounds to me like you've fixated on a conclusion and are researching for data to support it. Not the way to do, well, anything really, from science to history to politics.
> 
> It never ceases to amaze me how you drag these conclusions out of fresh air and make statements like this. I do not put words in your mouth do not put words in mine. If you think  I have some concept or idea why not ask me and I will tell you but please do not think for me.
> 
> In any case, this thread remains a Worldbuilding thread about how one should go about creating a religion, not a Research thread about real world religions.



I am not sure how you have come to this conclusion, I how you can possibly make an assumption that you can create a religion with no understanding of real world religion and what it is about? 
How can he create something plausible without it being based in a reality that the reader has experienced? What i your beef with the information I have supplied you have started playing my statements and not the thread. It is up to the thread poser to draw conclusions from the information I am posting and not become a big argument about what and how I have researched.

I do not take umberance to any statements that are made or people that have posted, I have replied to the poster directly with information based on my experience and research, so it amazes me that these comments are directed at me, play the thread


----------



## Chilari (Sep 14, 2012)

You have asserted something about religions ("all religions have a Thunder god as chief"). Others have provided evidence which conflicts with this conclusion ("Not all chief gods have a thunder affiliation"). You have continued to assert it. That is ignoring evidence to preserve the conclusion. That is why I made my first statement. I did not drag a conclusion out of fresh air.

As for the rest, the OP has asked how to create a religion in the Worldbuilding forum. Research is certainly something he should be doing; I do not claim that a religion can be created without knowledge of real religions and never have. But this is not a research thread, this is a thread about how to create a religion as a writer. Posting things that you believe about religion isn't answering the question posed. The OP hasn't created a research thread or asked for help researching real world religions. He has asked how to create a fictional religion. Advice such as deciding how many gods there are, or what ground-level beliefs people hold about the world they live in, is answering the question and is therefore helpful. Arguing about something that has not been asked for is neither relevant nor helpful and, especially with the way you post reply after reply rather than keeping it all in one post, clogs up the thread.

I am not taking umbrage with you. I am taking umbrage with the fact that this thread has derailed into your personal crusade to prove that all chief gods are thunder gods. What you research or don't is irrelevant in a thread about worldbuilding (unless your research was about how writers worldbuild). If people come asking about something relevant to your research in the Research forum, you are welcome to tell them all you like, and others are welcome to contest whatever claims you make with evidence and reason. And in worldbuilding threads if something you research is touched on, it is appropriate to brush on your research briefly, though making an absolute claim is ill-advised (much better to say that many chief gods appear to have a thunder affiliation, for example, rather than outright assert that all definitely did, then get annoyed when someone else presents information to the contrary). But this level of detail, with wikipedia pages pasted in, is nothing short of derailing a thread.


----------



## Ravana (Sep 14, 2012)

Shockley said:


> A religion debate touching on linguistics. I might just be dead. [et considerable cetera]



Double-plus thank you. 



> …knowing that Dacian comes from PIE and that being my best language…



Uhm… PIE is your best language? I'm impressed. 

(Yes, I know you probably meant Greek.)

•

Yes, Aplu/Apulu is taken to be an Etruscan equivalent for Apollo.

I'll have to work on AtÃ¤mshkai; I have some resources on Uralic languages. (The creation story—both versions—are common to many Uralic peoples, by the by, so I wouldn't look too hard for PIE influence there.)


----------



## Ravana (Sep 14, 2012)

gavintonks said:


> another link to literally every god
> Thousands of NAMES OF GODS, GODDESSES, DEMIGODS, MONSTERS, SPIRITS, DEMONS * & DEITIES for your dog, horse, cat, pet or child - from Chinaroad Lowchens of Australia



Literally… wrong. It didn't take me ten seconds to find an omission, less than a minute to find several; it took me only a little longer to confirm that not all of those omissions were covered anywhere in the massive list of links, either. (Several of which are broken, should anyone care.)


----------



## Svrtnsse (Sep 16, 2012)

Keep in mind that a religion doesn't have to have a god associated with it. Even if gods are a reality and known to exist in your world the religions don't necessarily have to get it right.


----------



## Shockley (Sep 17, 2012)

> Uhm… PIE is your best language? I'm impressed.
> 
> (Yes, I know you probably meant Greek.)



 No, I mean reconstructed PIE. My Greek is middling to poor, though I can generally make out what I'm reading. 

 I had a solid basis in Latin due to an elementary school program, Greek due to my mother having been raised in Greece/visiting that country and Old Norse due to a real fascination with that culture, so figuring out the workings of PIE was less difficult for me than it is for others.

 Obviously, there are limits to my knowledge of the tongue as it's reconstructed, but I have a working grasp of it better than my other areas.



 One last derail, then I am going to let this thread return to its natural course:

 I don't think thunder is a 'primordial' element to any religion or chief god - it says a lot that the few confirmed chiefs (Indra, Zeus, Jupiter and Perun) with thunder characteristics all come from cultures that originate from Indo-European peoples. That no convincing Asiatic, African, Semitic, etc. examples were provided says all that really needs to be said.

 But I'll push it further. If their is a primordial god-element, and I don't think there is, it's water. The water is the force of creation, with everything else seeming to be secondary. That's water in whatever form - rain, steam, oceans, seas, lakes, ice, etc.


----------



## Ravana (Sep 17, 2012)

[With apologies: derail continued, hopefully concluded… probably only Shockley will care about this, but I'm having too much fun not to round it out.  ]



Shockley said:


> No, I mean reconstructed PIE. My Greek is middling to poor, though I can generally make out what I'm reading. … Obviously, there are limits to my knowledge of the tongue as it's reconstructed, but I have a working grasp of it better than my other areas.



Then I'm definitely impressed. 

I've done coursework in Spanish, Latin, German, Sanskrit and Chinese (it was offered in high school: how could I pass it up?). I will, however, read anything that doesn't run fast enough… even if I have to pick up a new script to do so. My language library has dictionaries/grammars/both for, at last count, 117 languages (I may have missed one or two); as far as I'm aware, every major language group is represented in there somewhere, along with no few minor ones, an isolate or two, and several that are no longer spoken. Can I claim solid knowledge in all, or even most of those? Hell, no: that's why I collect the reference books. 

Which brings us to an update on AtÃ¤mshkai. Unfortunately, I only have references on the major Uralic languages–Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian. Thought I had more. (I did a grad-level paper on Nenets once; apparently I was limited to library resources. My reading German got a whole lot better that term.…) As Moksha is so remote it isn't even mutually intelligible with the other Mordvinic language, Erzya, these are pretty much useless. So what I have been able to determine is based on web sources. I really miss the days when I lived a five minutes' walk from a major university research library… sigh.

One item I have been able to verify: /shkai/ is, uncontroversially, "sun." Which means that AtÃ¤mshkai is highly unlikely to have been a thunder god originally… he might be totally misidentified as such. I have–barely–been able to verify that there _is_ a being named AtÃ¤mshkai; "barely" because in the process I was reminded of my limited ability to read Cyrillic (need to practice more), the far more limited ability of machine translators, and in particular their limits re: languages that aren't actually available for said translation. 

In other words, I found a reliable source… in Cyrillic… but _not_ in Russian. It was in Moksha. 

Here's what Google Translate did to the first passage I put in, on the assumption I was seeing Russian:



> Преданиять коряс П. шачсь кичкор пильгокс, сяс Чипазсь и Анге Патяйсь ёрдазь сонь Масторть лангс, коса сон эрясь снярс, мзярс ашезь са пинге рьвяямс.





> Predaniyat koryas P. shachs kichkor pilgoks, SNF Chipazs and Ange Patya erdaz dormice Mastort langs, Xhosa dream eryas snyars, mzyars ashez sa ping rvyayams.



All things considered, I suspect the only word in there which isn't a false cognate is "and." Which put paid to getting much else out of that particular source on anything other than an intensive, painstaking basis. 

Note that the passage mentions Chipaz, the Erzya sun god and equivalent to Shkai ( = /chi/; /paz/ is simply Erzya for "god"), Ange Patya, the Erzya "mother of gods"; presumably, Mastort is a form of either Mastoron, the earth god, or Mastorpaz, god of the underworld… so this is a genealogy. Assuming Moksha geneaology mirrors what's given in the (Wikipedia) entry on Erzya mythology, AtÃ¤mshkai would be the equivalent of Pur'ginepaz, the child of Ange Patya's daughter, and is a third-generation deity of comparatively minor importance; his father is not given. One might suspect that Pur'ginepaz as a thunder god arose from syncretization with Russian Perun, however… especially since the morpheme /purga/ (see below) originally referred to _snow_storms, not thunder. Given that the entry on Moksha mythology is completely different from that on Erzya–and, conversely, matches Uralic mythology I've seen elsewhere–one might also suspect that AtÃ¤mshkai and everyone else in his "family" were borrowed into the tradition from whatever source influenced the Erzya pantheon presented.

Should anyone wish to brave further research, the site–which is an extensive, academic encyclopedia on Moksha mythology and folklore, and looks like it would be really neat if only you could read it–here's the link to the specific article in question: 

Ã­ÃÃ‹Ã›ÃœÃ’ÃšÃ‘ÃŽÃ˜ ÃÃ‰Ã†ÃÃŒÃÃ‡Ã‰Ã‘Ã“Ã˜

The /atÃ¤m/ part I have been unable to track down. I found one reasonably thorough, if dated, page on reconstructing Proto-Uralic, but that morpheme does not appear there. I tried several variations, and also fed in about three dozen different English words that might have proved fruitful, including anything vaguely related to weather. There were some intriguing possibilities, but I don't think they bear out. In any event, words related to weather were farther from /atÃ¤m/ than several others which were not, and as a rule were not close enough you could make it to /atÃ¤m/ even with a compass, a fertile imagination, and a Greenberg tourist guide. Which isn't conclusive, as we're talking about a limited corpora here: the relevant morpheme might simply have not been included.

So I'm not certain identifying AtÃ¤mshkai as a weather god is correct in the first place, unless /shkai/ in this case is a coincidental resemblance, and we're in fact dealing with completely different morphemes altogether. (Were it not for the VÃ¤rden Shkai example, I would have been tempted to gloss this as "father of the people," i.e. /ata - moksha/. However, "father" was among the possibilities I tried that didn't pay out.) What is fairly transparent is that this was not the chief deity of a pantheon. VÃ¤rden Shkai must, I think, be seen as syncretic, rising to "supreme" status as a result of Christian influence… and in any case is most definitely _not_ a thunder god.

In case anyone cares, it also seems Shkai may have begun as female.

---

Enough about that. Shockley's other "derail," which I actually don't think is one:



> If their is a primordial god-element, and I don't think there is, it's water. The water is the force of creation, with everything else seeming to be secondary. That's water in whatever form - rain, steam, oceans, seas, lakes, ice, etc.



I'd say water and earth: it's highly unusual not to find an earth deity as a major figure in a given group. At which point it becomes mostly a question of "who came first"–and I agree that, for a great many traditions, it is water. I'm not sure I'd want to go so far as to say they are a majority; I'd want to do a focused count. Keep in mind that many of those come from the same area, too–the Near and Middle East, on to India–or were their direct descendants; this may not bear out elsewhere. In the Uralic creation myths, for example (I remember those coming up somewhere…  ), water _preexists_ any mentioned deities, is not personified, and is a passive background from which the seeds of creation are retrieved.

I'd put sky and/or sun as a distant third contender. Weather, of any sort, is _never_ "primordial" to the best of my knowledge: even the ancients recognized this as a phenomenon, not an element: something transient, not something permanent. Whether or not it was tacked on to a supreme being at a later date, or if a weather god was promoted to head of pantheon, is a different matter… and in fact, in the cases I'm familiar with, the weather god _was_ promoted–he was not initially "supreme": Zeus is a perfect example here.


----------



## Ravana (Sep 17, 2012)

Svrtnsse said:


> Keep in mind that a religion doesn't have to have a god associated with it. Even if gods are a reality and known to exist in your world the religions don't necessarily have to get it right.



I agree… to the extent that there might be, let's call them "empty," religions, ones for which the deity they worship does not exist.

I'd state one reservation, however: it still depends heavily on to what extent the gods interact with the world. If the interaction is regular and demonstrable, then a form of "Religious Darwinism" will cause those religions which do not have an existent patron to die out, as worshippers will favor faiths from which they derive benefits they can clearly see.

Even that's assuming that the deities behind those faiths aren't of the "jealous" variety: if they are, then the "empty" ones will simply be exterminated as rapidly as they arise… and new ones arising will be highly unlikely.


----------



## Devor (Sep 18, 2012)

It's worth noting, even if the pantheon is demonstrably real, it doesn't necessarily have to suggest that they get the religion they want.  Everyone may agree that the gods are real and who they are and what they do, but that doesn't mean they have the same attitude about it.  It seems likely to me that people might love or hate them, embrace them or avoid them, seek a "united pantheon" or try to pit god against god.  Philosophies would still emerge that are religious in nature but seek to fill in any intellectual or behavioral gaps the gods might have left.  Take a look at Tao or Buddhist concepts, for instance, which many local cultures have adopted around their pantheons.


----------



## Shockley (Sep 18, 2012)

> I've done coursework in Spanish, Latin, German, Sanskrit and Chinese (it was offered in high school: how could I pass it up?). I will, however, read anything that doesn't run fast enough… even if I have to pick up a new script to do so. My language library has dictionaries/grammars/both for, at last count, 117 languages (I may have missed one or two); as far as I'm aware, every major language group is represented in there somewhere, along with no few minor ones, an isolate or two, and several that are no longer spoken. Can I claim solid knowledge in all, or even most of those? Hell, no: that's why I collect the reference books



 I have a good grasp of Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and, as mentioned, reconstructed PIE. My Greek is poor, my Latin is about as good as you can get without serious study, I abandoned Spanish after two years because I find it to be an ugly language, just now commencing my study of French and have a rough grasp of basic spoken German.

 If I could do it over again, I'd probably devote more energy into something more useful than reconstructed PIE, but that's already been done and I'm happy with what I know. Since I plan on teaching history, it might help if I backburner that and focus more on my main area – migratory peoples. 

 As for everything else, we're delving into my weakest area. The only area I can throw in on is the name 'Pur'ginepaz.' Continuing off your idea that this is related to Perun, which seems absolutely solid, I'd break it down as follows:

 'Pur' or 'purgin (possibly)' would be something like 'oak,' or, if taken more broadly, 'tree.' For whatever reason, the term in IE can also refer to 'striking' or 'hitting,' which probably ties into the idea of lightning. As used in Perun, the term has a broader meaning – destruction, decimation, etc. 

 The 'paz' is particularly interesting to me. I'm taking a shot in the dark here (again, completely unfamiliar with the language and not knowing where this breaks), but I wonder if this could be related to the many variations of 'deiwos,' meaning god and usually taking on a hard 't' sound in the derivatives  (with many notable exceptions, such as 'Zeus'). Assuming that there is some relationship between their 'p' and 't' (there is, generally, such a shift between the western and eastern children of PIE), it wouldn't surprise me if 'paz' was just a generic title for a god. 

 I bring all of this up because it fits into something else. When we see the 'deiwos' representatives, they do tend to have thunder god characteristics. Zeus and Jupiter (as Deus) are the obvious examples, though Tyr/Tyz/Tiu/Tiwaz is a sky god. This might fit into a greater PIE pantheon, as all three of these gods are, like the debated example, third generation from a creator/primordial divinity. 



> I'd say water and earth: it's highly unusual not to find an earth deity as a major figure in a given group. At which point it becomes mostly a question of "who came first"—and I agree that, for a great many traditions, it is water. I'm not sure I'd want to go so far as to say they are a majority; I'd want to do a focused count. Keep in mind that many of those come from the same area, too—the Near and Middle East, on to India—or were their direct descendants; this may not bear out elsewhere. In the Uralic creation myths, for example (I remember those coming up somewhere…  ), water preexists any mentioned deities, is not personified, and is a passive background from which the seeds of creation are retrieved.



 All of these are fair points. I'd say the primordial beginning, in the context of western/near-eastern mythology, is the joining of water (in some form) to earth (in some form), or some form of earth being brought from some form of water. 



> I'd put sky and/or sun as a distant third contender. Weather, of any sort, is never "primordial" to the best of my knowledge: even the ancients recognized this as a phenomenon, not an element: something transient, not something permanent. Whether or not it was tacked on to a supreme being at a later date, or if a weather god was promoted to head of pantheon, is a different matter… and in fact, in the cases I'm familiar with, the weather god was promoted—he was not initially "supreme": Zeus is a perfect example here.



 Few religions, from what I can see, kept their original head over a long period of time. You already mentioned Zeus as a good example, and there are others. We know, for instance, that the most popular god of the Old Norse was Tyr, not Odin – and Tyr (as Tiu and Tyz, respectively) was worshiped as the chief god by the continental Germans and the Gothic tribes, even though they saw Fro Ing as the chief of the pantheon. 

 I have a personal theory on this – the 'Deiwos-Derivative' (I'm going to start capitalizing that, I think) was always the chief god, but in most cases was a bland, persona-less figure. Over time, this blank slate took on traits to fit into myths about more realized deities. This would explain the cases where the figure remains prominent (as in Continental Germanic religion) or there one god supplants another – the term is a title and just slips from one god to the next.


----------



## Sheriff Woody (Oct 5, 2012)

Varamyrr said:


> In other words: how do you make a religion?



Religion, like every other aspect of your story and your story's world, should have meaning. 

Start from the bottom and ask yourself what you like and dislike about religions in our reality. Look at multiple religions and find what you agree with, and what you feel is wrong. Why do you feel it's wrong? What would you change? How would you change it to something better? How do you anticipate the world in 50 years if people keep following these beliefs? 

Once you have that solid base, it's much easier to fill in the blanks and build from what you have so that you end up with something that makes sense in its own context and feels real, which is important because readers will subconsciously key in on those real-life connotations and feel moved by them in one way or another. The key is to be subtle enough and not preach.


----------



## Mindfire (Oct 5, 2012)

Chilari said:


> Going to have to contest that one. I'll concede that some chief gods have been thunder gods - Zeus, Jupiter and Thor, for example, but given that Zeus and Jupiter are the same guy I'm not sure we can count them separately. Meanwhile various other pantheons exist - from Egyptian to Aztec to Hindu to pre-Roman Celtic and beyond. I don't recall there ever being any mention of thunder amongst those, that I am aware of. Many of them were heavily associated with animals in some way - snakes and jackals and crocodiles and bears.



Thor wasn't the chief Norse god. Odin was. Thor was "the people's god" if you will. He was the most popular one and the one that cared most about humanity. He was the guardian, the protector, the one who went off the fight Frost Giants so that your family farm didn't get obliterated (and also because he loved to fight). Odin was king. Thor was popular. And actually, I think the sun god is considered top dog in most polytheistic faiths.

EDIT: 
*Sees massive discussion of linguistics and the evolution of mythology.*
"Realizes he is out of his depth*
*Exits thread*


----------

