# Religion Over Time, and the Mystic Truth



## Drakevarg (Feb 12, 2016)

One important aspect that inevitably comes up with my current "overarching project" of an overall timeline in my slow-moving worldbuilding attempts is the way religion and superstition evolve over time. And perhaps just as importantly in a world where the supernatural and the afterlife are observable facts, how they differ from the "mystic truth" as I pithily put it in the title.

What I mean by the "mystic truth" is the way spirituality, magic, divinity and so forth actually, mechanically function in a fantasy environment, in contrast to what ever perceptions are held by the commonfolk, dogma, or whatever limited observations can be made using the scientific method in a world where the laws of physics know you're watching.

On top of that, the perception of the supernatural inevitably changes over time between the advance of concrete knowledge, cultural interplay, the rise and fall of organized faiths, and perhaps even cosmic upheaval where the physical and metaphysical laws have legitimately changed around the observers.

In other words, _what is_ is different than _what is believed_ is different than _what was believed_.

I don't have time at this moment to give specific examples from my own writings, but I figured it might be interesting to open up the subject to the rest of you in the meantime, get some perspective on how others approach such a subject.


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## WooHooMan (Feb 12, 2016)

I know what you mean and I've explored with that in the context of religions (since it would be far too complicated to include all philosophies and in-universe-fiction).

I actually did a religion family tree to help me keep this topic straight but it's still greatly simplified and vague.
Check it out...
View image: fictionalreligions

I think a flow chart is the best way to visualize this but even then, I haven't found a way to illustrate all of the factors like geography and politics.  I was thinking I could have some kind of animated gif of a map with text boxes popping-up that coincide with the timeline.  Or something, I don't know.  It's complicated.

Also, I think Jung's writings would be the place to go for figuring out what something like this would look like.


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## Drakevarg (Feb 12, 2016)

Oh geez, that family tree is the simplified version? It's already a headache.


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## WooHooMan (Feb 12, 2016)

Drakevarg said:


> Oh geez, that family tree is the simplified version? It's already a headache.



It's 3,000 years over three continents.  Can you imagine seeing a religion family tree for Europe and Asia from 1,000 BC to today?


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## Drakevarg (Feb 12, 2016)

Hm, fair point. Even without taking things like flash-in-the-pan cults into account.

At the moment my setting is very sparse for organized religion, so for the most part I've just been defining it regionally with the assumption that the details will change from place to place.

That said, it's still very bare bones and for the most part I haven't fully defined what each of those regional faith bases ARE, specifically because taking the time to find think up how every region's perception of the cosmos a) differs from the accurate account and b) acknowledges and accounts for unavoidable facts - is hard work.

For example, there's a few basic deity-esque figures that are prominent that even if they're not worshiped, you can't just ignore their presence because they're great big obvious sore thumbs. Like the four Dragon Gods, which are literally manifested in the world as 2 km tall kaiju. They aren't seen very often, but there's simply no way a structured religion could come into existence and last any length of time without having to explain what the heck those are and how they mesh with the written dogma.


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## trentonian7 (Feb 12, 2016)

In my world there aren't any actual gods or higher powers, but the bulk of the population and many of my characters do believe in some sort of religion. Because this is a fantasy world and there is magic within it, my religions have had to learn to explain it- be it a gift from the gods or channeling the powers of spirits, it varies on the faith.

Many mages are actually seen as divine or holy for these reasons and a number of religions are ruled by a clerical magocracy. Think about it in a primitive setting: you have a very broad polytheistic or animistic belief system; you also have people that can heal sickness or raise crops. Depending on how these mages utilize their powers, they have the potential to be revered as shamans or prophets, but also as witches or demons.

This is also part of the reason some faiths regard magic as a sin and an evil practice.

The problem with such aversions is that governments need mages if they wish to compete with other nations on the battlefield; as a result, even in religions where magic is despised, there is at least an uneasy tolerance.


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## Drakevarg (Feb 12, 2016)

trentonian7 said:


> The problem with such aversions is that governments need mages if they wish to compete with other nations on the battlefield; as a result, even in religions where magic is despised, there is at least an uneasy tolerance.



This, along with the usual reasons like simply not wanting them around waving about the debug menu for the universe and poking holes in the plot/gameplay, is one of the reasons why mages either completely unheard of or extremely rare in my setting (I haven't quite decided yet). One of my big overhanging puzzles these days is how to handle that. My current thought is to hand off the mage's usual roles to vampires and werewolves as needed, and treat the scholarly pursuit of magic as mostly an applied science, if science could get angry at you when you poked it too much. Nobody's going to be firing lightning bolts out of their fingers, but they might figure out how to bind a storm spirit in a silver rod and build a Tesla coil.

Sorry, that wasn't entirely relevant, but it's what came to mind. As for the religious response to such things, similar to yours the cultural opinion of it varies from place to place. Some consider it wisdom and mastery, others consider it sacrilegious, the notion of trying to essentially bully the honored spirits to your will understandably seen as offensive.


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## ThinkerX (Feb 13, 2016)

> It's 3,000 years over three continents. Can you imagine seeing a religion family tree for Europe and Asia from 1,000 BC to today?



I did something like that with Christianity most of twenty years ago.  700 single spaced pages.


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## vaiyt (Feb 13, 2016)

In my world (as depicted in my own thread), every religion is true and false to an extent. The theology and rituals of a religion work as components of a really slow, really big spell that slowly creates something resembling that religion's otherworld and gods in the magical plane. Of course, as religions change over time and not everyone is on the exact same page when it comes to the meaning of rituals, the actual final form of the gods is never under anyone's total control.


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## hunthor108 (Feb 16, 2016)

So the "mystic truth" in my world is still something I'm playing around with, so religions based off of it are kind of wishy washy atm, but I do have a general idea of how much it will affect the average person's life, which is not much, so my religions tend to be more similar to how we view them in the real world.
However, to aid with worldbuilding and questions like this, I have a people who as a rule are the most pure and natural with everything in the world, not dealing with much outside influence or diffusion just by their nature (not isolationism). I.e, their "religion" is exactly (or at least very close to) what the mythic truth is. I guess this could be likened to how the wizards in Tolkien works have knowledge and lived with the supernatural, but also live among mortals in the world, so they represent the mythic truth. It helps to have something like this in the world to have a jumping off point for other more complex parts of sort of psychology with the way normal people would interpret in things.

also


> In my world (as depicted in my own thread), every religion is true and false to an extent. The theology and rituals of a religion work as components of a really slow, really big spell that slowly creates something resembling that religion's otherworld and gods in the magical plane. Of course, as religions change over time and not everyone is on the exact same page when it comes to the meaning of rituals, the actual final form of the gods is never under anyone's total control.


thats a really cool idea


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## Miskatonic (Feb 19, 2016)

Brief background synopsis. At one point there was just one big land mass and at some point, in order to save humans from being wiped out, one of the gods caused a portion of that land mass to break off and drift away, while another erected some sort of magical barrier to keep those on the original land mas from finding them. 

At one point humans more or less had a close relationship with their gods, received their blessings, granted them visions through oracles, yadda, yadda, yadda. Fast forward to after the gods intervention saves them and the humans are now pretty much cut off from any direct contact or influence. Humans are left with few clues as to what the gods were, kind of a partial-amnesia sort of thing. What is left is basically the sort of things you'd find at archaeological dig sites, abandoned ruins, damaged scrolls that are no longer compete etc.

So from what people can piece together about the past they start creating their religions. Different interpretations lead to conflicting views in regards to all the big philosophical questions, and all that goes along with that. Now you have basic religions, occult scholars trying to discover the ancient mysteries, those that uncover clues about rudimentary magical systems and this gives birth to sorcery, historians doing their thing and so on.

So now human curiosity is heading towards a greater understanding of the gods and that leads to, assuming they are real and not just symbolic, people wanting to find them. Of course this is bad because if they do that means they put their world in danger. But of course for those who wanted to destroy them in the first place this is a good thing, and perhaps they leaked some secret information before the barrier was created in order to cause this to come about.


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## Swordfry (Feb 26, 2016)

In my series, there is really one religion for each race that almost the whole race worships because it was something that they found shelter or protection in, or something to fear from, in their very first days on the planet. These separate religions, thought to be that of different gods, really in time over the series is revealed to be just one single god, pretty similar to the Christian God, but not quite. This one single god gave up trying to convince the races that it was just him on the very first day. This god is known by truly enlightened people as the "God with many faces," or "the masquerading god" because he makes it a point to play the roles of the separate fictional gods the races choose to believe in. I am just debating how soon I should let the reader in on this big secret...


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## AndrewLowe (Feb 27, 2016)

I personally believe that Frank Herbert's _Dune_ novels which span about 6,000 years do an excellent job of showing the evolution of religion over time.  One of the main 'factions' works to actively shape religions.  Although it's a sci-fi example, I believe that it still holds a firm grip on fantasy and reality.


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## NerdyCavegirl (Feb 29, 2016)

I'd enjoy participating in this discussion but my answer sounds so lame and confusing simple typed out. Dx If there's any mystic truth in my story, it's that everything is possible, God is love, and time is relative. I personally believe in a nutshell that we're all part of the same cosmic eternal lif eforce that is the mysterious forces of physics and that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I think my signature is pretty spot on. So while the people of my world have various beliefs colored by social norm and personal experience, just like us, they are all flawed perceptions because we're flawed beings. That said, what we believe does affect our world, and if you believe hard enough, you never know what impact you might have. Physics works in weird ways. Do our gods create us, or do we create them? I leave that up to each character and culture to decide, and what they believe is their own truth by law of the mystic truth. Our primate brains can only compute so much.


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## insomniac_tales (Feb 29, 2016)

vaiyt said:


> In my world (as depicted in my own thread), every religion is true and false to an extent. The theology and rituals of a religion work as components of a really slow, really big spell that slowly creates something resembling that religion's otherworld and gods in the magical plane. Of course, as religions change over time and not everyone is on the exact same page when it comes to the meaning of rituals, the actual final form of the gods is never under anyone's total control.



This is truly an excellent idea. I'd read that book.


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