What is a Pantheon and Why is it Mad at Me?
This is a re-post of a piece I wrote last year for the fine fellows at Sf Signal.
Q: In a created fantasy world, gods can proliferate by the hundreds. When building religious systems for fantasies, what are the advantages/disadvantages of inventing pantheons vs. single gods, or having no religious component at all?
You can read answers from science fiction authors more famous than yours truly here: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2009/04/mind-meld-gods-by-the-bushel/
My (typically longwinded) answer is below:
Very interesting question. I can answer both in the abstract and from experience.
In the abstract, the means to judge the utility of any element in a story is to assess the ends (the desired effect on the reader) and the means (the costs and benefits of employing a particular craft on the reader). What is your destination, and which road are you taking to get there?
If we were writing jokes rather than SFF, this assessment would take the form of asking: Well, is it funny? If it ain’t funny, leave it out.
In SFF, this assessment takes the form of asking: Well, is it fantastic, speculative, wondrous, sad, striking, memorable, horrific, elevating, impressive, edifying, sublime, etc., etc. (depending on what effect we want to achieve)? In SFF, if it ain’t scientifictionalistically fantastical, leave it out. At that point it becomes a judgment call, and no advice I can give will apply to all cases. I can, however, speculate about the general case. The topic is too deep and rich to treat fairly in his space, so I will treat it shallowly. Brace yourself for imprecise and unqualified statements.
In general, there are three types of fantasy fiction and two types of science fiction. (Obviously there is overlap and overbroadness to these categorizations, but bear with me).
The three types of fantasy are:
- Sword and Sorcery, also called Low Fantasy, as in Robert E. Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs
- High Fantasy, as in J.R.R. Tolkien or E.R. Eddison
- Dark Fantasy, as in H.P. Lovecraft or Darrell Schweitzer
The two kinds of science fiction where god or gods crop up are:
- Cargo Cult stories, as in Fritz Lieber’s Gather, Darkness!, where God turns out to be a fraud;
- Gnostic stories, as in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, where the devil turns out to be the good guy.
The point of low fantasy is to watch clean-limbed fighting men from Virginia clash flashing blades against surly yet brawny barbarians from Cimmeria during the last days of Rome on Mars or something, and maybe rescue a half-naked space princess from eldritch evil priests, eldritch chthonic demons, eldritch undead, eldritch pirates, eldritch highwaymen, eldritch encyclopedia salesmen of darkness. It does not matter what menace you are rescuing her from, so long she is half-naked and the menace is eldritch.
Low fantasy stories are not concerned with historical or theological accuracy: if you want to have your hero rescue his space-princess from an opulent cult of serpent-god worshipping warlocks from Stygia, it is better to have them practice human sacrifice than ascetic meditation as their primary form of worship, in so far as fighting a giant snake makes better drama than cutting down a bunch of meditating greybeards in saffron robes. Again, if you have your stalwart hero burn down the Temple of the Evil Spider-God of Evil in your first yarn, you need to knock over a new and different cult in your second.
Low fantasy is about spectacle, and polytheism lends itself nicely to spectacle, especially if the local temple also maintains the civic circus where gladiatorial duels against drug-maddened fighting slaves, ninjas, or dinosaurs are fought. Especially if the city is older than time, built on the slopes of an uneasily slumbering volcano, atop murmuring catacombs, and the eldritch ruins where men fear to tread loom over the unclimbed and unclimbable far side of the volcano, and strange musics or shrieks of nonhuman laughter ring across the ashy slopes when the moon is dark, or, in the case of Mars, moons.
If the gods and goddesses are actually real in your tale, and one of them is the antagonist, polytheism is easier thematically to handle than monotheism. The problem in a story when God fights Man is that it is rarely an even contest: it is sort of like ant versus boot.
But if you have a pantheon, this gives you some elbow room plot-weaving-wise. For example, if Juno, the Great Queen of Heaven, is angry (or, more poetically, wrathful) at your main character, and curses him with a divine curse, and stirs up winds and sea and monsters of the deep against him, if your hero is the son of divine Venus, the Mother of Rome, and therefore is half-divine himself, maybe he can get help from his side of the pantheon, or Mercury can slide him a stash of Moly plant or something.
High Fantasy is more about mood and atmosphere than it is about color and action. There is a melancholy in the modern world which looks with nostalgia to the days when magic ruled the world, and sunrise was a time of aubade, dusk a time for the canticles of evensong, when the elfin ships can be glimpsed by those with second sight against the fiery clouds, setting sail away from the mortal shores for worlds beyond the sunset, beyond the seas we know. Monotheism lends itself nicely to a mood of magic, for then the whole world is the artifact of one divine craftsman, a stained glass window meant to catch the sunlight of supernal things beyond. If the world is made by one maker, it is easy to portray the earth and sea and sky as magical, an enchanted sword hammered by a divine smith, a magical garden planted for our use. For the mood of melancholy, monotheism also is useful, for then the beautiful world as it was meant to be, if you are not setting your tale in a utopia, is imperfect: hence the earth is not an unfinished creation, a fetus not yet achieving to human beauty, but a wonder that fell, a majesty betrayed and marred.
(Whether or not the world is actually this way, is not my point. In a tale of wonder, such a portrayal of the world evokes a mood of high and antique magic, the sorrow of wisdom, the reader can glimpse as if in the evening star the last lantern that hangs in the towers of the twilight.)
If you want to have knights and princesses and priests in a hierarchy in a high fantasy, it is always jarring (to me, at least) to have your make-believe world have all the forms and rituals and particulars of the Roman Catholic Church, and have them worshipping the Seven Gods of Crystal Dragon Jesus or whatnot. It is sort of like having ‘ninjas’ in the Old West attacking a wagon train, or aboard the Pequod hunting the Great White Whale with shuriken and kusarigama. If you can get away with it, more power to you, but you have a jarring note to overcome. If you want a faux-Arthurian atmosphere, you would do better to bite the bullet and put in things of Arthur’s world, including Popes and priesthoods, smells and bells, holy hermits and the whole nine yards. A ‘knight’ is a Christian artifact from a Christian culture just as much as a ‘Kirtle Friar’ is. If you want to have Friar Tuck and Sir Lancelot and El Cid and Ivanhoe in your epic, you have to take their monotheism along with them, because the mental architecture of knightly oaths and vows and fealty and courtly love and smiting paynims and all that jazz does not make sense outside the Christian worldview.
You will have trouble to produce the melancholy and magical mood of High Fantasy if your story does not harken back to a real past the modern world has betrayed and forgotten.
If you are going to have a Paladin, complete with oaths and spurs, the marvelous horn of Roland at his hip and the enchanted sword of Hector in his hand, but then have him not serving the God of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, but instead serving Lord Lighthost, Lawful Good God of Lawful Goodness (located peacefully across the street from the cathedral of Lord Vile, Chaotically Evil God of Evil Chaos, which happens to be next door to the true neutral Druid Grove, all living in civic harmony together like a Burger King next to a McDonalds), don’t try for the mood or majesty of High Fantasy. Call your fighting-man Grayhilt the Grim, keeper of Dragonsword of Darkborn, give him a plus-five wand of fireballs, put him in a haunted labyrinth with a Beholder, rev up your typewriter, and let ‘er rip! But don’t try for a High Fantasy atmosphere unless you know what you are doing.
Like Tolkien, or like the anonymous poet who wrote Beowulf, you can keep the monotheism in the background, and merely display a sacramental attitude toward sacred things, starlight, sacred fountains, the seven stars, the one white tree, which might please your Christian readers without being so obvious or Aslan-like as to offend your non-Christian readers. They read fantasy too, remember, and their imaginations thirst for the wine of poetry, if not the water of life. Now, you can set a High Fantasy with bags of romantic melancholic magical half-familiar majesty with a pantheon in the background, but they would have to be gods that lend themselves to that sort of thing: think of majestic Roman Mars as opposed to craven Greek Ares. In his monumental masterwork The Worm Oroborous, E.R. Eddison has his Witchlanders and Demonlanders of Mercury worship the classical gods of Rome; but in his sequel, Mistress of Mistresses he wisely segues to a singular worship of Venus, and has his main character embroiled in a world created by his divine lover to bring out his heroic stature. No other goddesses or divine beings are mentioned: so we can assume this conception of Venus is a monotheistic avatar of the Divine Love that makes the sidereal universe.
Dark Fantasy lends itself nicely to monotheism, because we all know Christians are creepy: either they look like spooky Puritans, dressed in all black, a la Solomon Kane, or they have spooky gothic Cathedrals, complete with gargoyles and graveyards and torture chambers, not to mention ritual cannibalism and what’s not to like about that?
It is important if you put monotheism in a Dark Fantasy to have the monotheistic god be Dark.
You can have crucifixes drive back vampires in a dark fantasy, but there can be no hint of where or why crucifixes have that power. There can be no adumbration of all this joy and love stuff the Christians talk about, unless it is the Grand Inquisitor doing the talking, preferably while burning Galileo, buggering an altarboy, or hiding the bones of Jesus (who should, just to make it Dark, turn out to be a vampire or something). For example, the Magisterium of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials makes no mention of all about Christ or Redemption: it is simply an Evil Church Of Evil(TM) in a world ruled by dust and lies. Likewise, in Darrell Schweitzer’s We Are All Legends, God is a bloodthirsty madman, and Sir Julian is merely a helpless babe stumbling about a cosmic battlefield between the forces of an admittedly evil evil (Hell) and a hypocritical and inhuman goodness not one iota less evil (Heaven). Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon have similar unsympathetic portrayals of Heaven in Swamp Thing, Sandman, and Angel, all of which I would categorize as dark fantasy.
The point of Dark Fantasy is to let your imagination dwell on unpleasant possibilities that the world is other than it seems, and much darker (hence the name). Monotheism lends itself to this possibility simply because of its suffocating character: if there is one almighty and all-bloodthirsty god, be he named Jehovah or Azathoth, then there is no escape.
If you make the Christian God the bad guy (which is popular these days) you have to be careful not to betray an abysmal ignorance of what Christians actually say or teach, or else the cool kids will laugh at you.
Science Fiction that deals with God or gods generally falls into two groups: Cargo cults stories and Gnostic morality plays.
A Cargo Cult story is one where the gods are always bogus, and turn out to be computers, high-tech aliens, or whatnot. Think of Vaal or Landru or Apollo from Star Trek, or the dudes with no faces from Beneath the Planet of the Apes who lived underground and had way-cool Mind Powers and worshipped a still-working atom bomb. The point of these stories is to have Captain Kirk blow up the machine, or Charleton Heston blow up the planet.
I suppose we could also count one chapter of Asimov’s Foundation saga as a Cargo Cult story. Like the sinister priests in Fritz Leiber’s Gather, Darkness!, the priests of the Great Galactic Spirit of planet Terminus are puppeteers who use forgotten high technology to terrify the peasants of the Second Dark Age, but unlike them, they were the (nominal) good guys. Ditto for or Heinlein’s Sixth Column. The point of these stories is to show how fun it is to fool the superstitious natives. See Man Who Would Be King for a more cautious take on how well that works out.
Cargo Cult stories can please both atheist and Christian alike, since Christians hate idolaters, and atheists hate religion, and each can read into it whatever interpretation he likes. In these stories the god is always the Wizard of Oz, a humbug.
In Gnostic morality plays, the God is real, but he is EEEEeeevil. Gnostics preach that the world is false, God is an oppressor, and the Devil is a hero trying to engineer our escape from God’s universe to a higher reality, the Pleroma, where we will be like gods. Hence in their tales, the story is about escaping from a false world into superhuman power. The movies The Matrix and Dark City are in this mood, even though they use science fiction style evil computers or evil reality-control machines rather than fantasy-style evil divine beings as the source of the cosmic deception.
In Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, or in Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon, however, the Gnostic God is real, and comes on stage as a character, and even speaks dialog. In Lindsay, we are told to embrace pain and foreswear joy in order to escape the evil and degrading trap of the material world, and in Stapledon we are told to embrace pain and foreswear joy because God is good (even though the story makes him clearly evil) and love Him even though he hates us. The drawback of penning a peaen to Gnosticism that is too obviously Gnostic is that non-masochistic people will recoil. Note the relative obscurity of these two works.
Better to savor the sauce with only a hint of Gnosticism. In Clarke’s Childhood’s End, for example, the promised escape into godhood is only adumbrated, as the Union with Overmind served by the Overlords might be interpreted to be psychic rather than supernatural, and evolution rather than Gnosis is the mechanism. But, true to form, the Devils are the heroes, the old religion shown to be a fraud, and the (false, materialistic) world is destroyed as the disembodied superhuman children soar off to their godhood.
A story like Island of Dr. Moreau contains even subtler Gnostic hints, but also Cargo Cult elements. It portrays the eponymous doctor as being just as much of a humbug as the Wizard of Oz, lording it over his half-finished creation of animal people, but if read as a criticism of humans, it condemns religion as a product of deceptive priestcraft, which modern Gnostics are urged to flee, escaping to the safety and sanity of secular humanism. It is in other tales that the Wellsian promise is spoken that, thanks to technology and secular humanism, the things to come will make men like gods, as in such as in books called, by no coincidence, Things to Come or Men Like Gods.
HP Lovecraft, uniquely, falls in none of these camps and overlaps them all. His ‘gods’ are extraterrestrial and exodimensional beings and superbeings, which, when one escapes from the false and illusionary world of deception which you and I call normal life, we do not become godlike, as the Gnostic faith promises, we become aware that we are less than insects: a boiling abyss of infinite and transinfinite horror surrounds us on all sides, and presses in on us from all higher dimensions. Lovecraft represents that sense of disorientation that the modern world suffered when Relativity knocked down Newtonian clarity and Quantum Weirdness made everything uncertain and approximate. He is the one who leaves religion out of his fiction entirely, and to dramatic and memorable effect, since everything that looks like religion (inbred Louisiana cultists worshipping primordial devil-gods) turns out to be both real, and reality-destroying, and something no human mind can contemplate without going mad. The proud figure of Lucifer from Milton’s Paradise Lost seems almost like a long-lost cousin compared to that.
Let me now turn to my personal experience. Since I, in my craft, like to have both a sense of dreadful supernatural powers hostile to man in my fantasy stories, (as when Juno hates Aeneas), and have some hint of supernatural hope and objective moral order underpinning the despair of the universe (as when Dante meets Virgil in the dark woods), I just mix both monotheism and polytheism to suit my taste, with the polytheism in the foreground, and ambiguous hints of monotheism in the background. In my duology Last Guardian of Everness, for example, I had both Hyperion, the Titan of the Sun, and Uriel, the Archangel of the Sun, put in an appearance, and perhaps even be the same guy. In my trilogy Orphans of Chaos, Saturn, who is described as the creator of the universe, is a Gnostic god, An Evil God of Evil, who rebelled against High Heaven, called by the Greeks Ouranos or Uranus: but I also have a plethora of lesser gods running around in the foreground stirring up trouble for my characters. They escape by playing one part of the pantheon off against another: which is another reason why pantheons are useful for low fantasy.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
