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Today’s Writing Tip Topic: Religions!

When it comes to world-building religions, there are a lot of questions to answer, but where do you start building a religion. Gods first? Culture first? Which is the better approach? Well, the answer to that depends on what you’re doing with your story.

There’s two questions, you need to answer.

Question One: Are your gods real in this universe?

Question Two: Are your gods, characters and/ or plot points in this universe or are they background information, meant to flesh out your world?

Today, I’m going to focus on the Gods First Approach. And next week, I’ll focus on the Culture First Approach.

Gods First Approach

 [What an adorable war goat]

(Thor’s Fight with the Giants (1872) by Mårten Eskil Winge.)

The Gods first approach can really emphasizes what you need in the story.

It is a great approach for when some or all of your gods are real and characters or plot points in the story. For example, if your story is about an earth goddess, who has a trickster personality and entangles people in overgrown vines for fun, you might find that building culture first prevents you from creating such a goddess. This is due to the departure of the goddess’s personality from the norm of an earth god or goddess. However, it’s a perfectly reasonable character and might be a very interesting character to read.

  [Muhaha! I have you now!]

(Entangling Vines by Thomas M Baxa)

The advantage of a Gods First approach is you are not limited by the culture and environment, when building your gods. This allows you to build the culture and environment around the gods you need to make your story work.

For example, in our earth goddess universe, you may have vines that move and entangle people, even without the goddess’s direct intervention. This is something people would need to plan for. Can the entangling vines encase their houses? If so, what do they do to prevent that? Do they have a specialized military task force that cuts down weeds all day or is it left to the villages to deal with?  Or is it something only travelers through the woods have to deal with?  Maybe this plant likes dark places, like the deepest depths of tall forests. In which case, what preparation do the travelers need to do to prevent themselves from entanglement?

I admit I just went more into the environmental considerations over a cultural one, but what dangers pose a threat to a civilization does have huge impacts on their culture. For example, maybe there’s absolutely nothing this civilization can do about the vines. Maybe they are too thick to cut and fire resistant. Maybe this civilizations only option is to pray to the goddess that their village won’t be the next to be swallowed.

This kind of threat imposes cultural changes in the village. Most cultures need some kind of control over their environment. If there is none or it feels like there is none, they impose control on it, often in the form of some ritual and often asking the gods for help. (In modern times, you can see this in major religions in the world, who send out thoughts and prayers after a major disaster or tragedy.)

For example, in our earth goddess universe, maybe we decide there is no control over these vines. Maybe in order to feel safe, every year the villages offer up part of their harvest to the goddess, in the hopes that if it is bountiful enough the goddess will protect their village from the vines. Maybe, they even have a festival at this time, complete with a parade of costumed villagers, where they worship the goddess and sing songs in her praise. There’s a lot of different ways you can show an exertion of control over an uncontrollable situation. The major take away from this is draw your world to its conclusions. If you have a god with a specific trait, consider how that will effect your world and you’ll have a good God First religion.

We’ll talk about the Culture First Approach next week. Thanks for reading!