Welcome and thanks for coming!

Today’s Writing Tip Topic: Religions!

Today is the continuation of last week, where I focused on the God First Approach. Today, I’ll focus on the Culture First Approach.

As I noted last week, before you can decide where you want to do a God First Approach or a Culture First Approach, there are two questions that 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?

If you answer yes to these two questions, often times the best approach is a God First Approach. This allows you to focus on the character or plot of your story and create the world based off what you need.

There’s an additional point, I did not mention last week on this topic. If you’re gods are real – even if they are not characters or plot points – they aren’t necessarily going to conform to the culture or environmental factors that the people that worshiping them live in. They are real and real beings aren’t the same as a built myth that serves a purpose. This gives you some wiggle room with your real gods that you don’t have with unreal gods.

Culture First Approach

If your gods are not real and not characters or plot points in your universe, this is the best way to build your religion. It gives the religion a sense of organic realism that a story can really benefit from.

I find the best way to build a culture first religion is actually to build the environment first. The environment plays a huge role in what the culture and therefore the gods will be like.

For example, the Mesopotamian cultures. To focus on just one element, the rivers, Euphrates and Tigris. These two rivers flooded violently and chaotically. The same rivers that gave them the chance to thrive in the area were also the reason many lives were lost. This river caused endless problems for the civilization. This was hardly the only challenge the Mesopotamian cultures faced from their environment, but it illustrates well the kind of card, the Mesopotamians were dealt.

[Assyrian Archers. Circa 728 BC.]

And reflecting that, many of the Mesopotamian cultures were violent. Focusing on one: the Akkadians often waged wars to conquer, such as the Akkadian expansion into the Sumerian city-states and then again in Omar and Elamites to the east. This violent response reflects the violence in their own environment. But they also created solid roadways between their major cities and established, the first postal system. This response could have only been made possible by having enough food and solid leadership. This shows an expression of control over their environment, which brings us to our next topic.

Before you can know what the culture is about, you must know what challenges they face. Not only will a culture be shaped by the kind of environment they live in, but also by what they must overcome.

For example, the Incas lived in an environment where one of their chief obstacles was giant sheer cliffs. In order to create roads they build incredible suspension bridges made of out, wait for it, grass. Talk about an impressive technological feat. Maintenance of these bridges was handled by local villagers, who would replace key components, if not the whole bridge every year. This impressive feat was a huge part of the local villagers’ culture – from preparing the ichu grass every year to actually climbing the bridge and replacing needed components.

Now how do you take the environment and the culture you built and create the gods?

For an example of this look no further than Poseidon of the Greeks.

[Poseidon Sculpture at Copenhagen Port, 2005 (c) Hans Andersen]

The Greeks lived in a seafaring culture – the land wasn’t abundant or particularly good for crops – which meant they relied on the sea. But the sea is very dangerous, especially in a wooden boat. Most sailors knew to keep land in sight, because if they got too far into the sea, they may never find their way back to land. But even still the sea was a major killer. And Poseidon reflects this quality: he is vindictive and often cruel. There are many legends that show this, but the most well-known is the Odyssey, where Poseidon (for the reason of Odysseus blinded his monster son, when Odysseus was trying to escape him) forces Odysseus and his crew to wander the sea for ten years.

In order to build a culture first society, take the environment and cultural solutions to the problems and give your gods personalities based off of them. Of course, Gods aren’t the only part of a religion, consider what religious customs might evolve based off the challenges the culture faces every year. If you do these two things, you’ll have a good Culture First Religion.

 

Remember, in writing there’s no such thing as absolute advise. If you feel like you’d rather build your gods first, even if they are not real, then do so. It’s your story. Have fun with it.

We’ll talk about Races next. Thanks for reading!