Worldbuilding Wednesdays: As Above

Welcome to Worldbuilding Wednesdays!  Every Wednesday, we spend what is probably far too much time walking through our worldbuilding process.  This week, we're going to make a family of disaster pansexuals.

What We Have So Far

We've been discussing religions- what the reasoning behind them is, how they come together, and examples using our city by The Hill as source material.  We are at the point in our discussion where we are ready to discuss polytheism, which is the most common of all religious structures.  It is so common, in fact, that most of the prominent monotheistic religions are secretly polytheistic.  Rather than delve into real-world religions and maybe get in trouble, let's use a thinly veiled example from fiction:  Tolkein's Maia.

In the lore of Middle-Earth, there is only one god, Eru Illuvatar.  There is not only one being worshipped as a god, however.  The Valar, celestial rulers of Middle-Earth, are often worshipped as gods, even though the majority of them would deny the title.  They would refer to themselves, if necessary, as angels (or more likely as "servants") of Eru.  It doesn't stop folks from worshipping them, for reasons we'll get into shortly.

A surprising number of religions work similarly- ostensibly, there is only one being in charge of everything, and yet worship is directed not only to them, but also to lesser beings on their staff.  Given how polytheism works, this makes the difference between these "monotheistic" religions and polytheistic religions more or less academic.  The monotheistic religions, for their part, mostly tolerate this.  People seem hardwired to prefer their religions in a polytheistic setup.

Before we go any further, let's discuss why that is.

Made In Our Image

Basically, it's because we're self-centered egotists.  And by "we," we here at Vagrant Dog Productions mean "basically any intelligent species."

We touched on this just a little last week when we said that the three different species (nu human, scalie, and furry) were engaged in low-level hero worship of Mama Aanaga but couldn't agree which species she belonged to, each stubbornly claiming her as one of their own.  For reasons that we could write a doctoral thesis on, people see themselves in their heroes.  This extends upward from heroes, up to the divine.  Many religions preach that the creator made His/Her/Their chosen people in His/Her/Their image, but evidence suggests that it's the other way around: when people invent a god to explain what's going on, they tend to invent someone who is basically Them But With Power.  Similarly, when people try to come up with ways that the divine could organize itself, what they tend to default to is Like We Do But Better.  If we are led by a king, then the god who rules over all would be the King of Kings, yeah?  Similarly, if we are ruled by a creaking, overly-complicated bureaucracy, then the heavens themselves consist of an even more complicated bureaucracy, but one that runs perfectly, because gods don't make filing errors.

This has interesting implications for both mythology and the way our people use religion to control themselves and others, as it can create a feedback loop.  A super basic example:  say that our polytheistic religion's divine dynasty consists of an extended family.  According to the mythology of said religion, the royal family is a mortal offshoot of that same bloodline, which is why they're in charge- they're literally part-god and closer to the divine than the rest of us.  Then, one day, a bloody coup occurs, and the royal family is overthrown.  The new royals in charge make an announcement shortly afterward- "Don't worry, we're allowed to be in charge, because we're also descended from the gods!"

If you repeat this often enough, and none of the potential children of the gods gets discredited, you end up with a massive family tree for the gods and a few questions about how often the gods are seeding the earth.  Don't believe us?  What we've just described is how Greek Mythology worked.  One of the few things that everyone seems to know about the ancient Greek Gods is that Zeus, the chief god, slept with basically anything that moved.  In reality, these stories were passed down to legitimize kings who took over from other royals who allegedly had the backing of the gods.  By a "strange" coincidence, no matter which god backed the local royals, if they were overthrown, the new king would be suddenly revealed as the child of an even more powerful god, and you couldn't get more powerful than Zeus back then.  History being written by the victors, we heard from these children of Zeus far more often than we heard from the defeated royals who insisted that no, that wasn't a demi-god, it was a guy who bribed the watchmen to let his mercenaries into the royal palace.  Over time, the names of both parties are forgotten, but not the fact that a child of Zeus was involved, and he is eventually considered the patron god of not keeping it in his pants.

Intermediate Intercession

We've established that we like to make gods that work much the same way we do, and that our stories about them tend to influence, and get influenced by, their most powerful followers.  Let's talk about the fact that we don't really like praying to the more important gods.

Imagine the divine powers are a corporation.  At the top of the corporation is a board of directors, led by a CEO.  These are the head gods of a polytheistic religion.  As the head gods, they rule over creation, and each individual director is in charge of a specific aspect of said creation.  They have the authority and power to control that aspect completely, and broad "I'm the director" powers that apply even outside their aspect, in much the same way that the executive vice president of a retail chain doesn't really need to consult with anyone to fire a random cashier, even if they're only in charge of Information Technology.  Of course, a director isn't expected to do everything themselves; they've got managers, and those managers have supervisors, and the supervisors have a team in charge of the day-to-day.

Now imagine you need to approach this corporation for help.  Would you try to track down the CEO?  Probably not; even if you could get his attention, he would at best delegate one of the directors to take care of it, who would be miffed that you went over their head, and at worst turn his full attention to it, which would be "catastrophic" in the original meaning ("the opposite of what you expected").  For the opposite reason, you also probably wouldn't approach an entry-level employee.  They would be easy to talk to, but you're most likely going to end that conversation with them shrugging and saying, "That sucks.  Wish I could help."  Your best option is somewhere in the middle- you look for someone with enough power to help, close enough to listen, and not so vast and eldritch as to flatten you and your family accidentally while trying to help.

This approach is what polytheism is ideally suited for.  Yes, there are higher gods in charge of the cosmos, and they figure heavily in the stories, and they have the nicest statues because those are people you don't want to upset, but they aren't who you worship.  You worship the local representative, the saint or demi-god that works in the name of the god in charge of your type of problem.  If you're a sailor, you make offerings to Poseidon because you don't want him angry, but you pray to his daughter Rhode that your trip to her island goes well.

Making a Poly-Racial Religion

We can already tell that the polytheistic religion we come up with here is going to be the dominant religion in our example city, for one simple reason: it's the type of religion that most closely matches what's happening in the city itself.  Remember, people like it when their religion is made in their image.  A religion centered on three groups of gods, working together to run creation, is going to appeal to three species far more than a religion where just one person is in charge.

With that in mind, we can easily imagine that the gods of this religion will work similarly to the government of the city.  The three groups of gods (nu human, scalie, furry) will have features that can be best described by the individual species as Us But With Power.  We can look at real-world mythologies for ideas of how three species would mesh religiously.  In Western mythologies, what we mostly see are cultures sweeping in, crushing older cultures, and then telling stories about how a new generation of gods overthrew the older gods... but that didn't always happen.  Norse mythology tells of two groups of gods fighting but eventually making peace.  While the stronger culture's gods were still in charge, the older gods became part of an expanded pantheon.

Our religion tells of a time when all was chaos, a common theme.  The energies of different universes clashed, as did beings from those universes.  From this chaos emerged champions of this universe, who developed a new kind of magic, one that could control and force back the others.  These champions, like the magic they created, had a mixture of energies, but were beholden to none of them.  As they grew in power, they created the world, then the Lantern, the moons, and finally space.  They fight even now, for the other universes constantly try to destroy ours, pouring through portals and tears to this day.  In fact, all those stars in the night sky?  Distant tears that the gods continue to plug.

The gods war constantly, and are organized accordingly.  Of course, our people don't do wars as people of Earth do; wars aren't common enough to warrant developing complex strategies.  Each species has strengths and weaknesses, and takes on a set of roles that suits them.  At the head of all three species is a council with equal representation, each with a chief, and decisions are made by a majority vote of the chiefs.  Since there are three, ties aren't possible, and deadlocks aren't common.  Certain issues will see two of the chiefs invariably vote the same way, but this doesn't happen enough to constitute favoritism between two species against the third.

So it is that we would see a pantheon that consists of three councils, each headed by an all-powerful chieftain.  Each council controls a portion of Creation, so, for example, you wouldn't consult a furry god on matters of the ocean, and you wouldn't consult a scalie god about trees.  By a complete coincidence, we swear, beyond the most fundamental aspects of creation, which are shared, each council tends to deal with those aspects that their constituent species tends to focus on.  All three councils share governance of the sky, space, and especially the stars.  Similarly, all three share governance of the planet itself, which the religion states is a giant generator of the local magic that all living creatures contain.  It is the gods who are responsible for the dungeons, which help control the local tears and portals and also serve as a crucible to test if a mortal is worthy of serving the Divine Councils.  Anyone who wishes to join the City's councils must first defeat a dungeon for that reason.

Conclusion

We now have the bones of a polytheistic religion.  Were we to develop it further, we would begin naming and describing specific gods.  Each god would have a different worldly concern, with the most powerful gods sharing dominion over the neutral spaces.  Minor gods would have less power and increasingly specific concerns, tracking down from "Space" all the way to "pantries" or something similar.  Everyone would know the names of the mighty gods who fight for the safety of Creation; everyone would worship the gods that most directly control the aspects of life they're worried about.

Next week, we'll talk about monotheism and nontheism, which can be seen as variants on polytheism.  You know, if you tilt your head just right.