Religious Practice & Fantasy: Goat's Law

[Aberforths Goat / Mike Gray]

Barry bored away,

> OK.  Souls I'll give you though since wizards don't seem to
> practice any religion I'll need to write to  Edinburgh to get 
> the spelling confirmed. 

Perhaps the Dementors were really hoping to eat fillet of sole, but
Voldemort had inspired too much overfishing.

* * * * *

Smartalecking aside: That statement set me off on a rant of been meaning
to launch for a long time. Now's a good time to try it out on you guys
before I make a complete fool of myself with it at Accio. 

To wit: I think you - and a lot of other people - aren't considering an
important feature of the fantasy genre which, thanks to my complete lack
of knowledge, creativity and humility, I've decided to call "Goat's
Law":

- Where the author of any given work of fantasy fiction takes a positive
stance toward the contemporary practice of a religion which poses
questions basic to the narrative, the practice of that religion is
unlikely to be directly portrayed in the fantasy societies created by
that work.

- Extension: In fact, the more positive the religious stance, the more
"secular" the portrayal; the more negative the stance, the more
"religious" the protrayal.

A couple of examples: The Narnia and Lord of the Ring series are written
by authors with strong Christian convictions - and these convictions
have a lot to do with the character of both series (though in very
different ways). And yet, both fantasy societies seem strangely secular
- at least in terms of collective religious practice (things like
churches, temples, sacraments, clergy). I've read a lot of far less
known fantasy fiction written by conservative Christian authors (not
much of it worth recommending), and the same principle holds throughout.
(You can even go back to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which wasn't even
symbolic fantasy but straight allegory: Ever noticed that Christian
never goes to church?)

On the other hand, take Philip Pullman and Susan Cooper, two fantasy
authors with significant reservations (of different kinds) about
Christianity. Both series portray the collective religious life of their
fantasy worlds directly - and in terms that clearly resemble the
practice of West European Christianity. Or you can even go back to CSL:
the one religion that *is* portrayed in Narnia is ... bingo: the cult of
Tash. (Exactly what Tash-ism is meant to be is another question.)

I think there are two reasons for this. 

(1) The *positive* religious imagery of fantasy fiction is closely tied
to the quality of life itself in the secondary world. Fantasy fiction
deals, by rule, with the boundaries between the natural and the
supernatural - specifically, it relocates to an empirical, experiential
level things which we would, in our primary world, classify as
miraculous, supernatural, eerie or numinous. However, religion also
deals with these boundaries; and the semiotic function of religious
practice is to delineate these boundaries. The problem: once a work of
fantasy has performed its fictional relocation, the signs get all
screwed up. You don't *need* to point to the
supernatural/miraculous/eerie/numinous anymore; it's right there. It
would be as silly as hauling an exit sign from the freeway into your own
living room. Unless, of course, that is exactly your point: that a
certain religious practice *is* silly - or even evil because it points
in the wrong direction.

(2) The other reason: Authors who create secondary worlds based on the
spiritual principles of a religion to which they belong find thenselves
in something of a creative bind: they can't simply take their own
religious practice and transfer it to the new universe in an identical
form - it wouldn't fit; the form of their religion is too deeply rooted
in the history of their own world to be transplanted directly. However,
the author is also uncomfortable with the thought of creating a sort of
analogous religion - because the forms of religious practice are also so
closely bound up in its substance, to create a completely different form
would be very unsettling - it would cross a sort of boundary of
religious "good taste," even if the intentions were good; it would break
a kind of taboo. Again: unless, that is, breaking a taboo is exactly
what the author is trying to do.

There are a lot of holes in this theory. Inclusivistic religions of the
Eastern type may have a different dynamic. More to the point, authors
who don't really care about religion one way or the other obviously
wouldn't be in either category - and one could very argue that this
description applies to Jo. (Part of a response: I think fantasy fiction
is generally written by people who care deeply about religious
questions.)

BTW, The Never Ending Story (one of my favorite fantasy books of all
time) is just one example of a work that doesn't fit my theory. (Though
the author *does* care about religious questions.)

Earth to Goat? Earth to Goat? 

Oh. Sorry guys. Feel free to snicker a little, poke me with a sharp
object, ask me to lay off the goat weed - or just nod off ... After all:
it's late.

Baaaaaa!

Aberforth's Goat (a.k.a. Mike Gray) 
_______________________

"Of course, I'm not entirely sure he can read, 
so that may not have been bravery...."