The purpose of this post is to ask the question: How can I make a fictional religion for my world feel less “fantasy” and more authentic to an ancient world?
There are a number of aspects that are taken for granted in high-fantasy settings, as they have become tropes of the fantasy adventure genre, and leaked over from modern religions, but they aren’t really the way things were for a lot of the ancient monumental religions of the past. Hopefully some of the ideas I’m talking about here will help you think of your created religion in new ways, to help you simulate that ancient world feeling.
To clarify, I’m discussing mostly western religions (greek, roman, nordic, judaic) here. That doesn’t mean these things can’t apply to other religions, just that I don’t personally have as much expertise, and they haven’t been corrupted in quite the same ways.
1: The Purpose of a Priest
The Fantasy Cliché: Priests are worshippers and servants of their god. They push their God’s agenda, and act as a champion of that philosophy. For example, the priest of a God of Healing would go around healing people and talking about peace, whereas the priest of a God of Plague would have some nihilistic purpose and go around spreading plague to every community.
The Ancient Reality: Priests are human-first. They are less of an advocate for their God’s philosophy, and more of an intermediary between the common people and the God in question. The Priest of the Plague God doesn’t GIVE you plague… he tells you how to appease the plague god to keep you and your family safe. The God is more like a force of nature than a cult-leader, and the priest is an expert in dealing with and navigating the perils of that force, rather than a member of the cult. Or, another way to look at it. The God is a Business Executive whose goals may involve that area (plagues) but the priest is not an employee so much as a lawyer you can hire to help you negotiate with that CEO.
2: Victims of Their Own Power
I want to talk here about Medea. She was a demi-god who existed in the traditions of ancient Greece. Let’s examine a few of her stories before I establish my point:
Medea was the princess, and a sorceress, who betrayed her father to help the hero Jason steal the golden fleece, and then escape with it. During the escape aboard the Argo, the king sent his fleet after them. Those ships were much faster, and would have easily caught and destroyed the Argo if not for Medea’s actions. Jason and Medea had taken her brother captive in their escape. As they fled, they murdered him where the pursuit ships could see, then chopped him up and dropped the pieces of his body into the water. The pursuing ships COULD NOT LET even one piece of the prince’s body drift or sink, because he was a prince and their reverence would not allow it. So the ships one by one slowed to retrieve the pieces and the Argo escaped.
Pretty savage, right? Medea is someone who will clearly commit acts of brutality to meet her goals. She is something of a force of nature, herself. To the extent that Jason vastly underestimated her.
Medea and Jason, after many adventures, came to settle on the island of Corinth. The King of Corinth was pleased to have a hero living there and wanted to unite their houses by marrying his young and beautiful daughter to Jason, to tie the hero’s bloodline and status to his own. This would have been a good deal for Jason as well, even though he was married to Medea and had two children with her. He tried to convince his wife that it would be best for everyone, that he still loved her, that he could better provide for their family. Yet it was still a betrayal. It was a betrayal of her love, of what she had done for him, murdering her own brother.
Eventually everyone decided that Medea would just have to deal with it, though the King warned that if she caused trouble, she’d be banished. So she banished herself, but not before having her revenge. She sent a magically poisonous cloak to the bride as a wedding gift, which killed the young princess in a horrible and torturous way, and destroyed the king as well when he tried to pull the deadly garment off of her. Jason chased Medea down only to find that as a parting vengeance against him, she had murdered their two children. She left him weeping, and when he asked her why she had done this, how could she have done this, murdered their children whom she deeply loved? Well, there is a line from a Medea play that still rips at my heart when I think of it… she said, “Because I hated you more than I loved them.”
So that is Medea. A demi-goddess, possessing some divine blood (she was related to Pacifae. Pacifae, if you don’t remember your classics, was the daughter of Helios (and the queen of Crete, mother of the Minotaur), and sister to Circe the enchantress from the Odyssey. So Medea was most definitely a divine being who also had mortal blood.
So was she just THAT brutal? That heartless and cruel? She is often seen as a villain for her actions that seem incomprehensibly evil, but she begged Jason not to go through with his betrayal. She begged him. She loved him and loved her children.
My interpretation of her actions is my next point… that while the Gods often have personalities, the ancient greek gods also had certain rules that had to be followed. A mortal who offends must be punished. MUST be. To the point where it was essentially outside of their power to forgive. It was not possible for Medea to back down and accept that insult. And her vengeance had to be a grand divine retribution in all it’s brutal ruthless fury. She had to DESTROY Jason whatever the personal cost to herself. It was almost a compulsion. You can think of as the cost of having divine power… you can wield it, but you are also at it’s mercy.
3: The True Meaning of Sacrifice
The Fantasy Cliché: Evil gods demand sacrifices. It might be the wasteful destruction of resources, but the evilest demand sacrifices of animals, of blood, of virgins, and the worst of all: children. These gods are demonic devourers, who like to bathe in blood, revel in suffering and pain, and are predatory in the extreme. Sacrifice is the mark of barbaric and evil religions.
The Ancient Reality: Sacrifice was commonplace and not seen as evil. It was like tithes. The sacrifice was like a one-way express shipment to the God you were sacrificing to. It was a way of showing respect, not because you were willing to kill, or cause pain, but because you were willing to lose something of value to you. That was the transactional devotion. If you want the God to know you are worshipful, you might sacrifice some food, something useful to you. A rich man needing a favor, or a community hoping for good luck might sacrifice an animal. Not for the blood, but for the personal value to themselves that they were surrendering.
As for the sacrifices of blood, and even the lives of loved ones and children, that was not to show the “evil” nature of the gods, but rather to show the desperate nature of the devotee. Child sacrifice was pretty rare, and the only instance I know of offhand came from the Island of Crete, which went through a period of incredible strife, earth-quakes, and calamities, the destruction of their powerful navy by tsunami, and the attacks by barbarians which would later become the Greeks. They didn’t survive, but in those last desperate days when the Gods seemed to have abandoned them entirely, there were signs of desperate sacrifices of their children. Not because they thought the gods wanted their children to suffer, but because they wanted to beg for mercy by giving up the most precious things they had.
It does seem like in those parts of the world there was a real problem with seeing women and children as property rather than people, but I guess that’s not a surprise.
So, consider commonplace sacrifices, not as the evil acts they are often stigmatized to be, but as they represent transaction offerings to the Gods.
There’s also a long talk to be had about Judeo-Christian traditions, and how the whole purpose of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was to be one final sacrifice, eliminating the need for all others, but that’s one I can speak to in depth.
4: Religion as TV
The last concept I want to share with you involves looking at the role of divine stories, pantheons, and demi-god figures and their legends, not just as morality plays, or guides to faith, or explanations for the unknown, but as culture-unifying-stories. As entertainment.
Look at religions with large pantheons and how they are full of politics, dramatic events, betrayals, jealousy, heroes and all of that. Stories of the gods and their shenanigans filled the roles of soap-operas and comic books as much as anything else.
Look at the Nordic Pantheon, with Odin, Freya, Thor, Baldur, and Loki. Look at the Greco-Roman pantheon, with Zeus, Hera, Prometheus, Heracles, Aphrodite, Athena, Eris, Poseidon, Hades… they are all filled with all the hallmarks of the entertainment we still enjoy: Drama, Action, Emotion, Family… These characters are even often adapted to modern entertainments where they fulfil exactly the same roles, such as Thor and Loki in the MCU.
So consider how your ancient Gods, especially if you are designing a pantheon, are a mix of personalities, and fulfil similar requirements to an ensemble-cast TV Show or Comic Book series.
5: Evangelism and the Lack Thereof
The last concept I want to discuss is the idea that is very easy to miss until it’s pointed out. As Americans, our lives and culture tend to be dominated by a few religions more than others. The three biggest we probably hear about most often in the news today are Christian, Islamic, and Jewish.
Of those, Christian and Islamic religions have one major factor in common, and it is so pervasive that one may easily forget that the other kind even exists. That is their Evangelistic nature. They want to spread, to recruit, to bring people into their faith. That just seems like… what religion is, doesn’t it?
But look at the Jewish faith. Recruitment is not a common thing in the Jewish faith. Often you can’t become Jewish even if you WANT to. You can marry in, but still aren’t necessarily considered Jewish. That is an example of a modern non-evangelical religion.
But consider that, although evangelism and conversion has become a major part of some of the biggest and most influential religions today, it is not necessarily likely to be a part of an ancient religion.
Conclusion
I hope this has helped give you some ideas for how to make your ancient religions stand out. Before I go, there is one other resource I want to share with you. If you want to really get into the philosophy and thought process behind a fictional religion, you’ll want to check out Stant Litore’s book here:
Write Worlds Your Readers Won’t Forget by Stant Litore
He is not only an incredible author whose love of dinosaurs rivals my own, but a religious scholar in his own right, who has studied the various elements of religious philosophies and structures to the point that if I wrote an article on it, I’d probably be mostly regurgitating what I learned from him. And that is just ONE of the subjects covered in his book there.
If you’d like to share any of your own creations using these tools, or have any questions, suggestions, or thoughts about what I’ve written here, I’d love to hear them!
See you next world!
—Charles