When I first began to write, my reading habits shifted. It was slow, at first, and I did not notice it. Over time I came to read dominantly nonfiction—especially about the ancient world. Although this had long been of interest to me, I discovered that the more I studied, the more detailed my creative work grew. Not all this detail emerges into publication. Yet, as I build imaginative models of places and people in my head, I feel the writing improves. The fantasy grows more familiar, less distant and intangible.
This rarely leads to a one-to-one correspondence of terrestrial culture to fictional work. And that is best. A mélange is preferable to a pastiche (especially if the inspirational culture still exists). The god Hrunda in To Hunt a God began from learning that the baboon was associated in Egypt with Thoth, a god of knowledge and magic. Hrunda’s dismemberment came from the description of Siberian rites in Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism.
[The Horned One] lifted its long copper knife, and removed Hrunda’s head. Hrunda watched in horror as the Horned One carefully set the god’s head aside, then opened Hrunda’s body, and began removing his insides. Some looked healthy, while others were black and shriveled.
The Cult of Hrunda
The way I think about Esrolian religion is influenced by polis religion in ancient Greece. Each city-state recognized the Olympians, but worshiped and told stories about them in different ways. But there’s also ancient Babylonian elements in how I think about Esrolian social structure, and Aztec elements in land management and economy. The world of Akhelas—this site’s namesake—began from writing an Aristotelian tragedy in the modern fantasy genre. Its cosmology comes from Plato’s Timaeus, and its animism is shaped by my own (very American) individualism.
Speaking of To Hunt a God, did you know it’s now available in Print on Demand? If you want some bona fide non-canonical crazy, go check it out!
One such reservoir of ideas is James Frazer’s somewhat infamous 1890 study of comparative religion, The Golden Bough. I don’t know the extent to which The Golden Bough impacted Stafford’s development of Glorantha. Frazer’s work was deeply influential on known Glorantha inspirations, such as Joseph Campbell’s 1949 The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Even if Frazer’s work didn’t directly impact Stafford’s, there’s a Golden ghost lurking about the place.
The broad thrust of The Golden Bough seeks to demonstrate that “primitive” people experienced the universe as a magical place in much the same mode. Rituals ensured that natural rhythms would continue, and when humanity lost confidence in its magical prowess, it then turned to appeasing fearful and powerful gods. Further observation led to a slow understanding of natural law, and the development of science. Thus, Frazer instigates the concept of “progress toward civilization” which remains prominent in popular thought even today. Frazer’s argument is made through copious examples of ritual behavior—such as seclusion, fire rituals, and human sacrifice—across cultures as disparate as pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, 19th century European farmers, and medieval Judaism. He attempts to make universal claims through the variety of his evidence, but the connections are more anecdotal than logical. Frazer’s work is mostly a historical footnote in developing the study of comparative religions (kind of like how Freud was wrong about psychology, but nonetheless is of historical relevance).
Although Frazer fails to be useful to academics, he’s very useful to a writer. The thing is, my work doesn’t have to be correct. Who cares if Frazer was wrong, so long as he’s interesting?
Frazer’s copious anecdotes are great for story inspiration, but what really drew together The Golden Bough and Glorantha in my mind was the author’s hubris. The tenuous interconnections wrought in Frazer’s work, seeking to develop a unified story about religion, brought to mind one of Glorantha’s most infamous factions.
The God Learners.
The God Learners are infamous across Glorantha for developing a unified theory of mythology, typically called the Monomyth. Sound familiar? By identifying stories, gods, and rituals from across the world they sought to obtain reality-warping magic. Eventually this backfired on them, and they were destroyed by demigods from the Land of the Setting Sun.
The Monomyth—like Frazer’s theory—was ultimately a failure. It attempted to impose uniformity onto human diversity. Yet just as we can find uses for The Golden Bough, so to do the peoples of Glorantha find uses for the Monomyth. That doesn’t mean that it was true “unified field theory” of Gloranthan mythology. Just that it was interesting.
What was a failure for the God Learners is an enormous victory for those of us who muddle around in Glorantha. In my mind the fallibility of the Monomyth is the foundation stone to one of Stafford’s most celebrated principles: Your Glorantha Will Vary. Often abbreviated to YGWV, this premise is at the core of my RuneQuest work, and the work of other Jonstown Compendium creators. This principle doesn’t invite you to add a spare pebble, or change someone’s house to the west side of a city instead of the east. It invites you to make Glorantha yours. Take it home, get coffee stains on it, dog-ear and annotate and love the hell out of it. Invent gods. Discover myths. Tell so-called “canon” to fuck off, and discover what the God Learners forgot.
The lived story is always more true than the synthesized one.
That’s what Frazer forgot too, in his attempt to paint the beliefs of humanity with one palette. Just as academia grew beyond Frazer, Glorantha can grow beyond the Monomyth. That doesn’t mean abandoning it for anarchy. Frazer wasn’t wrong in everything; his details, for example, are useful, even if the conclusions were invalid. I see the Monomyth as being the same. We can draw interesting details from it, and then use them to create our own conclusions.
Until next time, then.
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The Golden Bough is definitely a deep and rewarding read about religion. It’s been a while since I’ve read it. One source of inspiration on myths and heroes that I just finished was Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock. Great tale of man influencing myths and vice versa.
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Cool, I’ll have to check it out.
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Here is a great example from the story as way of illustration:
The shamiga are mythagos, a legendary group, a tribe out of fable. Odd to think of it. Odder than being with Guiwenneth. They are a legendary people who guard – and haunt, after death – the river crossings. They transform into stepping stones when the river floods, or so the legend goes. There are several fables associated with the shamiga, all lost in our own time, but Steven learned a fragment of one such tale, concerning a girl who stepped into the water, ducked down to assist the crossing of a Chieftain and was taken to help build the wall of a stone fort.
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