Des avantages et des inconvénients des dieux en fantasy

[jerome]

Plusieurs auteurs ont répondu à la question : "In a created fantasy world, gods can proliferate by the hundreds. When building religious systems for fantasies, what are the advantages/disadvantages of inventing pantheons vs. single gods, or having no religious component at all?"

Parmi les réponses à l'article :
"L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
I've written one novel with what might be called pantheons of gods, an entire fantasy saga with no effective mention of or acts by any god, science fiction novels with cultural conflicts based on differing, if monotheistic, gods. In only two of my novels, however, are the gods direct physical players, and in one of those, there's a definite question as to whether the god is God.

It seems to me that, when gods take sides or act arbitrarily, such acts reinforce the ideas of the uncertainty and possible unfairness of life, but for a writer to create and use a pantheon of gods in such a fashion also, in a sense, changes the role of a deity away from being a moral force and merely becoming a supremely powerful being. In turn, a thinking believer in such a deity cannot help but become somewhat more fatalistic and less sanguine about life and the future.

Certainly, having a pantheon of gods can add greater complexity to otherwise simpler plots, and various gods can act against others for comparatively minor reasons that can create havoc for mere mortals who have to deal with the results of such acts. The disadvantage, of course, is that such divine meddling can end up with the gods looking petty, and the more technological a society becomes, I suspect, the less the people wish to believe in such pettiness as a facet of the divine. It may be just historical happenstance, but it does appear that monotheism, even atheism, tends to go with the wide-spread development and use of higher-level technology.

Then there is always the question that, if gods in a pantheon can destroy each other, are they really deities, or just powerful beings? If they can't destroy each other, then what is a stake? The manipulation and/or destruction of lesser entities to prove a point? Although I haven't seen much direct commentary on these points, Roger Zelazny addressed many of them in both Lord of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness."

Michael Swanwick
"I don't work with pantheons much in my fantasy, and when I do they're not tidy, codified systems like you get in Edith Hamilton's books, but more like the riotous confusion of gods the ancient Greeks had to deal with in their everyday lives, where it was assumed that all worshipped deities were real and that many were worshipped in foreign lands under different names. We're all at the mercy of the same forces the ancients were, and wake up in the morning not knowing if we've somehow managed to tick off the god of airline reservations or the goddess of infectious disease. So a little structural sloppiness and confusion goes a long way toward reflecting the messiness of our own lives.

In my own writing, there are two chief advantages to pantheons. One is to alert the reader that the book isn't going to go wandering into God territory. In The Dragons of Babel, Will le Fey may prudently sacrifice a goat to the Nameless Ones or meet a child who has sold her youth to the Year Eater, but nobody is going to expect serious theology in a book where the gods and goddesses have names like Ereshkigal and Mother Night. They have extraordinary power. . . but they don't represent anything. So you can have the plot advantages of the supernatural without the responsibility of explicating it.

Conversely, the other advantage to a pantheon is that it bestows distance when you are going into God territory. The Iron Dragon's Daughter was all about the struggle to find meaning in life and the proper way to live when God (or, in my book, the Goddess) won't say what is expected from you. It also dealt with the possibility or fear that Whoever or Whatever rules the universe may not necessarily be benign. Jane Alderberry was not only trying to find a place for herself in a world that had none to offer, but also an explanation for why the world is as it is.

To pose such questions in our own world is to invite proselytizing from religious missionaries. To posit them in a fictional universe with a single Deity is to risk offending sincere believers who will (quite rightly) reason that if there is only one god, it can only be God.

Both of which responses miss the point, mind you. The fantasy writer has been given special dispensation to tell lies in service of the Truth. But if we're to get a fair hearing, sometimes it's necessary to disguise the nature of the enterprise."