fantasy settings and cultural pluralism

[Green]

Bankuei> With all the good press HQ has been getting, I definitely would have bought it by now, but I can't seem to find a copy in my FLGS.

Ben> I'm sorry for my snappy reply.  Being cooped up in the house due to snow and ice tends to make you less than amicable.

[greyorm]

The issue I want to address here is what specific things game designers can do to diversify the mythic and aesthetic elements of the game world.

Could you clarify what you mean by "mythic elements" and "aesthetic elements"? Do you mean, for example, adding pantheons of other gods or mythologies to a setting, which are not central to the story being told? Or similar things which are mentioned in passing without ever being really used/touched on/explained in play?

However, the tendency is to make the game about the setting, and I'm not always interested in that.

I'm not sure I understand what, precisely, you are looking for, then. If the game is not about the setting (and thus exploration of the portrayal of the cultures in it), then why worry about detailing those cultures, if they have no impact or influence on the content of the game? What is the importance here, or rather, what is the focus on in play in terms of events?

What is it that the creators of fantasy settings can learn from science fiction and space opera with regards to cultural diversity?

Well, if we are talking about Star Wars, I would say it is not "other cultures" that you are actually interested in. It would seem to me that it is the mythic aspects of the setting rather than the cultural ones which you like.

I say that because Star Wars is about as "dead white guys" and Western culture as you can get. In fact, I'm not sure how it gets away from being anything but a European culture, or anything but a typical Eurocentric setting as you described not liking (the same for Fading Suns)? Could you explain?

From what you have mentioned in this thread so far, it seems to me that it is the suggestion of "stuff" "out there, somewhere" left undefined and unexplored that is of interest to you -- not in its exploration, but in its existance, because it gives more versimilitude, or more (even illusory) expansiveness to the world. Does that sound reasonable?

[clehrich]

Okay, so I've been out shoveling snow and thinking about this -- there isn't a lot else to do while shoveling 3 feet of snow.  I then came back in and wrote up a little discussion about designing fantasy settings so they don't come out Eurocentric... but it ended up 23 pages.  So I need to fix that up, polish it, and put it up as an article.  But in the meantime, your question....

I think the first point is to recognize what we mean when we say that these settings are Eurocentric.  Green doesn't want to debate this, and neither do I.  I know what he means, and I think he's definitely right.  The basic points are:

[*]The baseline assumptions about how people live and work and think are founded on Euro-American models.  For Tolkien this was deliberate and very much the point; for very few other fantasy writers is it so.  Nevertheless things like feudalism and such seem to be accepted norms.
[*]Fantasy cultures are, as a rule, monolithic.  The Elves think and act like this, while the Dwarves think and act like that.  Humans have several cultures, but each is a monolith unto itself.  Again, for Tolkien this was deliberate, and at the same time he hinted that this was in part a matter of perception: the hobbits just don't know enough to understand the intricacies, but it's clear that Minas Tirith is not actually a monocultural city, but has all sorts of funny subcultures.[/list:u]But Green doesn't want to debate this, so let's not.  Repeat: do not debate whether these worlds are Eurocentric—Green started by asking us not to do so in this thread.

Okay.  So how do we get out of Eurocentrism?

The basic problem is that the assumptions are very deep, and changing the surface isn't going to change the depth.  You'll get a shallow imitation of something different, but it will just slide into bad Orientalism or exoticism if you don't uproot and just slap a little paint around.

Here are my suggestions.

1.  Don't start with history, mythology, or anything like that.  Start with society: this is something Tolkien for example wasn't all that interested in, and if you build a distinctly non-European society, you're well on your way out of Eurocentrism.

2.  Forget logic, coherence, or clarity.  Just forget them.  Human culture doesn't work that way.  People don't sit down and say, "Hey, let's design a culture to be in."  Culture happens organically, and that means messy.

3.  Focus on cities and other dense populations.  You need to know how the common folk live, but the answer is that they live by whatever gets them food: agriculture, pastoralism, etc.  But in the city, you can create an unholy mess.  Remember that no big trading city should be more than about 75% composed of members of the dominant culture.  Include lots of enclaves of other cultures within them.  Ignore lords and so forth; tack them on once you have some notion of how the whole mess sort of looks.

4.  The basic principle of culture is that it is discontinuous and contested.  Thus it is normal, when examining a culture from without, to see incoherence and confusion.  Seeing how it all works smoothly takes a lot of patience and study.  Therefore if a fantasy culture appears coherent, rational, or comprehensible, you're doing something wrong.  Which leads to my #1 principle of fantasy culture design:

[*]Anything consistent, constant, and coherent in a society requires explanation, because it is abnormal.  You need to know why this is so, you need to know who maintains it, and you need to understand why it is in those people's best interests to maintain it.  Without constant vigilance, it will collapse into friendly messiness again.[/list:u]For example, if everyone in the society is gung-ho about the national religion, someone is going to an awful lot of trouble to keep them wound about this.

5.  One possible way to start is to take two utterly unrelated human historical cultures, in broad sketch, and mash them together.  Take anything that makes perfect sense and break it.  Then pound it all with a hammer until you have a nightmare of confusion.  That's a pretty good start for what real culture looks like.

6.  Do religion late, and make it messy and incoherent.  Assume that it makes no sense to anyone but the people involved.  Assume that five priests in a room have seven opinions.  Assume that if there is only one religion, it is a state religion, an important function of which is to maintain and stabilize royal or other centralized power.  Assume that ordinary people don't pay a lot of attention to any of this, and mostly offer bits of food or whatever to the appropriate gods because they sort of think they ought to and it's what dad always did and besides, it brings you good luck.  Don't worry about who believes what.  Very few religions are primarily about belief or especially faith.  If there are ethical tenets, the vast majority of them are about being good citizens, in whatever sense; the rest are about sticking to the tenets.

7.  If you want big historical background stuff, do it last and impose it on already incoherent and messy cultures.  Let that change things, but only to complicate, never to simplify.

Your object is to create a world of cultures and societies (not the same thing!)  that are sufficiently detailed that you can spin out fine detail at need, but are mostly overview sketches so you don't waste time.

This is just a few sketch points to get us started.  Green, this any help?

[Green]

clehrich,

Beautiful.  Thank you.  I'm flattered that I inspired an article, though.  I look forward to reading more of what you had in mind.

[clehrich]

Well, the article grows apace.  Sigh.

Glad you liked those points, Green.  Any particular points you want to bring up that I didn't touch, or disagreements, or things you want to expand on (or want me to expand on)?

One further point, though:

To my mind, the art of designing a really good fantasy setting, be it Eurocentric or otherwise, really resides in everyday life.  If you understand deeply how ordinary people live, in various walks of life and various parts of the world, the rest can lie gracefully over the surface.

Tolkien was extremely good at a number of things, but when it comes to everyday life it was only the hobbits he really did thoroughly.  For them, he seems to have drawn on his own country life and his idealized picture of how it should have been, how it was at its best.  But he doesn't seem to have liked cities much, if you ask me, because his cities don't seem very livable.

In order to work out a non-Eurocentric everyday life, you need to have a working knowledge of things like economics and a little anthropology.  Some cultural history of places other than home would help a lot as well.  Remember that the basic principles are always the same: food, clothing, shelter, sex, and entertainment.  The rest is gravy.

The thing that probably hits home most, of course, is sex.  If family relationships work quite differently than they do in typical imagined Euro-American cultures, everything will connect outward from that and make the whole seem quite alien and different.

This is why starting with myth and history, or religion as usually conceptualized (a bunch of gods), is unhelpful: these things don't matter to ordinary people's lives very much, at least not directly.  What you really need to know is what they eat and who they sleep with.

[Green]

clehrich,

I think that's about it.  If anybody has something else to add, I'm all for it, but I found what I was looking for.  Thanks.

[Mark Woodhouse]

This is why starting with myth and history, or religion as usually conceptualized (a bunch of gods), is unhelpful: these things don't matter to ordinary people's lives very much, at least not directly.  What you really need to know is what they eat and who they sleep with.

Well, I know Green said he felt his question was answered, but I did want to provide a tiny little bit of counterpoint to Chris.

The case differs somewhat when you are dealing with a certain kind of fantasy. When the 'gods' are a real thing that people encounter as a part of daily life, the direction of influence that Chris talks about can get reversed (or at least equalised somewhat). For us humans who live in a world where the gods, in so far as they might exist, are only ever operating behind the scenes and we can only hypothesize about them, the direction of social construction is as Chris describes it. We have the culture we have, built up from the messy basics of everyday life, eating, sleeping, sex, death, conflict. We rationalize a cosmic order to explain and justify it.

When that cosmic order is accesible and concrete, we may consciously try to order our culture on that model, or react against it. Essentially, the gods are part of our culture.

So take Chris's advice with a grain of salt if you are designing for a setting or game in which the supernatural is natural.

Best,

Mark

(who's working on a non-Euro fantasy setting himself)[/b]

[NN]

A related counterpoint: wouldnt our models of anthropological and economic organisation - European or non-European alike - also be undermined by the supernatural in a  high-magic world?

Id think that if its a high-magic world, have different game mechanics for magic and religion in the different cultures. You may want a unifying logic, and a "true" cosmology behind the variety, but keep it hidden from the players, and dont let any one culture get to close to the truth.

[greyorm]

Yes, that whole "how common people react to religion" statement is something I wanted to address as well: Chris is talking about how things work in a culture very much like our own, or that of our direct ancestors, but I do not consider it a good base model to work from in all or most instances.

If you take older cultures, and some other not-so-older cultures, as your baseline, the idea that the common person will react to religion as something "only them there priests worry about, but say your prayers cause dad did" breaks down as a good model.

Let us take a culture like that of the traditional Ojibwe people, instead. In such, religion is something the common people do pay a very great amount of attention to, because it is intertwined with one's very life. For example, the Ojibwe have a saying, "Everything I do is a prayer." And this is very much true -- there is a spiritual, religious, ritualized aspect to every action, from waking up to sleeping, to greeting one's neighbors, to asking to play a game with friends.

You would no sooner fail to perform the proper rituals, and more importantly, no sooner fail to understand why you were performing these rituals, than you would fail to breathe.

The ancient Norse pagan culture is another much like this, where religion is in the hands of the individual people, not the "priests", and life is structured according to codes of honor and behavior dependent upon what the Gods have said is the proper way to act. Similarly, and in the same general section of the world, you have the Lapps.

The whole "religion is what dad did, and that's why" attitude comes from urbanization and progress, rather than some inherent property of people. Once you move back to more tribalistic cultures (perhaps because they are survival-oriented) -- like the Ojibwe, and like the Norse -- you find that the religion practiced is vitally and immediately important to the people, as much as anything else physical and immediate (like growing food, hunting game, and building shelter).

I might also go into various Muslim cultures and subcultures as a counterpoint to Chris' idea of how to build religion into a culture, but I think everyone understands my point.

[Green]

Mark and NN:

You do bring up an interesting point.  However, at the base level, I still think clehrich's advice applies.  Even when experiencing the same event, people tend to have wildly divergent ideas on exactly what is happening and why.  Take UFOs, for instance.

If you put magic into the equation, any number of things can result, depending upon your point of view.  It can be a divine gift, a taboo (things mankind was not meant to tamper with), a curse, a sign of supernatural origins, a natural force, etc.  One, some, or all of these may be true for a given culture.  

For a non-European model of magic, consider Africa.  In Africa, you generally have two forms of magic.  The first type of magician is a medium.  They interact with spirits for the benefit of the community.  The second type of magician is a sorcerer, who uses his abilities in malevolent ways.  What's interesting here is that sorcerers are not banished or harrassed into leaving since it's generally held that angering a sorcerer is not a good idea.  I'm not saying that people never got fed up with a particular sorcerer and took matters into their own hands, but there was never something like the Inquisition.  This creates some interesting dynamics in a culture that has a perspective on magic.  You can't simply kill or banish sorcerer, especially since they can come back as spirits.  You have to neutralize their powers or appease them in some way.

[clehrich]

We're getting a bit afield, but Green seems pretty easy about whether we're debating something useful, so....

Yes, that whole "how common people react to religion" statement is something I wanted to address as well: Chris is talking about how things work in a culture very much like our own, or that of our direct ancestors, but I do not consider it a good base model to work from in all or most instances.

Hang on a sec -- you're reacting out of context.

Assume that if there is only one religion, it is a state religion, an important function of which is to maintain and stabilize royal or other centralized power. Assume that ordinary people don't pay a lot of attention to any of this, and mostly offer bits of food or whatever to the appropriate gods because they sort of think they ought to and it's what dad always did and besides, it brings you good luck.

The point is that if you are doing a quick setup and saying, "Okay, the Hargin all worship Byali," you're not talking about everyday life.  You're talking about state religion, some sort of big institutional structure.  What folks actually do, day to day, does not look very much like what the priests claim the worship of Byali is really fundamentally necessarily about -- because for them, it's big ritual supporting the governmental structure.

Which leads us to...

If you take older cultures, and some other not-so-older cultures, as your baseline, the idea that the common person will react to religion as something "only them there priests worry about, but say your prayers cause dad did" breaks down as a good model.

Let us take a culture like that of the traditional Ojibwe people, instead. In such, religion is something the common people do pay a very great amount of attention to, because it is intertwined with one's very life. For example, the Ojibwe have a saying, "Everything I do is a prayer." And this is very much true -- there is a spiritual, religious, ritualized aspect to every action, from waking up to sleeping, to greeting one's neighbors, to asking to play a game with friends.

First of all, a flat correction: not to be snarky, Raven, but this has nothing to do with "older" anything.  The Ojibwe culture is in no sense older than, say, Sumer, where what you had was state institutionalized religion.

But your real point, and it's a very good one, is that tribal culture and in fact everyday religion for ordinary folks is much more complex than I make out.  This is true -- but it's also possible to reverse the Ojibwe statement and have it be equally valid: rather than say that playing games and eating and such has a religious aspect, you can also say that their religion is made up of playing games and eating and so forth.

What difference does that make, you ask?  Well, I don't know whether you folks are going to like this.  But if you had asked the Ojibwe these same questions about 200 or so years back, the answer would not have been the same.  They would have said, "Eh?  What the hell are you talking about?"  They don't have this separate category we call religion at all.  They do now, because we kept telling them they ought to.  Part of colonialism, actually.

See, what they've got is a system of a lot of interwoven elements.  They're quite tightly wound.  And it's not the case that one block can be set apart and labeled "religion" as a distinct entity.  That's really just not the way that sort of culture works -- or that sort of religion.

But practically speaking, if you're going to set up a fantasy universe, I doubt very much whether you want to get into this.  I figure there is a certain basic comfort level, and without falling smack into Eurocentrism we can't go running too far afield.  So how about gods and institutional religion?  Nothing European about that, especially -- it's quite big all over.  And that allows cities (they do go together), and writing (ditto), and all that good stuff we usually like in fantasies.  The crucial point in avoiding the cheez-whiz "All the Hargin are very devout and they believe X, Y, and Z" monoculture racist tripe is to recognize that folks don't always actually do what the elites (including priests) say they do.

Could you set up a bunch of really serious complicated tribal cultures and let 'er rip?  Sure.  Sounds like a blast to me -- surely that's obvious by now?  I mean, after all that yattering about myth in South America and such?  But is anyone going to play this?  I mean, who's going to sit down and think his way into a really complicated tribal culture like this that is so fundamentally alien to everything you think you know, all the most basic categories and so on, that it takes you weeks just to get oriented?

One last remark:

You would no sooner fail to perform the proper rituals, and more importantly, no sooner fail to understand why you were performing these rituals, than you would fail to breathe.

Depends what you mean by "understand."  Understand what?  Why you're doing this?  Meaning, you can provide an account, an explanation, on demand, for this?  I'm afraid the evidence is flatly against this.  One of the first things that the great founders of fieldwork anthropology discovered was that people happily provide such accounts.  And they don't agree at all.  And some people say, a lot in fact, "Um, what do you mean?  Why do I do this?  I don't know, because that's how you do it, dummy."  So which is the right explanation?  Nobody's.  Everyone's right, and everyone's wrong.  And that's why folks actually mostly do their own thing and don't agonize about these sorts of issues.  Some people spend their whole lives agonizing about this sort of thing -- and a lot of them end up (or are already) priests, shamans, witch-doctors, etc.  But most folks do it because they do it.  Why should they spend more time thinking about it?

See, if you think that it's special and good and wonderful to focus on religion, to believe and worship and pray 24/7, because that's what really being spiritual is all about, THAT's Eurocentric.  That's a fundamentally Eurocentric conception of what religion ought to be -- a specifically Protestant one, in fact.  And it's one of the most pervasive myths we've sold to tribal peoples all around the colonial world, which is to say pretty much everywhere we got a chance to do it:  if you, the natives, tell us you live that way, we will give you honor and respect, although we will still maltreat you horribly in other ways.  But we're not going to kill you, because of your deep and wonderful wisdom.  Whereas if you say, "Um, we pretty much get on with things, and yes of course the spirits are important, why wouldn't they be? and incidentally that belt you're holding is kind of sacred so would you mind not picking at it?" then we will assume you're a bunch of illiterate savages.

Folks are folks.  The person who is mindful of the broader picture surrounding everything he does at all times doesn't exist -- or at the very least, he's extremely unusual in any culture.

Oh -- a last one.

Raven is dead right about Islam.  Everyone, go back and re-read that last paragraph from him.  Islam has institutionalized religion and all that, but it does not work the way it does here.  At the same time, most Muslims get on with their lives and don't worry about it all that much, but there is no question that the power-relations among clerical and governmental authorities are very, very dissimilar to the West.

[clehrich]

The case differs somewhat when you are dealing with a certain kind of fantasy. When the 'gods' are a real thing that people encounter as a part of daily life, the direction of influence that Chris talks about can get reversed (or at least equalised somewhat). For us humans who live in a world where the gods, in so far as they might exist, are only ever operating behind the scenes and we can only hypothesize about them, the direction of social construction is as Chris describes it. We have the culture we have, built up from the messy basics of everyday life, eating, sleeping, sex, death, conflict. We rationalize a cosmic order to explain and justify it.

When that cosmic order is accesible and concrete, we may consciously try to order our culture on that model, or react against it. Essentially, the gods are part of our culture.

I have to say I rather doubt this.  If the gods walk among us, not conceptually but actually, they're people.  Not quite people like us, but people.  And that means they're part of the system.  To be sure, the system has to bend somewhat from the way it usually works here in the West, but not really all that much.

A nice example that fits both this and Raven's discussion comes from the Hopi.  As you probably know, they live in pueblos on mesas, in dense towns or cities, and they in some sense or other worship a bunch of spirits known as Kachina.  They also have other spiritual beings around, but let's stick to Kachina for a minute.

Now the Kachina do walk among the Hopi.  All the time.

If you look at it from adult eyes, what you have is some specially trained men, initiated into special highly secret cults (I mean secret -- they don't let this stuff be known to anyone, ever), who put on the sacred costumes and masks and walk within the cities for any number of complicated reasons, still very poorly understood.  

But the Hopi are adamant about this: they are not men dressed as Kachinas, but Kachinas themselves.

Now I said that about "adult eyes" not because I mean the Hopi are a bunch of children.  What Sam Gill discusses in a famous article (though he was not the first) is the fact that the adults in the community go to extraordinary lengths to prevent their children from ever thinking, even for a moment, that those are men dressed up.  Ever.  This isn't Santa Claus: they are dead serious about this.  And so the children genuinely live in a world where the Kachina walk among the Hopi, as they always have.

Then there is the first adulthood initiation, when the children are about 12 or so.  This is EVERY Hopi child, by the way; the initiations are held about every two years so you have quite a large group doing it together, boys and girls mixed.  They go through classic liminal rites: mild torture, starvation, sleep-deprivation, weird clothing, etc.  They get really seriously worked up.  These kids are taken to about the edge of their sanity, and it's all about the Kachina.  And finally, they gather them all into a special sacred room.

The drums pound.  The chanting begins.  It's the middle of the night and the kids are a total mental and physical wreck.  And then the Kachinas come in and dance.  A serious, wild dance.  A frenzy.  And at the crowning big moment, they whip off their masks and reveal their human faces.  You know, "Hey, that's Uncle Dave, not a Kachina!"

Native testimony is unanimous: this is a horribly traumatic experience.  It is world-shattering.  The children in some sense never recover from this.  But they all, unanimously, sign on to keeping the secret from the younger children.  All of them.

So....

What do the Hopi mean when they say that these are Kachina, not men dressed as Kachina -- and when they say this to each other and to outside observers?  They are quite serious.  This is not a game or a deception, and this is one of the least damaged and altered tribal cultures we have in North America.  How can they say this and mean it?

Do the Kachina walk amongst the Hopi?





Please sit down and turn that over in your mind very slowly.  I am dead serious about this.

---
If I were doing this sort of thing in a fantasy game, I would have the great revelation be this: the gods are only gods, nothing more.  That's the great secret, the thing that makes the difference between adults and children.  The children think the gods are something really amazingly special and different.  The adults know that the gods are just gods, not like us but really a lot like us, and that life goes on.

[apparition13]

Clerich asked:

Do the Kachina walk amongst the Hopi?

I would say in the Hopi reality tunnel, yes.  Out side the viewpoint the situation is ambiguous, unlike the footprint that used to be your vegetable patch before  Paul Bunyan and Blue decided to go for a stroll.

If I were doing this sort of thing in a fantasy game, I would have the great revelation be this: the gods are only gods, nothing more. That's the great secret, the thing that makes the difference between adults and children. The children think the gods are something really amazingly special and different. The adults know that the gods are just gods, not like us but really a lot like us, and that life goes on.

This is certainly a great idea for a fantasy campaign, but  I think the point Mark Woodhouse was making is that assumptions about the relationships between gods, religion and society could be vastly different if gods are unambiguously manifest in the setting.  When the demons of Khorne are pounding on the gates of Kislev religion has an immiediacy we don't experience.  Life doesn't just go on when religious epiphanies are daily occurances, or more accurately it does go on, but not in any way we are familiar with.  As an example, when I first encountered Glorantha I thought it was a setting that was all about what life would be like when politics, culture are determined by religion and ethnicity and even species are rendered immaterial by cult affiliation.  All Swords of Humakt are brothers in arms, whether duck, troll, dwarf, or anything else.  I then discovered this wasn't quite what the case, but I'd still like to see it done.


Hey Green, just a couple caveats before beddy-bye,  I can go into more detail if you like.  Clerich's post (3rd from the top) is a work of art and the best world building advice I've yet encountered.  Religion has already been alluded to, I'd like to add magic and non-humans to the list.  

How widespread is magic?  What is it capable of?  Who wields it?  How powerful is it?  This can turn societal norms we are familiar with on their heads.    For example, some (if not all, not my area of expertise) of the prevelance of patriarchal societies can be attributed to greater physical capacity for violence (ie:  bigger and stronger).  Access to magic can render the size and strength difference moot, leading to egalitarian or even matriarchal (if females have more access to magic) societies.  

With regard to non-humans, the questions I ask are what do they eat, when are they active, how are they organized, what are their mating patterns, what do they value.  I usually have a vague impression of where I'm going, but I find mating patterns to be the most useful place to start.  For example, what would Ogres be like if they were organized like gorillas, with a much larger male controlling a harem of a few smaller (for ogres) females with solitary males wandering about looking for an opportunity to displace a "silverback" ogre.  What if dwarves were somewhat like elephants, with females living with children and adolescents and males on their own, at least until they have proved themselves fit (no wonder you never see dwarf women, and that's why they are always after gold)?  What if goblins are hive animals, with one or more queens, one or more males and many drones (invariably female in all existing eusocial insect species, both sexes in naked mole rats), all female?  Bear in mind intra-species warfare between ant hives are frequently wars of extermination that make human ethnic cleansing seem mild by comparison.  Or my personal favorite, what if Hobbits/halflings/kender were like bonobos?

I suppose my ultimate advice would be to take clerich's post as a foundation, and add your own twists at various points to personalize your world.  

night.

[clehrich]

If I were doing this sort of thing in a fantasy game, I would have the great revelation be this: the gods are only gods, nothing more. That's the great secret, the thing that makes the difference between adults and children. The children think the gods are something really amazingly special and different. The adults know that the gods are just gods, not like us but really a lot like us, and that life goes on.

This is certainly a great idea for a fantasy campaign, but  I think the point Mark Woodhouse was making is that assumptions about the relationships between gods, religion and society could be vastly different if gods are unambiguously manifest in the setting.  When the demons of Khorne are pounding on the gates of Kislev religion has an immiediacy we don't experience.  Life doesn't just go on when religious epiphanies are daily occurances, or more accurately it does go on, but not in any way we are familiar with.  As an example, when I first encountered Glorantha I thought it was a setting that was all about what life would be like when politics, culture are determined by religion and ethnicity and even species are rendered immaterial by cult affiliation.  All Swords of Humakt are brothers in arms, whether duck, troll, dwarf, or anything else.  I then discovered this wasn't quite what the case, but I'd still like to see it done. [emphasis added]

Actually, I quite take your and Mark's points.  What I'm trying to get at, and not doing it very well, is that the crucial point is everyday life.  See, if encounters with the gods or demons or whatever is everyday life, then that everyday life looks really different; as you say, it's not at all what we are familiar with.  My contention is that if those things are everyday life, then they are everyday life.  I know that sounds like a dodge, or a non-statement, but it's quite a big point.

In a great many fantasy settings, when the gods come and talk to you it's a big religious epiphany.  Basically it's constructed on the model of a miraculous event, an insertion of the Hand of God.  But if this happens every few days, it's just one of those things that happens.  It should be taken seriously, sure, but so should a lot of things.

I think one of the most elegant versions of this I have ever seen is Gene Wolfe's Soldier of Arete.  Basically the main character forgets everything, and he also sees gods.  To him, because he doesn't know better, they're just weird people.  Interesting, important, meaningful people, somehow more powerful or something than other people, but they're people.  You don't just yatter on at them, because something about them tells you that they are Other, but the main character never really quite gets that they are gods, that their otherness is something normal people worship at a remove.  He just doesn't really have that remove, because for him, they are everyday life again.

I think that following up the miraculous-as-everyday thing makes the "miraculous" something quite other than how we, in the West, think of it.  It's just how life works, you know?  And what I meant about the Hopi was that adult life is recognizing that the Kachina do indeed walk in the streets, and that they are also your uncle, and that these things do not at all contradict one another.  Just because he's your uncle doesn't mean you go up and ask him to lend you five bucks.  That's a Kachina there, you know?  That's a powerful godlike spirit.  You don't mess around.  But he's also your uncle.

It's often been claimed that fear made the gods; it's an old Latin tag I could quote but won't.  The thing is, that's not especially common outside the West.  As Durkheim correctly noted, a more common way of looking at the gods is as a kind of extreme older brother.  They look after you, they're bigger than you, they're more powerful and probably more important than you.  But deep down, they're family.  And it seems to me that if you have gods running around all over the place, they become family, or friends, or enemies, or whatever.  They don't stop being gods, but they're also folks.

[apparition13]

clerich wrote:

What I'm trying to get at, and not doing it very well, is that the crucial point is everyday life. See, if encounters with the gods or demons or whatever is everyday life, then that everyday life looks really different; as you say, it's not at all what we are familiar with. My contention is that if those things are everyday life, then they are everyday life. I know that sounds like a dodge, or a non-statement, but it's quite a big point.

(emphasis mine)  Nope, clouds part.  To paraphrase, what we are familiar with is "everyday life", what you are refering to is "everyday life, version 1.1 the gods are amongst us".  The details of what is experienced would be different, as they are for us and our medieval ancestors, but the psychology of everday life (another day, another dollar;  same shit, different day etc.) would be the same.  So the rabbit god in the carrot patch again, wouldn't be a source of wonder and awe but frustration and "honey, I thought you propitiated him this week".  About right?  If it is I'd hazard a guess that we are talking about the same thing, just viewed through differenct lenses.  The way I see it, the more lenses the better.  I believe my confusion stemmed from the use of system in this extract:

If the gods walk among us, not conceptually but actually, they're people. Not quite people like us, but people. And that means they're part of the system.

with system, as political system, implied in section 6 of your original post in this sentence:

Assume that if there is only one religion, it is a state religion, an important function of which is to maintain and stabilize royal or other centralized power.

Combine "system" with "people" and I think politics, hence the misunderstanding.