D&D 5E Are "evil gods" necessary? [THREAD NECRO]

[Doug McCrae]

Odo of Bayeaux, half brother of William the Conqueror. Norman knight, bishop of Bayeaux, used a mace in battle so as not to violate church law on clergy spilling blood. Shown on the Bayesux tapestry. The mace thing was a common loophole for fighting clergy of the time. He was the most famous example.

The use of blunt weapons to avoid the prohibition on shedding blood is a 19th century myth that made its way into D&D.

 

[Voadam]

The use of blunt weapons to avoid the prohibition on shedding blood is a 19th century myth that made its way into D&D.

Possibly, it wouldn't be the first time later myths lore the established understanding. My understanding is that is how Gorgons in medieval bestiaries became bulls instead of their greek earlier forms.

If you check out the wikipedia entry for Odo it mentions the disputed theories, particularly in footnote 2 and 3.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Modern? Commenting on the strict history, and leaving the religious content out - this view of things came up in Western culture with the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, as the role of the strong central church began to weaken. It strengthened immensely with the rise of Deists (including many of the Founding Fathers in the US), in the 1700s.

Yes, the Catholic Church has been dealing with heretics and their movements and splinter religions for something like a thousand years, and probably longer, but I do not have the time at the moment to research the first documented one. So this was going on throughout the entire real world time period that D&D borrows from. The historical corrupt and borderline evil times of the Catholic Church make them a great basis for a fantasy Theocracy that needs to be overthrown. Though I am not sure how much more this topic can be gone into, even from a fantasy viewpoint, before it crosses the "no religion discussion" line and turns into a Catholic bashing thread.

 

[Doug McCrae]

@Voadam I'm not talking about whether or not Bishop Odo used a blunt weapon at the Battle of Hastings, but the idea of a legal exception for blunt weapons being made under church law. It's the latter that's a myth.

See this post on the subject on r/askhistorians. u/sunagainstgold, who answers the question, is Cait Stevenson, a medieval historian. She writes "The BWE [Blunt Weapon Exception] is a romanticized 19th century myth."

 

[QuentinGeorge]

I think this is really a practical matter. If you try to write out the culture and traditions that grow around religion... you're going to have an entire book in and of itself, for every culture. It isn't supportable for a game. And, not being scholars of the matter, most of us would do a bad job of it on our own.



Modern? Commenting on the strict history, and leaving the religious content out - this view of things came up in Western culture with the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, as the role of the strong central church began to weaken. It strengthened immensely with the rise of Deists (including many of the Founding Fathers in the US), in the 1700s.

So, not really modern.

But, honestly, if we are going to talk about D&D religious practices and relationships with the divine, by basic structure we should be thinking pre-Christian European models, which are rather different.

Modern Christianity in my opinion, is post Reformation. It overturned 1000+ years of tradition for a new modern - see the commonality between Catholic, Orthodox and Coptic that you don't get in the Protestant denominations.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

I agree with this 100%. But...



Here I have a problem. "How religion was practiced prior to the 19th century," is a very, very expansive category. There is a poem known as "The Sister's Message" - it is an ancient Mesopotamian tract - maybe 4000 years old? Anyway:

As I was strolling, as I was strolling
as I was strolling by the house
my dear Inanna saw me
O, my brother, what did she tell me? What did she tell me?
What more did she say to me?
O, my brother of love; allure
The sweetest of sweet things.

I think the poet had "a personal relationship with" Inanna. The poem goes on - it is sort-of written from a woman's perspective, although a man undoubtedly wrote it - and is confiding in the goddess; maybe asking her for romantic advice; there is also a heavy erotic subtext. There are other tracts, thousands of years old, which bespeak other - very diverse and very complex - understandings of the notion of "deity." I think we fundamentally underestimate and misrepresent people in ancient cultures when we portray their personal religious experience and understanding - and how they construe divinity - as somehow different, inferior, less evolved, less informed than our own.

I don't take issue with anything you've written here, but note that the idea of "personal relationship" in BCE polytheism is very different to "personal relationship" in post-Reformation and particularly evangelical Christianity.

The former (as with your example) is very much with an emphasis on the physical, terrestrial manifestation of the deity. Think of Moses going up on Sinai and seeing Yahweh in his physical form, think Jacob wrestling with god, or the same deity wandering in the Garden of Eden looking for Adam and Eve.

The modern "personal relationship" is more of a "god loves me personally, and I hear his voice encouraging and guiding me". It is the transition from "god the autocratic king-father", to "god the dad as sports coach".

 

[QuentinGeorge]

@Voadam I'm not talking about whether or not Bishop Odo used a blunt weapon at the Battle of Hastings, but the idea of a legal exception for blunt weapons being made under church law. It's the latter that's a myth.

See this post on the subject on r/askhistorians. u/sunagainstgold, who answers the question, is Cait Stevenson, a medieval historian. She writes "The BWE [Blunt Weapon Exception] is a romanticized 19th century myth."

Yes when Catholic priests went to war (and it didn't happen often, but it did) they used the same weapons as everyone else. The priests in Constantinople claim that latin priests were fighting in the actual battles of the crusades. Now it is a matter of historical fact that they definitely were present at the battles, but I don't know of any evidence from western sources that they actually were swinging weapons around.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Yes, the Catholic Church has been dealing with heretics and their movements and splinter religions for something like a thousand years, and probably longer, but I do not have the time at the moment to research the first documented one. So this was going on throughout the entire real world time period that D&D borrows from. The historical corrupt and borderline evil times of the Catholic Church make them a great basis for a fantasy Theocracy that needs to be overthrown. Though I am not sure how much more this topic can be gone into, even from a fantasy viewpoint, before it crosses the "no religion discussion" line and turns into a Catholic bashing thread.

Thinking that it was the "Catholic Church" who was dealing with heresies is a very western-centric view of history. The eastern wing of the church (ie the bit that became "Orthodox") arguably dealt with even more heresies (Iconoclasm, Bogmolism, Monotheletism, Monophysitism etc), and it was the policies of Constantinople, not Rome, that led to the Copts throwing in behind the Arabs. If you said "the Melkite Church" or something else you'd be on less shaky ground. The only reason Protestanism is not "dealing with heresies" is because that is the very definition of it - the divergent theologies have now escaped the control of the theologians and are running wild in the world.

 

[pemerton]

I think this is really a practical matter. If you try to write out the culture and traditions that grow around religion... you're going to have an entire book in and of itself, for every culture. It isn't supportable for a game. And, not being scholars of the matter, most of us would do a bad job of it on our own.

<snip>

But, honestly, if we are going to talk about D&D religious practices and relationships with the divine, by basic structure we should be thinking pre-Christian European models, which are rather different.

D&D religion is a mix of Christianity overlayed on ancient pagan myths. The cleric is a Christian knight template who worships a pantheistic deity like Zeus or Athena. This carries over to a lot of the trappings like having christian based churches for most gods instead of temples, regular weekly worship days, church hierarchies, but the gods are Greekish in tone sometimes with a little bit of Zoroastrianism of two cosmic sides.

To add to what Voadam has said: both the cleric and the paladin are mechanical realisations of a Christian knight templar or warring bishop archetype or saintly king archetype. They are heavily armed and armoured. They heal with a touch; they abjure evil spirits; they conjure light in darkness, hurl their staves to the ground and turn them into serpents, and call down pillars of fire. Originaly they defaulted to good or lawful good - evil high priests were labelled "anti-clerics".

Having these archetypes worship pre-/non-Christian gods creates a strange state of affairs.

Another oddity is that the druid, who in archetypical terms is closer to a pagan priest, is often depicted as having no relation to the gods at all, but rather as drawing power from some nebulous "nature".

My own view is that it's not too much work in AD&D and 3E versions of the game to keep the mechanics but bring their religions and metaphysics into more sensible alignment with the archetypes. Maybe 5e makes it a bit trickier. 4e has it's own integration of classes to cosmology that makes sense on its own terms.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

To add to what Voadam has said: both the cleric and the paladin are mechanical realisations of a Christian knight templar or warring bishop archetype or saintly king archetype. They are heavily armed and armoured. They heal with a touch; they abjure evil spirits; they conjure light in darkness, hurl their staves to the ground and turn them into serpents, and call down pillars of fire. Originaly they defaulted to good or lawful good - evil high priests were labelled "anti-clerics".

Having these archetypes worship pre-/non-Christian gods creates a strange state of affairs.

Another oddity is that the druid, who in archetypical terms is closer to a pagan priest, is often depicted as having no relation to the gods at all, but rather as drawing power from some nebulous "nature".

My own view is that it's not too much work in AD&D and 3E versions of the game to keep the mechanics but bring their religions and metaphysics into more sensible alignment with the archetypes. Maybe 5e makes it a bit trickier. 4e has it's own integration of classes to cosmology that makes sense on its own terms.

I don't have any issues in my 5E game with replacing religious mechanics with a focus on religions rather than gods.