Polytheism in medieval europe

[jgbrowning]

Originally posted by Ysgarran
I find this very difficult to do within the iron clad, absolutist, black and white alignment system of D&D. The only way I've managed to make this work is to limit detection, scry and divination spells that are available and to make the gods a bit more distant.

I could see minor conflicts and corruptions within a LG church but I couldn't see anything happening on a major scale. The examples that you give are minor offenses. To take an extreme example I couldn't see a major schism involving the clergy killing each other on a large scale. Why would any LG god allow this kind of weakening of his own church? Again, this within the 'alighnments are part of the universal weave' and not some kind of abstract ideal.

Perhaps you could support a LN branch of the Church breaking off and creating their own 'branch'. I've thought it might be workable that such a group of LN clerics would try to 'pull' their god towards a more neutral outlook. The idea is that the god would go where the worshippers are. Even then I would see some definate 'rules' applying to the conflict.

later,
Ysgarran.

Well there's two main reasons why i think its possible.

1. Given the nature of landowership and that churches will be large landowners (not all churches, and not to the scale of the catholic church, but if the process of alienation of land to clergy is still occuring) you're eventually going to get clerics of the same church fighting each other.

Lord A has cleric vassal A: Lord B has cleric vassal B. Lords A and B decide to war (although clerics A and B try to talk them out of it).

Now Clerics A and B are stuck in a very very rough social and legal situation. The use of force as an expression of policy, especially as a legitimate expression of policy is one of the primary bases of a medieval society. These two clerics are required by law and by all right and just social pressures to support their lords. If they don't their lands can be subject to confiscation at worst, and at best the individual cleric will lose the right to govern those lands and be replaced with clerics who will obey the laws of the land.

Churches will attempt to fight such things, but they won't have the power to do so. The'll be other churches who'd be willing to be just, loyal, and obediant servants to a king. Polytheism in a magical medieval setting would rather drastically change the methods, and power, we typicall associate with large churches. Such a setting actually hampers "good" churches as many of the laws will require theire obedience even when performing "questionable" actions.

2. The option you pointed out. The'll be nothing worse than a war between two factions in a church. LG vrs LN would be a rough fight.

3. Even within an absolutest morality there are still "moralities of scale." A LG king who is LG 95% of the time and ocassionaly has to perform "evil" actions to maintain his power should, IMHO, be considered LG. Paldins, as often discussed on these boards, will have issues with such rulers and may be faced with situations where disobedience to their liege lord's wishes may become necessarily, but they'll also face all of the legal and social problems i've mentioned about LG clerics. all of this, of course, leads to point 4.

4. SOOOOOO much of this is dependant upon how DMs and players decide to view alignment. I was going to have an alignment section in my book, and i still might, that discusses the concepts of the DnD alignment when transposed into a more historical medieval setting. I still waver back and forth on this, as I'm trying to make sure of the "Stick with the Core Books." idea is the primary, but an explication about alignment would be most useful for understanding the medieval mindset. I'll probably make up my mind at the last minute..

p.s.
Joe, I'm very interested in the book you and your wife are writing. I know that I'll will purchase it once it comes out.

Great! I'm hoping that they'll be a lot more people like you that think this is interesting. Its been about 4 months of writing/researching so far and expect 2 more. I hope it helps a lot of people. And well, if it doesn't i'll at least have spent a lot of money so people can call me an idiot...

joe b.
Expeditious Retreat Press

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Re: Corruption in a LG Church.

I think Sepulchrave's Lady Despina's Virtue/the Heretic of the Wyre/ The Rape of Mourne story hour threads do an excellent job of demonstrating how it is possible to work corruption into the alignment system of D&D.

Furthermore, just because you can detect "Good" or "Law" doesn't mean that there is absolute agreement on what you are detecting--or for that matter what is the important thing to be detected. An organization serving an LG god could easily have his followers decide that Law was the key part of his personality and that members of the hierarchy had to be lawful but that good was an optional part--pure but impractical. In that case, they would probably think of Detect Law as detecting an adherance to standards and order--in other words detecting the important things that the god stood for. Detect Good would be seen as detecting purity or inflexibility. These could easily be seen as non-essential qualities.

In this case, detect chaos and detect evil would probably be seen as redundant methods of detecting impurity. (Chaos, evil, what's the difference?) There might well be theological debates about what the difference between chaos and evil was and why a person might not detect as impure even though they rejected order.

I find this very difficult to do within the iron clad, absolutist, black and white alignment system of D&D. The only way I've managed to make this work is to limit detection, scry and divination spells that are available and to make the gods a bit more distant.

I could see minor conflicts and corruptions within a LG church but I couldn't see anything happening on a major scale. The examples that you give are minor offenses. To take an extreme example I couldn't see a major schism involving the clergy killing each other on a large scale. Why would any LG god allow this kind of weakening of his own church? Again, this within the 'alighnments are part of the universal weave' and not some kind of abstract ideal.

Perhaps you could support a LN branch of the Church breaking off and creating their own 'branch'. I've thought it might be workable that such a group of LN clerics would try to 'pull' their god towards a more neutral outlook. The idea is that the god would go where the worshippers are. Even then I would see some definate 'rules' applying to the conflict.

later,
Ysgarran.

 

[fusangite]

And contradiction exists in all mythologies, not just polytheistic ones. It's the simple result of several things--the legends of various groups being absorbed into the whole, variations of in stories told being noted down as seperate myths, and occasionally simple errors. Personally, I think it's easy to forget the fact that as opposed to the real world, in the standard D&D world the gods are not only real beyond all doubt, but capable of direct communication to their followers...

Our modern idea of proof versus faith is a very recent debate. Whether God really existed wasn't really under debate until the 18th century. Everyone took the existence of the divine for granted.

The supernatural wasn't the main point of the religion anyway; and in some theories of Christianity, the Pope is in fact the third person of the trinity. In Japan, the emperor if God; doing magic, etc isn't really the central point of dealing with the divine. God-emperor type figures on earth also have the capacity for direct communication with their followers; is there any less diversity and heresy within Shintoism, Mormonism or Roman Catholicism? Not really.

As for contradiction, it's handled in a different way in religions that have survived the advent of philosophy and logic; European polytheism would never develop something like the Nicene Creed, Chalcedonian Creed, etc to address these things because they wouldn't even be received as contradictions in the way we understand them and would not even be viewed as problematic.

You assume that version we know of the mythos is somehow "canonical" and that the corpus of Norse mythology can therefore be analyzed accordingly. That's hogwash. Norse mythology was an oral tradition. It was also (as were most pagan European mythologies) subject to strong localization. Where you see inconsistencies, I see a much more likely scenario in which two seperate local traditions crept into the Edda.

To me, the fact that mythology is an oral tradition thousands of years long and what we see today is a strange amalgamation of that hodge-podged together after the fact makes a lot more sense than the strange belief that dark ages Europeans didn't mind having obvious and glaring inconsistencies in their mythology.

Well, Norse mythology is not the only primitive myth system I've looked at. I've seen dozens of aboriginal North American myth systems and they share this trait of containing things that our understanding of logic would see as contradictory but which their system of thought does not. Also, I don't see how the Utgaard-Loki story is a conflation of two stories -- it's one story. But even if you were able to successfully represent it as some kind of editing error, it doesn't alter the fact that many polytheistic myths involve this kind of thing.

You can even go up to medieval Christian thought to see that our modern conception of contradiction is often not shared by societies that are significantly different from ours. There is no question that the way people in ours and other Western societies think is different from the way many cultures before us thought. Not better. Different; one of the ways we can measure this is the emphasis of the both-and dialectic over the either-or dialectic.

Finally, my point is that if you read sociology, anthropology or critical theory of history, you will see that there is a virtual academic consensus that one of the features of an oral tradition culture is a different relationship to what we see as contradiction.

 

[fusangite]

One more thing...

As to this idea of alignment really hampering things, I don't know about you but in my world, most people are neutral of some stripe. Any well-designed evil or good church should present a good reason for neutral characters to join.

In my world, all of the prosecutors are appointed from the state lawful evil church (the lawful good church appoints state defenders and the lawful neutral church appoitns the judges). So, there are a lot of lawful neutral prosecutors (ln being the logical alignment for a good medieval lawyer). As well, there's my moon/underworld god; he's the racial god for most nocturnal and underground creatures -- they join this church on the basis of racial solidarity, etc. If one focuses on what the role of a church is in society and how one might benefit from joining, evil churches are a little easier to integrate.

 

[I'm A Banana]

How can corruption exist within a LG church?

....easy. Some of Satan's most popular domains are trickery, deciet, and stealth....

When you can make a Minor Image of illuminated wings and a Ghost Sound of a small choir in the background, it's easy to make the common mook believe you're actually from God and Good.

When trying to corrupt a church to your own desires, getting your paws on a Ring of Mind Shielding is almost a must...

Oh, that, and being the most powerful guy within a 30' radius, and to look good to your superiors, is also useful.

So how does corruption exist? Easy. Detect spells aren't used when there's not even the suspicion of deciet. You just have to be clever about it. just because the possibility exists doesn't mean it will be used. I could see them being used in trials about heresey and such...but for ever measure, there is a coutermeasure, and a smart villain will have this in place long before the measure is actually used.

Things that are hidden and mysterious are *the* things to do. You can't be in the open if you're hoping to take control of your enemy from within.

I think you just may have a pet peeve with alignment that's showing itself. The alignment system isn't (or doesn't have to be) as black-and-white, ironclad as you're making it out to be.

And on the note of polytheism...

Can people worship Satan for power? How about other gods? Philosophies? (the rules allow all of this)....

Congratulations, you have more than one source of divine power, and so have a polytheism....heck, even if people can worship Satan for power, it's a dualism....two divine entities to turn toward. If God is the only one, than are only those who approach God in a certain way given powers? Or can anyone who pays homage to god gain powers (even if it's only lip service)? Can you pray and gain powers from saints? It's a polytheism then, too.

The solution is to create a largely cohesive, tight pantheon, where all the deities of one type work together, and all those of the other type work together. This works best along alignment lines for something like medieval europe, but it can exist along any lines, in theory. This creates a dualism, but with more than one god to turn to, and if you can gain power from anything but the One True, you've got at least a dualism already.

 

[WizarDru]

is there any less diversity and heresy within Shintoism, Mormonism or Roman Catholicism? Not really.

In the case of Shintoism, I was under the impression that yes, there was less diversity and heresy than say, Buddhism or Catholicism. Could you give some examples?

 

[Piratecat]

I think corruption is pretty easy to sneak into a LG church. It always starts small: pettiness, jealousy, greed, lust. Human nature isn't pretty, and in a rarified atmosphere apart from the bustling world politics and coalitions begin to form. Soon, priests are acting to protect their own interests and not for the good of all, and its all downhill from there.

 

[Thorntangle]

I think corruption is pretty easy to sneak into a LG church. It always starts small: pettiness, jealousy, greed, lust. Human nature isn't pretty, and in a rarified atmosphere apart from the bustling world politics and coalitions begin to form. Soon, priests are acting to protect their own interests and not for the good of all, and its all downhill from there.

I think that the argument, at least with an active LG god, is that there would be constant divine interdiction in cases of improper behavior. It's hard to argue that an active god would not smack a holy man on the wrist if he should stray from doctrine or moral alignment. There is precedent - A Paladin or cleric will lose power/contact if they deviate from the straight and narrow. And multiple avenues of communication exist between individuals of moderate power and their deity.

Corruption is arguably more feasible in the church of a passive, silent deity. Or with a deity that wants corruption to occur due to their unfathomable plans.

edit - clarification

 

[Piratecat]

Ah, but that's how corruption takes hold, Thorntangle!

Imagine: you are a cleric who is slightly too pompous for your own good. You are an important part of your LG, political church, and you suddenly realize that God has denied you some spells.

You panic. You sweat. You cringe. After all, if you admit it publicly and atone, you will be back in the graces of God - but you will lose your position and authority in the church hierarchy, you will be a disgrace, and many of the things you've strived for over the years will be gone! That's not right. You're too old for that. You deserve better. Maybe you can keep it a secret, and atone privately?

But it doesn't work.

Now you've lost most or all of your spells, and your days are spent in a stressful panic trying to avoid situations where this information may come to light. What if adventurers come and need someone raised? What if you're forced to prove yourself? And here you are, slaving away undeservingly for a God who doesn't love you - who doesn't support you - the sermons and lessons turning to ash in your mouth. Your guilt scampers around inside of you like a caged animal, locked in by your own denial. You look for an escape, an answer, a solution....

And that's when the temptation is offered. I can save you from this, the voice whispers. Your God of love has rejected you unfairly. You deserve better. You don't deserve humiliation, for you are a wise and powerful man, and those others are trying to hold you back. Worship me, and you shall be restored, and fulfilled, and raised above all others.

So... what do you choose?

 

[Rhialto]

Thorntangle, I have to be blunt with you--all D&D gods are by default "active" because they grant people spells. Some gods may be more active than that, but even that action represents a great deal of interest in the world...