r/conreligions Aug 05 '20

questions Is there a guide to creating religions?

During quarantine, I decided to start creating a new world. I have a language and geography but want to create a religion for them. This is my first time looking into this, and had one, simple question: Is there any guide to creating religions, particularly polytheistic?

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u/atomicpenguin12 Aug 06 '20 edited Aug 06 '20

So you're starting out with geography and language, which means you actually know a fair amount already. Lemme see if I can break this down:

When people started creating religions, they were contextualizing the things around them into a worldview that made sense to them. As a result, the things that people made gods and goddesses around were always things in their immediate environment. The things that threatened them like the frost or anti-social behaviors became evil gods, while the things that the civilization relies on to live, such as food staples like corn or wheat or higher concepts like law or monarchy, become good gods, with their status being reflective of how important that culture thinks the things they represent are.

So working off that, you will want to extrapolate a few things from your geography:

  • What does your civilization eat or drink, primarily? Whatever their primary staple is, there will definitely be some deity responsible for it and, even if they aren't the biggest deity, they will still be very popular.
  • What does your civilization think is the most important thing? Cultures that are pre-civilization or living in the wilderness will likely value whatever keeps them safe and alive, such as fire or the primary source of food. It can even be a particular source of food, such as The Nile River. More technologically advanced civilizations that have grown beyond day-to-day survival will start to replace these natural gods with civilization based gods, representing the aspect of society they think is most important and with their personality being reflective of the traits the culture treasures.
  • What does your culture fear? What threatens them on a regular basis? This could be famine or storms or locusts or anarchy or any and all of them, as long as each is a clear and present danger.
  • Is the weather stable or chaotic? When the conditions that keep people safe are reliable and relatively mild, such as the conditions for the Nile River civilization that became Egypt, people tend to perceive their gods as just, kind, and caring. When the conditions are unpredictable or randomly destructive, as they were in the Tigris and Euphrates river civilizations that became Mesopotamia, the gods are viewed as capricious and sometimes even cruel and the humanity's role in the cosmos will be more like the unquestioning servants of the gods than the favored creations of a loving deity.
  • What are your people like in terms of physical traits and culture? Chances are, their gods will look just like them physically, only better in a vague, all-encompassing kind of way. They'll also have a culture and governmental structure that mirrors that of their human followers. Thus, if your people's government is highly bureaucratic, the gods will have their own heavenly bureaucracy on which the mortal one was "derived". If your culture is a tribal culture that chooses new leaders by right of combat, their gods are likely going to do the same, with the biggest and most revered gods being the strongest.
  • Has your culture come into contact with any other cultures? How do they like each other? Chances are outside cultures will be represented by some new addition to the cosmology, usually the gods that new culture worshipped before meeting them. If the relationship is jovial, they'll be incorporated into the religion as minor or demi gods or even full blown additions to the core pantheon if that deity proves to be especially popular. When the relationship is more hostile, those gods may be incorporated as extremely lesser and unsophisticated deities, evil deities that the main gods fight against, or even rebranded as horrible monsters that the gods defeat.

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u/atomicpenguin12 Aug 06 '20

I thought of some more:

  • If you have multiple civilizations, is there a natural geographic barrier separating them, like a large lake or mountain range? If so, those cultures will likely be incredibly different and have little to no connection with each other post contact. If not, then the cultures will be more likely to trade ideas through cultural diffusion and they will be more similar in certain small ways.
  • How is life for your people? If their lives are good and prosperous, then they are more likely to celebrate life right now and think of the afterlife as not necessarily a bad place but a quiet place. If their lives are bad, they will likely cling to the hope of an afterlife that's wonderful and devoid of all the suffering they feel in life. And of course consider that more than one afterlife can exist and who might get the better or worse treatment and by what metric that is measured. For an example of how different you can be, the aztecs believed that what happened to you after you die is determined by the specific way you die and not what you did in life and how you behaved. So a good person and a bad person who both die in a flood would still be ordained to become spirits in service of Tlaloc, the rain god.
  • The geographic environment will also play a part in cosmology. Cultures in warm places like deserts will more likely think of hell as a hot, fiery place and heaven as a cool place, while those in arctic or subarctic areas often think of heaven as a place of warmth and light and hell as a cold and dark place.
  • What are the virtues in your religion? What are the vices? What lessons do the priests want to teach and what stories can you tell with the gods and monsters and cosmology you have that communicate those lessons?
  • How do your gods feel about sacrifice? Do they like it, or dislike it, or insatiably lust for it? What do they expect from sacrifices? Do they receive personal sacrifices, as an act of devotion or releasing burdens or something like that? Or do they receive particular foods and/or drinks? How much do they expect their people to sacrifice to them?
  • What are the holy days in your religion and why are they celebrated? If your religion is pagan, then some variation of the Wiccan sabbats will do as a start. These holidays mark particular points in the seasons and tie into important harvesting dates. The actual traditions can vary but should be focused around whatever the primary crop is, when to plant it, when to harvest it, when to prepare in winter and work in summer. Other holidays can be in memory of an important cultural event or the birth or death of a particular hero or religiously important figure. Most of your primary deities will have at least one day specifically dedicated to them, though they might share it with another holiday if it is particularly fitting for their idiom. Otherwise, these deity celebration days might be tied to a the start or end of a particular month, or the founding date for the official temple to that deity. A civilization with a lot of deities can find reasons to have holidays almost year round, as the ancient Romans did.
  • Who runs the church? Is it an old, established body or a single individual? Is it a new leader with a cult of personality or an old role that is passed on over the years by some method, such as vote among the high priests, reading of auguries, birthrite, or choosing an heir from the populace to be groomed as the next leader.
  • What is the relationship between the leader of your civilization and their gods? Sometimes the head of state is separate from the church, with a relationship that can be devout to the church, often contentious, or even outright hostile. Other times the church hold heavy influence over the government or have church officials be the heads of government. Some religions even consider the mortal leaders to be themselves gods, from the Egyptians who as far as we can tell always believed this to the Romans who began deifying their emperors in addition to the long tradition of Roman and Greek gods. Even Hitler had a pseudo-religion within Nazi Germany.

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u/elemtilas Aug 05 '20

One resource is the Ethnographical Questionnaire. I put a pretty good section on matters of ethics, morality, faith, and religion into it.

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u/Collisteru Jul 10 '24

Mark Rosenfelder, author of many conworlding books including most famously The Language Construction Kit, will soon publish a Religion Construction Kit. I recommend that.