All the recent discussion on the list about religion lately sent me diving into the depths of the Internet, searching for a particular site: "The MythoPoet's Manual", by Loren Miller. It took awhile, but I finally tracked it down to: http://www.rpgmud.com/WorldBuilding/Mythopoets/tmm.html It's not really complete, being a collection of draft notes for a larger project, but it has a very interesting discussion of how the form of a culture's religion is *very* strongly influenced by its subsistence pattern. To grossly simplify, foragers are pantheists, who believe that "Everything is divine/alive/magical" and "The world is basically benevolent". Horticulturalists are polytheists, and believe that the world is hostile, because they have injured it by poking holes and planting seeds in the earth. As the number of crops a horticulturalist society grows increases, so too does the number of gods whom they worship(not a linear relation, tho.) Herders are often nomadic and unable to maintain complex belief systems; they are very likely to become monotheists, seeing the relationship between their deity and themselves as being analogous to the relationship between themselves and their herds. Religious celebrations are closely tied to the route the herd travels. Societies that use agriculture for subsistence can become far more complex than herding, foraging, or horticultural societies. Agricultural societies can support religious specialists, and like horticulturalists, tend to worship multiple deities or beings. The heavenly hierarchy mirrors the society's own organization. Instead of polytheism, where the various deities are more or less equals, agricultural societies are often henotheist, where there is a Supreme Being, surrounded by lesser deities/beings and ancestral spirits. It can be argued that medieval Roman Catholicism, as understood by the peasantry, was henotheist, not monotheist. In the cities of an agricultural society, things are different. City dwellers tend to become more irreligious. While they may maintain the religious forms, the belief in those forms is lost. There's far more in the Manual, and I highly recommend it. Andrew Janssen __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, send mail to celandra-off@phoenyx.net.
