As you should already know, I've just finished reading Trudi Canavan's Age of the Five trilogy. I generally found it to be an enjoyable piece of High Fantasy with some fun ideas and some likeable characters. A couple of things irked me about it, though, and a big problem I had was its treatment of religion. Since the main character is a priestess, and most of the supporting characters are other varieties of priest, cultist, or holy person this is something of an issue.

In the interview which ships as a special feature with the last volume of the series, Trudi explains that the reason her first trilogy (the Black Magician Trilogy) presented an essentially atheistic setting was that since she is not herself religious, she wasn't sure she could do religion properly, with the Age of the Five, however, she felt that: "writing about a pantheon of gods was much easier because the scenario was so different to most of the religions practised today."

Except that, of course, it kind of isn't, and that's kind of the problem. Canavan's invented religion, consciously or otherwise, carries over a huge quantity of cultural assumptions which are pretty much directly inherited from Christianity. Of course this isn't by any means a unique problem, it's pretty much par for the course with Fantasy religions (it's what TV Tropes refers to as a "Crystal Dragon Jesus"). The simple fact is that the modern, western idea of what a "religion" looks like is so intimately bound up with Christianity that it's almost impossible to tell where the Catholic Church ends and Religion In General begins.

So really I'm just treating the Age of the Five as a case study here. It just happens to be the most recent thing I've read, and the most recent example of the phenomenon.

The main character in the Age of the Five series is Auraya of the White, a priestess in the Circlan faith. Let's start simple. The Circlan faith has an organised priesthood with a central authority, being a priest is a full time job, and the basic "benefit" the religion grants its followers is life after death. Judging by what we see of Circlan society and culture, the moral and cultural teachings of the Circlan Faith seem pretty Judeo-Christian-slash-secular-liberal as well. In short, there seems to be very little connection between the Circlan Gods, the Circlan religion, and the supposedly theocratic Circlan society. Canavan, like a great many fantasy writers, fails to make the connection between "what the Gods are like" (kind of a cross between the Greco-Roman pantheon and the Vorlons) "what people think the Gods are like" (kind of like the Christian god, only there's five of them) and "what society is like" (kind of like twentieth century Australia, only with less advanced technology).

I think the thing that Fantasy authors don't get is that, in a sense, religious people are crazy. Okay, I'm going to get letters about that one, and obviously I don't mean it literally, but being religious (frequently) means believing that things exist which other people do not believe exist and (usually) means modifying your behaviour as a result. Combine this with a world in which Gods are verifiably and objectively real and you have to wonder why Fantasy societies aren't more messed up than they are. If you really, genuinely believe that the only way to stop a volcano erupting and destroying your village is to sacrifice innocent girls to an angry god, you're going to be quite likely to do it. In a Fantasy world, you might also actually be right (and I suppose the religious pluralist in me should suggest that you might even be right in this one - damn I'm such a wet liberal sometimes).

Canavan's Five Gods are revealed - in the last volume - to be powerful immortal sorcerers who have transcended their physical bodies to become beings of pure magic. They're also mostly assholes who enjoy watching people slaughter each other for their amusement. The thing is I can think of no reason whatsoever for such individuals to pretend to be anything else. It's implied in the books that they're playing nice in order to get people to worship them and do their bidding, and while on one level I find this idea charmingly naive, on another I find it ... well ... naive. I mean really, if you're a powerful, immortal sorcerer who has just become a God, why not just turn around to your apprentice or nearest analogue and say "okay kid, I've just obtained unlimited power, now you and me are going to team up and take over the motherfucking world". A cursory glance at the history of real world religion shows that people are perfectly happy to worship gods who don't pretend to be nice cuddly bunnies. The Greco-Roman Gods were complete assholes but they were also pretty popular back in the day, I doubt that many Romans woke up in the night having a crisis of faith over the seduction of Leda. The big reveal at the end of Age of the Five is that the brutal, destructive war which had torn the world apart for the past three books was something the Gods had orchestrated for their amusement. At which point any self respecting citizen of ancient Greece would presumably say "well, duh". As flies to wanton boys, and all that.

Of course the real reason that the Five had to pretend to be nice guys was the demands of the plot. The main character had to be a Priestess, which meant she had to like the Gods, but she also had to be sympathetic, and that meant that she had to believe in an effectively New Testament version of the Gods who were all about hugging kittens and being nice to old ladies. If she'd started the books as knowing, willing servant of the Gods as they actually were she would have been far less sympathetic. Except actually it might have actually made for more interesting character development if, instead of discovering that the Gods were evil because they'd lied about their natures, she'd always known what the Gods were like, but had been forced to re-evaluate her opinions about them as she grew and developed.

By having Auraya's opinion of the Gods depend entirely on how closely their behaviour matches her personal moral code, Canavan prevents her from being convincingly "religious" in any sense I can understand. Or, to put it another way, she's religious in the same way that a lot of not-terribly-religious-actually people are religious. Her supposed "love" of the Gods is actually just an extension of her being a nice person, since the teachings she seems to love the Gods for are the ones which mesh with her essentially twenty-first century moral outlook.

Again, I wonder if this all results from the staggeringly vast influence of Christianity on European thought. A large amount of what we take for granted as self-evidently moral is in fact strongly influenced by Christianity. Every so often a politician will stand up and say something like "every religion teaches us to care for each other" when actually they don't (indeed arguably Buddhism teaches the exact opposite - you're not supposed to be attached to anything in the material world). We assume that being "religious" basically means holding the same beliefs as everybody else, but deciding that it all comes from the Gods instead of from yourself.

Auraya's first big crisis of faith comes when the Goddess Huan (the evil goddess) tells her to kill Mirar (her lover, mentor and friend who also happens to be the immortal founder of a heathen cult). The crisis comes about because her Gods, who she loves, have asked her to do something which is against her conscience. This is all very well as far as it goes, but the problem is the way the conflict is expressed. She never, for one moment, considers the possibility that she might be wrong and the Gods might be right, she just feels disappointed that the Gods have become, in her eyes, fallible. It's not that she had previously supported the right of the Gods to demand the death of people who crossed them, but was forced to reconsider when it was somebody she cared about, rather she simply never expected the Gods to demand the execution of their sworn enemy. At no point is she asked to question her religious beliefs, because she effectively doesn't have any. At no point does she ask herself "is it right for me to kill a man, if the Gods tell me to," only "will the Gods ever ask me to do something which I know is wrong, like killing a man."

It's all the more problematic because apparently Auraya's twenty-first century beliefs are apparently supported by the Circlan faith (she complains that the Gods are asking her to "break the rules they themselves laid down") but again this raises the question of why the Gods set things up like that in the first place. She insists that Mirar doesn't deserve death because he has committed no crime, but she lives in a goddamned theocracy, surely "being the immortal leader of a heathen cult which leads people away from the Gods and therefore causes the destruction of their souls" is, in fact, a crime whichever way you cut it. Of course, when Auraya says "he has committed no crime" she means "he has committed no act which would be considered a crime to a twenty-first century, atheist fantasy reader." In fact he encourages people not to worship the Gods, which from the perspective of somebody who does worship the Gods, and who believes that worshipping the Gods is the key to saving your soul from destruction, should be a very bad thing. A crime, in fact. In Dante's Inferno, Heretics wind up in the sixth circle of hell, along with murderers and suicides. Heresy - the propagation of false doctrine (like "It's okay not to worship the Gods") - is, from a religious perspective, an act of violence equivalent to murder. It destroys souls. It is not okay from any genuinely religious perspective.

The problem is that modern audiences (and by extension modern writers, who after all come from the same stock) just don't see it that way. "Heresy" is just a word, for most people one that conjures up images of sinister black-robed priests tying innocent villagers to stakes and cackling. The idea that religion might genuinely be something worth fighting over is something we understandably find uncomfortable. Religion has caused a great many bloody wars in the past few millennia, and nobody's keen on that, and I somehow doubt that the Pope is going to call any more crusades any time soon.

I do wonder, though, whether we haven't gone a little too far in our rejection of religious conflict. We've finally (more or less) reached the conclusion that slaughtering each other might not be the best way to resolve our religious differences, but since we place such a high value on the act of slaughtering each other, this seems to have led to our rejecting the value of religion entirely. Since we no longer see it as worth having wars over, we no longer see it as worth paying attention to at all, and this unfortunate state of affairs bleeds over into fantasy worlds whose fictional Gods hand down divine laws they don't actually believe in to followers who are just going to do whatever they want anyway.

I can't help but think it's a bit of a shame.