Faith in Books:
Strange Loops of Religion & Fiction

by Don Webb

Riding home from the University of Texas campus, I overheard two people discussing the merits of cable versus satellite TV. This was a vitally important discussion for me to hear since I had recently invested in the latter and discontinued the former. "Brand X dish is better because they provide the SciFi channel, and I watch Battlestar Galatica religiously," one woman said. Her friend gasped: it was "blasphemous" to use the word religion for anything rather than Christianity. I thought of pointing out that many religious movements in the late 19th and 20th centuries were based on fiction, but my stop was coming up and I never start a theological discussion unless I have at least 45 blocks in which to finish it.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that Willow and Terra on Buffy the Vampire Slayer will attract a new generation of witches…

For our ancestors' ancestors it was easier. They didn't have the tyranny of the Book. Fiction and religion were seen for the common activities they were. Both involved a trance state wherein certain images were presented in a certain order to produce a desired effect – bit by bit, it was all laid out, and in the end the soul was made better. Hopefully the now-transformed soul would have both more knowledge and more strength/inspiration to transform the world in accordance with to the model that had been presented. Storytellers have known this forever, and the first people to write down their myths certainly understood it very well. No one complained that Ovid re-structured the myths into a good story, no one yelled at Plato when he created myths like Atlantis, Homer had few critics. (Of course Homer and Plato never rode the bus and Ovid did but seldomly.)

Let's look at few modern faiths, and some looser belief structures, that derive some of their philosophy and imagery from fiction, some fictional responses to these faiths. Since an average Signum article, once downloaded and printed, can be read aloud in a 45-block bus journey, I should be safe. (If you read this article aloud you will discover that it is an inovocation full of hidden messages. !fit ot yenom dneS).

Bulwer-Lytton, a popular novelist of the 19th century and the man who introduced the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night," wrote three novels about occult powers coming from secret societies, the future, or the mysterious and ancient East. Telepathy, remote viewing, healing by visualization, and other commonplace beliefs of the New Age movement came from Lytton’s occult romance novels; his friends visited India, and he included their relayed accounts of occult techniques, such as the use of certain mandalas (tattvas) to invoke the power of elemental spirits. His novels, Zannoi, The Coming Race, and A Strange Tale paved the way and provided many ides for H. P. Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophical Society– which still has branches in every major world city.

 

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