Religion & Gods
Religions play an active role in the Shadow World, with various gods taking active roles in the unfolding of the storyline directly and indirectly. The deities of Kulthea are divided into several categories
- The Lords of Orhan, considered unambiguously good by most human and elven societies.
- The Unlife, identified in the authorial voice as unambiguously evil.
- The Dark Gods of Charon, ranging from ethically complex to outright evil in how human and elven cultures view them.
- Local Gods, animistic embodiments of places with immense power over that geographically limited region. (Though the spheres of influence for some local gods, such as Mynistra, can be quite large.)
- Other Entitites, such as demons, spirits, dragons, etc., that can convince a population that they are worthy of worship.
Religious organizations on Kulthea are dedicated to one or more of these gods, as understood through the filter of their priests and lay worshipers, giving rise to the potential for dispute between different groups worshiping the same god. Religious groups dedicated to the Dark Gods of Charon are usually, but not always, forced by social pressure to hide their places of worship.
Read more about this topic: Shadow World
Famous quotes containing the words religion and/or gods:
“The only human beings I have thoroughly admired and respected in the world have been those who carried the load of the world with a smile, and who, in the face of anxieties that would have knocked me clean out, never showed a tremor. Such men and women end by owning us, soul and body, and our allegiance can never be shaken. We are only too glad to be owned. Religion is nothing but this.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons—reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.”
—Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)