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:
“Religion is an attempt to get an irrefragably safe investment, and this cannot be got, no matter how low the interest, which in the case of religion is about as low as it can be.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“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)