Pitfalls of syncretist fantasy

[mrissa]

I love me some syncretist fantasy--sometimes I write the stuff. The Carter Hall stories? Completely syncretist. Nor are they the only ones of my stories in which myths have been put in a blender, or at least a food processor. And then there are writers like Charles de Lint and Neil Gaiman going around making it look like fun, so of course we want to join in! I haven't seen anybody talking about the problems and pitfalls lately, though, and I've discarded a couple of books unfinished for handling these issues badly. So I thought I'd start and see if anybody had anything else to say.

1. Different mythologies don't always play nicely together. What are the gods, for example? Are they hugely powerful? Are they immortal? Some cultures have very similar understanding of gods or magical beings. Some don't. Sometimes these differences make for interesting stories, but other times--or more to the point, other ways of handling them--can just make one culture look like the Little League in syncretist baseball. Which leads me to:

2. Playing with this stuff isn't always respectful. You are not, of course, required to care. (Readers, in turn, are not required to not get really mad at you when you don't, if they see fit.) But when you do care, having their belief system put alongside something a twee 19th century white person made up about fairies as equivalent may genuinely upset readers in ways you were not hoping for. Go ahead and skewer whatever religious/philosophical powers that be, but deliberately, thinking about it first.

3. You get distortions from false equivalencies. I know this one from some of my own favorites, because how many times have I shouted at a book, "People, Loki is not Satan!" or, "Gahhhh, Odin is so not Zeus and neither is Thor gahhhhhhhh!"? Too many times, I tell you what. It's all very well to spot universal or near-universal human needs, but humans have found extremely different ways to express their relationship with those. Having every sky god come out Jupiter--or insisting that everybody has a powerful sky god really, so that's who this obscure spirit has to be--can make your work shallow and annoying instead of rich and diverse.

Anybody else?

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I commonly see approaches where "syncretism" is actually "shoehorning this non-European thing into a European framework." I guess that's sort of your Point 3, but I especially want to call it out when it's directional like that, and going between such different parts of the world. Okay, no, Odin =/= Zeus, and ditto Thor, but very especially Shango =/= Zeus, when you never see anybody doing it as Zeus = Shango instead. Also, Kali =/= Morrigan, and no, the Maiden/Mother/Crone thing isn't universal, and GAHHHHHHHHHH.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

Also, Kali =/= Morrigan

Yeeeah. In general, I think keep yer frickin hands off Kali is a good rule.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

For sure.

There's a strong tendency for culturally grounded complexities to get lost in "translation" from one context to another. For example, Liz William's Snake Agent (and presumably its sequels) depicts the Chinese Hells as a Chinese-tinted version of the Christian Hell, in terms of having demons encouraging people to be bad on earth, and.... no. Just no. Does no one read Strange Tales from Liaozhai any more?

(Silly question. Almost no one in the west has read Strange Tales at all, much less the story about the drunken scholar who makes friends with one of the Judges of Hell...)

[zwol.livejournal.com]

ILL'd.

[landofnowhere]

I think I've heard that story read aloud (admittedly by a westerner who had been living in China), actually, but I didn't know what it was from.

(lurker coming out to answer rhetorical question)

[redbird]

Requested from the library (someone else has it out, but it's due back in a couple of weeks).

[zwol.livejournal.com]

One of my favorite factoids: the Romans, who were positively obsessive about equating other people's gods with their own, did not say Odin = Jupiter. They said Odin = Mercury. Personally I don't think that's a great fit either, but it's less wrong.

Another problem that comes up sometimes is confusion of levels of abstraction, or scale. I'm having trouble thinking of fictional examples, but for instance Jewish mysticism is at pains to distinguish the true, infinite, unknowable G-d from its various finite reflections and shadows, which are comprehensible by us but still far removed from anything human. If you tried to draw equivalences between those and more, er, human-faced gods it would not go well, I think.

[mapache]

Yup, which is why Wednesday is called Wednesday. (Wednesday = Odin's Day, and it's called Mercury's day in all the Romance languages, like Miercoles or Mercredi.)

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

Slightly off-topic. Yesterday on KNX news radio, Los Angeles, I heard some financial whiz explain that Thor is the Greek god of thunder. Yes, I wrote in to complain.

He did not get struck by a thunderbolt, which suggests that Thor has lost a lot of power lately or else he's decided that any publicity is good publicity. This is LA, after all.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

One bit of Scandinavian folklore I came across some time back: Elves are Christians. However, being unfallen, they don't need the New Testament; they only have the Old Testament. (I forget which country that came from.)

This conflicts with various other stories: for example, that they're descended from those angels who were neutral during the War in Heaven.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

I didn't tell you, but I loved The True Tale beyond the telling.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's good to know. Thank you.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Wow. Reading your post just clarified some of my hate for me. Unfortunately, it didn't cause me to hate any less.

Perhaps we should talk about books that do it well?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Please do!