JohnDoe9838
Member
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2022
- Messages
- 26
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- 13
Context: I am thinking of a stereotypical medieval fantasy setting.
Drawing some parallels with reality, religion has had an important weight in the history of humankind in its function of directing and moralizing people: forbidding attitudes, establishing by force a series of unbreakable moral laws (I mean, unbreakable for common people, the Church can send these rules to hell if it suits it), sexually repressing, initiating witch hunts.
(I am thinking mostly of religions related to Christianity, my little western mind does not allow me to think of other parts of the world).
It would not be strange to think that an institution with so much power would prohibit magic to the common people to ensure its hegemonic exercise of power.
I just think a story dealing with religious repression regarding magic would be interesting.
This is not limited to a group of commoners resisting and learning magic clandestinely, but also how the world of the story would change if religious institutions started to lose their power to other nascent institutions or some natural disaster (a State that starts to take shape and wants to break away from the Church, feudal lords who start to own large tracts of land and people and start to dislike giving religious tribute, some pandemic that leaves the world in ruins and starts a mass apostasy, that sort of thing).
In the case of the pandemic, if religious institutions accumulated all the knowledge about healing magic.... Would they let people die simply to control them, so that their health must always depend on the Church? Would all the hierarchies that make up these religious institutions agree to this? Couldn't some of them rebel by teaching these secrets to ordinary people, founding resistance groups?
I can also imagine a sort of medieval dystopia (with some elements of modern dystopia) where the Church subjugates absolutely every aspect of ordinary people's lives through magic.
Another possible scenario is that this leads to fights between many religious institutions with their different interests, resulting in feuds ranging from battles with hundreds of thousands of deaths to skirmishes between two religious people in a tavern.
Hell, do you want to write a love story between two individuals of different religions amidst all the repression? Go ahead.
You want people to use magic for sex in rebellion against religious repression? I guess you can too.
I think making magic almost taboo would give a sense of intimacy to people, as if that magic was part of them and the Church or Churches were cutting off this part of them, depriving them of their full potential. So magic would have a deeper meaning than just being pretty lights and destructive attacks (nothing wrong with that, I love it when a character blows up half the city with a superpower).
Also the use of magic would have its strong moral implications: could magic be used as a method of contraception? Would religions forbid this? Would they punish those who did this to themselves? If this contraception magic started to become public knowledge, how would it affect population growth? Would it age the population, reducing the labor force or religious adherents?
Drawing some parallels with reality, religion has had an important weight in the history of humankind in its function of directing and moralizing people: forbidding attitudes, establishing by force a series of unbreakable moral laws (I mean, unbreakable for common people, the Church can send these rules to hell if it suits it), sexually repressing, initiating witch hunts.
(I am thinking mostly of religions related to Christianity, my little western mind does not allow me to think of other parts of the world).
It would not be strange to think that an institution with so much power would prohibit magic to the common people to ensure its hegemonic exercise of power.
I just think a story dealing with religious repression regarding magic would be interesting.
This is not limited to a group of commoners resisting and learning magic clandestinely, but also how the world of the story would change if religious institutions started to lose their power to other nascent institutions or some natural disaster (a State that starts to take shape and wants to break away from the Church, feudal lords who start to own large tracts of land and people and start to dislike giving religious tribute, some pandemic that leaves the world in ruins and starts a mass apostasy, that sort of thing).
In the case of the pandemic, if religious institutions accumulated all the knowledge about healing magic.... Would they let people die simply to control them, so that their health must always depend on the Church? Would all the hierarchies that make up these religious institutions agree to this? Couldn't some of them rebel by teaching these secrets to ordinary people, founding resistance groups?
I can also imagine a sort of medieval dystopia (with some elements of modern dystopia) where the Church subjugates absolutely every aspect of ordinary people's lives through magic.
Another possible scenario is that this leads to fights between many religious institutions with their different interests, resulting in feuds ranging from battles with hundreds of thousands of deaths to skirmishes between two religious people in a tavern.
Hell, do you want to write a love story between two individuals of different religions amidst all the repression? Go ahead.
You want people to use magic for sex in rebellion against religious repression? I guess you can too.
I think making magic almost taboo would give a sense of intimacy to people, as if that magic was part of them and the Church or Churches were cutting off this part of them, depriving them of their full potential. So magic would have a deeper meaning than just being pretty lights and destructive attacks (nothing wrong with that, I love it when a character blows up half the city with a superpower).
Also the use of magic would have its strong moral implications: could magic be used as a method of contraception? Would religions forbid this? Would they punish those who did this to themselves? If this contraception magic started to become public knowledge, how would it affect population growth? Would it age the population, reducing the labor force or religious adherents?