Religion in Fantasy | YYSE Author’s Notes, pt. 3

Hey! You’ve made it to the final set of Author’s Notes for YES, YOUR SERPENTINE EXCELLENCY! Herein I discuss an element that makes this book an outlier in my canon: the on-page mentions of religion.

A question of faith

I don’t write a lot of overt religion into my books. It’s usually in the background, a foundation hidden beneath the broader structure of the plot. However, when I contemplated the magic system for this world and how to counter-balance it, religion seemed like the natural answer.

In real life, people often pose magic and religion as adversarial to one another. I didn’t want to take this route. Instead, I envisioned a complementary system, two harmonies that could blend well together when characters looked past their first assumptions. If a work of fiction acknowledges the existence of a God, it stands to reason that all true power in that work—including magic—stems from that God.

That being said, when it came to including religion in this project, I hesitated. I’m a practicing member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. My faith fills a huge portion of my life, and of course it would inform how I build theology in any of my works. However, it’s also sacred to me. I’m simply not going to port it into an imaginary world. Among other things, I’d rather not add to the multitude of misrepresentations that already abound.

It’s so much easier to leave faith in the background, where I know it’s there but it doesn’t intrude on the main story events.

Counseling with peers

In late 2024, while I was wrestling with this dilemma, I engaged in discussions about Religion in Fantasy with two fellow authors: Stella Dorthwany and Rabia Gale. Both are Christian as well, though of different denominations than me, so Christianity formed one baseline in these conversations.

We met for two sessions, each around two hours long, and we covered the following topics:

Meeting with these two brilliant minds is always a delight. Our exchange of opinions and ideas helped reconcile me to a more overt portrayal of faith. It allowed me to identify boundaries that I liked versus those I found uncomfortable. Ultimately, it made me realize that I could still “write what I know” without defiling what I hold most dear.

A singular guidepost

The question that guided my world-building was this: “What would a Messianic faith look like in a world that didn’t host the mortal Christ?” 

This naturally delves a lot deeper into theology than what shows up on-page. Part of the LDS faith is that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever and that He loves His children in every nation of the world. As an extension of these two tenets, that also means, logically, that He has revealed His plan of salvation to mankind from the foundation of this world, and that echoes of it can be found across cultures throughout history.

Also central to my faith is that Jesus Christ is the Redeemer of all mankind, that his Atonement is infinite, and that He is the God of the Universe, not of one measly planet. Perhaps He has to suffer and die on each world He creates, but me making that assumption would place a boundary on His power that I’m not comfortable making.

So in exploring what a Messianic faith might look like in a different world, I examined religions here that haven’t recognized the divinity of Jesus Christ. 

A template for a temple

Logically, my examination began with Judaism. This led naturally into the commonalities between the Jewish temple layout and Shinto shrines in Japan—a coincidence, some say, but I do believe the Lord reveals Himself to whatever degree we will listen.

These sacred places have in common a gate at the edge of the holy ground, a washing ritual, an approach toward a divine space where God/the kami resides, and a high priest who oversees ritual observances.

That provided the base layout of Temple Hill in my secondary world. I made it a broader complex: the gate had a guardhouse, the temple had a chapel and a records office, the property included living quarters for those workers (gardeners, building maintenance, administration, etc.) who served on the hill, along with an infirmary and a charitable distribution center—all endeavors of a living faith.

I used “archbishop” as the title for the religious figurehead because the more accurate “high priest” could evoke pagan imagery, and also because the technically correct title for his office would be “president” (i.e., one who presides in authority), and that term has wayyyyyy too much negative political baggage to connect with a fantasy religion.

Because I styled this as a living faith, the archbishop is a fundamentally good person. Were he to deny kindness and compassion to anyone, he would lose his divine authority. Hence, he treats everyone with dignity regardless of their station in life.

Cosmic Theology

At the base of this fictional faith lie the Three Pillars of Eternity: the Creation, the Fall, the Atonement. However, because this isn’t a world that hosted the mortal Christ, the Fall involved a choice granted to their primeval parents, namely that God Himself offered them the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

I reasoned this because the devil’s sole purpose from the beginning has been to usurp God’s power and dominion. So when he gave Adam and Eve the forbidden fruit on our world, he was usurping God’s authority in that act. Ergo, on other worlds, the Lord might offer the fruit Himself if that “Adam and Eve” didn’t succumb to temptation and partake without permission.

And again, this is me drawing conclusions to create a fictional faith on a fictional planet.

None of this cosmic theology shows up on-page, except for in a single line of dialogue from James Bellamy: “The world is chaos. It always has been, ever since our first parents ate the divine fruit and plunged us into this fallen mess.”

Note “the divine fruit,” not “the forbidden fruit,” because it came from God’s hands, not the devil’s.

Finishing Touches

Because I wrote from the underlying premise that Christ’s Atonement here is sufficient for all worlds, I also tied the devil to our world. They are opposite ends of the Good–Evil spectrum. Since Christ is omnipotent, it stands to reason that the devil is bound—to our world for now, and from all worlds when the Final Judgment comes. Thus, he wasn’t a player in the founding mythos of my fictional world.

That doesn’t mean that evil can’t still exist. People still have agency, weaknesses, and mortal flaws even if a demon isn’t coaxing them to make the worst possible choices. The concept of devils still exists, too. Whether any fallen angels inhabit my fictional world is a toss-up. I only determined that Satan himself would not.

And if you read all of this and thought, “Wow. She’s a religious nutcase,” I probably am. However, I also maintain that anyone, regardless of religious affiliation or lack thereof, could read my books without any threats to their own faith traditions. I’m not trying to proselytize through fiction; I’m merely playing with my beliefs in a creative medium.

In this instance, I love the result.