On Belief Shaping Reality

 I don’t feel fantastic this week, which is a shame because it’s Easter tomorrow and it’s supposed to be a feel-good day. It’s not too bad, and I suspect by next week I’ll be fine. But I would rather not deal with this right.

Also! I started watching The Chosen. I had meant to put it off a bit, but then I thought it’d be very nice to at least start it during Lent. And I like it so far!

Anyhow it took me quite a while to come up with what I would write about before settling on this. I talked a bit about this in my sporking of Iron Druid Chronicles, but I figured why not make a Saturday Note for it! So here we are.

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On Belief Shaping Reality

So small only vaguely-related tangent before we begin:

I somehow came to this because Easter’s coming, and I thought about (for some reason) that one episode of American Gods with Ostara, Eostre? Which suggests that the Christian feast of Easter is entirely cribbed from the Germanic goddess Eostre. This wouldn’t be so bad, because it’s fiction, and for the novel Neil admitted that he fudged some facts to make the story work better (a third Zorya, for instance), but I remember picking up a behind-the-scenes book about the show in Barnes & Noble, and it straight-up tells you that Christians copied and pasted Eostre.

And yes, the English word ‘Easter’ is most probably taken from ‘Eostre’, but I think the assertion that the most holy day of the year for a religion started in the Middle East and really took off in the Greek and Roman world, whose words for the day aren’t remotely related to ‘Eostre’... to put it lightly, it strikes me as a bit silly.

Anyway, the actual point of the Note.

There’s a fairly common idea that is persistent in fantasy that wants to incorporate mythology, especially real-life mythology, go with this idea: gods, or mythological figures, exist because people believe in them. The more people believe in them, the stronger they are, and if people don’t believe in them then they don’t have as much power. So ancient gods are weaker in modern day, and ones who are unknown are dead or faded. And in some versions of this take, you see that reality itself is shaped by the beliefs of people.

I’m going to be real with you: I don’t much like this trope.

I don’t think that this concept was invented by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, by they’re the ones who popularized it in their books. The Sandman, Discworld, and American Gods run on this idea. And those stories all work! They work very well! But the difference between those and how a bunch of other stories deal with it is that they’re using this trope to make a point. Discworld uses the idea of belief being an actual force to talk about human nature and how it shapes how people act and the way they construct the world around them. American Gods is using gods and belief to talk about the fickleness of American culture. And The Sandman has a title character who is explicitly the anthropomorphic personification of creativity and imagination; of course, there’s going to be a lot about the nature of what people create through the things they believe. That’s just how that story would go.

A lot of stories in modern fantasy just relabel this idea though without the thematic reasoning behind it. Not all of them do, mind you, and they still manage to be creative. In Dresden Files powerful beings like gods aren’t kept alive by belief, but they do get power from active worship, and being known about helps them keep an anchor in the mortal world. We’re shown that there’s a group dedicated to kicking beings out of the mortal world by destroying records and eliminating all memory of them.

Also Fables? It’s a comic series about fairy tale characters in modern day. Plenty of characters run on the assumption that fairy tale characters’ strengths are tied to how popular their stories are, and one of them, Jack, goes so far as to work his way into Hollywood to make movies about himself, all in an attempt to become functionally immortal. Except the smarter characters (and the author himself) have suggested that no, that’s not how it works, and the characters are using a flawed theory to try to make sense of the world they live in.

There’s also a thing in Gunnerkrigg Court in which Coyote tells Antimony that the world works this way in that setting, but other characters express their own doubts. He’s got evidence to back it up, but it’s unconfirmed, and one of the mythological characters explicitly hates it because he doesn’t love the notion that he exists because humans made him up.

Percy Jackson & the Olympians also has the gods not tied to belief (at least, not entirely), but to Western Civilization itself, and so the villains taking down the gods is equated with destroying Western Civilization. And to be clear, both of these (the Olympian gods and Western Civilization) are called out as being flawed constructs prone to abuses, although this isn’t gotten too deeply into because it’s a kids series. Gods can seemingly choose to fade away and die if they’re forgotten, but that seems to be something of a choice, and also tied to their domains. Pan dies not because he himself is forgotten (he’s certainly not), but because humans don’t respect his domain at all–the wild places, which are rapidly dwindling.

But a lot of mythology-based stories use the gods-need-belief idea uncritically. I just talked about PJO and how it played with this, but the sequel serieses all play the trope completely straight, suggesting that the gods need humanity’s belief and are terrified of losing it, despite often featuring little-known mythological figures that barely anyone knows, all the while pointedly not depicting any major religions that dominate the spheres today. The obvious explanation is that Riordan wanted to have crossover cosmology–Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and Norse myths are all real in this setting, and Aztec, Celtic, and Yoruba myths are suggested to be real–without stirring too much controversy from having figures from Judeo-Christian or Islamic mythology appearing. And to be clear, there are Muslim and Jewish characters in the series, their religious beliefs are just kind of handwaved.

Iron Druid Chronicles also takes the cake as the worst offender here because the gods exist because people believe in them, but it’s only there for crossover cosmology and nothing else. And when the protagonist explains this to a practicing Catholic, that her deity exists because He’s made up, this is meant to be taken as a heartwarming affirmation of how we’re all right, in our own way.

I suppose Nightside ALSO has the same system, but it’s rarely the focus of the story, and that story runs on Rule of Cool. Look, one of the protagonist’s friends is Razor Eddie, Punk God of the Straight Razor. Simon Green isn’t even trying to be clever, he’s just throwing stuff he thinks sounds cool into the books, which… is kind of fun, actually?

Which leads to my second problem with this trope: it doesn’t actually do much with actual believers in the story. Look, people who believe in a religion believe it is true. Christians and Muslims believe that God made the world, for instance. So for someone to come up to a religious character in one of these settings and say, “Actually, no, the world just exists and God does because we made Him up”: this should be earth-shattering. It should be a revelation that the character’s religion, all religions, are in fact made up fabrications with only pockets of truth. It shouldn’t be “Oh, okay, we’re all right?” for a religious character. It should be “Oh snap! We’re all wrong, then aren’t we?” In most belief systems, if your deity is discovered to explicitly be made up, then he or she or they or it isn’t real!

Thirdly, when we get to the idea of beliefs making things real, well, a lot of people believe in weird or stupid things. The weirdest this usually gets is things like aliens or Bigfoot. But you know how many wild conspiracy theories there are out there? So if people believe in that vaccines contain mind control chips, in a world where belief makes things real, do those exist now? Do some people really live on a Flat Earth? Is there really a lizardman cabal ruling the world?

And that’s some of the less offensive stuff.

Also! If the world is shaped by what people believe… well how does anything get discovered? How does anyone learn anything contrary to popular opinion? Columbus was looking for Asia because Europeans didn’t know there was another continent in the way. How would they have not reached Asia if the world is shaped by belief? How did spontaneous generation get disproved? How did geocentrism? This doesn’t make any sense!

You can’t just throw in an idea about how reality is shaped and then not think through the implications of it! And this is a big idea! Reality is a big idea! And so copying and pasting a thematic concept from better books doesn’t work if you don’t also do the work to make it fit into your own story.

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