Ella Hansen's Blog
December 9, 2018
A brief digression (religion in fantasy, IV)
I.
When I began this series many months ago, I did not intend to offer any focused critique of any existing fantasy works; nor did I intend to offer (beyond my initial thoughts on God in fantasy) anything like a prescription for how to approach religion in writing. I am suggesting things one might imagine and, in so doing, criticizing certain failures of imagination, not saying what anyone ought to do. I have, therefore, effectively treated authorial choices as morally neutral.
I still think this is basically the right proceeding for this kind of essay. However, a conversation with a friend has led me to think that one might say more about the limits an author might wish to impose upon his own writing of fantasy. The topic was the morality of Rowling's Harry Potter series, and, specifically, of its spiritual content. This was a matter of particular concern among Christian readers when the books first became popular; and, though I think active criticism has largely died down with the publication of Deathly Hallows, my friend, a devout Evangelical, offered a variation on the usual complaint. The concern was, put in various ways, that the content of Harry Potter is too "occult" or "magical" to be safe; that it may encourage (perhaps, has in fact encouraged) readers to dabble in esoteric practices and so imperil their souls; that it, in some hidden way, corrupts the mind and draws people away from God.
To this objection, I offered the obvious counters: although theologically confused, Rowling is a professed Christian, and her profession must inform any reading of the work; Rowling most likely saw the magic as mere fantasy, and most readers probably do likewise; and many do in fact find within the books valuable theological or moral themes, so claiming that they are inherently wicked is unlikely to succeed. In short, his reading is bad as a reading: it does not correspond to fact, or distorts certain facts out of proportion, and it confuses the literary for the real.
Despite the force of these counters, I still feel a certain weight behind my friend's argument. Reading is, after all, a moral act, and books, like conversations, can shape a person's character. Some books are harmful, if not to everyone, then to people of certain temperaments or at certain moments of weakness. One would not (to choose a few extreme cases) give a copy of Mein Kampf to a person who suspects an all-pervading Jewish conspiracy, or an ancient Egyptian book of curses to a young person hungry for arcane knowledge or power. Even if one thinks the curses so much hookum, the desire for control and esoteric insight is itself vicious. Though the book might not have the same influence on the mind of a scholar of ancient religion, it is unlikely to do him any good, either: the book is evil in itself, because it is made by an evil person with evil intentions; reason and the distance of time and belief can, however, lessen its effect.
The difficulty, of course, for the Christian is that things such as curses might well be real. I say "might be," because circumspection is needed. It is common among modern Evangelicals influenced by the Pentecostalist and Charismatic movements to credit virtually every personal or social evil to the hidden work of demons, and to construe any pretension to occult power as a proof of the malignant presence of the Devil. This seems to me unwarranted. As others have put it, "The Catholic Church admits in principle the possibility of interference in the course of nature by spirits other than God, whether good or evil, but never without God's permission. As to the frequency of such interference especially by malignant agencies at the request of man, she observes the utmost reserve." Most Protestants, I think, would agree.
That there are demons and they can exercise malign influence is manifest from the Gospels; that the power of Christ is incomparably greater is even clearer, and we have few to no examples of successful magic in Scripture (perhaps the summoning of the ghost of Samuel by the witch of Endor, but, if Samuel appeared at all, that must have been the result of a special divine miracle, as a judgment on Saul). In the New Testament, the sorcerers Simon Magus, Elymas, and the sons of Sceva are rendered at once powerless and ridiculous by the Holy Spirit, and I can think of no curse--except the curse of God himself--that is shown to hold even temporary power over the people of God. Balaam was not even able to pronounce such a curse.
Still, there are demons, and there are people who try to invoke them. There is, moreover, the whole morass of myth, esoteric doctrine, and arcane rituals that makes up the world's occult traditions; what little of this I have encountered has seemed either banal or bunk, but some who have dabbled in it--such as the young C.S. Lewis, when he had grown wiser--do sternly warn against its allure, and I must think them right.
The problem with my friend's approach is that "the occult," defined in this broader sense, may well be found in all kinds of places. There are passing allusions to astrology, alchemy, and so on in Lewis's Narnia books; That Hideous Strength, in turn, works in part through the elemental qualities of the planets (on whose falsehood Lewis was, of course, clear), and envisions Merlin as a practitioner of a kind of relational magic in a world once animist. In part, of course, Lewis is just playing with the medieval ideas of which he was a professional student; in part, perhaps, his work showed the influence of his dear friends Owen Barfield, the Anthroposophist, and of Charles Williams, at once (it is said) a devout Anglican and a devotee of arcane, Hermetic and Rosicrucian philosophies.
However, except for a few wishful witches and his more breathless online critics, few would be likely to see either of Lewis's speculative series as an engine for advancing occult lore, let alone magical practice. These are subordinate elements within Lewis's Christian vision--less important, perhaps, than a more general Romanticism, and still less than what is often called his "Platonism." He also warns the reader against trying to dabble in magic: even for Merlin, as Ransom says, it was not entirely safe or healthy, and it is now "utterly unlawful."
The chief literary purpose Merlin's magical approach to the world plays is, to my reading, first to offer to the reader one of the obvious alternatives to the brutally rationalistic materialism that is the main target of the book's criticisms, as of the popular-philosophical Abolition of Man, and then to show that the Christian relationship to nature (embodied in the paradisaical Elwin Ransom) rises above even an animistic paganism. Ransom does not wield nature or commune with its spirits; he is Man, dealing kindly with the animals, living in the presence of angels, and trusting in the power of God alone.
III.
Merely identifying the presence of an occult motif (or, more properly, one shared with occult thinkers or texts) does not, therefore, exhaust the real import of a work of fiction. Moreover, though the magical themes of a book like That Hideous Strength could work an unhealthy influence on some minds, that is, I think, a danger brought to the book, not one that the author intended, or that most readers are likely to encounter. However, there are books whose portrayal of magic is much more pervasive, and much closer to actual magical practice.
Here, Harry Potter is not an obvious example: the magic is, quite simply, ridiculous, and put as much to benign use as malignant. It is not, and is not meant to be construed as, magic or witchcraft as it has actually been practiced in our world: it is a kind of talent used by the innately gifted, not an arcane property of the world to be conjured by the initiate. Nevertheless, the magic of Harry Potter, taken seriously, does raise a number of problems.
First, what is the relationship of "wizardry" to real-world magic, as condemned in Scripture, found in a multitude of ancient texts, or allegedly practiced by the witches of the early-modern trials? This, I gather, is largely side-stepped, and understandably so: probably Rowling does believe magic to be so much fantasy, and didn't want to get into the issue. However, the problem remains, and it leads swiftly to a second and larger difficulty, the opposition between Wizards and Muggles.
The basic counter to arguments like my friend's is that the magic is a mere literary device. However, the wizards are still removed, like actual magicians purport to be, from the common herd. If they are not all arrogant, the art itself could well be accused of arrogance. Rowling, to her credit, does much to puncture this, showing the best wizards, people like the Weasleys, to be genuinely fascinated with the muggle world, squarely condemning the blood purists, and underscoring the humanity of the wizards themselves. Nevertheless, the magician remains a breed unto himself, both more interesting (as Gene Veith has pointed out, in one of the shrewder Christian criticisms of Harry Potter) than the muggle and able to work arts parallel to the arts of the real magician (I say "parallel," of course, as I do not suppose that her wizards' astrology or potions, e.g., are more than loosely inspired by the sort of thing found in magical manuscripts).
The key point is this: between these two things, there is a danger that the distinction between "literary" and "real" magic will collapse, that Rowling's wizards will be found, upon close examination, simply to be real-world magicians, re-imagined as harmless (and perhaps even Christian) persons of gifts but not character other to our own.
IV.
I doubt Rowling ever intended anyone to think this deeply about her magicians, who are far more whimsical than the often morbid Christian critiques have made them. I do not doubt, moreover, that the average reader would simply tell me to lighten up and stop taking a middle-grade-to-young-adult series so seriously. What I am about to say, therefore, is not really a criticism of works such as hers; it is instead a warning to people who think systematically about fiction (as I try to do), and who are less able to approach such things lightly and innocently.
Just as the Christian is bound always to tell the truth about God--even in, perhaps, imagining a fantasy setting in which God is not known--he is also bound to tell the truth about sin and righteousness, about good and evil, about the servants and the enemies of God. Reading is a moral act, and so is writing. The one who reads merely for diversion likely does so innocently enough, even when reading books that are not altogether good; but that is not obviously true of the careful reader, and still less of the writer, who must dwell on and labor over his work.
One might imagine a fantasy world in which, as I suggested in the last post, garlic and virgins and clothes of gold ward off demons; I doubt, however, that one could innocently depict such a thing as really efficacious, even in a fantasy world. That is not to close off description of peoples with beliefs very different from our own, or from the truth. A work of historical fiction or fantasy (some of Kaye's novels come to mind) that did not portray something like the rituals and beliefs of the Chinese or Romans or Aztecs or whoever it may be would be simply dishonest about its subject. There is, moreover, no need that I can see for the author to comment explicitly on the proceeding--that the characters believe it is enough, and any mature reader can see that we are not expected to agree. The novelist is, after all, acting something like the anthropologist, describing and repeating without interposing his own judgment. Something similar probably applies in a story set in a world explicitly distanced from our own, by style, setting, language, or people.
However, it is quite another thing from this to show a world in which magic really does work, and no distance opens up between the reader and the magical act. The reader of the historical fantasy knows that he is reading something set in a quasi-historical world, with beliefs different from any we would hold to. The reader of the ordinary fantasy, by contrast, is imagining a world in which magic works, tout court, and that is not something that the Christian can countenance, except with great care--he must, in effect, be showing a magic that is not "our" magic at all. A demon who could be warded off with garlic would not be a real demon, any more than a god who ruled over a single planet would be the real God.
V.
In the final sum, I suppose, I don't quite believe in fiction, in the lie purely for entertainment (and I recognize that this may be a failure in me as reader). "Magic" is a literary device, in many stories; but it is something that should not be glorified in anything like its real-world form, any more than adultery or theft or the worship of idols ought to be. Some stories will, therefore, lie simply beyond the pale. I see no bright line, however, and I suspect, again, that some stories are harmful for some readers and innocent enough for others.
Harry Potter is an example. Empirically, it is simply not true that all or even most readers have begun to dabble in magic for themselves (where is the enormous explosion of interest in such practices?), though some larger number may have gone on to read fantasy of a more morbid kind. The obvious successors to Harry Potter by sheer number of sales are actually dystopian young adult novels--The Hunger Games, Divergent, and so on--or perhaps A Song of Ice and Fire, which features a good deal of magic, yet in a world profoundly different from our own and, apparently, atheistic in its metaphysics.
Still, there are, I suspect, personalities that ought not read something like Harry Potter, and everyone who reads any book needs moral as well as imaginative formation. The person who reads a certain kind of fantasy book, knowing that magic is wrong and believing that this kind of "magic" has nothing to do with the actual thing, may do so without harm; the person, on the other hand, who hungers for spiritual things and turns first to this, does so to his peril.
When I began this series many months ago, I did not intend to offer any focused critique of any existing fantasy works; nor did I intend to offer (beyond my initial thoughts on God in fantasy) anything like a prescription for how to approach religion in writing. I am suggesting things one might imagine and, in so doing, criticizing certain failures of imagination, not saying what anyone ought to do. I have, therefore, effectively treated authorial choices as morally neutral.
I still think this is basically the right proceeding for this kind of essay. However, a conversation with a friend has led me to think that one might say more about the limits an author might wish to impose upon his own writing of fantasy. The topic was the morality of Rowling's Harry Potter series, and, specifically, of its spiritual content. This was a matter of particular concern among Christian readers when the books first became popular; and, though I think active criticism has largely died down with the publication of Deathly Hallows, my friend, a devout Evangelical, offered a variation on the usual complaint. The concern was, put in various ways, that the content of Harry Potter is too "occult" or "magical" to be safe; that it may encourage (perhaps, has in fact encouraged) readers to dabble in esoteric practices and so imperil their souls; that it, in some hidden way, corrupts the mind and draws people away from God.
To this objection, I offered the obvious counters: although theologically confused, Rowling is a professed Christian, and her profession must inform any reading of the work; Rowling most likely saw the magic as mere fantasy, and most readers probably do likewise; and many do in fact find within the books valuable theological or moral themes, so claiming that they are inherently wicked is unlikely to succeed. In short, his reading is bad as a reading: it does not correspond to fact, or distorts certain facts out of proportion, and it confuses the literary for the real.
Despite the force of these counters, I still feel a certain weight behind my friend's argument. Reading is, after all, a moral act, and books, like conversations, can shape a person's character. Some books are harmful, if not to everyone, then to people of certain temperaments or at certain moments of weakness. One would not (to choose a few extreme cases) give a copy of Mein Kampf to a person who suspects an all-pervading Jewish conspiracy, or an ancient Egyptian book of curses to a young person hungry for arcane knowledge or power. Even if one thinks the curses so much hookum, the desire for control and esoteric insight is itself vicious. Though the book might not have the same influence on the mind of a scholar of ancient religion, it is unlikely to do him any good, either: the book is evil in itself, because it is made by an evil person with evil intentions; reason and the distance of time and belief can, however, lessen its effect.
The difficulty, of course, for the Christian is that things such as curses might well be real. I say "might be," because circumspection is needed. It is common among modern Evangelicals influenced by the Pentecostalist and Charismatic movements to credit virtually every personal or social evil to the hidden work of demons, and to construe any pretension to occult power as a proof of the malignant presence of the Devil. This seems to me unwarranted. As others have put it, "The Catholic Church admits in principle the possibility of interference in the course of nature by spirits other than God, whether good or evil, but never without God's permission. As to the frequency of such interference especially by malignant agencies at the request of man, she observes the utmost reserve." Most Protestants, I think, would agree.
That there are demons and they can exercise malign influence is manifest from the Gospels; that the power of Christ is incomparably greater is even clearer, and we have few to no examples of successful magic in Scripture (perhaps the summoning of the ghost of Samuel by the witch of Endor, but, if Samuel appeared at all, that must have been the result of a special divine miracle, as a judgment on Saul). In the New Testament, the sorcerers Simon Magus, Elymas, and the sons of Sceva are rendered at once powerless and ridiculous by the Holy Spirit, and I can think of no curse--except the curse of God himself--that is shown to hold even temporary power over the people of God. Balaam was not even able to pronounce such a curse.
Still, there are demons, and there are people who try to invoke them. There is, moreover, the whole morass of myth, esoteric doctrine, and arcane rituals that makes up the world's occult traditions; what little of this I have encountered has seemed either banal or bunk, but some who have dabbled in it--such as the young C.S. Lewis, when he had grown wiser--do sternly warn against its allure, and I must think them right.
The problem with my friend's approach is that "the occult," defined in this broader sense, may well be found in all kinds of places. There are passing allusions to astrology, alchemy, and so on in Lewis's Narnia books; That Hideous Strength, in turn, works in part through the elemental qualities of the planets (on whose falsehood Lewis was, of course, clear), and envisions Merlin as a practitioner of a kind of relational magic in a world once animist. In part, of course, Lewis is just playing with the medieval ideas of which he was a professional student; in part, perhaps, his work showed the influence of his dear friends Owen Barfield, the Anthroposophist, and of Charles Williams, at once (it is said) a devout Anglican and a devotee of arcane, Hermetic and Rosicrucian philosophies.
However, except for a few wishful witches and his more breathless online critics, few would be likely to see either of Lewis's speculative series as an engine for advancing occult lore, let alone magical practice. These are subordinate elements within Lewis's Christian vision--less important, perhaps, than a more general Romanticism, and still less than what is often called his "Platonism." He also warns the reader against trying to dabble in magic: even for Merlin, as Ransom says, it was not entirely safe or healthy, and it is now "utterly unlawful."
The chief literary purpose Merlin's magical approach to the world plays is, to my reading, first to offer to the reader one of the obvious alternatives to the brutally rationalistic materialism that is the main target of the book's criticisms, as of the popular-philosophical Abolition of Man, and then to show that the Christian relationship to nature (embodied in the paradisaical Elwin Ransom) rises above even an animistic paganism. Ransom does not wield nature or commune with its spirits; he is Man, dealing kindly with the animals, living in the presence of angels, and trusting in the power of God alone.
III.
Merely identifying the presence of an occult motif (or, more properly, one shared with occult thinkers or texts) does not, therefore, exhaust the real import of a work of fiction. Moreover, though the magical themes of a book like That Hideous Strength could work an unhealthy influence on some minds, that is, I think, a danger brought to the book, not one that the author intended, or that most readers are likely to encounter. However, there are books whose portrayal of magic is much more pervasive, and much closer to actual magical practice.
Here, Harry Potter is not an obvious example: the magic is, quite simply, ridiculous, and put as much to benign use as malignant. It is not, and is not meant to be construed as, magic or witchcraft as it has actually been practiced in our world: it is a kind of talent used by the innately gifted, not an arcane property of the world to be conjured by the initiate. Nevertheless, the magic of Harry Potter, taken seriously, does raise a number of problems.
First, what is the relationship of "wizardry" to real-world magic, as condemned in Scripture, found in a multitude of ancient texts, or allegedly practiced by the witches of the early-modern trials? This, I gather, is largely side-stepped, and understandably so: probably Rowling does believe magic to be so much fantasy, and didn't want to get into the issue. However, the problem remains, and it leads swiftly to a second and larger difficulty, the opposition between Wizards and Muggles.
The basic counter to arguments like my friend's is that the magic is a mere literary device. However, the wizards are still removed, like actual magicians purport to be, from the common herd. If they are not all arrogant, the art itself could well be accused of arrogance. Rowling, to her credit, does much to puncture this, showing the best wizards, people like the Weasleys, to be genuinely fascinated with the muggle world, squarely condemning the blood purists, and underscoring the humanity of the wizards themselves. Nevertheless, the magician remains a breed unto himself, both more interesting (as Gene Veith has pointed out, in one of the shrewder Christian criticisms of Harry Potter) than the muggle and able to work arts parallel to the arts of the real magician (I say "parallel," of course, as I do not suppose that her wizards' astrology or potions, e.g., are more than loosely inspired by the sort of thing found in magical manuscripts).
The key point is this: between these two things, there is a danger that the distinction between "literary" and "real" magic will collapse, that Rowling's wizards will be found, upon close examination, simply to be real-world magicians, re-imagined as harmless (and perhaps even Christian) persons of gifts but not character other to our own.
IV.
I doubt Rowling ever intended anyone to think this deeply about her magicians, who are far more whimsical than the often morbid Christian critiques have made them. I do not doubt, moreover, that the average reader would simply tell me to lighten up and stop taking a middle-grade-to-young-adult series so seriously. What I am about to say, therefore, is not really a criticism of works such as hers; it is instead a warning to people who think systematically about fiction (as I try to do), and who are less able to approach such things lightly and innocently.
Just as the Christian is bound always to tell the truth about God--even in, perhaps, imagining a fantasy setting in which God is not known--he is also bound to tell the truth about sin and righteousness, about good and evil, about the servants and the enemies of God. Reading is a moral act, and so is writing. The one who reads merely for diversion likely does so innocently enough, even when reading books that are not altogether good; but that is not obviously true of the careful reader, and still less of the writer, who must dwell on and labor over his work.
One might imagine a fantasy world in which, as I suggested in the last post, garlic and virgins and clothes of gold ward off demons; I doubt, however, that one could innocently depict such a thing as really efficacious, even in a fantasy world. That is not to close off description of peoples with beliefs very different from our own, or from the truth. A work of historical fiction or fantasy (some of Kaye's novels come to mind) that did not portray something like the rituals and beliefs of the Chinese or Romans or Aztecs or whoever it may be would be simply dishonest about its subject. There is, moreover, no need that I can see for the author to comment explicitly on the proceeding--that the characters believe it is enough, and any mature reader can see that we are not expected to agree. The novelist is, after all, acting something like the anthropologist, describing and repeating without interposing his own judgment. Something similar probably applies in a story set in a world explicitly distanced from our own, by style, setting, language, or people.
However, it is quite another thing from this to show a world in which magic really does work, and no distance opens up between the reader and the magical act. The reader of the historical fantasy knows that he is reading something set in a quasi-historical world, with beliefs different from any we would hold to. The reader of the ordinary fantasy, by contrast, is imagining a world in which magic works, tout court, and that is not something that the Christian can countenance, except with great care--he must, in effect, be showing a magic that is not "our" magic at all. A demon who could be warded off with garlic would not be a real demon, any more than a god who ruled over a single planet would be the real God.
V.
In the final sum, I suppose, I don't quite believe in fiction, in the lie purely for entertainment (and I recognize that this may be a failure in me as reader). "Magic" is a literary device, in many stories; but it is something that should not be glorified in anything like its real-world form, any more than adultery or theft or the worship of idols ought to be. Some stories will, therefore, lie simply beyond the pale. I see no bright line, however, and I suspect, again, that some stories are harmful for some readers and innocent enough for others.
Harry Potter is an example. Empirically, it is simply not true that all or even most readers have begun to dabble in magic for themselves (where is the enormous explosion of interest in such practices?), though some larger number may have gone on to read fantasy of a more morbid kind. The obvious successors to Harry Potter by sheer number of sales are actually dystopian young adult novels--The Hunger Games, Divergent, and so on--or perhaps A Song of Ice and Fire, which features a good deal of magic, yet in a world profoundly different from our own and, apparently, atheistic in its metaphysics.
Still, there are, I suspect, personalities that ought not read something like Harry Potter, and everyone who reads any book needs moral as well as imaginative formation. The person who reads a certain kind of fantasy book, knowing that magic is wrong and believing that this kind of "magic" has nothing to do with the actual thing, may do so without harm; the person, on the other hand, who hungers for spiritual things and turns first to this, does so to his peril.
September 21, 2017
A thunder sent to bring / black Ariel and Azrael and Ammon on the wing: demons (religion in fantasy, III)
Furthermore, there are certain divine powers situated in the middle, in the airy space between the height of ether and the depths of earth, through which our desires and our deserts travel to the gods. These the Greeks name daemones....
Apuleius, On the God of Socrates 6
1.
Gods are not the only superhuman beings who feature in real-world religions. A whole host of lesser beings crowd the space between humans and the heavens. The ancient Greeks called these beings daemones. From this our own word "demon" derives, yet, unlike the demons of the New Testament or the saints' lives, these spirits were not unambiguously maleficent.
Fickle as the air of which they were made, the daemones were sometimes good, sometimes evil. as Apuleius, the author of the most famous ancient fantasy-story, the Metamorphosis, tells us in his theological treatise On the God of Socrates, they served as the gods' intermediaries with mankind, transmitting prophetic dreams and inspiring seers. They could even direct the lives of individual persons: each man had his guardian daemon, and Socrates himself felt (so Plato's Apology tells us) that he was directed through life by the inspiration of his daimonion, the titular "god" of Apuleius' treatise.
The daemones were drawn to the sacrifices of their worshippers. From this fact arose one of the fateful episodes of Roman history. Roman magistrates were accustomed to sacrifice and read the message of the gods in the entrails of the sacrificial victim. The reading was the duty of Etruscan soothsayers, the haruspices, and relied ultimately (so Apuleius, for example, reports) on the work of intermediate daemones, who manipulated the entrails and other signs, such as lightning bolts, to make the will of the gods known.
This custom had been established for a very long time. There was, however, within the Roman Empire a growing people that denied the lawfulness of sacrifice and rejected the worship of the gods in favor of the service of One God. If there were inferior "gods" in any meaningful sense, they were really angels, messengers of god who were inherently good, and so desires neither worship nor service from the humans who were their fellow-servants. To the Christians, all the gods of the nations were demons, as the Psalmist had said: not just lesser spirits, that is, but lesser spirits who were addicted to nothing but evil, corruption, and rebellion against the only God. Against them they invoked the power of Christ, who had destroyed the kingdom of the demons by rising from Hell and the grave.
One day in 302, the emperor Galerius, one of the Tetrarchs (the "Gang of Four," as it were, who jointly ruled the empire from 293 to 305), was offering his customary sacrifices to the gods. Several members of his entourage made the sign of the cross, probably over their foreheads, as was the custom for the baptised--and those recalling their union with Christ in baptism. The demons were driven off, and the sacrifice failed. Galerius was infuriated.
That winter, he began to agitate with the senior emperor, Diocletian, for a universal campaign against the Christians. Advised by his military and civilian subordinates and encouraged by the oracle brought by another haruspex from the oracle of Apollo at Miletus, Diocletian concurred. On February 23, 303, Diocletian and Galerius ordered the church in Diocletians' capital, Nicomedia (modern İzmit, at the east end of the Sea of Marmara in Turkey), to be burned to the ground. The next ten years would see near-continuous persecution of Christians in the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and the rise to power of its first Christian ruler: Constantine, the son of Galerius' old counterpart in the West of the empire, Constantius Chlorus.
3.
Our account of the affairs in Galerius' court comes from On the Deaths of Persecutors , a tract written in a mood of ferocious exaltation by a prominent Christian member of Diocletian's court, the rhetoric professor Lactantius, and dedicated to a Christian who had been imprisoned and probably tortured for his refusal to sacrifice to the gods. He certainly had no sympathy for Galerius, and we may doubt whether he had accurate knowledge of events in his court.
Still, the demonic mechanism underlying soothsaying is precisely what the pagan Apuleius had described a century and a half earlier, and the ability of the sign of the cross to disrupt divination was a well-known problem. Some two centuries after Lactantius wrote, another Christian writer, a biographer of the great Severus of Antioch, would give the pagan explanation for why it worked: the gods did not like to be reminded of human suffering. That was a very old, and authentic, pagan notion. Though pagans and Christians agreed on nothing else about sacrifices, they did agree on this: they really did involve demons, and the invocation of the cross could, at least sometimes, interfere with their successful operation as an instrument of soothsaying.
4.
I have gone on at length about a single historical example. It is, I think, worth the consideration. Often, fantasy-writers think of world-building as a matter of basic architecture: are humans the only race, or are there elves and dwarves too? Are there orcs and, if so, are they good? Is there a Dark Lord, or only a bunch of grey ones? Is the world ruled by Powers who dwell off in some cardinal direction, or do the inhabitants expect to solve their own affairs, with or without the intervention of heavenly beings?
These are the facts of a fantasy-story, the nuts and bolts of the world, and they are very much worth thinking through. But there is a great deal of room in which to explore the subjective experience of those facts, as well. I have already mentioned the possibility of religious conflict in my preceding post, and hope to devote the whole of another post to it.
For now, it is enough to observe this: the gods and lesser spiritual beings of a fantasy world may not only be different from our own--or from those the average Westerner is accustomed to think about, at any rate, which is not the same thing--but also perceived in contradictory ways by the inhabitants of the imaginary world itself. Put differently: if a story is going to have gods or lesser spirits who interact with the characters, there probably are going to be different opinions about them, and those opinions likely will matter, if not to the story you wish to tell, then to the wider world in which it takes place.
5.
A final note: it has become rather popular in contemporary fantasy (perhaps especially urban fantasy) to have demonic or angelic beings be corporeal, subject to wounding or even killing by sword, crossbow, or high explosive (yes, I have seen this, or something like it, in an appallingly bad book of fantasy that shall remain nameless!) While it is perfectly fine, I suppose, to imagine races of elves or orcs--that is, people who, while corporeal like humans, are somehow better or worse than we--one rather wishes that such beings would not be called demons. That is not what a demon (or, still less, an angel) is, in pagan or in Christian thought: demons are, for the Platonists at least, neither immaterial (or nearly so), like the properly immortal gods, nor do they have bodies of earthly matter, like mortal humans; they are spirits, and have to be dealt with accordingly.
It is important, therefore, not to make one's demons too un-spiritual. I do not mean, of course, that they should sit around and meditate or some such: that is not what it means to be a spirit. But it will do no good to try to fight off an airish beast with a crossbow, any more than to treat a virus by hitting it with a shovel. If a fantasy story is to have enemies solely of flesh and blood, well and good, but, if not, the adversaries ought to be dealt with by the means through which the story's peoples deal with their gods, their gods' minions, and their gods' inhuman adversaries, whether prayer or expiatory sacrifices or (who knows) feeding raw bulbs of garlic to a virgin who is wearing a tunic woven of a single unbroken thread of pure gold. Religion itself can be a method for fighting the fantastic enemies, and it may very well work.
Apuleius, On the God of Socrates 6
1.
Gods are not the only superhuman beings who feature in real-world religions. A whole host of lesser beings crowd the space between humans and the heavens. The ancient Greeks called these beings daemones. From this our own word "demon" derives, yet, unlike the demons of the New Testament or the saints' lives, these spirits were not unambiguously maleficent.
Fickle as the air of which they were made, the daemones were sometimes good, sometimes evil. as Apuleius, the author of the most famous ancient fantasy-story, the Metamorphosis, tells us in his theological treatise On the God of Socrates, they served as the gods' intermediaries with mankind, transmitting prophetic dreams and inspiring seers. They could even direct the lives of individual persons: each man had his guardian daemon, and Socrates himself felt (so Plato's Apology tells us) that he was directed through life by the inspiration of his daimonion, the titular "god" of Apuleius' treatise.
The daemones were drawn to the sacrifices of their worshippers. From this fact arose one of the fateful episodes of Roman history. Roman magistrates were accustomed to sacrifice and read the message of the gods in the entrails of the sacrificial victim. The reading was the duty of Etruscan soothsayers, the haruspices, and relied ultimately (so Apuleius, for example, reports) on the work of intermediate daemones, who manipulated the entrails and other signs, such as lightning bolts, to make the will of the gods known.
This custom had been established for a very long time. There was, however, within the Roman Empire a growing people that denied the lawfulness of sacrifice and rejected the worship of the gods in favor of the service of One God. If there were inferior "gods" in any meaningful sense, they were really angels, messengers of god who were inherently good, and so desires neither worship nor service from the humans who were their fellow-servants. To the Christians, all the gods of the nations were demons, as the Psalmist had said: not just lesser spirits, that is, but lesser spirits who were addicted to nothing but evil, corruption, and rebellion against the only God. Against them they invoked the power of Christ, who had destroyed the kingdom of the demons by rising from Hell and the grave.
One day in 302, the emperor Galerius, one of the Tetrarchs (the "Gang of Four," as it were, who jointly ruled the empire from 293 to 305), was offering his customary sacrifices to the gods. Several members of his entourage made the sign of the cross, probably over their foreheads, as was the custom for the baptised--and those recalling their union with Christ in baptism. The demons were driven off, and the sacrifice failed. Galerius was infuriated.
That winter, he began to agitate with the senior emperor, Diocletian, for a universal campaign against the Christians. Advised by his military and civilian subordinates and encouraged by the oracle brought by another haruspex from the oracle of Apollo at Miletus, Diocletian concurred. On February 23, 303, Diocletian and Galerius ordered the church in Diocletians' capital, Nicomedia (modern İzmit, at the east end of the Sea of Marmara in Turkey), to be burned to the ground. The next ten years would see near-continuous persecution of Christians in the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and the rise to power of its first Christian ruler: Constantine, the son of Galerius' old counterpart in the West of the empire, Constantius Chlorus.
3.
Our account of the affairs in Galerius' court comes from On the Deaths of Persecutors , a tract written in a mood of ferocious exaltation by a prominent Christian member of Diocletian's court, the rhetoric professor Lactantius, and dedicated to a Christian who had been imprisoned and probably tortured for his refusal to sacrifice to the gods. He certainly had no sympathy for Galerius, and we may doubt whether he had accurate knowledge of events in his court.
Still, the demonic mechanism underlying soothsaying is precisely what the pagan Apuleius had described a century and a half earlier, and the ability of the sign of the cross to disrupt divination was a well-known problem. Some two centuries after Lactantius wrote, another Christian writer, a biographer of the great Severus of Antioch, would give the pagan explanation for why it worked: the gods did not like to be reminded of human suffering. That was a very old, and authentic, pagan notion. Though pagans and Christians agreed on nothing else about sacrifices, they did agree on this: they really did involve demons, and the invocation of the cross could, at least sometimes, interfere with their successful operation as an instrument of soothsaying.
4.
I have gone on at length about a single historical example. It is, I think, worth the consideration. Often, fantasy-writers think of world-building as a matter of basic architecture: are humans the only race, or are there elves and dwarves too? Are there orcs and, if so, are they good? Is there a Dark Lord, or only a bunch of grey ones? Is the world ruled by Powers who dwell off in some cardinal direction, or do the inhabitants expect to solve their own affairs, with or without the intervention of heavenly beings?
These are the facts of a fantasy-story, the nuts and bolts of the world, and they are very much worth thinking through. But there is a great deal of room in which to explore the subjective experience of those facts, as well. I have already mentioned the possibility of religious conflict in my preceding post, and hope to devote the whole of another post to it.
For now, it is enough to observe this: the gods and lesser spiritual beings of a fantasy world may not only be different from our own--or from those the average Westerner is accustomed to think about, at any rate, which is not the same thing--but also perceived in contradictory ways by the inhabitants of the imaginary world itself. Put differently: if a story is going to have gods or lesser spirits who interact with the characters, there probably are going to be different opinions about them, and those opinions likely will matter, if not to the story you wish to tell, then to the wider world in which it takes place.
5.
A final note: it has become rather popular in contemporary fantasy (perhaps especially urban fantasy) to have demonic or angelic beings be corporeal, subject to wounding or even killing by sword, crossbow, or high explosive (yes, I have seen this, or something like it, in an appallingly bad book of fantasy that shall remain nameless!) While it is perfectly fine, I suppose, to imagine races of elves or orcs--that is, people who, while corporeal like humans, are somehow better or worse than we--one rather wishes that such beings would not be called demons. That is not what a demon (or, still less, an angel) is, in pagan or in Christian thought: demons are, for the Platonists at least, neither immaterial (or nearly so), like the properly immortal gods, nor do they have bodies of earthly matter, like mortal humans; they are spirits, and have to be dealt with accordingly.
It is important, therefore, not to make one's demons too un-spiritual. I do not mean, of course, that they should sit around and meditate or some such: that is not what it means to be a spirit. But it will do no good to try to fight off an airish beast with a crossbow, any more than to treat a virus by hitting it with a shovel. If a fantasy story is to have enemies solely of flesh and blood, well and good, but, if not, the adversaries ought to be dealt with by the means through which the story's peoples deal with their gods, their gods' minions, and their gods' inhuman adversaries, whether prayer or expiatory sacrifices or (who knows) feeding raw bulbs of garlic to a virgin who is wearing a tunic woven of a single unbroken thread of pure gold. Religion itself can be a method for fighting the fantastic enemies, and it may very well work.
September 16, 2017
The Sign of the Sibyl on sale - around 85% off
I will be holding a sale for the Kindle e-book of The Sign of the Sibyl from September 21 through September 27, inclusive, on Amazon and Amazon UK (sadly, price promotions aren't available on other international Amazon affiliates--a choice of theirs, not mine, I can assure you!)
Here's how it will work:
At 12:00 am GMT, September 21, the price will drop to 0.99 GBP on Amazon.co.uk (about 83% off).
At 12:00 am Pacific Daylight Time, September 21, the price of the e-book will drop to 0.99 USD on Amazon.com (about 87% off).
At 12:00 am, September 28 (in the respective time-zone), the book will revert to the ordinary list price of 7.49 USD/5.75 GBP. Throughout, it will remain free for subscribers to the Kindle Unlimited program, as well as to those who borrow it from their friends via the Kindle Owners Lending Library.
Here's how it will work:
At 12:00 am GMT, September 21, the price will drop to 0.99 GBP on Amazon.co.uk (about 83% off).
At 12:00 am Pacific Daylight Time, September 21, the price of the e-book will drop to 0.99 USD on Amazon.com (about 87% off).
At 12:00 am, September 28 (in the respective time-zone), the book will revert to the ordinary list price of 7.49 USD/5.75 GBP. Throughout, it will remain free for subscribers to the Kindle Unlimited program, as well as to those who borrow it from their friends via the Kindle Owners Lending Library.
September 15, 2017
Above the evening star: astrology, the gods, and powers in heaven (religion in fantasy, II)
For Manassah built again the high places which Hezekiah his father had broken down, and he reared up altars for Baalim, and made groves, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them. Also he built altars in the house of the Lord, whereof the Lord had said, In Jerusalem shall my name be for ever. And he built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord.
2 Chronicles 33
1.
Ancient people worshipped the stars as gods, and believed that they had control over their lives and destinies. This is something that modern people, at least in Western Europe and North America, have great difficulty understanding. They can hardly be blamed for it, of course. It is rarely easy to understand the people of a different time and place. Even when you feel a kinship of mind or feeling with an ancient person--and many who read their works do--you nevertheless stumble across things that are utterly foreign, that cut clean contrary to the ordinary intuitions of life, the common sense of your own age. The worship of the heavenly bodies is one of those things.
To the typical modern, raised (even if he never studied or understood it) on post-Classical physics and living in a city (as virtually everyone does now) where the night-time sky is almost invisible against the glare of man-made lamps, stars simply are balls of super-heated plasma and gas. The planets simply are giant rocks or balls of gas. Maybe, just maybe, they contain life, and writers and filmmakers imagine what might come to pass, if someday we did meet a person like us in mind and soul (whatever he or she or it looked like), but from outer space.
But neither stars nor planets are themselves alive. For the ancients, they were. Higher and brighter than the wet, dirty ball on which we ourselves dwell, the heavens were everlasting and unchanging, a perpetual order moving in perfect harmony with the providence that ruled the world. At once gods and the work of the supreme God, they regulated both heaven and earth, and bound man's life, character, and destiny to their dictates. To this, the science of astrology was dedicated.
I go too far, of course. Some ancient thinkers--most notably the Epicureans--flatly denied that there was a providence at all, let alone that the stars superintended over the fates of man. Others--most notably the writers of the Hebrew scriptures, and their Jewish and Christian heirs--utterly rejected the deification of the heavens. However, even the anonymous author of Chronicles, who deplored Manasseh's worship of the starry host, would have believed that there were 'lights in the firmament of the heaven ... for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years'. 'And I will shew wonders', another prophet wrote, 'in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.' The heavens were not gods, but they were still steered by the hand of God.
Some modern Westerners do still see the world, in part, as ancient people did. Belief in heavenly signs is not uncommon in Pentecostal circles, for example, or among some (perhaps rather more eclectic) inhabitants of the internet. But it is not the ordinary bent of our ways of thinking. Even those who do believe in heavenly signs still ordinarily speak of the movement of the heavens according to physical laws, not the will of Providence or, still less, the will of the heavenly bodies themselves. Our universe is fundamentally impersonal, not a Great Chain of Being extending from earth to the ineffable One itself or (for Christians) to the highest created beings, who lie an infinite gulf below God.
2.
One of the attractions of fantasy literature is its ability to offer a vision of a world different--either objectively or in the understanding of its inhabitants--from our own. One need not, of course, believe that that vision is true, in order for it to hold its mythic power, and the older, more personal ways of viewing the universe have a great deal of mythic power. C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy recognised that squarely. Though heliocentric, the Field of Arbol is not really our Solar System as a scientist would describe it; it is our solar system, described in mystical terms borrowed from the medieval cosmology that Lewis described in The Discarded Image. That image was, as he recognised there, rightly discarded. Beautiful as it was, it was not really true; yet, appropriately updated, it made a potent setting for a 'fairy tale', as he called That Hideous Strength.
Both Lewis's trilogy and Tolkien's Silmarillion-stories (save in their very last revisions) put the human protagonists in something like the ancient universe, above the animals and beneath exceptionally great and powerful cosmic beings. Neither, of course, advanced anything like a religion of those beings, as I noted in Tolkien's case in the previous post. Yet cosmology, whatever its shape or inspiration, will inevitably leave an imprint on the religious thought-world of a people, including an invented people. Comets would cause a great deal more alarm among modern Americans of all religions, if they still believed them to be signs from God or the gods.
There is thus a great deal of room for an author to contemplate ways in which a world might be ordered--or in which a people might imagine their world to be ordered--and their influence on the thoughts and actions of the characters within a story. In my own writing, I have thus far largely adopted variations on ancient and more modern models. One could, however, imagine yet more exotic alternatives: a world in which astrology is true, for example, or in which every natural law really is carried out by a sentient spirit of some kind.
Whatever the case may be, it will bear upon the religion and worship of the people in the story. If the stars dictate your fate, expect many people to attempt to propitiate them by sacrifice or prayer--or to seek, as some ancient Gnostics did, greater powers that could transcend the evil will of those who seemed to have power over the universe. If the sun rises because its steerswoman makes it rise, expect her to be lauded in hymns and psalms for her dedication--unless, of course, she wishes you to direct your praises to a greater at whose pleasure she herself serves.
The key thing, I think, is simply to remember that your people may not view the world in the way you do, and that actions that seem irrational to us might well, within their world, be the right ones. Do not have a man pray silently to a quasi-divine hero present before him in the flesh, as one well-known fantasy-writer has done; still less have a man believe that the stars rule over him, and not try to gain their aid, or, if they are averse, at least to stand against them as bravely as he might. Your characters must truly live within their world, as its inhabitants and not as modern people disguised as natives.
3.
Most interesting, in my mind, is genuine disagreement over cosmology and divinity within a fantasy-world. In The Sign of the Sibyl, I have begun to sketch a contest between Newtonian mechanics (and a strand of allied in-world astrology) and a kind of magic for self-willed supermen; this is, in story, part of a larger contest between God and the gods, both deified mortals and primordial beings of chaos and destruction.
That story involves the irruption of Christianity into another world, one only partially linked to our own. One could imagine a conflict that was entirely native to the invented world itself: a struggle, for example, between worshippers of many gods and strict dualists, or the overthrow of an inherited heliocentric system by a less intuitive, yet correct geocentric model (now there's a reversal of our ordinary presumptions!). Mark Rosenfelder's wonderful short story, The Multipliers, depicts something akin to this: a bitter social and political conflict between parties with different mathematical techniques. Such a controversy can involve all the things that we ordinarily differentiate as politics, academics, and religion--and lots of good, old ordinary conflict between the personalities of characters.
No one, maybe, wants to read a story about philosophy; a story about philosophers, on the other hand, may be a great deal more fun, and no less insightful for it. Tolkien, famously, abhorred allegory, but allegory is not the only way to make a story about ideas, nor the most effective, as story, at least for one raised on modern novels (we must never pretend, after all, that our ways of telling stories are the only ones). Religion in fantasy is not just a matter of inventing practices or pantheons, or transposing real-world religions to an invented setting; it, and the wider arrays of thought and practice of which it is part, can provide much of the actual material of a story itself.
2 Chronicles 33
1.
Ancient people worshipped the stars as gods, and believed that they had control over their lives and destinies. This is something that modern people, at least in Western Europe and North America, have great difficulty understanding. They can hardly be blamed for it, of course. It is rarely easy to understand the people of a different time and place. Even when you feel a kinship of mind or feeling with an ancient person--and many who read their works do--you nevertheless stumble across things that are utterly foreign, that cut clean contrary to the ordinary intuitions of life, the common sense of your own age. The worship of the heavenly bodies is one of those things.
To the typical modern, raised (even if he never studied or understood it) on post-Classical physics and living in a city (as virtually everyone does now) where the night-time sky is almost invisible against the glare of man-made lamps, stars simply are balls of super-heated plasma and gas. The planets simply are giant rocks or balls of gas. Maybe, just maybe, they contain life, and writers and filmmakers imagine what might come to pass, if someday we did meet a person like us in mind and soul (whatever he or she or it looked like), but from outer space.
But neither stars nor planets are themselves alive. For the ancients, they were. Higher and brighter than the wet, dirty ball on which we ourselves dwell, the heavens were everlasting and unchanging, a perpetual order moving in perfect harmony with the providence that ruled the world. At once gods and the work of the supreme God, they regulated both heaven and earth, and bound man's life, character, and destiny to their dictates. To this, the science of astrology was dedicated.
I go too far, of course. Some ancient thinkers--most notably the Epicureans--flatly denied that there was a providence at all, let alone that the stars superintended over the fates of man. Others--most notably the writers of the Hebrew scriptures, and their Jewish and Christian heirs--utterly rejected the deification of the heavens. However, even the anonymous author of Chronicles, who deplored Manasseh's worship of the starry host, would have believed that there were 'lights in the firmament of the heaven ... for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years'. 'And I will shew wonders', another prophet wrote, 'in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.' The heavens were not gods, but they were still steered by the hand of God.
Some modern Westerners do still see the world, in part, as ancient people did. Belief in heavenly signs is not uncommon in Pentecostal circles, for example, or among some (perhaps rather more eclectic) inhabitants of the internet. But it is not the ordinary bent of our ways of thinking. Even those who do believe in heavenly signs still ordinarily speak of the movement of the heavens according to physical laws, not the will of Providence or, still less, the will of the heavenly bodies themselves. Our universe is fundamentally impersonal, not a Great Chain of Being extending from earth to the ineffable One itself or (for Christians) to the highest created beings, who lie an infinite gulf below God.
2.
One of the attractions of fantasy literature is its ability to offer a vision of a world different--either objectively or in the understanding of its inhabitants--from our own. One need not, of course, believe that that vision is true, in order for it to hold its mythic power, and the older, more personal ways of viewing the universe have a great deal of mythic power. C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy recognised that squarely. Though heliocentric, the Field of Arbol is not really our Solar System as a scientist would describe it; it is our solar system, described in mystical terms borrowed from the medieval cosmology that Lewis described in The Discarded Image. That image was, as he recognised there, rightly discarded. Beautiful as it was, it was not really true; yet, appropriately updated, it made a potent setting for a 'fairy tale', as he called That Hideous Strength.
Both Lewis's trilogy and Tolkien's Silmarillion-stories (save in their very last revisions) put the human protagonists in something like the ancient universe, above the animals and beneath exceptionally great and powerful cosmic beings. Neither, of course, advanced anything like a religion of those beings, as I noted in Tolkien's case in the previous post. Yet cosmology, whatever its shape or inspiration, will inevitably leave an imprint on the religious thought-world of a people, including an invented people. Comets would cause a great deal more alarm among modern Americans of all religions, if they still believed them to be signs from God or the gods.
There is thus a great deal of room for an author to contemplate ways in which a world might be ordered--or in which a people might imagine their world to be ordered--and their influence on the thoughts and actions of the characters within a story. In my own writing, I have thus far largely adopted variations on ancient and more modern models. One could, however, imagine yet more exotic alternatives: a world in which astrology is true, for example, or in which every natural law really is carried out by a sentient spirit of some kind.
Whatever the case may be, it will bear upon the religion and worship of the people in the story. If the stars dictate your fate, expect many people to attempt to propitiate them by sacrifice or prayer--or to seek, as some ancient Gnostics did, greater powers that could transcend the evil will of those who seemed to have power over the universe. If the sun rises because its steerswoman makes it rise, expect her to be lauded in hymns and psalms for her dedication--unless, of course, she wishes you to direct your praises to a greater at whose pleasure she herself serves.
The key thing, I think, is simply to remember that your people may not view the world in the way you do, and that actions that seem irrational to us might well, within their world, be the right ones. Do not have a man pray silently to a quasi-divine hero present before him in the flesh, as one well-known fantasy-writer has done; still less have a man believe that the stars rule over him, and not try to gain their aid, or, if they are averse, at least to stand against them as bravely as he might. Your characters must truly live within their world, as its inhabitants and not as modern people disguised as natives.
3.
Most interesting, in my mind, is genuine disagreement over cosmology and divinity within a fantasy-world. In The Sign of the Sibyl, I have begun to sketch a contest between Newtonian mechanics (and a strand of allied in-world astrology) and a kind of magic for self-willed supermen; this is, in story, part of a larger contest between God and the gods, both deified mortals and primordial beings of chaos and destruction.
That story involves the irruption of Christianity into another world, one only partially linked to our own. One could imagine a conflict that was entirely native to the invented world itself: a struggle, for example, between worshippers of many gods and strict dualists, or the overthrow of an inherited heliocentric system by a less intuitive, yet correct geocentric model (now there's a reversal of our ordinary presumptions!). Mark Rosenfelder's wonderful short story, The Multipliers, depicts something akin to this: a bitter social and political conflict between parties with different mathematical techniques. Such a controversy can involve all the things that we ordinarily differentiate as politics, academics, and religion--and lots of good, old ordinary conflict between the personalities of characters.
No one, maybe, wants to read a story about philosophy; a story about philosophers, on the other hand, may be a great deal more fun, and no less insightful for it. Tolkien, famously, abhorred allegory, but allegory is not the only way to make a story about ideas, nor the most effective, as story, at least for one raised on modern novels (we must never pretend, after all, that our ways of telling stories are the only ones). Religion in fantasy is not just a matter of inventing practices or pantheons, or transposing real-world religions to an invented setting; it, and the wider arrays of thought and practice of which it is part, can provide much of the actual material of a story itself.
August 31, 2017
Safekeeping: a new cover, and a new release!
A bit ahead of the projected release date, Safekeeping is now out, with both paperback and ebook versions. I ended up redesigning the cover, this time using a photo purchased from iStock; I think I prefer this colour scheme to that of the initial design (blueish purple and white).
I am also now a Goodreads author, which means that Goodread-users can add Safekeeping to their bookshelves, rate or review the book, and even submit questions for me to answer.
I am also now a Goodreads author, which means that Goodread-users can add Safekeeping to their bookshelves, rate or review the book, and even submit questions for me to answer.
August 22, 2017
First book released!
The Sign of the Sibyl is now available in e-book and paperback formats on Amazon (including Amazon UK and other European subsidiaries).
The process of publication is a little more drawn-out than one might anticipate from outside, and a few practical details still need to be ironed out. In particular, it will take another week or so before you can look inside the print book, but, in the meantime, the sample chapter remains available, as does the look-inside function for the e-book.
Safekeeping will take a little bit longer, but it should be up in September as anticipated.
The process of publication is a little more drawn-out than one might anticipate from outside, and a few practical details still need to be ironed out. In particular, it will take another week or so before you can look inside the print book, but, in the meantime, the sample chapter remains available, as does the look-inside function for the e-book.
Safekeeping will take a little bit longer, but it should be up in September as anticipated.
August 5, 2017
Adventures in Self-Publishing, Part II
While we wait for proofs, let's talk about print layout! A manuscript is usually in 12-pt double-spaced Times New Roman with half-inch indents, on letter-sized paper with one-inch margins. A finished novel is not. Getting from one to the other isn't hard, exactly, but it does take work and care and patience. I find that using styles (Normal, Heading 1, etc.) saves a lot of time.
I am not a professional typesetter, and I'm not about to fool anyone who is (for one thing, I'm working in Microsoft Word). My goal in formatting has been to avoid anything that would stick out to careful readers as obviously amateurish.
Page Layout
Trim size (that is, page size), if one's using the standard CreateSpace sizes, will most likely be in the 5" x 8" to 5.5" x 8.5" range; anything much larger stops looking like a novel. Margins are mirrored (inside/outside rather than left/right), with extra space on the inside for binding. I tried 0.4" outside margins, but that left the pages far too cramped; they've ended up over 0.6".
The pages with the story will have page numbers and running heads (those lines at the top of the page with author name and/or book title and/or chapter title), except the first page of a chapter, which has a page number only. Front matter pages (title page, copyright page, table of contents) and blank pages don't have either page numbers or running heads. Page numbers and running heads should be centred or mirrored (e.g., left-justified on the lefthand page, right-justified on the righthand page).
Normal page numbers start on the first page of the story, which is always a righthand page. So any two-page spread in the finished book should have an even number on the left and an odd number on the right. (In older terminology, the right/odd page is the recto and the left/even page is the verso.)
The running head is usually different on odd and even pages; author--title seems to be a fairly common pair (for left/even--right/odd). In Word, this can be handled by section breaks between chapters and the 'different first page' and 'different odd & even pages' checkboxes on the header design ribbon (and by judicious fiddling with the 'link to previous' setting; Philipp's version of Word seems to change header/footer margins spontaneously).
Paragraph Settings
Typical body-text for a novel has:
justification (to both margins);fairly small first-line indents, perhaps 0.2"-0.3" (not a manual tab!);no extra space between paragraphs;a serif font.
Common, default fonts (like Times New Roman) look very MS-Word-y. Variations on Garamond come up quite high on most lists of recommended typefaces, so I chose one of those.
Chapters
A chapter heading usually falls partway (perhaps a third of the way) down a page. We played with several different designs (typefaces, decorative elements, etc.) for chapter titles and printed sample pages before deciding on one for each book. Using the Heading 1 style for chapter titles lets one easily generate a table of contents (from the Reference ribbon).
The first paragraph of a chapter isn't ordinarily indented. A drop cap (large first letter of a chapter, usually with the rest of the word in all caps or small caps) can be a nice touch but doesn't always work properly in Word: letters that are broader at the bottom than at the top (e.g., A or L) leave too much space before the rest of the first word and (comparatively) no space before the first word of the next line. One workaround is to make a clear textbox with the first letter (in the right typeface and size) and place it where a drop cap would be, behind or in front of the other text (that is, without wordwrap); the other text can then be positioned around it, using spaces, line breaks, and possibly some distributed justification. (Note that spacing around text boxes can change in unpredictable ways when a Word doc is converted to a PDF.)
Tweaking Things
Once the general settings are applied, it's time to go through the whole text and fix awkward-looking spots. Things for which to watch:
large gaps in justified lines;very short end-of-paragraph lines;very short end-of-chapter pages (e.g., 1-4 lines);stacks of words or punctuation (e.g., several lines beginning with the same words or ending with hyphens);widows/orphans (first or last line of a paragraph stranded at the top or bottom of a page).
These things often depend on personal taste; e.g., I tend to prefer a widow/orphan (as long as it's close to a full line) to pages of uneven length. I was able to fix most awkward spots by tightening them with hyphenation or slightly-condensed spacing (using the second tab of the Font dialogue; I condensed some lines by 0.1 pt, or 0.2 pt when really necessary, but never more, because that looked too cramped to me). Hyphens make words slightly harder to read, so they're best used only in common nouns (that is, not in names) and only in standard positions (not always predictable, but marked in most dictionaries). If all else fails, one can alter the text to something that fits better. (I mostly tried to avoid this.)
After all that, print layout still isn't done! Converting a Word doc to a PDF can introduce new problems, so the PDF also has to be checked carefully.
By comparison, ebook layout is easy enough that I don't have anything to say about it. The next post in this series is likely to cover assorted things that come up before release.
I am not a professional typesetter, and I'm not about to fool anyone who is (for one thing, I'm working in Microsoft Word). My goal in formatting has been to avoid anything that would stick out to careful readers as obviously amateurish.
Page Layout
Trim size (that is, page size), if one's using the standard CreateSpace sizes, will most likely be in the 5" x 8" to 5.5" x 8.5" range; anything much larger stops looking like a novel. Margins are mirrored (inside/outside rather than left/right), with extra space on the inside for binding. I tried 0.4" outside margins, but that left the pages far too cramped; they've ended up over 0.6".
The pages with the story will have page numbers and running heads (those lines at the top of the page with author name and/or book title and/or chapter title), except the first page of a chapter, which has a page number only. Front matter pages (title page, copyright page, table of contents) and blank pages don't have either page numbers or running heads. Page numbers and running heads should be centred or mirrored (e.g., left-justified on the lefthand page, right-justified on the righthand page).
Normal page numbers start on the first page of the story, which is always a righthand page. So any two-page spread in the finished book should have an even number on the left and an odd number on the right. (In older terminology, the right/odd page is the recto and the left/even page is the verso.)
The running head is usually different on odd and even pages; author--title seems to be a fairly common pair (for left/even--right/odd). In Word, this can be handled by section breaks between chapters and the 'different first page' and 'different odd & even pages' checkboxes on the header design ribbon (and by judicious fiddling with the 'link to previous' setting; Philipp's version of Word seems to change header/footer margins spontaneously).
Paragraph Settings
Typical body-text for a novel has:
justification (to both margins);fairly small first-line indents, perhaps 0.2"-0.3" (not a manual tab!);no extra space between paragraphs;a serif font.
Common, default fonts (like Times New Roman) look very MS-Word-y. Variations on Garamond come up quite high on most lists of recommended typefaces, so I chose one of those.
Chapters
A chapter heading usually falls partway (perhaps a third of the way) down a page. We played with several different designs (typefaces, decorative elements, etc.) for chapter titles and printed sample pages before deciding on one for each book. Using the Heading 1 style for chapter titles lets one easily generate a table of contents (from the Reference ribbon).
The first paragraph of a chapter isn't ordinarily indented. A drop cap (large first letter of a chapter, usually with the rest of the word in all caps or small caps) can be a nice touch but doesn't always work properly in Word: letters that are broader at the bottom than at the top (e.g., A or L) leave too much space before the rest of the first word and (comparatively) no space before the first word of the next line. One workaround is to make a clear textbox with the first letter (in the right typeface and size) and place it where a drop cap would be, behind or in front of the other text (that is, without wordwrap); the other text can then be positioned around it, using spaces, line breaks, and possibly some distributed justification. (Note that spacing around text boxes can change in unpredictable ways when a Word doc is converted to a PDF.)
Tweaking Things
Once the general settings are applied, it's time to go through the whole text and fix awkward-looking spots. Things for which to watch:
large gaps in justified lines;very short end-of-paragraph lines;very short end-of-chapter pages (e.g., 1-4 lines);stacks of words or punctuation (e.g., several lines beginning with the same words or ending with hyphens);widows/orphans (first or last line of a paragraph stranded at the top or bottom of a page).
These things often depend on personal taste; e.g., I tend to prefer a widow/orphan (as long as it's close to a full line) to pages of uneven length. I was able to fix most awkward spots by tightening them with hyphenation or slightly-condensed spacing (using the second tab of the Font dialogue; I condensed some lines by 0.1 pt, or 0.2 pt when really necessary, but never more, because that looked too cramped to me). Hyphens make words slightly harder to read, so they're best used only in common nouns (that is, not in names) and only in standard positions (not always predictable, but marked in most dictionaries). If all else fails, one can alter the text to something that fits better. (I mostly tried to avoid this.)
After all that, print layout still isn't done! Converting a Word doc to a PDF can introduce new problems, so the PDF also has to be checked carefully.
By comparison, ebook layout is easy enough that I don't have anything to say about it. The next post in this series is likely to cover assorted things that come up before release.
July 23, 2017
Sample chapters
The blog has been a bit quiet this month, but we've been busy: most recently, with print layout for our novels. We now have sample chapters!
Read the first chapter of Philipp's Sign of the Sibyl
Read the first chapter of Ella's Safekeeping
Watch the blog (or follow by email, in the right sidebar) for further progress updates; we hope to have the novels available as paperbacks and e-books in August or September.
Read the first chapter of Philipp's Sign of the Sibyl
Read the first chapter of Ella's Safekeeping
Watch the blog (or follow by email, in the right sidebar) for further progress updates; we hope to have the novels available as paperbacks and e-books in August or September.
June 25, 2017
Fish and chips: food in fantasy
Food has a history. Once you say it, it seems obvious, but most of us don't think about the fact very often. We all know the basics: potatoes come from the New World, wheat from the Old; the Aztecs ate chili peppers and chocolate and avocados, the Chinese did not, though they did have tofu. But the details get fuzzy when you look a little closer. Where are bananas from? Two-thirds of the export crop is produced in five countries: one is the Philippines, the other four are in Central or South America. Yet bananas are not a New World fruit. They were first domesticated in Southeast Asia, and almost a fifth of the world's total crop is produced in India (or was a few years ago). What about coffee? We associate it first with Turkey and the Near East (or at least I do), but it is actually native to Sub-Saharan Africa.
And that's only the plants themselves. Things get even more complicated when you look at recipes, when we have them at all (there is at least one Roman cookbook, for what it's worth). Pasta was not, perhaps, invented by the Chinese (that seems to be a fairly recent legend), but no one was eating spaghetti bolognese, back when the tomato was unknown less than five thousand miles from Bologna.
What does this have to do with writing, you wonder? Quite a lot, actually. Not everyone likes to describe food in fantasy (I've gotten through The Sign of the Sibyl without a meal more elaborate than "duck breast with rice, steamed greens, and wine"), but some go on at length. George R.R. Martin is a famous example, and there's a fair bit of food even in the Narnia books (Edmund and Turkish delight; Shasta eating butter for the first time; the three lords of Telmar at Ramandu's table).
Food, like clothing, weapons, armor, religious rituals, and government bureaucracies, can help set the feel of the fantasy story, that elusive element in world-building that lets you describe the setting and the characters and their customs in a series of swift strokes. Enough such strokes, and you have (if you're good at it) built up a picture of a whole imaginary world, or at least the parts of it that we as readers need to see. The kind of food you portray should thus fit the rest of the setting of the story, and give it the proper texture.
Fantasy is not quite the same. The world is imaginary, at least to a degree. The closer a fantasy story is to being alternate history, the more significant any noticeable deviation from real-world patterns is going to be. Foods have particular histories, and they have symbolic meanings that are related to, but not fully determined by, their histories. I don't even mean symbolism in the strict sense, though of course that does come into it: having a woman eat an apple and give one to her husband might well mean something (nevermind that it wasn't an apple, anyway). Rather, I mean the kind of associations that certain foods bear: different, presumably, for each one of us, but broadly similar across the whole culture. Tofu with rice and soy sauce feels like a story set within the wider Chinese-Korean-Japanese cultural sphere, ground beef placed in a fluffy white bun and garnished with weak mustard and a sauce of tomato, sugar, and vinegar like the modern USA, kidney pie like England of any era.
There's nothing to prevent people in an imaginary quasi-Europe whose armies are dominated by armored horsemen, the setting of so much high fantasy, from eating something like modern hamburgers, but it would not fit so easily as kidney pea or pottage or beef sausages. If you did show it, the element would distinctly mark out the story as not quite like our own world. Such a flourish may be a good thing, of course, but it needs to be done with some care: think of Tolkien's explanation for the presence of Nicotiana species and potatoes in northwestern Middle-Earth (in-story, a pre-historic Europe). The risk is something akin to anachronism. Not a lapse in the presentation of an actual historical period, but an insufficiently artful rupture in the tapestry of the invented world.
Of course, you could invent a wholly distinct in-world history of life, and of the animals and plants that humans eat, just as so many fantasy authors have invented linguistic systems. I have little to say about the prospect, save that doing it properly would require a level of scientific sophistication that few writers are likely to have. Picking a few plants or animals might be easier: imagine a world in which the only domesticated large animals were loxodonts. People would breed small, docile elephants for domestic tasks (pulling carts, producing milk, carrying your children around at the fair), big, docile elephants for farm work or other heavy draft, medium-sized, obedient but powerful elephants for individual cavalrymen, big (but not unhealthily or uncontrollably big), aggressive elephants to carry multi-man units into battle. All this would permeate every aspect of culture, including food: elephant cheese is not going to be quite the same as cow or goat cheese, nor elephant-riding like horse-riding. But it would be hard to have the idea without the story being in some way about the changes brought in human society by having elephants in place of cattle and horses and donkeys and camels (and real-world elephants, of course).
And that's only the plants themselves. Things get even more complicated when you look at recipes, when we have them at all (there is at least one Roman cookbook, for what it's worth). Pasta was not, perhaps, invented by the Chinese (that seems to be a fairly recent legend), but no one was eating spaghetti bolognese, back when the tomato was unknown less than five thousand miles from Bologna.
What does this have to do with writing, you wonder? Quite a lot, actually. Not everyone likes to describe food in fantasy (I've gotten through The Sign of the Sibyl without a meal more elaborate than "duck breast with rice, steamed greens, and wine"), but some go on at length. George R.R. Martin is a famous example, and there's a fair bit of food even in the Narnia books (Edmund and Turkish delight; Shasta eating butter for the first time; the three lords of Telmar at Ramandu's table).
Food, like clothing, weapons, armor, religious rituals, and government bureaucracies, can help set the feel of the fantasy story, that elusive element in world-building that lets you describe the setting and the characters and their customs in a series of swift strokes. Enough such strokes, and you have (if you're good at it) built up a picture of a whole imaginary world, or at least the parts of it that we as readers need to see. The kind of food you portray should thus fit the rest of the setting of the story, and give it the proper texture.
Fantasy is not quite the same. The world is imaginary, at least to a degree. The closer a fantasy story is to being alternate history, the more significant any noticeable deviation from real-world patterns is going to be. Foods have particular histories, and they have symbolic meanings that are related to, but not fully determined by, their histories. I don't even mean symbolism in the strict sense, though of course that does come into it: having a woman eat an apple and give one to her husband might well mean something (nevermind that it wasn't an apple, anyway). Rather, I mean the kind of associations that certain foods bear: different, presumably, for each one of us, but broadly similar across the whole culture. Tofu with rice and soy sauce feels like a story set within the wider Chinese-Korean-Japanese cultural sphere, ground beef placed in a fluffy white bun and garnished with weak mustard and a sauce of tomato, sugar, and vinegar like the modern USA, kidney pie like England of any era.
There's nothing to prevent people in an imaginary quasi-Europe whose armies are dominated by armored horsemen, the setting of so much high fantasy, from eating something like modern hamburgers, but it would not fit so easily as kidney pea or pottage or beef sausages. If you did show it, the element would distinctly mark out the story as not quite like our own world. Such a flourish may be a good thing, of course, but it needs to be done with some care: think of Tolkien's explanation for the presence of Nicotiana species and potatoes in northwestern Middle-Earth (in-story, a pre-historic Europe). The risk is something akin to anachronism. Not a lapse in the presentation of an actual historical period, but an insufficiently artful rupture in the tapestry of the invented world.
Of course, you could invent a wholly distinct in-world history of life, and of the animals and plants that humans eat, just as so many fantasy authors have invented linguistic systems. I have little to say about the prospect, save that doing it properly would require a level of scientific sophistication that few writers are likely to have. Picking a few plants or animals might be easier: imagine a world in which the only domesticated large animals were loxodonts. People would breed small, docile elephants for domestic tasks (pulling carts, producing milk, carrying your children around at the fair), big, docile elephants for farm work or other heavy draft, medium-sized, obedient but powerful elephants for individual cavalrymen, big (but not unhealthily or uncontrollably big), aggressive elephants to carry multi-man units into battle. All this would permeate every aspect of culture, including food: elephant cheese is not going to be quite the same as cow or goat cheese, nor elephant-riding like horse-riding. But it would be hard to have the idea without the story being in some way about the changes brought in human society by having elephants in place of cattle and horses and donkeys and camels (and real-world elephants, of course).
June 4, 2017
Clothing in Fantasy
Some writers (I am one!) like to come up with clothing for their various fantasy cultures and characters. The typical fantasy setting, though, doesn't have sewing machines, washers, dryers, or steam irons. How do people make and take care of clothes? How do they use the clothes? How do all these things affect the kinds of clothes they choose?
So after this, I'm not writing about the princess's wedding-dress, but about the things ordinary people wear, and the things not-so-ordinary people wear on ordinary days.
Laundry
Sewing a piece of clothing happens once (not counting mending). Washing, though, has to happen over and over, so people will tend to choose clothes that make for easier laundry, even if those take a bit more sewing.
For very dirty things, hand-washing usually means scrubbing the cloth, either against itself or against another surface, like a washboard; not-so-dirty things can be soaked and swished around a bit. Then they're squeezed or wrung out to remove as much water as possible, and hung or spread flat to dry.
The more slowly something dries, the mustier it smells. Sun, wind, warmth, and dry air make for faster drying; rinsing in very hot water helps, too, but heating the water takes time and fuel so is impractical for most things. Lightweight, simple pieces turn out best, and, if hung neatly, may not need ironing. Sunlight will take out some stains.
Washing not only takes time and work, but it's also hard on clothes. Unnecessary washing can be avoided by airing musty clothes and dabbing little spots off otherwise clean clothes.
The key to simple laundry is dressing in layered pieces. If one petticoat with three layers gets dirty, the whole thing has to be washed and will take a long time to dry. Wearing three separate petticoats means that only one might need to be washed, and that one will dry faster, too. A corset (which is difficult to wash) should have a lightweight piece beneath it to absorb sweat. Aprons are good for cooking, cleaning, and other messy work: they protect the clothes underneath, can be allowed to get quite messy in between washings, and are easily washed and dried.
The layering principle extends to other linens. Wool blankets and furs can go over sheets, and duvets and mattresses (filled with feathers, grass, or other not-so-washable stuff) can have removable covers. In cloth diapers/nappies, prefolds (like this) and more form-fitting options have mostly replaced flat diapers, which are essentially lightweight towels; prefolds save time folding, but flats are easier to hand-wash and faster to dry.
Cloth
Spinning, weaving, and hand-sewing all take time, so people will want their clothes to last a while. The kind of cloth they use will depend on the plants (flax, cotton, hemp) and animals (sheep) available. Wool is harder to wash and dry than things like cotton and linen, but layering can keep it from needing to be washed as often. Lanolin, the wax naturally found in wool, makes it somewhat waterproof; I don't know how well it survives premodern washing techniques. (Note that wool clothes aren't always itchy.)
I've always sewed with boughten cloth so can't say much about the details of spinning or weaving.
Clothes can also be made by knitting or crocheting. Knitting is millennia old, and crocheting unattested before the nineteenth century, but there's no reason it should happen that way in another world. Knitted and crocheted work tends to be much stretchier than weaving, hence knitted socks and gloves. A tear in knitting quickly becomes a 'ladder' (like this, also called a 'run'); a tear in crocheting tends to unravel a bit more slowly.
Dyes, especially darkish colours like browns and olives, help keep stains and small spots from showing. Faded clothes can be redyed, but the dye or mordant (used to set the dye) may do strange things to stains. (I once dyed a towel with tea to hide a small bloodstain; the towel came out nicely brown, but the bloodstain turned black, perhaps because of the iron in it.) Check patterns or stripes are made by weaving with threads of different colours. More complex patterns can be dyed using techniques like tie-dye, wax-resist (batik), or printing, which all take extra time, but much less time than embroidery.
Closures
Clothes can be made very loose and secured with things like belts or sashes. Other pre-zipper closure options:
Strings, either a drawstring or a plain string sewn to either side of a gap.Lacing, that is, a cord going through loops or eyelets on either side of a gap. It can cross itself (as on shoes) or simply spiral from one end to the other (a more common mediaeval pattern, I understand). Eyelets can be sewn, like little round buttonholes.Buttons with buttonholes. One doesn't really want to do hundreds of buttonholes (or eyelets) if one can help it.Buttons, beads, or knots with loops (also called frog closures).Hooks and eyes. These need to be washed carefully, to prevent rust and tearing.Buckles. Same caveat as above.Pins or brooches. Their advantage is that they can be removed for washing. Their disadvantage is that they can be lost.
Bits like buttons, hooks and eyes, and buckles can be removed from worn-out clothing and reused.
Sewing
Hand-sewing takes longer than sewing by machine, but it doesn't take ages. If I remember correctly, somewhere in the Wheel of Time books, Nynaeve splits two or three skirts in an afternoon and evening (that is, turns them into something like loose trousers for riding); this seems reasonable if she has good light and not much else to do. I recently planned and made a rather elaborate little doll in about a day, between keeping a toddler's hands out of the pins and doing other housewifely things.
Even a very long hem can be finished quickly with a running stitch. Seams that will be under any strain may need a stronger (and slower) stitch. With practice, hand-sewing can be as strong and neat as machine-sewing. Further details, however, are best learnt by experience.
A bit about tools: The essentials are a needle or two, a dozen pins (or so; they can be repositioned frequently), small scissors, and a thimble. With those and some dark and light thread, a character on a questing party can probably handle all necessary mending and sewing.
Pins are usually stored in a pincushion, but any needle shorter than the pincushion's diameter tends to get lost unless a bit of thread is left on it. Without stainless steel, pins and needles are in danger of rusting; they can be cleaned with sand (e.g., the little pepper on the common tomato pincushion).
Scissors can rust, too, or go blunt if used on things other than cloth and thread, but that questing seamstress still needs them -- biting or breaking thread leaves a rough end that doesn't go easily through a needle-eye. (Besides, biting thread isn't good for teeth.)
The thimble is not just for looks, nor is it to protect one's fingers from needle-pricks; instead, it's worn on the hand holding the needle and used to push the needle through the cloth. This is usually necessary. A prick from a sharp needle is rarely very painful and may not even bleed; the eye-end of the needle, on the other hand, is small enough to pierce one's finger but blunt enough to bruise, hence the thimble. The dimples in the thimble keep it from sliding off the needle.
Mending
Clothes take time and work, so it doesn't make sense to throw something out just because it's torn. Tears can be mended, and holes can be darned or patched. Sheets that are worn in the middle can be cut in half and have the less-worn sides spliced together. If a piece is beyond repair, parts of it can perhaps be reused to make new things. Patchwork quilts are a bit slow to make but almost free.
*****
And I haven't even mentioned climate (short version: warm, snug clothes for cold weather; cool, loose clothes for hot weather; and cover up in the sun), or the sort of work people are doing (moving arms and legs tends to be important). But that's probably enough on clothes.
The key thing is to think about what makes sense for the people who don't have a lot of time or money (most of the people in any society). Of course, people often do impractical things because it's tradition or it looks nice. But the natural selection of everyday work will favour clothes that are comfortable to wear, fairly easy to wash, not ridiculously hard to make, and long-lasting. And it doesn't hurt if they look good, too.
So after this, I'm not writing about the princess's wedding-dress, but about the things ordinary people wear, and the things not-so-ordinary people wear on ordinary days.
Laundry
Sewing a piece of clothing happens once (not counting mending). Washing, though, has to happen over and over, so people will tend to choose clothes that make for easier laundry, even if those take a bit more sewing.
For very dirty things, hand-washing usually means scrubbing the cloth, either against itself or against another surface, like a washboard; not-so-dirty things can be soaked and swished around a bit. Then they're squeezed or wrung out to remove as much water as possible, and hung or spread flat to dry.
The more slowly something dries, the mustier it smells. Sun, wind, warmth, and dry air make for faster drying; rinsing in very hot water helps, too, but heating the water takes time and fuel so is impractical for most things. Lightweight, simple pieces turn out best, and, if hung neatly, may not need ironing. Sunlight will take out some stains.
Washing not only takes time and work, but it's also hard on clothes. Unnecessary washing can be avoided by airing musty clothes and dabbing little spots off otherwise clean clothes.
The key to simple laundry is dressing in layered pieces. If one petticoat with three layers gets dirty, the whole thing has to be washed and will take a long time to dry. Wearing three separate petticoats means that only one might need to be washed, and that one will dry faster, too. A corset (which is difficult to wash) should have a lightweight piece beneath it to absorb sweat. Aprons are good for cooking, cleaning, and other messy work: they protect the clothes underneath, can be allowed to get quite messy in between washings, and are easily washed and dried.
The layering principle extends to other linens. Wool blankets and furs can go over sheets, and duvets and mattresses (filled with feathers, grass, or other not-so-washable stuff) can have removable covers. In cloth diapers/nappies, prefolds (like this) and more form-fitting options have mostly replaced flat diapers, which are essentially lightweight towels; prefolds save time folding, but flats are easier to hand-wash and faster to dry.
Cloth
Spinning, weaving, and hand-sewing all take time, so people will want their clothes to last a while. The kind of cloth they use will depend on the plants (flax, cotton, hemp) and animals (sheep) available. Wool is harder to wash and dry than things like cotton and linen, but layering can keep it from needing to be washed as often. Lanolin, the wax naturally found in wool, makes it somewhat waterproof; I don't know how well it survives premodern washing techniques. (Note that wool clothes aren't always itchy.)
I've always sewed with boughten cloth so can't say much about the details of spinning or weaving.
Clothes can also be made by knitting or crocheting. Knitting is millennia old, and crocheting unattested before the nineteenth century, but there's no reason it should happen that way in another world. Knitted and crocheted work tends to be much stretchier than weaving, hence knitted socks and gloves. A tear in knitting quickly becomes a 'ladder' (like this, also called a 'run'); a tear in crocheting tends to unravel a bit more slowly.
Dyes, especially darkish colours like browns and olives, help keep stains and small spots from showing. Faded clothes can be redyed, but the dye or mordant (used to set the dye) may do strange things to stains. (I once dyed a towel with tea to hide a small bloodstain; the towel came out nicely brown, but the bloodstain turned black, perhaps because of the iron in it.) Check patterns or stripes are made by weaving with threads of different colours. More complex patterns can be dyed using techniques like tie-dye, wax-resist (batik), or printing, which all take extra time, but much less time than embroidery.
Closures
Clothes can be made very loose and secured with things like belts or sashes. Other pre-zipper closure options:
Strings, either a drawstring or a plain string sewn to either side of a gap.Lacing, that is, a cord going through loops or eyelets on either side of a gap. It can cross itself (as on shoes) or simply spiral from one end to the other (a more common mediaeval pattern, I understand). Eyelets can be sewn, like little round buttonholes.Buttons with buttonholes. One doesn't really want to do hundreds of buttonholes (or eyelets) if one can help it.Buttons, beads, or knots with loops (also called frog closures).Hooks and eyes. These need to be washed carefully, to prevent rust and tearing.Buckles. Same caveat as above.Pins or brooches. Their advantage is that they can be removed for washing. Their disadvantage is that they can be lost.
Bits like buttons, hooks and eyes, and buckles can be removed from worn-out clothing and reused.
Sewing
Hand-sewing takes longer than sewing by machine, but it doesn't take ages. If I remember correctly, somewhere in the Wheel of Time books, Nynaeve splits two or three skirts in an afternoon and evening (that is, turns them into something like loose trousers for riding); this seems reasonable if she has good light and not much else to do. I recently planned and made a rather elaborate little doll in about a day, between keeping a toddler's hands out of the pins and doing other housewifely things.
Even a very long hem can be finished quickly with a running stitch. Seams that will be under any strain may need a stronger (and slower) stitch. With practice, hand-sewing can be as strong and neat as machine-sewing. Further details, however, are best learnt by experience.
A bit about tools: The essentials are a needle or two, a dozen pins (or so; they can be repositioned frequently), small scissors, and a thimble. With those and some dark and light thread, a character on a questing party can probably handle all necessary mending and sewing.
Pins are usually stored in a pincushion, but any needle shorter than the pincushion's diameter tends to get lost unless a bit of thread is left on it. Without stainless steel, pins and needles are in danger of rusting; they can be cleaned with sand (e.g., the little pepper on the common tomato pincushion).
Scissors can rust, too, or go blunt if used on things other than cloth and thread, but that questing seamstress still needs them -- biting or breaking thread leaves a rough end that doesn't go easily through a needle-eye. (Besides, biting thread isn't good for teeth.)
The thimble is not just for looks, nor is it to protect one's fingers from needle-pricks; instead, it's worn on the hand holding the needle and used to push the needle through the cloth. This is usually necessary. A prick from a sharp needle is rarely very painful and may not even bleed; the eye-end of the needle, on the other hand, is small enough to pierce one's finger but blunt enough to bruise, hence the thimble. The dimples in the thimble keep it from sliding off the needle.
Mending
Clothes take time and work, so it doesn't make sense to throw something out just because it's torn. Tears can be mended, and holes can be darned or patched. Sheets that are worn in the middle can be cut in half and have the less-worn sides spliced together. If a piece is beyond repair, parts of it can perhaps be reused to make new things. Patchwork quilts are a bit slow to make but almost free.
*****
And I haven't even mentioned climate (short version: warm, snug clothes for cold weather; cool, loose clothes for hot weather; and cover up in the sun), or the sort of work people are doing (moving arms and legs tends to be important). But that's probably enough on clothes.
The key thing is to think about what makes sense for the people who don't have a lot of time or money (most of the people in any society). Of course, people often do impractical things because it's tradition or it looks nice. But the natural selection of everyday work will favour clothes that are comfortable to wear, fairly easy to wash, not ridiculously hard to make, and long-lasting. And it doesn't hurt if they look good, too.