One of the unexpected pleasures of releasing Seven Days of Mercy into the world has been the depth of commentary from those readers attracted to the thematic work. I don’t receive these emails and DMs daily or even weekly, but the book has invited a steady stream of thoughtful engagement. The kind that challenges me to think hard about the novel’s successes and its shortcomings. The specificity of these commentaries goes beyond the remit of the Reader Question of the Week, but this one inspired me to tackle the question in long form as a worldbuilding essay–exactly the kind of featurette y’all said you like to read.
Here’s the question, from reader Robert C., who self-identifies as a seminarian.
After reading Seven Days of Mercy for the Apostatic Priest, I was eager to download your free preview of What Lies Between. I just finished those chapters (nice cliffhanger, by the way), and one of my concerns from the first novel resurfaced in bolder font. I hope you’ll take this question in the spirit of friendly critique. As a seminarian (University of Saint Mary on the Lake, Mundelein Seminary), I appreciate the first book’s attempt to treat theology as plot-driver instead of typical fantasy bauble. You’re in good company with C.S. Lewis and Tolkien himself. Your theological argument is unusually omnivorous. In book one, the eclectic borrowing earned its keep. I expected some narrowing in the follow-up, but the first section of book two is even more theologically expansive.
When a single chapter can deploy Hebrew (Sephirot, aqeda), Gnostic (pleroma, Aeon, Abraxes), Greek (Eidolon, Noumenon, Pastophorus, taxiarch), Sanskrit (Mahakalpe), and Zoroastrian (agiaries) material, the line between a synthesized imagined religion and a dazzle of borrowed sacred words grows thin. My judgment is that you mostly stay on the right side of it, because the borrowings demonstrate real understanding and engagement with the terms and because the Gnostic-Kabbalistic spine genuinely organizes them. But a skeptical reader could reasonably charge that the erudition sometimes outruns the integration, and the books do not always pause to earn each allusion. My 2am thoughts, for you. I look forward to reading the rest of the book.
I hope Robert doesn’t mind me dredging this one up for the purposes of this essay. He provides a razor-sharp critique of The Divine Heretic’s theological worldbuilding, and reading it invited me to think critically about my own worldbuilding techniques in a way that proved creatively productive.
Not unlike the series’ central characters, the theological ecosystem of Hebdomar is genuinely fractured, co-mingled, and rife with contradiction. It’s a magpie and it’s syncretic. That tension derives from the worldbuilding insight that unlocked the setting.
When is Hebdomar?
Any attempt to place Hebdomar at a fixed point in human history invites frustration. In the tradition of Robert Howard’s Hyborian Age, I’m playing fast and loose with the arc of technology. Ruxindra walks through the bronze gates of Mahakalpe carrying steel at her hip, and the steel explicitly belongs to the same vintage as the portcullis. Stone walls guard populations approaching medieval size (Rome notwithstanding). Maltane legions organized in quasi-Roman maniples carry weapons that won’t exist until the time of Charlemagne. Pastoral peoples with no knowledge of agriculture shepherd scripture in leather-bound books. The anthropologists are pulling their hair out.
The anachronism is part-liberty, part-substance. Like Howard, I’m telling a story more engaged with metaphysics than physics. The theology is precise, because the theology carries the thematic load. Granting equal precision to the level of technology risks a descent into pedantry. Here is where I beg the most indulgent suspension of disbelief. The Divine Heretic delivers readers to a world where 1500 years of human technology comfortably co-exists.
In addition to the aesthetic mea culpa, I can offer two in-text justifications for the anachronism:
- A world of physics-defying sorcery and walking deities would follow a profoundly different line of epistemological development. Sorcery makes the laws of physics mutable, and the observable fact of Luka’s divinity changes the epistemic position of the entire world. Hebdomar isn’t tracking some analog of the Aristotelian model evolving through Archimedes to Newton and Leibniz. The scientific revolution will not be televised.
- The scattered technology of Hebdomar isn’t actually all that anachronistic. Cultures achieve technological advancement at different rates, and multiple paradigms coexist contemporaneously even today. Pastoral cultures persist in North Africa and East Asia. Stone Age tribes still populate the Amazon. Historically, this disjunction is most profound after periods of global upheaval.
In Seven Days of Mercy for the Apostatic Priest, we encounter Hebdomar at a moment of profound disruption. The Fall of Mysin, the whole series’ stage-setting deicide, leads to a period of regression that draws inspiration from two historical calamities: The Late Bronze Age Collapse and the Fall of Rome. Both events led to a long period of socio-political reorganization and technological regression. Hebdomar’s Dark Age has an acute cause like the fall of Rome, but the shape of its aftermath better resembles the realignment after the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Ruxindra ruminates on this condition in Book 1 when she first sets eyes on the Mahak’s palace:
No one who has seen as much of Hebdomar as I have would dispute
that it is a fallen world. The great cultures of antiquity are ash, their
advancements lost or maligned. Our modern sorceries grasp the Unseen
World by its thinnest threads, and our G-d is dead. So rare are the occa‐
sions to look upon a pristine capsule from our golden youth that it’s
easy to forget their splendor. Perhaps it is a gift that memory sands the
sharpest edges from the sublime. Dun recollections soften to better
blend with the banality of our time.
In Book 1, we encounter a world less than what it once was. The incomplete preservation of ancient technology causes anachronism. So does the asymmetrical recovery from Mysin’s fall. No fictional invention maps perfectly to its historical inspirations, nor should it, but the research is real. I won’t gaslight readers by denying the fingerprints. Ohtahp resembles the Levant, a graveyard of fallen cultural centers like historical Ugarit. Eryzitar owes its political structure to post-Mycenaean Greece, a once-thriving federation of city-states clinging to a Golden Age that no longer exists. But the Late Bronze Age Collapse also had its winners. The Fall of Mysin is the same. For every Ugarit or Babylon, there’s an ascendant Phoenician culture well-positioned to take its place.
Iron Age institutions in a Bronze Age milieu
A few readers have pointed out that the fictional Karochan faith resembles the Judaism of the Second Temple at the moment of Christilization. I think it’s a fair reading, though I’ll delicately push back on any attempt to produce a one-to-one allegory from the text. The Karochan faith at the time of Luka’s encounter does share some DNA with Second Temple Judaism. It’s a canonized religion with clerical institutions inspired by the Rabbinic tradition that emerged in Judaism after the Babylonian exile. Luka is born into a faith that’s already written its bylaws. They carry the ur-text around in massive bronze plates, and the clerics have spent the better part of the last millennium layering interpretations and re-readings on top of the Tractate’s foundation.
The theological and cultural inspiration is older. In terms of its relationship to contemporaneous faiths, Karochan better resembles the embryonic Judaism of the First Temple. The strict monotheism of the Abrahamic religions dates to the Babylonian exile, when priests first compiled the Torah by redaction. Before that, Judaism was more henotheistic than monotheistic, with YHWY treated as “first among many” instead of “one and only”. I understand this interpretation is disputable, but it’s the origin story I find most historically compelling. Israel emerged from the polytheistic cross-currents of the Bronze Age Levant. The First Temple is Solomon’s Temple, and Solomon’s reign is defined by his thousands of wives who brought a panoply of Levantine Gods into Solomon’s court. The Torah treats this indulgence as a predicate for Solomon’s downfall, but the fact that this history is preserved suggests the Judaism of the First Temple still acknowledged a constellation of deities, even if the priestly class was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the coexistence.
In The Divine Heretic series, Luka is similarly positioned. One God among many, held aloft by the adherents of his canonized faith. In a henotheistic world, the magpie-syncretist tension Robert notes somewhat dissolves. The in-world lexicon pulls from Mithraism, Judaism, Sethian Gnosticism, Animism, Zoroastrianism, and a dozen more inspirational sources because Hebdomar is a world where the dark lines between traditions have not yet been drawn. The effort to compartmentalize, systematize, and prioritize modes of worship is active but in its infancy. As an author, that’s a much richer theological moment to mine than the more frequently excavated alternatives.
Appropriation and Interrogation in The Divine Heretic
The Divine Heretic series makes no intentional argument about any extant faith, but it risks inviting that kind of reading with its plentiful appropriations. The Karochan faith owes much of its theological structure to a blend of Judaism and Sethian Gnosticism, but the books deploy these raw materials to interrogate universal questions. These books appropriate the language of real-world theology as short-hand–each borrowing, an invitation to engage the broader exploration from a semiotic place of mutual understanding. The Divine Heretic takes no position on whether any one particular faith is authentic, or moral, or right. It’s a series more concerned with exploring the universal disconnect between faith and religion, how religions cohere and codify out of moral and spiritual intuition, and how the bilateral relationship between worshippers and the worshipped evolves over time. It necessarily encounters the friction points between politics, philosophy, science and faith, but these seams are always tangent to the narrative spine.
I won’t exculpate myself from the obligation to do justice to the borrowings. Fantasy fiction has a bad habit of deploying borrowed terms as window-dressing–a Latinate name here and a Catholic doctrine there to evoke an aesthetic mood. The borrowings in The Divine Heretic don’t exist to color the surface, but rather to engage the theological substance beneath the term.
Hebdomar isn’t populated by Second Temple Jews and Sethian Gnostics, but the in-world faiths confront many of the same questions and contradictions embodied by the appropriated terms. When Ruxindra tells Luka in the prologue of What Lies Between that, “Understanding is better than trust, in the same way knowledge is better than faith,” that’s a gnostic proposition on the tongue of an apostatic priest. When Liyah provides the Ziggurat metaphor for the liturgical evolution of Karochan, she’s speaking to the same evolutionary dilemma that every codified religion confronts, and providing the same interpretive instinct that inhabits the Jewish Midrash and Talmud.
Every borrowed term has to meet the same standards. The agiaries of Mahakalpe must be more than Zoarastrian fire shrines. In Book 1, they allude to an older tradition that predates the Holy City built around them. Thematically, they signal a Manichean theology at odds with Luka’s Karochan. Robert’s correct to point out that Book 2 takes an even more omnivorous approach to these borrowings. That’s a trend that will hold across the entire arc. Each theft is intentional, but intent isn’t exculpating. Intent, rather, invites the greater obligation. Readers will adjudicate my performance as the series develops. They won’t all reach the same conclusion, but they’ll all be right, and maybe that’s also the point.