When we talk about worldbuilding, there are umbrella concepts that automatically come to mind. Every setting needs to have a few basic elements to ground it: cultures, landmasses, relevant history, languages, that sort of thing. Tied in with that is a world’s religion; in particular, the gods that inhabit a world and its faiths. This makes sense, from our viewpoint.

Whether you’re religious or not, you can’t deny that the presence of religion on Earth has played a major factor in its history and in the development of our various cultures. Accordingly, if the world you’re writing resembles our own, the design of its religion(s) plays a large role in coloring the setting properly. 

Polytheism and its Role in Fiction

For my part, I’ve always been fascinated by polytheistic traditions. It feels to me like it has a high prevalence in modern fantasy. To be fair, the sample of books I’ve read is fairly selective for, among other things, the way they incorporate gods.

I’ve been a fan of these sorts of traditions since I was seven or eight and my mother bought me my first book of Greek myths. I read it cover to cover countless times, each occasion as special as the last thanks to the liberal amount of illustrations and its child-friendly adaptations of the classic stories. When I began seeing these myths reflected in the movies I watched or in other books I read, I began to feel the value of learning about these ancient faiths. 

Though it fails to accurately reflect The Iliad, the movie Troy absolutely blew young me away in its larger-than-life representation of the stories I’d read.

Since then, I’ve dove into various other traditions. The Norse gods came easy to me because of my father’s own collection of The Mighty Thor comics. Though very few of the gods represented their Marvel counterparts, that was at least a jumping off point. An elementary school brush with Okami primed me for learning about the Shinto tradition, something that has since been contextualized by the spiritual messages of Miyazaki-san’s Princess Mononoke, another formative part of my childhood. I’ve spent a lot of time lately getting to know the myths and legends of the Tuatha Dé Danann of Celtic tradition. I’ve dabbled in Egyptian, Hindu, and Persian traditions more recently (even taking some inspiration from the latter for my current project).

My early exposure to Thor I think helped color my view of polytheism generally and how I always view the traditions through a sort of fantasy adventure lens. While they served all sorts of purposes, including story telling, organization, and metaphysical foundations, many of them always just seemed so heroic and exciting. The Epic of Gilgamesh, perhaps human history’s first written tale, was foundational not only in its being the earliest example of literature, but in that it showed gods in a fantastical setting full of momentous and calamitous deeds.

Gods have always been important to storytelling, going back to literally the first story. 

Back to worldbuilding: a believable fantasy world should have some tenets of faith represented. In the most abstract sense, they can just dictate the rituals and traditions that your main characters adhere to. Let your characters’ ideals and virtues say something about the gods, and vice-versa. You can have perfectly virtuous and heroic characters following a god of death that requires ritual sacrifice.

For example take the death priestess Pyrre in The Unhewn Throne. She plays the assassin archetype, someone who makes a holy living through death and is, on the surface, amoral in her devotion to a god of death. She easily could have been portrayed as a one-dimensional villain, but author Brian Stavely turned her into a fairly integral protagonist. Her role is naturally bloody and violent, but Pyrre sees the death she causes as a holy sacrament and a necessary part of life. Her initial moral conflict with the other characters, many of whom were disgusted by her blunt approach to murder, can similarly provide a complex background to your characters. 

I think it says something that Stavely created a prequel series entirely about Pyrre; haven’t gotten to it yet, though.

But sometimes I like to see gods who get out there and do the dirty work themselves (thanks Thor). Gods are never required to be separate, just above the rank and file. They are forces of nature personified, housing unimaginable magical power bent to the whims of all-too-often very human personalities. There’s no greater tale of heroic deeds than a person rising up against a god and emerging victorious.

Jenn Lyons’ Approach to Anthropomorphic Polytheism

What is anthropomorphic polytheism? I found this term defined on Britannica, so let’s start there. It refers to gods that “appear in human form but have superhuman powers”. This could, of course, be immediately seen in all sorts of polytheistic traditions, including the ones I’ve referred to already. Greek and Norse myths are full of this, with gods descending from Olympus or to Midgard and waging war, performing great works, and the like.

This concept is ripe for exploration in fantasy fiction. Investigating the relationships between humans and gods is not only pure fantasy, but pure storytelling as well. Conflict between humans and the supernatural (i.e. gods) is one of the classic plot frameworks. Anthropomorphization challenges this structure by compounding the conflict in your story.

A humanized polytheism allows for man vs. supernatural and man vs. man conflict to develop concurrently, ultimately enriching the setting as a whole.

The banner example of a humanized polytheism in fantasy is the one set up by Jenn Lyons in A Chorus of Dragons. She unifies conflicts versus man and the supernatural in a way that can only be accomplished in high fantasy. I hope to show below how Lyons’ worldbuilding and use of polytheism advances the thematic background of the series, and I will conclude by putting forward what I think her story has to say about our own world.

Thesis out of the way, now for a little background info – the gods in this setting are referred to as the Eight Immortals. They are beings who represent eight distinct facets of their world: life, death, magic, luck, destruction, invention, stars and the sky, and the world. These are familiar concepts. Virtually every polytheistic tradition has at least one analogue that can be applied to each of them. 

In The Ruin of Kings, the series’ opener, the reader gets to meet one of these Immortals very early on, and her identity is not kept a secret. In Ruin, the goddess Thaena plays a fairly significant role as a minor antagonist, imprisoning the hero on a remote island (though ultimately for his own good). 

This arrangement sets the tone for the entire series. As it goes on, the Immortals tend to be treated just like any other character and they run the gamut from protagonist to antagonist and everything in between. This serves the larger themes of Chorus by establishing the relative helplessness that humans have against the workings of the very present gods. It is very clear who controls the world here; it is the ultimate goal of the series’ villain to find a way to throw off these shackles, though his self-preserving tendencies and lack of imagination would doom the rest of reality.

Lyons takes a very cavalier approach to incorporating the Immortals into the narrative and the world at large, making them hardly different from the more ‘normal’ humans that the reader identifies with.

Mid-series spoilers ahead.

The Immortals’ immediacy is bolstered by the eventual reveal of their true origin. They were transformed from normal humans by the villain, and then further used by him in a ritual to fight demons. Naturally, this went awry. In a fit of irony, this second ritual resulted in the god of the stars being transformed into a being that’s basically a human-shaped black hole. What followed was a slap-dash approach to seal the destructive god away, kicking the can down the road, fully knowing that the seal wasn’t permanent. 

In the millennia since, the remaining Immortals have set themselves up as the gods of the world, with vast organizations of worship and even aristocratic frameworks popping up in their service. 

The goddess of death, Thaena, is known throughout the world for her ability to ‘Return’ dead souls to their bodies. As a result, a practice reminiscent of Catholic indulgences has popped up where her priests are essentially bribed to beg her to Return a human, something we know she can accomplish on a whim. It’s corruption in its purest form, and Lyons’ writing delights in it to the fullest.

It is a reveal full of existential dread when the protagonists learn of the falsehoods their worship is built on, ultimately culminating in finding out that the Immortals had been using the lives of humans this entire time to power the seal of the dark god. Thaena herself is the greatest proponent of this secret, her domain of death granting no wisdom over the way she uses the humans she rules over. 

The heroes’ discovery of the pure ordinariness of the gods is felt directly by the reader. The Immortals are some of the most fallible characters in the series. They make it abundantly clear how far removed they make themselves from the humans they used to belong among. The world is their plaything and its eventual destruction (which is their fault) is but a minor annoyance that it is up to humans to deal with and pay the price for. 

Ring any bells for our own climatic fate?

A Chorus of Dragons is clearly a story that cannot be divorced from its setting’s gods. It would be an entirely different story without them. Even if they took a more passive role, showing up sparingly if at all in the story, something indelible would be lost. Lyons makes a point in her writing that amassed power can shape our world; it is a moral failing to not use power to improve the lot of others.

The central conflict in The Ruin of Kings, the smallest in scale of the five books, shows the protagonist rejecting the abusive and controlling family he comes from. It is primarily man versus man. This is reflected throughout the series in his relationship with the various gods and creeps into the man versus supernatural realm, but without ever leaving the original form of conflict.

The heroes do not fight the Immortals in A Chorus of Dragons just because of their role as deities; the conflict coequally springs from the gods just being horrible people doing horrible things.

I feel the parallels to real life have become apparent. Lyons has used one of the oldest elements of storytelling, gods, to make a statement on the conflicts we face in our world. No one would in good faith say we are fighting a conflict versus the supernatural; really, it’s more versus the environment or society. In any event, Chorus‘ conflict shows Lyons’ distaste for generational wealth and climate apathy. It is felt clearly in the writing. Lyons shows her hope that we can move past the stagnation holding us back, making A Chorus of Dragons an absolute must-read in 2022. 

Just draw out a family tree as you begin reading. Don’t make the same mistake I did; Lyons loves her resurrections.