Juliha prided herself on her religious acumen—until the Realmwalker crossed the rift between worlds, stared at the empty shelves in the Tower He had built His people, and sighed. Unable to refuel his magic from the idols he’d taught them to forge, he was forced to use their souls. ## AFTERWORD Confession time! I minored in Religious Studies in college, but until recently, the concept of idolatry always confused me. I think part of the problem is that it's sort of a broad concept. Religious icons, pop culture icons, iconography, and iconoclasm are all connected concepts that tend to get muddy around the edges. It's inherently a religious concept, but I first came across it in fantasy stories. Many fantasy novels involve a great deal of idol worship on the part of polytheistic cultures. It tends not to be used in a pejorative sense in the books I read during my formative years, so that's not how I think of it. But the Spaniards who colonized South America _definitely_ meant it in a contemptuous way. They considered idolatry to be not only primitive but morally reprehensible, mostly due to Christian theology. There's a whole "thou shalt not worship the golden calf" philosophy in Christian theology that, being honest, I first learned about from _Dogma_ (a great movie if you haven't seen it). It comes up in other contexts related to Christianity, though, since arguments over idolatry are one of the primary points of conflict between the Orthodox and Protestant churches. Do statuettes of the saints count as "idols"? Does praying beneath one count as "worship"? If so, is that placing the worship of an idol _before_ God, or beneath? Such philosophical debates have sparked wars — or at least been used as an excuse for them. I'm generally uninterested in debating the finer points of Christian theology, if only because experts have spent thousands of years doing a better job on the topic than I ever could. What I find fascinating is all the stuff that inspired early Christians to talk about idolatry in the first place. During ancient times in the Middle East, people generally thought their gods were (or at least could be) literally embodied in their statues. The statue was the god, but not the whole of the god, as it were. At least once, a king sent his city's goddess to another city, and the statue traveled with an enormous escort and an absolute horde of riches. Egyptians did not consider the statues of divinities and dead pharaohs and to be _art,_ they considered them to be _tools_. Recent scholarship indicates that defaced Egyptian statues weren't just casually vandalized by tomb raiders. Instead, vandals targeted ritually important body parts, for example hands (used to accept offerings) and ears (to hear entreaties). Moving toward the other side of the world, for a moment, let's go back to those Spaniards. One of my favorite stories about idols comes from Easter Island, the famous statues that natives claimed "walked" to their new resting places. For centuries, people thought this was an obvious myth. It turns out, though, that with enough ropes and muscle power, the statues can indeed be made to walk — which makes transporting them easier in a world without much in the way of domesticated beasts for hauling carts. Like I said, the term "idol" is pretty broad. This is partly due to a combination of Christian conquerors trying to wipe out native religious practices by connecting them to forbidden practices, and partly because a bunch of different religious concepts got shoved under their closest English equivalent for translation purposes. Animism, totemism and idolatry are not _really_ the same thing, but the idea that some objects can be imbued with faith, power, mana, sami, etc., is a powerful one across cultures and Christian civilizations generally don't have a good vocabulary for discussing the nuances. The semantic difference between a lock of hair from a Christian saint, thought to have healing powers, and a Native American medicine pouch, is not one I care to delve into — not least of which because I'm not qualified. Academics still debate the nature of huacas — a Quechuan word referring to holy / venerated / sacred objects. They have far more expertise on the subject than I do. I am willing to delve into the abstract commonalities between concepts. Holy, venerated, and sacred objects, imbued with powers because of faith or because they literally hold a portion of divine "life force," appear in a variety of cultures. Fiction is a great way to explore what these ideas might look like, and so I wrote _Acumen,_ in which I subvert the concept of an idol. I'll discuss the nature of divinity a different week, but in _Acumen,_ the local god needs idols, carefully prepared by his followers, to fuel his efforts. I think of it a bit like  the kinds of [donation drives that rely on rounding up to the nearest dollar](https://news.ncsu.edu/2018/09/rounding-up-fundraisers/), or, well, taxes. Remember when I wrote about [different kinds of taxation systems](https://eleanorkonik.com/taxes/) %% ( [[2021-10-18 Taxes (DRAFT)]] ) %% in the October 18 edition? We rarely feel the bite when small bits of money are taken from us regularly, but a once-a-year tax bill for tens of thousands of dollars is usually harder to handle than a small tax refund — even if, ultimately, paying the bill once a year might [cost less in the long run](https://www.cnbc.com/id/100390473). The idols mentioned in _Acumen_ are repositories of faith and power, but instead of the Realmwalker's "godhood" fading away when He is abandoned by his people (as I often see in fiction like Gaiman's _American Gods_), the Realmwalker is able to remind his chosen of his power. The results will not be pretty — but we'll have to save that for another week, as well. ## Further Reading - I highly recommend [Glen Cook's](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/AX3/garrett-pi) _[Garret P.I.](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/AX3/garrett-pi)_ [series](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/AX3/garrett-pi) if you like darkly imaginative fantasy noir novels. It's one of the few books I've ever read that melds the best parts of urban fantasy with gritty realism and a completely invented world. The role of gods and magic and polytheism and idolatry in these books is fascinating. - [Was the Presence of Christ in Statues? The Challenge of Divine Media for a Jewish Roman God by Michael Peppard](https://www.academia.edu/34021108/Was_the_Presence_of_Christ_in_Statues_The_Challenge_of_Divine_Media_for_a_Jewish_Roman_God) is an in-depth look into the complexities of the early Christian relationship with idolatry and religious identity. - [Gods, Demons, and Idols in the Andes by Sabine MacCormack](https://www.jstor.org/stable/30141050) goes deep into the complexities of these concepts. It also touches on how "animated statues" probably did exist in some sense. - I learned most of what I now know about idols from Andrew Roddick, who sent me a ton of resources when he saw me asking for help learning about this. Here's a great article he wrote about [South American monoliths](https://theconversation.com/amp/the-recent-appearance-of-unexplained-monoliths-offers-connections-to-the-ancient-past-152058)... and their role in modern cultures.