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. Books like Glen Cook's _Garret P.I._ series 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 pejorative sense. They considered idolatry to be not only primitive but morally reprehensible, mostly due to the 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. %% find the citation for this! %% Egyptians did not consider the statues of divinities and dead pharaohs and to be _art,_ they considered them to be _tools_. %% [[2022-01-17 Art|Art Newsletter]] %% 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. 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. What I am willing to delve into, though, is 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 that 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. The idols _are_ repositories of faith and power, but instead of his "godhood" fading away when He is abandoned (as I often see in fiction), the Realmwalker reminds his chosen of his power. If they will not harvest a small portion of their soul power to build reservoirs, he will take it all at once. The results will probably not be pretty — but we'll have to save that for another week, as well. ## References - [[Idolatry notes]]