#religious lore

[the-martyrfication-of-the-matron]

so making that post about meif'wa in headscarves and such made me think about religion in my rewrite and i remembered that i haven't spoken about religious headwear at all, so here is some stuff for Avra. I might post about other religion stuff for LR at some point too.

These are mostly aph-specific since no one religions the way she does lmao. Except for the coin-chain, that's a little something she starts doing that ends up being a cultural thing for Phoenix Drop because surprisingly the way rulers dress does persuade their people to dress similarly.

Coin Scarves are a Scaleswind thing, and quite an old-fashioned one. You're more likely to see a little old lady (or man, it isn't gender specific) in church wearing one than your average individual. Only hair that is longer than shoulder length is typically put beneath them (hence Avra's little microbangs being out) however in some parts of Scaleswind it is seen as more proper to cover the entire top of your hair regardless of length.

Different colour + metal combos refer to different divine, and multiple can apply to a singular Divine. People often wear them based off of the divine they follow most of all (Irene, for most), however those who only wear them for prayer will wear them according to the divine they're praying too. Pre-O'Khasis/Scaleswind war, royal-blue and gold was the most common combination as those were the colours most associated with Irene, however they're also associated with O'Khasis, so it changed to white and gold when the war began.

Avra gets hers during her little excursion to Scaleswind. Those who worship the Destroyer often thought of her quite highly for reasons, and she is quite recogniseable, so when she was just walking around a little old woman pressed a red and cold coinscarf into her hand and walked away. Red and Gold are colours associated with Shad only by his worshippers, however black and silver is more often used by the gaggle of elderly folk in Scaleswind that dare to worship him as they aren't ashamed of their religion. It is however seen as heresy, so any youth that continue the practice + worship Shad will often wear the red variant.

Avra honestly just thinks its cute (she is wearing it in my recent Shadmau/Shavra drawing :})

This is a coin veil, inspired by catholic veils because they're so goshdarn pretty. They're the predecessor of coin scarves and while coinscarves are made with opaque, typically thicker material, coin veils are made with lace or sheer fabric.

It is not practiced anymore, it kind of went out of fashion when the elaborate worship of the gods was replaced with the more humble and accessible worship of the divine. Coin scarves were kind of made so the church could try and make those that were fond of veils convert away from the gods, under the idea that 'they're basically the same thing anyway!!'.

Avra gets hers because it was a practice she partook in during her life as Irene, so she kind of was drawn to it. For Donna and Logan's wedding, she had an excuse to wear fancy stuff, so she asked Cadenza to help her make a coin veil. She doesn't remember what it's meant to actually represent, she just thinks they're pretty and comforting. Cadenza makes her a red one, using a bunch of lace she had already made, and it is very long. Avra only typically wears it for events or whenever she's stressed and needs to chill out.

Similarly to coinscarves, colour and metal indicate certain gods, but so does lace pattern and veil length. Worship of Judgement/Death (The destroyer/shad) was often indicated with long black veils with golden coins and the lace covering the face as well as the hair, with the lace usually having patterns of wilted flowers and animal skulls to represent the very decay they worshipped. Of course, this could only be afforded by the very rich, however the rich were often patrons of his temples in larger communities and would supply them with veils for the worshippers to wear. The addition of coins to veils was thought to have started with Judgement/Death worship, as it was believed that if someone was buried in their veil and brought back, you would be able to hear them by the chiming of the coins. Which was good because you didn't want an SK sneaking up on your ass, even back when Shad was thought of highly.

Worship of The Mother (Irene) was done through medium-length white-lace veils which were usually not adorned with coins (though were still called coinveils) but had beads instead, and were typically tied or pinned closed around the chest. The lace usually had floral patterns on it, though not always. Irene herself wore one, however due to lace being very hard to carve, most of her statues depict her wearing a hood instead.

I could get into the impacts of Avra wearing her red little coin veil but naaahhhh.

[sapphic-bats]

If I, say, began writing a post-season two fic that had to do with the Second Coming and a bunch of succubi/incubi and lords of Hell getting restless, would anyone be interested?

[sygneinl]

Religious lore for my comic

[porcelain-pines]

God stood in the doorway

[heresylog]

Update on the journey of nun-hood*

It’s been about a week since I entered the convent. Right now I still haven’t made any vows or promises, but I can tell you what it’s like so far.

There are so many women, and they’re all so different. Whatever image you have in your head about what a religious sister is, she probably exists. There are sisters who like the traditional hobbies of gardening and sewing but there are others who like riding motorcycles and flying planes.

You’re never bored. I have such a packed schedule. My day starts around 6am and ends at 10pm. In that time I probably have about two hours of downtime, not including meals or required recreation. Most days I’m doing dishes or folding laundry. Other days I’m reading or working on schoolwork.

It’s been a big change. I’m glad I’m doing this and I wish I’d done it sooner.

*I used the word “nun” even though I am not aiming to be cloistered. I am an aspiring religious sister.

[riverstyxsarts]

I’m not afraid of god I’m afraid he was gone all along

[peace-hunter]

also lowkey obsessed with the way the script describes orion's death. "an offering to their god". a literal sacrifice to their deity. poor little lamb led to slaughter, paying for crimes he didn't commit. it kinda fucks i'm not gonna lie

[devilsainz]

she ate with this concept here

bonus

i hope they dont get mad at me for screeshotting them but feel free to contact me if youre the acc and want this post deleted

[vigilskept]

gnashing my teeth thinking about how veilguard talks about the gods only as a joke when they could've gone somewhere truly crazy.... you're so right.

Yeah... you get it. It's just such a missed opportunity!

I don't even mind the jokey tone they use a lot of the time, because we all joke about things we struggle to understand/cope with.

Except Veilguard refuses to let you even try to broach the subject beyond that surface level. In fact, when it does let you engage with it at all, it manages to make things even less nuanced!

I'm just going to talk about Bellara's quest here since it's the most directly linked with the elven gods, and it's already a lot. Fundamentally, her companion quest is asking us two things:

Should elves be blamed for the actions of the Evanuris?

Should they preserve any of their past at all?

The first one is absurd to even begin with. It's not even a good or interesting take on the (very christian!) question: "Are we responsible for the sins of our ancestors?"

The Evanuris are not the ancestors of modern elves. Dalish religion implies that modern elves descend from those who the rebels never freed from slavery to the Evanuris.

This setup is already awful without looking at any of the parallels Bioware has (intentionally) drawn between the elves of Thedas and Jewish/Indigenous people. I have to put the rest of this under the cut because I genuinely don't think it can be shortened without making it sound flippant. In the context of the coding of the elves, the theological/social implications of all of this are so much worse.

TLDR: the indigenous/jewish coding of the elves makes bioware's treatment of elven religion in veilguard thoughtless at best, cruel at worst. they did not have to write themselves into this corner. there was a way of handling this lore reveal without the implication of elven religion (again, jewish/indigenous coded) being obsolete

So, the religion of the Dalish was part of their enslavement. It's the belief they were forced into by the cruel gods they are still devoted to. That's already pretty bad. How could it get worse, you might wonder?

Whether Bioware deviated from their initial inspirations for the elves or not, the implications for these lore reveals in light of those parallels are particularly cruel. Those two core questions in Bellara's quest? Yeah. Those have both been levied against the oppressed groups that Bioware chose to draw inspiration from. Both historically and presently. To justify atrocities against them.

And to be clear, Bioware does not deviate from or subvert the usual indigeous and jewish-coding of the elves in their writing here. If anything, they end up actively endorsing a very significant element of antisemitic and anti-indigenous sentiment.

Indigenous-Coding

Advocates of colonisation have always justified it by arguing they were 'saving' groups of people who were stuck in the past. They had been ‘left in the dark’ through ignorance of Christianity. In the more secular sense, this was framed as Europeans having journeyed through history to reach enlightenment, while the rest of the world was still in an ‘uncivilized’ state.

Christianity and progress had to be brought to these people to save their souls and bring them into the future with everyone else. Their Gods? There were only two possible ways to frame those. Either they were not real at all, or they were evil. Either way, they were obsolete.

In the Americas, these arguments were still used when corralling indigenous children into residential schools or tearing them from communities through the adoption system. Governments pushed the idea that they had to be forced to assimilate because they were 'backward' in their practices and beliefs.

In the settler-colonial state Canada, where Bioware is based, it's still common enough to hear people justify all of this as having been done "for their own good." Even those who admit that the ways colonization was perpetuated were cruel will still try to defend it by telling you, "it was bad, but their ancestors weren't saints either."

Sounding painfully familiar yet? A little uncomfortable in the context of Bellara's questline?

Jewish-Coding

Since the dawn of Christian Church, Jewish people have had a very fraught place in Christian theology. Christianity claims that that the coming of the messiah in the person of Jesus Christ makes the religion of Judaism obsolete. Christians believed the obvious answer to this problem was that Jewish people should convert.

When many did not, they were labeled as ignorant, obstinate, stuck in the past. They were so focused on their history that they couldn't see the truth which had been revealed in the present. There’s a significant legacy of this idea in Christian artwork with depictions of Synagoga blindfolded next to the clear eyed Ecclesia. You still hear echoes of this sentiment in antisemitic language today.

As for the nature of the Jewish God... there is some deviation here. For some Christians, He is God the Father, and He is good. For others — and this idea has been around from early Christianity till now — He is the Creator of the material world, but He is evil.

There are innumerable variations of Christian gnosticism that probably wouldn't be productive to get into on a Dragon Age Blog. What I need to underline here though, is that the idea of the Old Testament God as the devil/the demiurge/fundamentally evil, has been used to justify atrocity towards Jewish people for over a thousand years.

Should elves be blamed then? For the sundering of the Titans? For the Veil? For the Blight? For the evils of this world, created by their Gods?

Implications for Veilguard

Not only is religion in Dragon Age: The Veilguard often devoid of nuance or ignored outright, when the game does engage with it at all, it does so in a way that quite literally draws on these incredibly harmful antisemitic and anti-indigenous sentiments that have been (and still are) used to perpetuate real harm.

To be clear, I don't think the writing here intends to endorse the idea that elves should be blamed for any of what's going on. Bellara's anxieties are being projected onto her people as a whole while she grapples with what this all means for her, I get that. In fact, you could be generous and read some of this as a critique of this particular kind of anti-indigenous/jewish bigotry.

However, I don't think that absolves the writers of any of the implications they've created by confirming that the elven pantheon did exist and was canonically evil.

Elements of Dalish/elven culture might be preserved after all this, but the conclusion the game railroads you into is that their religion is obsolete. Just like Judaism. Just like the many Indigenous religions around the world. Except in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, it’s no longer just the bigotry of outsiders claiming that to be the case. It’s now the objective truth of the setting.

Going forward, the elves of Thedas can keep their culture, but they can’t practice their religion. If they continued to practice, they would be framed the way the Venatori are: evil and stuck in the past. This really can’t be overstated: this is the exact rhetoric that has justified centuries of violence and oppression of Jewish and Indigenous people. This rhetoric is still around and still weaponized.

It’s so cruel to create an in world ‘lineage’ that draws so heavily from their cultures and histories, then validate the rhetoric that has been used to hurt them. At best, it’s thoughtless. But as a company based in a settler-colonial state, this is something they should’ve put thought into, given that they chose to code their elves and Jewish and Indigenous. That was their responsibility, actually.

What gets me about all this is that they actually didn't need to force that conclusion at all. They could have kept the Evanuris as cruel tyrants without demonising the Creators and their worship at the same time.

The Evanuris weren't always Gods. They weren't even always rulers.

In Trespasser, when asked how they became Gods, Solas tells Lavellan that they did so slowly. That it started with a war. That fear bred a desire for simplicity. For right and wrong. For chains of command. That generals became respected elders, then kings, and finally gods.

Veilguard confirms all of this. The addition it makes is that before all this, the first elves were spirits who made their bodies out of the Titans. This all occurred over the course of thousands of years.

None of this needs to be retconned in order to allow for a respectful yet nuanced portrayal of religion!

TLDR pt2: bioware, u could’ve avoided literally ALL of this by making the evanuris part of a priestly class who seized power after the war with the titans. it wouldn’t even have undermined ur lore! u could’ve kept dalish religion alive! u could’ve implied complex political dynamics for your ancient elves without even having to write it! why didn’t you even try?

Trying to Fix This Mess

Say the elves took their bodies from the Titans and settled the lands of Thedas. Say the Titans even allowed this for a time. The dwarves were made from their own bodies after all.

Yet the elves didn't have the same connection with the Titans as the dwarves did. They had no stone-sense, so they couldn't understand the Titans' song.

Generations down the line, some of them took too much from the Titans. More than they were willing to give. That was when the Titans lashed out, making the earth tremble so that all the elves had built crumbled beneath them.

And what if the firstborn among the elves had taken up priesthood to guide the younger ones. They were closer to spirits than the elves that were born into this world, and so the younger ones looked to them for guidance. Maybe they were the ones who were trusted to reach out to the more powerful of the spirits who chosen stay in the Fade, their old kin who preferred to keep their distance from the physical world to preserve the essence of what they were. The spirits of Justice, of Benevolence, of Craft. Those who the elven people paid homage to, and trusted to preserve them in turn.

So when everything seemed to fall apart, the elves turned to their Keepers, their priests, and asked of them what they ought to do. How could they make the earth stop shaking? What would they have to do to be at peace again?

Whatever the spirits themselves may have responded, many of the Keepers (among them the Evanuris) took up arms and chose war. They saw it could be won so they fought, sundering Titans from their dreams and stilling the land.

And yet there was no peace.

Some Keepers sought to hold on to their power as generals, and wanted to wage war on new shores to keep it. Some Keepers thought they had already gone too far, claiming they had acted without the guidance of the spirits who hadn't wanted war.

These Keepers could've caused chaos and endless bloodshed, so the Evanuris formed their alliance to suppress the others. Likely, they thought they were doing so for the benefit of all the elven people. More war meant more death, and it was needless now that the land was still. And even if what they did to the Titans was wrong, it was done and they could not fix it. Better to silence those who meant to stir up fear among the people.

The Evanuris fought until they were the last faction left, naming the few holdouts the Forgotten Ones. They were praised for bringing peace to Elvhenan, and trusting in their guidance their people crowned them as rulers.

Yet some dissent always remained. None of them were infallible. They were no longer spirits, they hadn't been for thousands of years. They were now more accustomed to command than to priesthood after all that war. They had drawn on the power they had stolen from the Titans to gain the advantage over their enemies, and the corruption of the Blight was starting creep in, ever-so-slowly.

Maybe some of the people, unhappy with their rule, started to voice the thought that was expressed by their rival Keepers once more: that the Evanuris had grown distant from the spirits. That Elgar'nan didn't serve Justice anymore. That Mythal had strayed from Benevolence.

So Evanuris took the mantle of godhood for themselves. It was only for peace and stability.

It would be too dangerous if anyone could claim they were deviating from the will of the spirits, so they would claim they were those great spirits. Elgar'nan was Justice, Mythal was Benevolence. They would use their rule only for the benefit of the people, not abuse their power.

And there you go. None of what I've written above can't be neatly incorporated into the existing lore of Veilguard. It leaves the elves of Thedas precisely where they started in Dragon Age: Origins. Distant from their ancient Gods, trying to pick up the pieces of their forgotten past.

[jugumpuppet]

◗ Big thanks to @shockbot for holding my hand as I attempted what ever tf Prime Prime is. Also ES Megan. *thumbs up*

S: "You chose the hardest OP to draw." Me: "Don't say that."

[katerinaaqu]

When people create movies: We must be very careful! We need to be respectful as possible. We shall cast very specifically people who have descent from that area or that look like their parts. What do you mean it is just a cartoon? OF COURSE it matters! And we shall also brag about how ethnically correct our voice actors are. And of course it doesn't matter it is fiction because culture behind fiction is important and it needs to be properly featured. Oh no we shall not feature the diversity we know by evidence it existed in the area because we need to focus on the ethnic identity of the indigenous populations

When people create movies featuring ancient Europe: We cast everything because we need diversity on every corner of Europe! What? What do you mean you have objections because the area did not look like this? Racist! Shut the fuck up is just a movie and the cast is very talented! They need empowering and you don't know what you are saying! It IS accurately depicted you just don't know shit! Aww the movie features myths but you have problem with the inaccurate ethnicity? Racist! It is just fiction! It doesn't matter! Your stories don't matter. They are mainstream anyways so who the fuck cares about something that happened thousands of years ago? No one would understand it anyways.

Me: Incredible! And you manage to fuck both of the above examples up because the "ethnically correct" movies are totally stripped of essence and do not give the real powerful cultures that they represent and the second...there ARE amazing examples that are unknown to the public that wait to be explored that involve both cultural diversity AND amazing stories and yet...yeah...

[canisalbus]

forgive me if this has been answered previously, but what were the circumstances around vasco finding out about machete's death? i'm heartbroken but fascinated to think about what his immediate reaction could have been

They don't live together, Vasco was at home in Florence at the time. Either someone who knew of their relationship managed to alert him of the murder, or he showed up in Rome to visit him just like countless of times before, and one time he was just gone. He would've missed the funeral for sure, and since Machete doesn't have family, his belongings would most likely end up escheated and subsequently liguidated by the church. He certainly wasn't remembed fondly, for the most part it was like he had never been there in the first place.

I don't want to get into the details but of course he was devastated. The threat of death was a constant presence in Machete's later years, he survived at least a couple of assassination attempts and his health kept getting worse. I think he tried to keep Vasco in the dark about how bad things were exactly, but Vasco didn't miss how his fear of death ramped up in intensity towards the end. So it wasn't a complete surprise when he found out they had finally gotten him. For a long time he had hard time not blaming himself for it, thinking whether he could've done something to prevent the outcome, whether his presence would've changed how things played out. Over the years he learned to live with the sudden and violent end of their relationship, but the first few years were extremely rough, the whole ordeal broke him in unprecedented ways and he never fully recovered to his previous state.

[iidgm]

"In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti"

[apollo18]

Concept: the justice league finds out that Blaze and Satanus, the rulers of hell, are kids of their ‘even more of a boy scout than Superman’ coworker’s “boss” and think Shazam is the Christian God. They ask Billy really vague questions that lead Billy into confusing them even more and they become convinced that Marvel’s Wizard guy is God with a capital G and Marvel’s either an angel or the second coming of Jesus.

Meanwhile Shazam doesn’t even know what the Bible is and his knowledge about religion is so outdated he still thinks Solomon’s Judaism is new age and not worth his time to research such a ‘fad’ religion, but he knows humans will make a religion out of anything as well as bastardize existing ones and very well could have mixed up actual tales that involve him, his allies, and his children into some sort of melting pot of a religion.

So when someone finally asks Marvel outright if his “boss” is God, Billy goes ‘wait… old guy in white robes and sandals, with long white hair and a beard… lives in space… aka the “heavens”, whose a ghost(Holy Spirit), and knows everything(historama)??? I need to dig deeper into this hold on guys’ and goes off to ask the wizard.

So when Billy asks the Wizard he just tells Billy “well, my boy, if so many things match up, maybe it is so and the tales of myself and my champions grew so estranged from their origins or mixed in with other beliefs that it can explain the things that aren’t true to our reality.”

Then The Canonical Character To The DC Universe, Jesus of Nazareth, shows up.

[bizlybebo]

anyways since it’s the holidays shout out to religiously traumatized people, people questioning their religion, people who just got out of their religion, people considering getting back into their religion, people who miss their religion even if it ended up hurting them, people who never practiced religion, people who have practiced religion their whole lives, and people who don’t celebrate christmas/celebrate other holidays because of their religon

and FUCK the mormon church

[zundely]

I gotta admit this made me little mad. So yall are aware that explaining the whole methaphisics of your world is a mistake right? Especially when it means "explaining" an entire in game religion in a way that makes it "real" or "fake".

So how is it that when it comes to *check notes* every damn religion except for the christianity expy they did feel a need to explain it and left nothing to the imagination. Why is canonizing the "elven gods were evil colonising slavers" ok but when it's the Girlboss Christian Church it's suddenly off the table to make any definitive statements.

Why can't yall take your own advice sometimes and realise that shutting up can be very valuable part if writing.