Conversation

The more I pay attention to how religious people live, the less I’m able to distinguish it from fandoms+larps
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There’s a genre of morning TV in India (which has emerged since I left) that’s just dwell shots of idols at famous temples with devotional music. It’s not active prayer, it’s just watching the camera pan across idols. Why?? Then it hit me: examining your action figure collection.
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Polytheism is not primarily about conceptual pluralism of aspects of divinity. That’s post-hoc intellectualization. It is primarily action figures. Not just 1000 incarnations of 0-100 eigengods (depending on the extended universe), but a dozen action poses for each.
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There’s entire subgenres of temples for specific poses. For eg anantasayana temples/idols are sleeping Vishnu. Product idea: posable action figure idols that can be put in different poses. Though you can’t do variable facial expressions easily which might be a deal breaker 🤔
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Navaratri is coming up, a festival with a track devoted to literal action figure displays (kolu) where women put their idol collections on stepped displays, but freely include secular dolls. If your kid has a Barbie or spider-man doll they can legit go in a kolu
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Ie this is not a subtle connection. Nor is the conflation of religious practice and secular play offensive. It’s explicitly part of the design.
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Stan Lee explicitly cited traditional mythology as the inspiration for modern extended superhero universes, down to co-opting literal gods like Thor. But there’s a weakness in that MCU type memeplexes aren’t taken seriously enough. Nobody draws on it for theology!and philosophy
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Otoh it’s hard to make serious additions to actual historic living traditions that do have that. Norse mythology can be appropriated into comic book universes because there is no living tradition. This is why I think you can’t just make up new Vishnu plot-lines and retcon them.
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There’s always been a modern comic book industry around Hindu mythology (amar chitra katha) but they never take serious liberties with the canon. At most you can tell new fan fiction stories on the margins that don’t affect canon.
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But I wonder… could you actually develop an MCU type thing that has the felt depth and gravitas of old living traditions but also the narrative freedom to tell new stories? If you can do that you could rule the world. I suspect anime pulls that off to some extent.
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Rajamouli’s movies (Bahubali series) are a brave attempt to create entirely new stories in the spirit of Hindu mythology but I suspect the incumbency of the living canon is just too strong and entrenched to compete with. New material can’t rise above “entertainment” 🤔
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In the west, modern Christian storytelling (eg Hallmark movies) seems to ignore literal mythology and build an alt extended universe around Christian values, but I think it doesn’t really work. Either culturally or economically. It’s a kind of resistance art/rearguard action
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Islam tries really hard to counterprogram this human tendency to make fandom larps of everything but I don’t think it succeeds. Sufi saint culture is exactly the same, despite the strictures against representational art.
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I suspect people who take religion seriously try to look for its cultural adaptive functions at too high a level of abstraction, like “meaning making” The adaptive function is mainly at the action figure level for 90% of “believers.” Narrative sensemaking with Mary Sue options.
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By the typology in the Gita of 4 types of faith, I think the pie chart is: Gnana yoga (knowledge faith): 1% Raja yoga (self-mastery faith): 9% Karma yoga (righteous-action faith): 20% Bhakti yoga (devotional/fandom faith): 70%
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This is why Zuck is smart to bet on the metaverse. The Hindu metaverse will be a huge deal. And Meta probably knows it since half the content on Indian WhatsApp is fandom traffic. Images, songs, etc.
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In case it isn’t clear, I’m taking the opposite view to the usual interpretation that comic book EU fandoms are modern religions. I think religions are old fandoms that acquired some intellectual/philosophical trappings. Religions supervene on fandom/larp phenomenology.
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I’m surprised somebody hasn’t rushed to make nft collections based on Hindu mythology. Get each minted hash blessed by a priest. Famous temples could sponsor ongoing mints. Donate at Tirupati, QR code pops, scan it and you have proof-of-darshan nft.
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I mean all the blessed threads and amulets and stuff are basically physical nft mints. I just got a red thread from a family religious thing.
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Pilgrimages are collection quests. Often the collected artifact is holy water. People have mint condition sealed little brass pots of Ganga water in their home shrines. It’s like comic-con souvenir badges or something.
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