Fantasy religion and culture

[salamandraga]

So originally I was thinking about adding a few little things to help flesh out my fantasy religion while avoiding cultural appropriation. I've created the mythology and come up with the structure of the faith. My characters pray, blaspheme, and utter minced oaths. I've made holidays, festivals, and folklore. I've got holdouts still clutching to

Comments

[myste_uk]

Where it doesn't make sense for me is if women were the philosophers, why they ultimately ended up perceived as only good enough to study what the people of your world consider "fluff" subjects. Mathematics grew out of philosophy, and engineering grew out of mathematics. If the original philosophers were mostly women, then so would be the mathematicians, engineers and scientists. - How did the men come to take over these areas

[salamandraga]

I sort of had it that men took over all the things that had military applications. So mathematics and engineering would be used for fortifications, siege machines, and artillery - though then it would have been correctly timing the explosion of fireballs and other things so that they only went off when you wanted them to - rather than cannons and mortars. Materials science would be theirs as well since chemistry and metallurgy go hand in hand with weapons making

[sollersuk]

Some of that reminds me of the immediately pre-Reformation nuns at Syon, who were more than anything else like an Oxbridge women's college; they wrote books on theology and commissioned books to be written for them. But women in general at the time didn't have a particularly high status.

In the 1920s in South Wales, at a time when only women over the age of 30 had the vote, my grandmother actually had two votes: one as an individual and one as proprietor of a business.

*puts on archaeologist hat* The spread of technology and agriculture is very complicated; there were definitely independent developments in the Americas, but for some things, including creation legends, there are traceable links going back from the Mediterranean area to the Sulu Sea and possibly further; the earliest agriculture and pottery seem to have been in areas that were land until the sea level rose after the end of the last ice age. Mesopotamian legends attribute major advances to the arrival of the "seven sages" from the east, which fits in well with the

[randomstasis]

I've got a lot of questions about the developments here

[xtricks]

Also, one way to organize things so they have less of a judeo-christian bent is to look at some Asian social structures where religious pursuits are age based - it's common in some Buddhist cultures that people live secular lives until their children are grown, then become monks or nuns when they're older. In Western culture, religious persuit is a lifetime concept - you become a monk/nun/priest as a career instead of a married person.

[sei_shonanon]

"women are condescended to and certain things are viewed as womanly and thus unimportant"

I think you're going to have to revise this a bit. Clergy are authority figures in their communities, and the authority figures can't be viewed as inferior. What you could do is have these womanly things be regarded as not practical or not applicable in the larger world. Maybe they think women are pure and intellectual and holy and should be sheltered from the world in an ivory tower so they can write their books in peace (i.e. women are respected but condescended to)? Or maybe (drawing from the "cunning folk" roots) they think women are good at tending to small communities (parishes, villages, convents/monasteries, etc.) but have no place in politics at a national or international level (which ties in with your female clergy's origin; the women staying at home to take care of things while the men go out to wage war)?

Also, it occurs to me that a female clergy would have a very practical reason for a rule of celibacy: pre-modern-medicine