If Satan, Then God
Recently, I've been intrigued by the show Sleepy Hollow. It is essentially urban fantasy, but instead of the usual cast of vampires and werewolves, we have demons brought forth by the impending End Times. If you're able to check it out, I'd recommend it as an example of good (and fun) character development.
What caught my attention (aside from the spot-on casting) is that the characters frequently reference sources such as Milton for their information. The juxtaposition of Biblical text, Christian folklore, and general American folklore does a lot for the show's atmosphere.
It also got me thinking more generally about the use of deuterocanonical stories (and religious-flavoured folklore) in fantasy tales that don't make much use of the underlying material-- the religion which inspired the derivative folklore in the first place. Sleepy Hollow wisely decided to focus almost exclusively on the material in Revelations, which is in many ways separate from the rest of the Bible. (And since if you put a dozen Christians in a room and ask them what Revelations is all about, you'll get at least fifteen different answers, there's very little danger of 'messing up').
From a completely utilitarian perspective, using the religious folklore without delving into the underlying religion creates a fundamental worldbuilding problem. For the folklore to exist in real life, it requires the religion to have existed first (even if it springs from a fusion of several belief systems, those systems have to had existed first to create the syncretic folklore). In a universe where the folklore is true, it is intrinsically tied to the rest of the religion-- you can't have a awesomesauce Holy Grail unless Jesus existed, and by default the rest of Christianity; if Satan is real, that means he got tossed out of Heaven, indicating the existence of an Abrahamic God. And so forth.
This doesn't mean that you have to turn your fantasy story into an in-depth exploration of religious history. However, you should think through the other logical worldbuilding implications of having specifically religion-derived folklore be true in your fictional world.
What caught my attention (aside from the spot-on casting) is that the characters frequently reference sources such as Milton for their information. The juxtaposition of Biblical text, Christian folklore, and general American folklore does a lot for the show's atmosphere.
It also got me thinking more generally about the use of deuterocanonical stories (and religious-flavoured folklore) in fantasy tales that don't make much use of the underlying material-- the religion which inspired the derivative folklore in the first place. Sleepy Hollow wisely decided to focus almost exclusively on the material in Revelations, which is in many ways separate from the rest of the Bible. (And since if you put a dozen Christians in a room and ask them what Revelations is all about, you'll get at least fifteen different answers, there's very little danger of 'messing up').
From a completely utilitarian perspective, using the religious folklore without delving into the underlying religion creates a fundamental worldbuilding problem. For the folklore to exist in real life, it requires the religion to have existed first (even if it springs from a fusion of several belief systems, those systems have to had existed first to create the syncretic folklore). In a universe where the folklore is true, it is intrinsically tied to the rest of the religion-- you can't have a awesomesauce Holy Grail unless Jesus existed, and by default the rest of Christianity; if Satan is real, that means he got tossed out of Heaven, indicating the existence of an Abrahamic God. And so forth.
This doesn't mean that you have to turn your fantasy story into an in-depth exploration of religious history. However, you should think through the other logical worldbuilding implications of having specifically religion-derived folklore be true in your fictional world.
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