Is it problematic to use Christian mythology as some of the basis for the vampire/demon lore in my urban fantasy series? I don’t mean in an “offensive to Christians” way, but more in the sense of is it affirming Christianity as “right” or “true” and being dismissive of other religions? Am I overthinking this?
-Ze
Hey Ze, thanks for writing in!
The short answer is no: it’s unlikely to be offensive to anyone, Christian or otherwise, if you use Christian mythology as a basis for your urban fantasy elements. Maybe some book burning, “D&D is evil” types will get upset, but that’s just free publicity for you. The longer answer is a little more complicated, but only in specifics.
I used to be worried about exactly the same problem. I thought that if my urban fantasy story featured angels, I was saying that Christianity was “real,” while other religions weren’t. Or if I featured Odin in my story, then I was saying that only Norse mythology was real, etc.
At first, I thought the solution was to include aspects from other religions. That way, I was saying that in this setting, at least, every belief system was equally correct. However, that brings in the risk of appropriation. A lot of people have mixed feelings about their beliefs being used in fantasy stories, whereas others don’t want them used at all.
This is a sensitive enough topic that we generally recommend people not use spiritual elements from cultures they aren’t part of, unless it’s from a very privileged religion like Christianity where almost no one cares or something like Norse and Greek mythology, which are either no longer practiced or have been revived by modern adherents.
So long as your story doesn’t directly claim that Christianity is the only true belief system, you won’t have any problems. Readers either won’t think about other implications, or they’ll assume that other belief systems are also part of the world; they’re just not making an appearance.
Hope that answers your question, and good luck with your writing!
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Actually I think you have to be very careful with this.
I think many Christians would not want to read fantasy books that contain specific Christian elements, no matter if their faith is portrait in a positive or negative way, they’re just not okay with it, that is part of the religion.
Maybe using angels and specific angel names might be one of the few things acceptable, as this has been done before already.
Christians, like anyone else, like when their religion is portrayed positively. Visit a Christian bookstore for plenty of examples of fantasy and other genres with Christian elements.
What people typically don’t like is when their cultures are portrayed negatively, even when historically accurate.
For vampires, demons, etc., crosses and holy water are so much a part of the lore that you’d have to explain if you DIDN’T have them
One question you may want to ask:
WHY does this stuff work?
1. You state outright that Christianity is true and all other religions are false. That this is Jesus Himself at work. This could be a problem, particularly for non-Christians
2. Cultural indoctrination. Belief makes it so. Then all you need to say is that these beliefs are common, or that the specific creature has them
3. No explanation. That worked for Buffy and numerous others
I was going to suggest the same thing as #2 above – some authors use a “belief engine” type of mechanic where magic comes from people’s beliefs (or their speech, writing, etc). This is a way of explaining why the mythology elements of dominant religions/cultures are more prevalent (maybe only in certain areas) without endorsing the objective truth of those beliefs. Often these stories make some sort of point about the nature of reality.
When I GMed a ttrpg with vampires, they were a fungal infection that animated dead bodies and had partial access to the brain which they keep from decaying. Since most victims (in the old movies at least) were Christian, sacred symbols from their old lives causes a “what have I become” reaction. So someone who was Hindi who became a vampire would not be repelled by a cross but they would be repelled by a lotus (symbol of Vishnu).
There’s also the possibility that it doesn’t work, that vampires are spreading false rumors about their weaknesses so people and vampire hunters get overconfident. For instance vampires invade a village and everyone runs to the church for protection. Yep, one big target that can be surrounded.
The main problem i see in using Abrahamic monotheistic religions is that their Gods are omnipotent by definition. You know that Odin will die in the Ragnarok and despite having the gift of prophecy, he has limits. On the other hand Kirshna/Lord Brahma don’t realy care about anything, as “letting it go” is kinda the basis of their religion. But God, Yaveh and Allah are both omnipotent and concerned with people making the correct choices to the point to condemn their immortal soul to eternal damnation if they don’t behave the right way. That feels contrieved when such a god could just wish demons, monsters or vampires out of existence instead of imbuing someone with the ability to channel divine power. It would make sense if God weren’t omniscient, kinda like “Hey, if you have problems, say the word and i’ll help you with all my might”, but God should already know that there are Demons and what are their plans. Most stories of this kind forget that the moment an author say that Demons are true, he is telling also that God is true, and then the questions arise.
Vampire lore states that “blessed items” are a protection, but each culture uses their own items, as there are versiosn of vampires everywere from the greek Lamia to the malassyan Penanggalan, some even predating Christianity (like what happened to silver bullets to werewolves, when even guns didn’t exist in the early records of the myth, i.e Lycaon).
I think there even are vampire stories where vampires make fun of humans who wave a cross at them, because they themselves didn’t grow up Christian and the cross has no meaning to them.
What I found quite interesting is the idea that it is the faith of the person who uses a religious symbol and not the symbol itself. Like this, the vampire will not flee from the cross, but from the faith of the one holding it. Whether the person holds a cross, a David’s star, or a Thor’s hammer would be of no consequence.
That way you take the Power of God out of the equation, making a vampire (often a demon itself like when Dracula is called the Prince of Darkness) just a monster, and the way to fight it just Magic.
If you take out the religious leverage you can’t maintain the supernatural premise of vampires being demons or vengeful spirits possesing a dead body to do evil things. Because for spirits to exist, soul must be real, and unless you create a whole cosmogony, only religion mess with souls and other metaphysical stuff. A soul needs an afterlife and either a heaven or a hell to go (otherwise there would be ghosts, or in this case vampires, everywhere), and for an afterlife to exist there must be a God that judges where each soul go. And so on.
An exorcism implies that the exorcist reminds the possesing spirit that “the power of God” compels it to leave the body, just that. And the Catholic doctrine specifies that noone have any power but God.
Declaring that, in fact, there is no God, can be a fast solution, but would have more nihilistic and cynical consequences.
I think you’re forgetting that those religions have been dealing with the question of omnipotent God that doesn’t always readily react to the believers’ plights for centuries.
Maybe a Vulcan would go “hah, illogical”, but at least in the Western culture (which I assume, because the author is talking about Christianity) people are conditioned to accept this idea of God acting in vague, unexplained ways, mostly through humans. It’s even expected.
One shouldn’t base their writing on the bad writing of Sacred Texts. Back in the day they didn’t had the need to handle the problem of an omnipotent character (given that for them God wasn’t “a character” at all). They always can say that “Humanity is not ready to know God’s plans” but it is lazy writing in the end. I don’t think it should carry over a fiction work.
An author must have a cohesive plot with everything keeping the internal logic, so when one put Demons (specially christian demons) in, they must be ready to handle all the questions that would arise, because no matter what you believe, i think we can agree that demons and vampires don’t exist in the physical world, so we can congecture wether is God work preventing them to appear or whatever else.
But in that story one of the narrative premises is that demons/vampires are real, which imply the existence of God (muslim God if it is a Djinn, Efreet or any other islamic demons), because there is no other explanation.
The moment you change any of that you’re changing the demon into something else.
tl;dr: In real world religion is a matter of faith because there aren’t any physical evidence like a demon munching in your innards, once that evidence exist, you must provide an answer or your readers will be as mad to your book as with the real world injustices.
I would argue that while demons and vampires might prove the existence of a soul (aka. something which endures beyond the death of a human being), the existence of a soul does not, per se, prove the existence of god (or a god). You’re making a logical jump there.
Humans could very well have had dealings with these beings and thought up a powerful entity which might keep them under control (if so the entity wished, hence the whole ‘god’s plans are not understandable for man’ argument whenever someone falls prey to a demon or other evil entity) to feel better about a world in which they were far from the most powerful players. ‘I might be less powerful than that Efreet, but Allah is far more powerful than it and if I am devout, Allah will protect me from it.’
As i said, the existence of a soul mean that once the body dies, the soul must go anywhere, because if the soul simply cease to exist demons couldn’t be evil spirits, and if they go nowhere the world would be full of vampires and ghost to the brim. If there is a “where” for the souls to go, either you choose a cosmogony that already deals with it or you make up a new one, which was my point.
We are talking about Abrahamic gods here, or about omnipotent Gods that enforce a specific behaviour by threats of eternal hell. Such a vengeful god wouldn’t allow oposition and leaving the fight in the hands of imperfect third hand creations don’t seem to be a great plan when He could fix everything in a whim.
It’s not a case on how could someone define such a situation, it’s about what Christianity say in their rulebook.
When we are told that there is a God but we have no proofs, we must use Faith, but when you have a certainity of a living demon you don’t need to believe, it is right there in front of you. And any evidence of the supernatural must mean that all the linked phenomena is real too.
Again, we can’t extrapolate from how real world religions work. Authors word is law, and what they say is the reality of their book. So if a God have a mysterious plan, better make sure the writer knows it and explain it, or it would feel contrieved.
The existence of a soul merely suggests that there is a soul. It could reincarnate (then becoming a demon or other evil spirit could be some form of failed incarnation) through a natural process. It could fade over time. It could become one with nature and join a neutral, non-acting life energy all around us (in which case evil spirits might have a due date) which in turn also infuses humans with energy which turns into a soul over time, through use. Perhaps some souls simply refuse to return to their original state, having gained too much identity and those souls become ghosts.
Religions are based on the fact that humans understand the principle of ‘far future’ and think past the next week or next month or next winter. Humans know they will die one day, that their life will have an end. Religion is created to answer the question of ‘what happens when we die.’ We don’t know the answer to that question – because when we die, we don’t come back. That doesn’t mean all which religion tells us about the afterlife is correct.
Having evil spirits in your urban fantasy means there are evil spirits. It does not automatically mean that there is a god. Humans might call them demons because Chrisitanity exists in this world. That doesn’t mean that the Christian (or any other) god exists in this world. Perhaps there are gods in this world, perhaps there even is the Christian god. But the existence of evil entities does not automatically validate Christian (or other) belief. There are other ways they can come into existence.
Demons don’t even have to be human souls. Evil spirits in general don’t have to be human. Perhaps they are an immaterial species which simply exists and they’ve hung on to human belief of souls and pretend to be souls to play with us or further their own plans. Perhaps they can even possess humans – if they possess the dead, they create vampires.
As I said, you are making a jump in your logic. That jump is ‘when demons exist, souls must be real, and when souls exist, god must be real.’ Neither of those things absolutely leads to the next. Neither does the existence of immaterial beings who are involved with the world in a bad way say that souls are real, not does the existence of souls say that god is real. Demons can be their own species. Ghosts can be ‘recordings’ of traumatic events that are just replayed. (As a matter of fact, many ghost stories suggest that the ghost is not aware of their surrounding, which would go well with that theory.)
It’s a matter of the chicken and the egg – which was first? Did god make the world and evil spirits exist because of god’s will? Or did evil spirits come from elsewhere and humans made up god to deal with them? You can have both versions in your story, the choice is yours. Choosing to incorporate Christian belief doesn’t automatically mean that your story will validate the existence of the Christian god. You just say that humans in your world created Chrisitanity to deal with the world around them.
If you’re curious about how various people have dealt with the concept of souls, you could look into how different philosophical schools of thought deal with minds/souls (eg dualism, monism, and their peers). An interesting case is epiphenomenalism, where a mind/soul is a byproduct of a physical brain, like smoke off a fire, and when the brain ceases to function, so does its output. It could be an intriguing thing to explore if you’re including a world that explicitly contains souls.
I’m replying here because the layout don’t let me nest as far.
All those “perharps” are just creating a new cosmogony, is not what Sacred texts say and OP asked about using Christianity in their works. If you explain anything differently from the dogma then is another thing.
-“Here, this is a Demon”
+”Cool, a fallen angel vanished from heaven for helping Satan trying to take over the Thone of God?”
-“No, just a monster i want to call Demon”
+”Oh…”
It’s not my logic jump, but religions’
I’m not trying to devise a way for the Christian cosmogony to make sense, i’m just pointing out the problematic points of Christian/Islamic/Judaic belief system when applied to a work of fiction. Readers would be more critic to reasons given by the author than to reasons given by a religion, given that religions don’t care if their message makes sense, you just can add faith until it fits. “Mysterious motives” are just lazy worldbuilding. A novel must have internal consistency, which religions usually lack of.
You still can use parts of a religion in your work without making all of religion a truth there. That is what I was telling you.
Demons exist – so humans have come up with a way of explaining them. They use expressions from Christianity, because that is the way of explaining they have come up with. They call these evil spirits demons and assume they are fallen messengers of god, because that is what their scripture says. What the scripture says, however, doesn’t have to be true, even in-universe.
Using beings from a religion doesn’t necessarily make that religion reality in the world in question. The religion can have come up because that being exists, but the existence of that being, even in-universe, doesn’t mean everything else about the religion is also true. The existence of demons doesn’t always proof the existence of god.
Just stepping in to say that God, Yaveh, & Allah are all names for the same figure. The Abrahamic religions all worship the same figure. Many aspects of that worship & the cultures surrounding said worship may differ, but it’s all centered on the same deity.
Even the capital A Allah, just means God in Arabic. Just as Christians choose to captialize the G in God. When writing about figures such as the Olympic gods in Arabic, they would be written as being allahs. Lower case. Referring to God as Allah is in deference to Arabic as a sacred language & using it when speaking of sacred figures. Even then, there are some Muslims that will say or write God when doing so in English.
(Side note to no one in particular: discussions such as these are one of the few times my chosen online moniker feels weird.)
There’s a horror novel – “The Keep” – in which the vampire retreats from the cross-shaped symbols engraved on the walls of the keep. However, it turns out (Spoilers) that he’s doing this not because crosses had any effect on him, but to freak out his main opponent, who is a deeply religious Jew, and to make people believe that the symbols are crucifixes, rather than the hilt of the sword that could actually kill him!
As for using Christian mythology to stop vampires, I’m guessing that the same people who’d be offended by using Christian symbols in a vampire story would be just as offended, if not more so, if the symbols were shown not to work (as in the example above), or weren’t even tried due to the vampire’s opponents not being Christian believers.
Neil Gaiman uses a lot of lore from Abrahamic religions! His work might be a good source of inspiration.
You might consider Christian symbols and stories as useful metaphors of something else in your writing. For example, I like to think of demons as a metaphor for humanity’s dark side.
I have a story about demons and angels because they’re so prevalent in the culture and I want their basic symbolism as a foundation for the lore. But I removed the religion and God from the equation, and changed them into a forces of nature. Like, that’s just how it is, that’s how this world works.
Not sure if it’s a good idea, but like, I’m still gonna call my demons demons because otherwise the meaning is lost.
“Demon” is a generic enough term that you’re probably fine there, but “angel” may seem a little weird if there’s not at least a nod to Christianity (or another religion that has angels). You could probably just change the name to something nature themed and be fine though.
I’m leaning towards leaving angels as is because they’re paired with demons. It wouldn’t make sense for them to be demons and water spirits. Even demons and light spirits would sounds weird.
I do have higher powers called Order and Chaos, and Order with its angels is considered good, while Chaos and its demons are considered bad. But they’re not actually Good and Evil, and that’s kinda the point of the story. Also, it’s an urban fantasy so I can just say that’s what humans call these beings, even if they’re not actual angels and demons.
So I hope, as you said, people wouldn’t think too much about it, lol
I think you should be just fine. There are plenty of stories where there are angels but no God. So long as the angels represent something abstract like order or light, this shouldn’t break theme.
Daemon means spirit in greek and hence any spirit would be a demon (there is still controversy between who thinks that demons are the fallen angels that fought alongside Lucifer and the ones that think that they are the souls of very bad people) while Angel comes grom angelos, greek for messenger as they are messengers of God, created just for that and that alone (which raises questions as to why where they able to rebel in the first place).
If you use the archetypical winged man form it really wouldnt matter how do you call them. They wouldnt be lore accurate anyway.
On the topic, and of the greater topic of “omnipotence” which I feel is more relevant here, some approaches I have considered and been influenced by are that “God is like the Force from Star Wars (honestly one of the best ways to handle it).
PS: I recall that another approach in the Files series was that any being with such capabilities must necessarily also be incredibly finite, so that such beings are at the same time the most strong and most impotent. In terms of how while “mundane” logic might not apply, there are certainly logics that do apply to them (especially in terms of the range of effective belief, but now we get into forum confusion zones).
PPS: Incidentally, the belief that “God” is some sort of “punitive sky grandpa” is pretty much outdated elements from cultural effects at the time of those writings, and, perhaps more importantly, pretty unworkable in media.
To expand on a point: I believe that it is important to utilize, but not emphasize, comprehensibility. If you think about it, “omnipotence” is a paradox in and of itself. But that just means “mundane” logic might not apply. This is one of the best ways in general to consider the issue when you write it.
A problem with the “claim that Christianity is the only true belief system” is it’s often just a poor attempt to proselytize. The big reveal is that everyone should believe in Jesus and confess their sins. Christians aren’t the only offenders. There are plenty of stories where the big reveal is _____ religion is true, and the audience should convert. They’re all terrible stories.
As long as the author isn’t trying to convert people and the religious elements fit, there’s no inherent problem with including religion in a story. Religion is a way that people deal with fear. Religion also feeds fear. It’s no wonder, as others have observed, that religious symbolism is entangled in the lore of many creatures. So it’s not unexpected for that symbolism to be present, whatever the base religion.
There’s nothing wrong with using well-researched portrayals of creatures from other cultures. Just don’t make the protag-savior white, and don’t make all the Jews, Arabs, etc evil.
Just please don’t portray the upside down cross as evil/ associated with demons. It’s a strange trope and I hate it. The upside down pentagram on the other hand makes sense.
Both actually make sense from the way they were originally designed as the evil counterpart.
The upside-down cross is first found in descriptions of black masses – as the black mass is the upside-down version of a regular mass, the cross, too, must be upside down.
The pentagram is an older symbol than the cross and the upside-down pentagram also resembles a devil’s head (the downward-pointing point is a triangular chin, the outward-pointing points are goat ears, and the upward-pointing points are the horns). In its regular way, the pentagram is a symbol of protection, in the upside-down way, it is a gateway for evil.
The very first use of an inverted cross was the crucifixion of St Peter, who asked to be crucified upside-down because he wasn’t worthy to die the same way as Jesus.
True … thought of that after my answer, too. But the other commenter especially spoke of it as a symbol of evil and – apart from being an instrument of torture and killing, as in Jesus’ case – the upside-down crucification here is not a symbol of evil.
The upside down cross is the symbol of the Catholic Church. People get conspiracy theories and start thinking the pope has a symbol of Satan on his hat rather than a symbol of the church.
I don’t think inverted crosses were associated with black masses until much later. Most descriptions describe no cross.
But my point stands, if you have Christianity being true 99% of the time that means Catholicism. And catholic characters being scared of an upside down cross is silly.
Oh no! The house is protected by Saint Peter… ooo!
Meanwhile an upside down pentagram was a symbol of evil, as instead of the spirit being pointed toward god, it pointed down to the material, the association with goat horns came later.
Although Catholics absolutely used upright pentagrams as a protective and mildly holy symbol.
Larry pointed out that the cross was upside-down, but I’d already noticed this myself.
“Do you know what that means?” he asked softly.
“Religious distress signal?” I said.
‘A Night in the Lonesome October’ by Roger Zelazny
I disagree that you can’t use elements from cultures you aren’t part of. As long as you aren’t disrespectful I don’t see why not. After all, mixing cultures is part of being human.
For example, I am atheist, and Hinduism considers atheism a valid path to spirituality since the journey is individual. I rather like that idea. Also, I have been researching Buddhist concepts, and the idea of not-self, the idea of you having no fixed self and being okay with that, using it to not focus on suffering, is rather comforting and useful. Just because I wasn’t born in that culture doesn’t mean that I can’t talk about or use those elements.
If you’re only talking about abstract concepts like individual spiritualism or not having a static concept of the self, that’s more likely to be okay. It’s when you put Vishnu or Mahakala in the story that you enter a mine field.
Why? If you do enough research, I don’t see a problem with it. After all, cultural appropriation came from minorities doing things, and then white people coming in, doing them, and people crediting the white people or saying they did it better. (See black people singing rock songs, like a black woman sang a cover of Hound Dog, and then Elvis Presley singing those rock songs, and them being popular). If I use a pocong, an indonesian spirit in my story, I don’t see what’s different than using La Llorona or the Jersey Devil, or christian demons.
We have an article that lays out our position in detail: https://mythcreants.com/blog/understanding-appropriative-worldbuilding/
The short version is that the risk of getting something wrong is high, and the potential to cause harm is great.
I actually know that a lot of people from Mexico and the surrounding areas are not happy with the way horror movie makers have been using La Llorona, because they usually get things wrong about her. So using her isn’t that good, either.
The Jersey Devil is an American myth and as a such not from a culture considered a minority, therefore you can use it. Same goes for any kind of western European being. If you use the Scottish Nessie or the German Rübezahl, nobody is going to beat an eye.
“I actually know that a lot of people from Mexico and the surrounding areas are not happy with the way horror movie makers have been using La Llorona, because they usually get things wrong about her. So using her isn’t that good, either.”
Oh. I didn’t know that. (That Conjuring movie, La Llorona, was awful, by the way. I’d like to see Mythcreants go over the flaws in the conjuring franchise.)
What do people get wrong?
“Same goes for any kind of western European being.”
Not Eastern European? I thought using Baba Yaga, and vampires (living-corpse types, pre Bram Stoker) was okay.
Thanks for answering my questions.
I’d be a little more careful with Eastern European lore, because people also get a lot wrong. The Witcher series is an exception, as the author is Eastern European and working with his own mythology.
Vampires are around all over our planet, they’re not specific to Eastern Europe (although the nosferatu-like type is, but it’s been used a lot already and what goes for vampire these days is not, strictly speaking, a classic Eastern European vampire). Baba Yaga is already another topic – a lot of people use her as your average evil witch. She can be that (she certainly enjoys human flesh), but she’s much more than that – including a former goddess of great power. Using Slavic beings in a strict black-white way doesn’t work, because Slavic mythology doesn’t have that strict good-vs-evil setting.
What was done wrong with La Llorona is different depending on the movie. Mostly it’s taking a legendary figure who warns of marrying the wrong guy and making her an average horror movie monster.
Although linked to the symbol to the “Seal of Solomon”, the magical signet ring used by King Solomon to control demons and spirits, and used in Kabbalah, the Star of David is NOT a religious symbol to Jews the way the Crucifix is to Christians. It symbolizes Judaism, not God
If a demon or vampire is to be affected by a Jewish symbol, I’d recommend the Hebrew letter SHIN, which looks roughly like a W. It stands for the word Shaddai, a name for God
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_(letter)#In_Judaism