Hyper-Real Religion, Fiction-Based Religion

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the organisation and development of the spiritual Tolkien milieu, a largely online-situated network of individuals and groups that draw on J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary mythology for spiritual inspiration. It is the first academic treatment of Tolkien spirituality and one of the first mono¬graphs on fiction-based religion, a type of religion that uses fiction as authori¬ta¬tive texts. Adopting a semiotic approach to religion, the book raises questions about the persuasive power of narrative, about religious blending, and about rationalisation of beliefs. How can some readers come to believe that supernatural agents from fictional narratives are real? How do fiction-based religions emerge when their authoritative texts lack important religious building-blocks, such as descriptions of rituals? And how do adherents of fiction-based religions legitimise their beliefs, given the fact that their religion is based on fiction? In short, with Tolkien religion as a case the dissertation aims to uncover the semio¬tic structures and processes involved in the construction and maintenance of fiction-based religion, and the social structures that sup¬port the plausibility of such religion.

er uddannet cand.mag. i religionsvidenskab ved Aarhus Universitet. Han er siden 2011 ansat som docent i religionssociologi ved Leiden Universitet, Holland. I efteråret 2014 blev han tildelt PhD-graden (cum laude) for sin afhandling The Spiritual Tolkien Milieu: A Study of Fiction-based Religion.

FAERIE, FAE AND OTHERKIN TRIBES: The Silver Elves’ Guide for Finding Your Magical Kind and Kin by The Silver Elves is dedicated to tribes of the faeries, fae that are faerie blends, otherkin, otherworldlies, and miscellaneous assorted fae, but we have also created a companion book that has the elven tribes in it. So if you are of elven kind, you may wish to also check out ELF TRIBES: The Silver Elves’ Guide for Finding Your Magical Kind, Kin and Tribe.
In these modern times we now abide, it is most important that the faerie, fae and otherkin have a strong magical narrative of their own in a world that often likes to tell us who we are and who we are not, and mostly quite inaccurately so. It is our hope that in reading the over 150 magical narratives contained in Faerie, Fae and Otherkin Tribes that you will be inspired, our kindred brothers and sisters, to begin if you have not already done so to create your own narrative or add to what you already remember and intuit.

The Complete Dictionary of Arvyndase: The Elven Language of The Silver Elves. There are over 30,000 words in the language of Arvyndase and in this dictionary, as Arvyndase is a complete language and may be both written and spoken as such! This dictionary is divided into two parts for easy use, first, English to Arvyndase and second, Arvyndase to English. The pronunciation is provided next to each Arvyndase word. Arvyndase is a complete language and people are finding it both beautifully magical and easy to learn, write and speak. It is perhaps the only full elven language (Tolkien's elven languages, for instance, are beautiful but very limited in the amount of words and usage.) Both people who are following the Elven Way as a spiritual path as well as authors of fantasy novels with elven characters are beginning to use Arvyndase more and more since it is a complete language that may be fully spoken or written in conversation. It is easy to learn because it follows the same basic structure of English and essentially may be learned through word substitution using the Arvyndase dictionary. Dialects of Arvyndase may also be created for non-English speaking individuals by word substitution into different language structures. If you are interested in learning to use Arvyndase as a language, then we also highly recommend the book Arvyndase (Silverspeech): A Short Course in the Magical Language of the Silver Elves. There are nine chapters in the book with 30 lessons in each chapter or 270 lessons altogether. The book uses a process of word substitution to gradually introduce the student to the use of the language while it speaks about the language itself, its creation, and the philosophy of the Elves.
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Today a new trend is clearly discernable, that of ‘hyper-real religions’. These are innovative religions and spiritualities that mix elements of religious traditions with popular culture. If we imagine a spectrum of intensity of the merging of popular culture with religion, we might find, at one end, groups practicing Jediism appropriated from the Star Wars movies, Matrixism from the Matrix trilogy, and neo-pagan rites based on stories from The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series. At the other end of the spectrum, members of mainstream religions, such as Christianity can be influenced or inspired by, for example, The Da Vinci Code. Through various case studies, this book studies the on- and off-line religious/spiritual consumption of these narratives through a social scientific approach.

ELF TRIBES: The Silver Elves’ Guide for Finding Your Magical Kind and Kin is dedicated to tribes of the Elven, but we have also created a companion book FAERIE, FAE AND OTHERKIN TRIBES: The Silver Elves’ Guide for Finding Your Magical Kind and Kin. If you are of faerie, fae or otherkin, you may wish to check it out. And if you are interested in elves, fae and otherkin and in the phenomenon of the awakening in our modern times of the magical folk, you will surely enjoy reading both of these books and delighting in the many magical variations of tribes that are here among us.

Modern day elfae find it to be very important to have a strong magical narrative of their own in a world that often likes to tell you who you are and who you are not, and mostly quite inaccurately so. It is our hope that reading the over 150 magical narratives of elven tribes contained in Elf Tribes will inspire you, our kindred brothers and sisters, to begin if you have not already done so to create your own narrative or add to what you already remember and intuit.

Full bibliographical information:

Davidsen, Markus Altena (2016), “From Star Wars to Jediism: The Emergence of Fiction-based Religion”, in Ernst van den Hemel & Asja Szafraniec (eds.), Words: Religious Language Matters, New York: Fordham University Press, 376-389 (plus endnotes pp. 571-575).

The article is a revision of an article published in Danish in 2010 as "Fiktionsbaseret religion: Fra Star Wars til jediism", Religionsvidenskabeligt Tidsskrift 55, 3-21.

Unfortunately the volume took a long time coming along; the volume is based on a conference in Groningen, the Netherlands in June 2009. My article was submitted in 2011. Sorry if it is already pretty outdated - and please get in touch if you have newer or better information on Jediism.

In this short version of my BA thesis, I investigate how H.P Lovecraft and Kenneth Grant apply strategies to be read as a religious text, based on the theories of Marco Frenschkowski. (This English version was written as a language sample and excludes further contemporary debates in the discussion of fiction-based religion.)

The Jedi Community is a loose confederation of groups and individuals who, inspired by George Lucas' Star Wars movies, have adopted an identity as Jedi Knights. Contrary to Star Wars fans who may occasionally and temporarily play as Jedi, members of the Jedi Community aim to simply be Jedi Knights – always and everywhere. They will even say that they are the real Jedi – as opposed to the fictional Jedi of the movies. Members of the Jedi Community also believe that the Force, the cosmic power from Star Wars, actually exists in the real world. An important part of the practice as Jedi Knights is thus to study the Force and connect with it in ritual. This article provides the most comprehensive overview to date of the Jedi Community. It sketches the history of the Jedi Community since its emergence from the online Star Wars roleplaying community in the late 1990s, and presents an overview of the Community members' core beliefs and practices. Throughout, due attention is paid to the divergent views on issues of doctrine, practice, and identity held by the two main factions within the Jedi Community, the Jedi Realists, for whom the Jedi Path is a spiritual way of life, and the Jediists who seek to develop Jediism into a full-fledged and legally recognized religion. As Henry Jenkins has famously pointed out, fans of popular culture are no passive consumers, but active agents – " textual poachers " even – who engage in " a type of cultural bricolage through which [they] fragment texts and reassemble the broken shards according to their own blueprint " (1992, 26). In other words: fans use popular culture as a resource for the creation of their own folk culture or folklore. This process of turning popular culture into folklore can arguably take place at three levels. At the most basic level, any consumption of popular culture involves the co-construction of " folk meaning. " Readers interpret popular culture in light of their own experience, and use fan texts to make sense of situations, relationships, and aspirations in their own lives. This interpretative freedom is what Michel de Certeau

This paper challenges recent arguments that the Church of the SubGenius (COSG) is a 'real' religious organization, in that it purportedly provides a path to spiritual enlightenment. Besides downplaying the COSG's comedic aspects, these essentialist approaches have largely ignored its historical development within the American 'alternative' underground of the 1980s and early-1990s. Drawing on interviews and the analysis of participatory media, this paper examines the COSG alongside Zontar, a stridently political zine named in honour of a B-movie monster that its founders claimed to worship. It is demonstrated that these interrelated, intentionally 'fake' religions emerged in the context of a turbulent American culture war, and confronted a conservative evangelicalism perceived to be a political threat. While the founders of the COSG and Zontar accordingly attacked and satirised politically engaged television preachers such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, their approaches to certain less explicitly political televangelists can be considered examples of ironic fandom, shot through with flashes of genuine admiration. In all of these activities, the founders of these fake faiths participated in a cultural discussion about authentic Christianity in America -playful religious work more indicative of the COSG's cultural significance than its alleged status as an 'authentic' religion.

English Summary of the PhD Dissertation "The Spiritual Tolkien Milieu: A Study of Fiction-based Religion". The public defence took place on Thursday 16 October, 1.45 in the Large Auditorium of the Academy Building of Leiden University. The doctoral degree was awarded cum laude.

During the last decade, scholars of religion have researched Star Wars-based Jediism, the Tolkien-inspired Elven community, and other religious movements inspired by popular fiction. This article raises two related questions about this new kind of religion: what should we call it?, and what differentiates it from conventional religion on the one hand, and from fandom on the other? Referring to Jean Baudrillard, Adam Possamai has suggested referring to new religions based on popular culture as ‘hyper-real religions’. I contend, however, that for Baudrillard, all religions are hyper-real in the sense that they ascribe reality to the socially constructed. I therefore offer fiction-based religion as a more accurate term. Fiction-based religions draw their main inspiration from fictional narratives (e.g. Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings) which do not claim to refer to the actual world, but create a fictional world of their own. As such, they can be contrasted with conventional (or ‘history’-based) religions whose core narratives (e.g. the Gospels) do claim to refer to the actual world and therefore fall under the narrative meta-genre of history, although they do not correspond with the actual world from a historian's perspective. Despite their fictional basis, fiction-based religions are genuine religions because the activity and beliefs of which they consist refer to supernatural entities which are claimed to exist in the actual world. As such, fiction-based religions can be contrasted with fandom which, as a form of play, creates a fictional play world rather than making assertions about the actual world. Fiction-based religion emerges when fictional narratives are used as authoritative texts for actual religious practice.

This contribution expands and explores the concept of “hyper-real religions” through the case of the Disciples of the New Dawn (DOTND). A pure parody internet religion, DOTND is subtle and sly with its snark but quite real in its religious import and impact. Based on digital ethnographic observation on social media sites such as Facebook and on blogs, this contribution adds to the conversation about hyper-real religions and “authentic fakes.” Drawing on the literature surrounding these terms and interviews with individuals who share their perspectives and opinions about DOTND, this chapter reconsiders what an authentic religion is in light of authority, authenticity, community, identity, and ritual. By doing this with an “ambiguous fake” religion such as DOTND, this chapter helps enlarge the understanding of what constitutes “religion” in light of digital parody and the ambiguity of the features of religion online.

Dit is de Nederlandse samenvatting van mijn proefschrift getiteld 'The Spiritual Tolkien Milieu: A Study of Fiction-based Religion'.

Voor de meeste mensen zijn de fantasyboeken van J.R.R. Tolkien pure fictie. Voor een kleine groep mensen betekenen ze meer: over de hele wereld hebben individuen en kleine groepen religieuze praktijken en tradities ontwikkeld op basis van het werk van Tolkien. Ze roepen de bovennatuurlijke wezens uit de verhalen op in rituelen geïnspireerd door moderne hekserij, of ze maken sjamaanreizen naar Midden-aarde om hen daar te bezoeken. Sommigen geloven dat ze zelf ‘ontwaakte elfen’ zijn; ze hebben ontdekt dat hun voorouders elfen zijn, of ze hebben een elfenziel die gevangen zit in een menselijk lichaam. Tolkien-religie kan worden gezien als een voorbeeld van fiction-based religion, dus religie gebaseerd op fictie in plaats van op verhalen die beweren authentieke geschiedenis te zijn. Er zijn meer fiction-based religions dan Tolkien-religie – het ‘jediïsme’, de Star Wars-religie, is er een – en in het boek wordt een theoretisch kader ontwikkeld waarmee fiction-based religion in het algemeen bestudeerd kunnen worden. Er wordt een theorie ontwikkeld over de religieuze affordances van teksten, op basis waarvan het mogelijk is te voorspellen welke fictie bruikbaar is om een religie op te baseren en welke niet. Een belangrijke reden dat Tolkiens werken daarvoor geschikt zijn is dat Tolkien zelf in de proloog van In de ban van de ring en in privécorrespondentie suggereert dat de bovennatuurlijke wereld uit zijn verhalen misschien wel echt bestaat. Ten tweede wordt een theorie van ‘geloofsdynamiek’ van religieuze tradities gepresenteerd. Volgens deze theorie bestaat de kern van alle religies, ook Tolkien-religie, uit rituelen waarin contact wordt gemaakt met bovennatuurlijke wezens. Deze rituelen worden vervolgens verklaard, uitgewerkt en verdedigd in een stelsel van geloofsvoorstellingen. In het boek wordt daarbij bijzondere aandacht besteed aan de vraag hoe aanhangers van Tolkien-religie omgaan met het feit dat hun religie gebaseerd is op fictie. Het Tolkien-milieu is klein, maar het laat bijzonder helder drie trends zien die zich in het algemeen voordoen in hedendaagse religie, namelijk individualisering, psychologisering en een toenemend gebruik van fictie als inspiratiebron.

Met vier collega-religiewetenschappers publiceerde een van ons in november vorig jaar [2015] een opiniestuk over religiekunde in NRC Handelsblad (Davidsen et al. 2015). Het stuk was een oproep voor kritisch, vergelijkend en religiewetenschappelijk gefundeerd religieonderwijs. We hebben veel positieve reacties op het stuk gekregen, maar docenten vroegen zich af hoe ze religiekunde in de praktijk voor zich moesten zien. Met een artikelserie in Narthex over proberen we deze vraag te beantwoorden. De artikelen worden geschreven door religiewetenschappers en vakdidactici samen en reiken nieuwe religiewetenschappelijke kennis aan én didactiek om deze kennis te verwerken in activerende, boeiende lessen.

The book and film franchise of Harry Potter has inspired a monumental fandom community with a veracious output of fanfiction and general musings on the text and the vivid universe contained therein. A significant portion of these texts deal with Professor Severus Snape, the stern Potions Master with ambiguous ethics and loyalties. This paper explores a small community of Snape fans who have gone beyond a narrative retelling of the character as constrained by the work of Joanne Katherine Rowling. The ‘Snapewives’ or ‘Snapists’ are women who channel Snape, are engaged in romantic relationships with him, and see him as a vital guide for their daily lives. In this context, Snape is viewed as more than a mere fictional creation. He is seen as a being that extends beyond the Harry Potter texts with Rowling perceived as a flawed interpreter of his supra-textual essence. While a Snape religion may be seen as the extreme end of the Harry Potter fandom, I argue that religions of this nature are not uncommon, unreasonable, or unprecedented. Popular films are a mechanism for communal bonding, individual identity building, and often contain their own metaphysical discourses. Here, I plan to outline the manner in which these elements resolve within extreme Snape fandom so as to propose a nuanced model for the analysis of fandom-inspired religion without the use of unwarranted veracity claims.

Fiktionsbaseret religion RV T 5 5 ( 2 0 1 0 ) 3 -2 1 Fiktionsbaseret religion Fra Star Wars til jediisme M A R K U S D AV I D S E N ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Jediism is a new religion which is based on George Lucas' Star Wars movies. The core traits of Jediism are the identifi cation with the Jedi Knights from Star Wars, the belief that the Force exists outside the fi ctional universe, and the ritual interaction with the Force. Based on an analysis of the home pages of seven Jediist groups, this article sketches the self-understanding of the Jediists focusing on their self-identifi cation, Force teachings, practice and ethics, and on the negotiation of the relation to Star Wars. Further it is argued why Jediism must be interpreted as a religion and not simply as a fan phenomenon. Finally the category 'fi ction-based religion' is suggested to denote a series of new religions based largely on 'fi ctive religions' embedded in works of fi ction.

Fantasy i bred forstand er ikke kun tidsfordrivende underholdning. Mange laesere og seere finder i fantasy en kilde til fornyet livsoptimisme og moralsk opbyggelse. Nogle går endnu videre og opbygger religioner baseret på fantasy. Et eksempel på en sådan fantasybaseret religion er jediismen, en religion baseret på science fiction-filmene i Star Wars (SW )-serien af instruktør George Lucas.