Day 129.2: An Involved Day
Sep. 22nd, 2024 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunshowerdandelionI started research on the sociology of moon rabbit society. I think that tradition and myths would be their everyday. There wouldn't be a separation between nature and the divine, like here: there, the divine is nature, in the sense that the liturgy is the practice of their everyday life. I don't think it'd be right to call them 'religious' because the devotions - their work, mainly, which they get paid for, but is also what they occupy their life with (or at least the standard way to occupy the day) - is something that is indistinguishable from eating and everything else. I think this is why they take such a relaxed approach, even if they are colonized subjects. I also think this is why doctrinal things don't often concern most of them: faith is liturgy is their everyday, and they're pretty flexible.
At the same time I think I'll have to probe around a bit for the dislocations of colonialism. Obviously, the rabbits work the watermills of faith for the moon gods, and I think there would be something akin to a successful National Study movement (the nativist movement to recenter Japanese culture not on 'foreign' things like Confucianism, but on supposedly 'pure' and 'actual' Japanese classics), with an actual Department of Divinity and a strict ritual calendar that shifts every few years according to which gods are ascendant, and these redirect rabbit faith to power the ruling class, but the hegemony will have to be rather subtle I think.
And I'm talking fancy and high like this, very cleanly, but I don't think I'm going to make an actual rigid worldbuilding thing. Mysticism and hearsay are powerful weapons of the lunar ruling class, and I don't think Seiran, for all her natural savvy, can see all the layers (she doesn't need to), and I don't think I'll want to fall into that weird rigidity and ideal-type of tradition that I see sometimes in fantasy novels. So I'll leave a lot of it ambiguous! Today was quite interesting as a day.
At the same time I think I'll have to probe around a bit for the dislocations of colonialism. Obviously, the rabbits work the watermills of faith for the moon gods, and I think there would be something akin to a successful National Study movement (the nativist movement to recenter Japanese culture not on 'foreign' things like Confucianism, but on supposedly 'pure' and 'actual' Japanese classics), with an actual Department of Divinity and a strict ritual calendar that shifts every few years according to which gods are ascendant, and these redirect rabbit faith to power the ruling class, but the hegemony will have to be rather subtle I think.
And I'm talking fancy and high like this, very cleanly, but I don't think I'm going to make an actual rigid worldbuilding thing. Mysticism and hearsay are powerful weapons of the lunar ruling class, and I don't think Seiran, for all her natural savvy, can see all the layers (she doesn't need to), and I don't think I'll want to fall into that weird rigidity and ideal-type of tradition that I see sometimes in fantasy novels. So I'll leave a lot of it ambiguous! Today was quite interesting as a day.
