Dangerous Games by Laycock Joseph P.;

Author:Laycock, Joseph P.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

Reenchantment without Delusion

How are we to account for White Wolf’s strange relationship with “real” magicians, vampires, and faeries? How do fiction and reality begin to converge? Eliade suggested that humanity has a fundamental need for myth and that if scientific rationalism deprived humanity of sacred stories, popular fiction such as films and novels would arise to take their place.93 However, the extent to which popular culture can adequately fill this role is debatable. In what I have called the “consolation model,” secularization is triumphant, and role-playing games are a particularly potent mode of temporary escape into a realm of myth. However, there is now evidence that popular culture can reenchant the world by becoming “sacralized.” The fictional worlds depicted in novels, films, and role-playing games serve as resources for the production of actual moral and metaphysical meaning.

As early as the 1980s, sociologist Nachman Ben-Yahuda noted that science fiction offers answers to “fundamental existential problems” in a way that (at least for the populations these genres attract) science and traditional religion cannot.94 Many scholars found it significant that the first pagan group to obtain government recognition in the United States, the Church of All Worlds, derived its name from Robert Heinlein’s science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land.95 In more recent decades, scholars such as Christopher Partridge have demonstrated how such popular media as Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, and the Harry Potter series have influenced metaphysical and theological questions.96 A similar process has occurred in Japan where anime and manga have likewise contributed to new forms of religious belief and ritual.97

Danielle Kirby’s research on otherkin has framed this movement as part of the sacralization of popular culture.98 Lupa, a therianthrope, is the author of A Field Guide to Otherkin, which is currently the definitive text on this community from an emic perspective. Lupa cites an extensive list of popular media that otherkin can turn to in search of “inspiration for personal mythology.” This includes the fantasy fiction of Lewis and Tolkien, a variety of comic books and fantasy films, as well as D&D and Changeling.99

Sociologist Adam Possamai coined the term “hyperreal religions” to describe new religions adapted from popular culture. He writes, “Religion and popular culture co-exist intimately, and cannot be seen simply as having a relationship of cause and effect.”100 The sacralization of role-playing games does not occur in the manner claimed by moral entrepreneurs, in which players simply forget that games are fiction, or, alternatively, the games were always religions and the pretense of a “game” was simply a ploy to indoctrinate children. Fantasy games do not affect what players believe so much as how they perceive the world. Vampires and otherkin do not regard game mythologies as religious truths, but rather engage in a creative process in which fictional media is approached alongside religious ideas. Lynn Schofield Clark, in her ethnography of the intersection of religion and popular culture, notes that the millennial generation has an especially strong “openness to possibility.” Clark suggests that for many

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