Chapter Text
What do you reference for the ethical issues and rituals of the Fire Nation?
I have a few degrees in various religious studies, and I'm drawing heavily on multiple sources. Because we've mainly only seen the Fire Nation so far, I'll focus on that. The ethical quandaries and the place of the religious leader as a legal expert are drawing heavily on the classical period of early rabbinic Judaism (in theory; in practice, eh, probably a little closer to medieval Judaism - which I wanted for the sense that law can and should reflect ethics and the will of God); the power structure of the temple itself (being highly centralised and structured, having a system of councils to make religious decisions, relationship with the secular state / imperialism) borrows heavily from the Catholic church; the actual theologies/philosophies/rituals borrow mostly from Hinduism and Shinto, with a bit of Judaism and Buddhism. (Edited to add re: ethics and ritual: also Confucianism.)
The ceremony I built for the soldiers was based on Shinto (the blessing; also the tea ceremony, but that was more loosely Japanese), Buddhism (sort of), and Hinduism (the circling of the ritual fire).
The ritual I built for Zuko when he became a Fire Sage sort of mixed Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim traditions (fire, self-immersion, statement), because you can do that with firebenders! It also maybe possibly kind of was inspired by Game of Thrones. A little.
There's a bunch of other stuff that's drawn from other sources, too, but I should probably finish this essay. If you have anything specific you want to ask about, please do! But the short answer is: legal/ethical/moral issues: Judaism; structure/relationship with state/structural decision-making: Catholicism; theology and ritual: Hinduism, Shinto, Judaism, and Buddhism.
(I'm also especially interested in Shinto and Judaism as indigenous land-based religions on that front, but I suspect that will reflect more on displaced peoples than on the Fire Nation.)
But how do you make decisions about ritual?
What I actually do is pare it down to the point I'm trying to make. So let's take Zuko's initiation. What did I want to represent?
1. The importance of consent. This is usually a step taken by adults who know what they're doing, and the ritual should show that. 2. Rebirth. A sage is no longer the person they were before the sagehood.
Great, so with those two things in mind, I thought about the bestowing of religious status (conversion, priesthood, etc). What rituals do I know that reflect consent? Islam focuses on the making of a statement. All immersing religions are referencing rebirth in some way, so that's good. Jewish immersion (unlike Christian immersion) requires one to immerse oneself, which has implications for consent. I knew I wanted those aspects to be in the ritual because they demonstrated the point I was trying to make.
Then I started to build around it: immersion should be in fire, which can result in the burning away of hair etc, to symbolise that rebirth; Hindu yajna (sacred fire) ceremonies also often come with hymns being recited, so I'll have the sages recite blessings during the immersion; Judaism, from which I'm drawing a lot of the legalism, requires these things to be properly witnessed, so High Sage Kenji will be a silent witness to the ceremony.
The Room of the Broken: Can things be repurposed?
Most of the things that end up in the Room of the Broken were never actually holy objects - they’re normal objects with quotes from the scriptures, etc. For example on a painting or a vase. Those things could absolutely be repurposed into pottery or stained glass window art, because their status would remain the same!
There are some things that can’t be repurposed, because they were used for worship and are now broken and unusable. That would be lowering their status, which is a no-no.
(#casually giving religious answers for a religion I made up #is this what it feels like to start a cult)
The Room of the Broken: Since you've talked about the Fire Nation being Judaism-meets-Shinto, is this something found in Shinto?
My very vague, very new understanding is that holy objects in Shinto get stored (sometimes wrapped up and boxed so much that what’s in there is a mystery, which is SO MUCH FUN). I haven’t read about disposal of sacred objects. Afraid this remains unclear to me, anon!
I based the Room of the Broken on:
a) Buddhist and Hindu customs around destruction of holy objects via burning (though I gave the sages a custom of only doing this once a year, one object at a time, by the highest ranking sage of the temple)
b) the Jewish custom of storing holy objects all together until they’re ready to be disposed of (in Judaism, via burial)
I basically melted those two ideas together until I had a room of broken holy things for Zuko to hang out in, for obvious, heavy-handed symbolism.