First, since the prompt is likely to take you away from this blog, let’s tackle today’s questions.
Today’s questions will be about religion, which is crucial to understanding the whole culture that your characters live in. Religion is of varying importance to varying cultures throughout the world and throughout history. Your world might be predominantly non-religious, but it might be like ours a couple hundred years ago, almost entirely ruled by religion.
1. Does religion influence education? How so?
Religion, especially if there is a state religion, almost always influences how people are educated in any given country. The effects could be as simple as a bias in teaching or as complex as the temple itself providing education. Your church could be in charge of your schools.
In the Kingdom of Llyr which I have been working on this summer-and continue working on as my main Nano project takes place there-the God Lyrus demands that all his people are educated, at least to the basic level of reading, writing, and simple math. As such, each Temple of Lyrus contains a school, where people are given two years of lessons. Education also comes with a huge religious bias-the way of Lyrus and Astra is the only right way…
2. What are four Holy Days in this kingdom?
Holy Days can include but are not limited to solstices and equinoxes, Gods’ birthdays and celebrations of ‘holy victories’ in various wars. Every religion has them, and every religion needs them. The peasants especially need them as reasons to celebrate in a dreary, hard life. (Assuming midieval fantasy, of course).
You might need to build a calendar for this, in which case you should leave this question until a later day. We’ll be looking at creating a calendar in more depth over the next week or two.
Marla
In my kingdom, everyone studies. Everyone is learned. Lyrus demands that we study his knowledge, for that is our purpose. He spent centuries writing it and years creating us so that we might learn it; it would be entirely ungrateful not to study in his temples and his schools. With every right to be, he would be angry. There would be punishment.