I’m doing a bunch of preparatory work winnowing down and organizing material for my book about story-systems, and I came up with a decent metaphor which I wanted to jot down for future development. This is based mainly on my earlier article describing what I see as the three main drives in religious traditions: orthodoxy, syncretism & mysticism.

To summarize, each of those three directions attempts to interpret the central stories of a religion in a particular way. Mysticism is generally an emphasis on personal experience and exploration. Orthodoxy and syncretism both center around shared meaning among a social group to bond people together. Where orthodox religions will usually require everyone in a group has the same interpretation of a story, syncretism will create social cohesion by fusing together multiple stories and interpretations.

One of the most common outward characteristics of the differences described above can be understood by what each religious tradition does when it encounters information or a story which does not “fit” within that story. In orthodox religions, I feel like you have this one area which is pretty rigidly mapped out by their traditions. Beyond that area, everything sort of fades off into grey - almost like how people say that medieval maps would contain the admonitory text, “Here be dragons!” in areas which were uncharted, in an effort to keep people from venturing out into the unknown.

Usually, this is mentioned in close proximity to discussions of how people used to think the world was flat (which itself isn’t totally true) and that you could sail off the edge of it. Interestingly, an article I just found online claims that maps didn’t really say that at all, but it’s still a useful metaphor for looking at the border regions outside the understanding of a particular religious tradition. Following the image through, I might suggest that syncretism, as a religious approach, is the attempt to stitch together multiple maps, around the points which they overlap. I’m sticking with the image of maps, because they are a means of creating shared understanding. And, taking it one step farther, perhaps the way mysticism would fit into this is that the attempt here is not so much cartographic as it is to arm you with a ship and a sense of adventure, and maybe a sword or something with which to fight the dragons if and when you do encounter them off the world’s edge.