Spirituality, Faith, and Religion

Introduction

The Malazan Book of the Fallen is one of the few works of contemporary epic fantasy that takes religious experience seriously as a subject of sustained analytical treatment. Most fantasy handles religion instrumentally — gods are plot devices, prayers are power-ups, clerics are tactical assets — and rarely pauses to ask what religious experience actually consists in, why humans across history have engaged in it, and what the cognitive and cultural conditions of its persistence are. Steven Erikson's series does pause to ask these questions, and the answers it proposes are grounded in his anthropological and archaeological training, in his reading of the literature on pre-modern religious cognition (notably Julian Jaynes), and in his own fieldwork experience alongside indigenous populations whose spiritual practices he has described as "fundamentally different" from Western ones while being "equally valid."

This essay examines the series' treatment of spirituality under seven headings: Erikson's own definition of spirituality as "an irrational acknowledgement of something our senses cannot perceive"; the Western Enlightenment as an outlier civilisation that has denigrated spirituality to its own detriment; the two-tiered Greek religious structure as the model for the Malazan pantheon; the principle that in Malazan the question is not whether gods exist (they provably do) but whether they are worthy of worship; the Mayan drought-collapse as the historical model for the consequences of divine failure; altered states and psychoactive substances as universal human practices built into the series' world; and the entire series as, in Erikson's own framing, "an examination of the crisis of faith."

Erikson's Definition: The Irrational Acknowledgement

Erikson's definition of spirituality, articulated directly in the Conversation with Steven Erikson about Spirituality in Malazan interview, is worth quoting in full because it serves as the conceptual anchor for the series' entire religious apparatus:

"I'm going to be struggling even to define spirituality. At least as I see it, I guess it's a kind of — I don't know if this is a word — irrational acknowledgement or recognition of something that our senses cannot necessarily perceive. And so it's kind of a belief system in the unseen and the unknowable. But there's an element to which our behaviour and practices can open a small window to that other realm, if you will, and then engage in a form of dialogue of some kind. So the spiritual side of things is very much intrinsic to the worldbuilding of any culture, including our own." (Conversation with Steven Erikson about Spirituality in Malazan transcript)

Three features of this definition are analytically load-bearing. First, Erikson uses the word irrational deliberately — not as a pejorative, but as a precise category marker. Spirituality is the cognitive mode in which the subject acknowledges something whose reality cannot be confirmed by the ordinary sensory apparatus. The acknowledgement is "irrational" in the technical sense that it operates outside the evidentiary standards rationality requires, but this does not mean it is baseless or foolish; it means only that its basis is not the basis of ordinary empirical claims. The distinction is the one philosophers have long made between propositional knowledge (based on evidence and inference) and acquaintance knowledge (based on direct experience that cannot be fully articulated in propositional form). Spiritual experience belongs to the second category.

Second, the definition identifies spirituality with a behaviourial component: "our behaviour and practices can open a small window to that other realm." Spirituality is not merely a set of beliefs held in the mind; it is a set of practices (meditation, ritual, prayer, fasting, sweat lodges, altered-state inducements) that produce specific cognitive conditions under which the "small window" becomes accessible. This is the key move that separates Erikson's account from intellectualist definitions of religion (which treat religion as a set of propositions to be evaluated for truth). For Erikson, religion is what religious practitioners do, not what they believe, and the doing is the mechanism by which the beliefs become phenomenologically real.

Third, the definition treats spirituality as "intrinsic to the worldbuilding of any culture, including our own." This is an anthropological claim: every human culture that has existed has had spiritual practices of some form, and the practices are not a primitive feature that civilisations outgrow but a permanent feature of human social organisation. A culture without spirituality would be an anomaly in the anthropological record, and the closest contemporary example — the modern Western secular culture — should be understood as a specific historical aberration rather than as the default condition toward which all cultures naturally move.

The Western Enlightenment as Outlier

Erikson's most pointed observation about spirituality is that the modern West, following the Enlightenment, has deviated from the global human norm by systematically denigrating spiritual experience:

"Our Western civilisation is a bit of an outlier when it comes to human civilisations — where, following the Enlightenment, we began to sort of culturally denigrate spirituality. And as a consequence of that, a lot of understanding of that engagement with that other world, it goes to the wayside. It ceases to be approached with the same analytical vigour that you would get in the rest of the sciences. And I think that's been to our detriment." (Conversation on Spirituality transcript)

The observation has two components. The descriptive component is that the West has, since roughly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, treated spirituality as an embarrassment — as a feature of earlier or lesser civilisations that modern scientific culture has outgrown. This descriptive claim is broadly accurate as an account of how academic and elite Western culture has handled the subject since the Enlightenment, though popular religion of course has remained vigorous and complex.

The normative component is that this denigration has been "to our detriment." The claim is that Western culture has lost something by refusing to take spirituality seriously, and the loss is visible in the specific impoverishment of Western cognitive capacities for handling what Erikson calls the "unknowable." A culture that has trained itself to recognise only what the senses can verify is a culture that has lost access to modes of experience that other cultures still possess, and the loss is not compensated by the gains in empirical rigour because the loss is in a different dimension from the gains.

The implication for Erikson's fiction is that fantasy — because it is set in a secondary world whose rules are not the rules of the contemporary West — provides a specific kind of permission to explore what Western secular realism has excluded. The exploration is not escapist; it is compensatory, an attempt to recover capacities Western culture has systematically atrophied. Readers who engage with the series' religious material seriously are not indulging a nostalgic fantasy; they are exercising cognitive capacities that their own culture has trained them to suppress, and the exercise is one of the specific goods the series has to offer.

The Greek Two-Tiered Model

The structural model for the Malazan religious apparatus is the two-tiered religious organisation of ancient Greece — the Olympian pantheon (the named gods with human-legible personalities) coexisting with the chthonic register (nature spirits, household gods, spirits of place). Erikson has discussed this directly:

"One of the inspirations was the two-tiered religious systems in ancient Greece, where you had the pantheon with all the various gods, but then you had a kind of chthonic, earth-based existence where you had dryads and naiads and spirits related to households and thresholds and springs and various other things. So that was kind of the almost witch- or shaman-based level even below." (Conversation on Spirituality transcript)

The importance of the two-tier model is that it recognises a crucial distinction Erikson has made explicit elsewhere: the difference between divinity as relationship (the pantheon) and divinity as presence (the chthonic spirits). The first is humanised — the gods have personalities, can be addressed, can be angered, can be bargained with — while the second is not — the forces are not persons, cannot be reasoned with, can only be accommodated through ritual attention. Both registers exist in the Malazan world, and both are accorded the same seriousness. The High House pantheon (Shadowthrone, Hood, Fener, the Errant) corresponds to the Olympian tier; the Elder Gods, the warren-bound spirits, the Azath houses, the Jaghut and soletaken presences correspond to the chthonic tier. The two registers interact with mortals in categorically different ways, and the distinction is preserved throughout the series rather than collapsed into a single homogeneous category.

The two-tier model also reflects Erikson's anthropological realism. Real pre-modern religions typically had exactly this structure: a named pantheon for formal worship, combined with a much larger substrate of household gods, spirits of place, and nature forces that everyday life required accommodating. Modern Western religions (Protestant Christianity especially) have tended to collapse the two tiers, treating the household and local levels as superstition while preserving only the named-pantheon level. The collapse has been to the detriment of both tiers, and Erikson's preservation of the two-tier structure is one of his specific contributions to fantasy religion — a reminder that real religions are not single-tier systems.

Provable Gods and the Question of Worth

A distinctive feature of the Malazan religious apparatus is that the existence of gods is not in question. Mortals in the series can see warrens, witness divine interventions, experience answered prayers, and in some cases meet gods face-to-face. The question "does this god exist?" therefore has a simple empirical answer within the fiction's own logic: yes. The question the series instead poses is harder and more interesting: is this god worthy of worship?

Erikson has framed this reframing explicitly:

"In fantasy stories, they communicate directly with their god. The crisis of faith in those instances — I explore that a lot — is about the relationship. So it's no different from a crisis of faith in a marriage where one partner cheats. There's going to be a crisis of faith in that marriage, in that relationship. All things that were originally unquestioned or suddenly questioned. And that's kind of how this is. It's not a question of whether they exist or not. It's a question of what is the nature of the relationship I have with this entity, and is it what I thought it was?" (Conversation on Spirituality transcript)

The reframing is philosophically significant. In our own world, the typical Western discussion of religion centres on the question of whether God exists — a question whose answer cannot be determined empirically and which therefore generates the standing disagreement between believers and non-believers. The question's centrality is an artefact of the specific philosophical apparatus the Enlightenment developed, and the question's answer is in practice determined by which side of the apparatus one was raised on. Erikson's shift of the question to is this god worthy? places religious inquiry on different terrain entirely. The question of worth is answerable by reference to the god's actions, dispositions, and effects on worshippers; it can be discussed between believers and non-believers without requiring either party to concede the existence question; and it is the question that actually matters to practising religious people, who are typically more concerned with whether their god has earned their continued devotion than with whether the god exists at all.

The series' treatment of Itkovian and Fener is the clearest case of the reframing in action. Itkovian is Fener's Shield Anvil, sworn to the boar god's service. At a critical moment, Fener is displaced from his warren and becomes inaccessible — not non-existent, just unavailable. Itkovian's crisis is not whether Fener exists (he clearly does) but whether the relationship that once held between them can still hold given Fener's changed condition. Itkovian's decision to absorb the T'lan Imass's pain into himself is, in part, a response to this crisis: he can no longer serve Fener in the conventional way, so he performs an act of compassion whose scale exceeds what any mortal servant of any god was supposed to perform. The act is simultaneously a confirmation of Itkovian's service and an acknowledgement that the service has moved outside the relationship that originally defined it. The worth question has been re-answered by Itkovian's own action, and the re-answer is an act of moral generosity rather than an act of faith.

The Mayan Drought-Collapse as Historical Model

Erikson's sense of how religions end is shaped by his archaeological reading of the Mayan civilisation's collapse in the ninth and tenth centuries — a collapse triggered by sustained drought that made the Mayan religious apparatus's promises (rain in exchange for sacrifice) demonstrably unfulfillable. He has discussed this in the Community Malazan Questions interview:

"In the Mayan civilisation, a lot of the human sacrifice, a lot of the ritual activities that were occurring were bound to bringing the rain. And when the rain stopped and drought hit in the tenth century, ninth century, the religion completely collapsed because the reward system broke down. The rains had not come in response to the sacrifices made seasonally." (Community Malazan Questions with Esslemont and Erikson transcript)

The observation is analytically precise. The Mayan religious apparatus had been a bargain: the people provided sacrifices, and the gods provided rain. The bargain's operation had been confirmed for centuries because the rains did come — often enough that the correlation between sacrifice and rain was empirically convincing within the culture's own epistemic standards. When the climate changed and the drought persisted for decades despite increased sacrifices, the bargain was visibly broken from the human side. The religion did not collapse because Mayan people stopped believing in the gods; it collapsed because the gods stopped delivering on the deal, and a bargain whose other party is not performing cannot be maintained indefinitely even when the believing party wants to maintain it.

The principle generalises. A religion whose central promise is falsifiable, and whose central promise is then falsified, is in serious trouble regardless of how devout its believers are. The devotion cannot compensate for the delivery failure; the failure is in the relationship itself, not in the belief. This is the historical mechanism Erikson is dramatising in his "is the god worthy of worship?" reframing. A god who fails to deliver on their end of the relationship becomes a god whose worthiness is under question, and the question is answerable by reference to the delivery record, not to abstract theological argument.

The Malazan cosmology incorporates this principle at the level of its plot. The Crippled God's followers find their god increasingly unable to deliver on promises as his own condition deteriorates; Fener's displacement makes him unable to discharge the obligations his Shield Anvils had been relying on; Mother Dark's withdrawal from the Tiste Andii leaves her children without access to the divine presence that had oriented their culture for millennia. In each case, the crisis is not the non-existence of the god but the god's effective unavailability, and the crisis has the same structural shape as the Mayan drought collapse. The believers are not asking whether their god is real; they are asking whether their relationship with their god is still the relationship they thought it was.

Altered States and Psychoactive Substances

A less formal but equally important dimension of the series' religious apparatus is its treatment of altered states. Erikson, drawing on his anthropological training and his own experience of sweat lodges, has insisted that the cross-cultural universality of altered-state religious practices should be taken seriously as data about human cognition:

"It's fairly well established that repetitive practice, as well as acoustics, can lead a person into a trance state. And that is an altered state, without any question. It's also a state in which time does strange things. So I've done a sweat lodge, I was invited to a Sundance but I couldn't make it unfortunately. But that aspect of humans engaging in an activity that alters their perception of the environment around them and their relationship to it — and anthropologically, I mean, that has always, almost in every culture, involved psychoactive substances of some form or another. So that is just a common trait of the human condition. And so it certainly made sense that in the Malazan world you would have every example imaginable — even ones that we just invented on the fly, because humans are very inventive when it comes to finding ways to alter their perceptions." (Conversation on Spirituality transcript)

The anthropological observation is that altered-state practices are not a feature of specific cultures but a feature of human cognition as such. Every culture that has been studied has developed some combination of rhythmic drumming, chanting, fasting, sensory deprivation, sweat-induced hyperthermia, or psychoactive-substance use to produce alterations in ordinary consciousness that the culture identifies as spiritually significant. The practices are different in every culture, but the category of practice is universal, and the universality is diagnostic: humans, it seems, cannot help but develop such practices, and the cognitive states they produce are part of what it is to be human.

The Malazan world incorporates this observation through the warrens, the various rituals, the sweat-lodge and vision-quest analogues, and the specific altered-state substances (the hallucinogenic honey in the Y'Ghatan tunnel scene being the most famous example) that appear across the volumes. The altered states are not ornamental; they are the mechanisms through which characters gain access to information or understanding that ordinary cognition cannot reach, and the access is treated as real within the fiction's own epistemology. The reader who dismisses these scenes as decorative misses one of the series' specific points: altered states are not a fantasy trope but a human practice that fantasy is uniquely equipped to dramatise, and the dramatisation is part of the series' recovery of cognitive territory the Enlightenment has tried to seal off.

The Series as an Examination of the Crisis of Faith

Erikson has framed the entire series as, at its thematic core, "an examination of the crisis of faith." The framing is important because it identifies the religious dimension as primary rather than secondary in the series' design. A reader who thinks of the Malazan Book of the Fallen as a military-fantasy series with religious elements has misread it; the series is more accurately described as a religious-fantasy series with military elements, and the military plots are the vehicles through which the religious inquiry is conducted.

The crisis-of-faith framing is instructive because it places the series in a specific literary tradition. The Victorian crisis-of-faith novel (Matthew Arnold, Mary Augusta Ward, George Eliot's later work) addressed the cognitive shock of Enlightenment secularism on nineteenth-century European readers whose inherited Christian frameworks were coming into conflict with evolutionary biology, higher biblical criticism, and comparative religion. The twentieth-century existentialist novel (Camus, Sartre, Kazantzakis) addressed a later version of the same crisis in which the God whose existence Victorian readers had come to doubt had been replaced by an absurd cosmos whose meaning had to be produced rather than discovered. Erikson's series places itself in this tradition by taking the crisis seriously and by refusing the easy resolutions both the Victorian believers and the twentieth-century atheists proposed.

The Malazan version of the crisis is distinctive because it cannot be resolved by either the "god exists" or "god doesn't exist" options. The gods exist — the question is whether they are worthy — and worthiness is a question that each mortal must answer for themselves through examination of their own relationship with their god. The series therefore presents a world in which religious crisis is not about metaphysics (which has been settled empirically) but about ethics (which cannot be settled empirically and must be worked out through ongoing practice). This is a more grown-up version of the crisis of faith than the Victorian or existentialist versions, and it is one of the specific contributions Erikson has made to the literary treatment of religion.

The series' eventual articulation of its religious commitment — discussed in the lesson on compassion and anti-nihilism — is that the worthy response to the question of divine worth is not faith in the god but compassion extended regardless of the god's worthiness. The Bonehunters save the Crippled God not because he has earned salvation but because his suffering is real and compassion is owed. This is a specific theological position: the worshipper's moral obligation is not to a god who has earned devotion but to a suffering being who needs help. The worshipper's virtue therefore exceeds the god's desert, and the exceeding is the substance of what the religious life is for.

Conclusion: Religion as the Series' Operating System

The cumulative portrait that emerges from the series' treatment of spirituality is of a fiction whose religious apparatus is its operating system, not its decoration. The plot arcs are religious at their core; the cosmological framework is a sustained thought-experiment in comparative religion; the moral argument is a theological one; and the series' eventual conclusions are offered as answers to theological questions that Western secular culture has largely given up asking. A reader who engages with the series at this level discovers that the Malazan Book of the Fallen is one of the most ambitious works of religious fiction of the twenty-first century, even though it contains no contemporary religious content and would never be shelved as religious fiction by any bookstore.

The deeper contribution is Erikson's insistence that the cognitive and ethical capacities religion historically cultivated are real capacities whose loss is a loss. A culture that has decided religion is embarrassing has given up something specific — the ability to take altered states seriously as information, the ability to evaluate relationships with unseen presences as a moral question, the ability to understand that the worth of a bargaining partner is more important than the partner's existence, the ability to recognise sustained ritual practice as a cognitive technology rather than as superstition. These capacities cannot easily be recovered within the terms the contemporary West has set for itself, but they can be exercised in the controlled environment of serious fantasy fiction, and the exercising is one of the specific things fantasy fiction can do that no other contemporary genre can.

The implication for readers is that engaging with the series' religious material seriously — rather than treating it as background colour for the military plots — is the way to receive the specific education the series is designed to deliver. Readers who finish the ten volumes have been exposed to a sustained meditation on what religious experience is, why humans have always had it, what its collapse looks like, how it can be redeemed, and what the worthy response to a broken god might be. The meditation is conducted through fiction rather than through direct argument, but its content is as substantive as any contemporary work of philosophy of religion, and its accessibility to non-philosophers is one of the specific goods that serious long fiction can provide where academic philosophy cannot.

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