How Piers Anthony Made Me Lose My Religion

For a fantasy - lie with wonk who first entered high schooling in 1990 , Piers Anthony was inevitable . He does n’t get as much recognition now as Robert Jordan or Raymond Feist , but for a heavy parcel of the belated 20th C he was churning out a stunning variety of YA - point scifi and phantasy novels , including the pun - heavy Xanth book , the Incarnations of Immortality series , Apprentice Adept , and more . Basically , if you were any kind of book - loving grind in the ‘ 80s and ‘ 90s , you could n’t nullify Piers Anthony .

Back then , I really did n’t discriminate in my music genre reading , and having enjoyed pretty much everything else Anthony had written that I ’d gotten my hands on , I take the Tarot trilogy would be much the same . From the binding , they looked like any other fantasy novel ; there were barely clothe woman , monsters , a rocket ship , and even some sort of chariot - dragon ( that ’s actually it above , by fantasy artist Rowena ) . About the only thing I found unusual was the fussy - wearing champion economise the demoiselle in hurt , as ( Earth ) religions virtually never entered into the genre novels I consume so voraciously . But again , back then I would read fairly much anything that had a spaceship or a dragon on the cover , and these three novels — imaginativeness of Tarot , Faith of Tarot , and God of Tarot — had both .

I was expecting just another playfulness scifi / fantasy series . What I got blew my middle - school brain , because the Tarot trilogy is nothing less than Anthony ’s perfect and full exploration of religion , morality , gender , government , education , and good knows what else . As latterly as 2006 , Anthony called Tarot “ one of the most significant of my calling ” but then immediately tote up “ therefore for the most part ignore by the vital and reviewing establishment , which is not outfit to dig it . ” ( In fact , it was suppose to be one massive , terrifying tome but publishing firm altogether refused to deal with it until it was collapse into three more palatable , and yet even less comprehensible , Good Book . )

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It begins innocently enough . In the good future , humans has spread through the galaxy , standard subroutine , until a group of colonists on a far - off , set-apart satellite constitute Tarot discover it is home to a flaky phenomenon called Animations . In essence , these Animations move like storms , but when people get caught up in them they all experiences totally different realities — realities in which they can experience just about anything , both gilded and horrible , but they can also die . Also , I should point out that Bigfoot apparently lives on the planet . ( Not the foreign equivalent weight of Bigfoot ; regular Earth Bigfoot . Just wanted to make that clear . )

Besides the aforementioned Sasquatch , the planet is inhabited by dozens of different religions religious order , from Methodists to Mormon to Muslims to Scientologists to Satanists to Communists ( do n’t ask ) and they all detest other . They are convinced the Animations are the work of God , but they do n’t know which one , and they certainly do n’t believe each other to figure it out . So they ask Earth to send an unbiased congresswoman to enquire , and that person is Brother Paul of the Holy Order of Vision , which is a humble , monkish , super liberal Christian sect that respects all faith and faiths equally .

In Animation , Paul goes through a serial of trials that make Dante ’s journey through hell look like a picnic . Paul relive the drear moment of his pre - religious life , he is dumped in a giant chalice full of body waste , he meets the Buddha and then visits a unknown major planet where the humans are forced to idolize the religion of the local outlander , as an illusion to voodoo . He hangs out with Jesus and Mohammed in hell ( do n’t ask ) , attending a unholy orgy / ritual sacrifice , and while visiting hell has his ball bitten off by a snake . He also , and I swear this is true , is at one point ejaculated through Satan ’s penis when Satan masturbate . ( These Holy Scripture were available in my middle - school library , for the record . )

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I was not prepared mentally for any of this . I was raise Catholic , and while I had begun to suspect the veracity of some of what I was being tell in Sunday School every workweek , my dubiety was always positioned as being a bad Christian . short , I was push up into a world where the account and mythology of all these religions were compared side - by - side , where the faith of Lutherans , Mormons and Satanists were treat with adequate weight . And that ’s Anthony ’s hypothesizes through the Tarot series , albeit in a very strange way — that all religious belief are essentially a worship of an unsung divine , and thus are all equally valid . By the end I actually hold with Anthony — but not necessarily in the way the author intended . Because while I did determine that these religions did seem evenly valid , it was because all the religions featured seemed evenly esoteric , tenuous , and imperfect .

Look , even as a young teenager I understood Piers Anthony should not be the last authority on any public religious belief . But what I did take to heart is how the characters of Tarot all believed their disparate religions with adequate fervor , disregardless of their dogma or their creative activity . And what these religions most had in rough-cut was the sheer conviction that their religion was correct and everyone was wrong . They may have differed in how well or ill they treated others , they may have vary in compassion for others , but they were entirely secure in the correctness of their faiths — and , by extrapolation , that everyone else in their life was excluded from the paradise that awaited them .

And why was everybody so certain they were proper ? It seemed only because of in which religion they were raised , They each had holy anatomy say to be divine . They all had holy book said to be complete , yet write by fallible human hands . They all had some sorting of promise of living after death , although they vary in what happened to the non - worshipper . Again , I jazz that I was set about a trivial perspective of these faith — but I also knew that if the basics were essentially the same , then what really would the fine details weigh ? manifestly , to think in any faith you have to have faith — but for the first prison term , it get through on me that all these believers believe in their faith utterly . They all had faith that they were correct , and the “ proof ” they ground their faiths on — holy books , prophesier , etc.—were essentially the same things , differ mainly in content . How could I possibly be sure my faith had chosen aright ?

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I do not mean to proselytize here , and I absolutely do n’t want this to be a personal sermon on my disbelief . All I need to say that as a immature 13 - year - old , read a very strange scifi / fantasy novel when he should have been paying tending in geometry class , this realisation — and these eldritch , lurid , utterly bonkers books — made me realize something underlying . I was force to examine my own faith , my own beliefs , and compare them with others — and then suddenly I could n’t regain them anymore .

I am grateful for the fruition , even though I can not recommend anyone read these books — they have absolutely not senesce well . reread them these past week I am shocked I get anything other than a headache and a lingering sense of filth and guilt out of them , as the Book are frequently a bit anti-Semite , tremendously sexist , and , if you hold any sort of religious belief , possibly profane . For example , Paul goes back in prison term to fall with Jesus for a bit , and the revealing that Jesus had a bungled castration — mean he had no human intimate needs — is one of the series ’ least bonkers spiritual hypotheses . to boot , the main distaff character exists almost solely to seduce men or be raped , and an grownup military personnel marry a 12 - year - old fille . Also , the entire planet of Tarot ends up idolize Satan . It ’s absolutely bonkers , if not instantly disturbing .

I was too untested and too naïve to observe Anthony ’s purpleness , shocking prose , his less - than - complimentary portrayals of womanhood , or his incredibly skeezy habit of sexualizing underage character , and for that I ’m extremely thankful . Instead I got one of the most heavy reading experiences of my young aliveness , a narrative that forever altered my personal trajectory and , for all its fault and insanity , had a profound gist on me and who I am today .

Photo: Jae C. Hong