Religion is my fandom
Ever since I was a child, I've been interested in religion, my own and other people's. One of my earliest memories involving books is of a volume of Greek myths for children; something about the illustrations disturbed me, and I wound up lying awake in bed, convinced that a vulture was going to come out of the closet and eat my liver. (Perhaps the worst part was that I was not at all sure where my liver actually was.)
I cut my teeth, so to speak, on Greek mythology, on Norse mythology as illustrated by the D'Aulaires and by Willy Pogany, and on Egyptian mythology filtered through books on archaeology and ancient Egyptian culture. I pored over color plates of Tutankhamen's treasures and learned the story of the cursed ring, the original one, from the Volsungasaga rather than the Nibelungenlied: Sigurd and Brynhild, Andvari and Gudrun.
But I also got interested very early in religion as well as mythology--people's beliefs and practices, as well as their stories. Perhaps the thing that got me hooked was that big red Time-Life volume on Religions of the World. It had text, and I read the words, but while I was a good reader at a young age, what I remember now--as with the D'Aulaires' book and Padraic Colum's The Children of Odin--is the pictures: The D'Aulaires' Thor glaring through his bridal veil; Pogany's slender Loki and his up-curling hair, nibbling daintily on Gullveig's burnt black heart; the two-page color painting of all those Hindu gods and goddesses, with Vishnu and Lakshmi on one page, Shiva and Parvati on the other, Brahma and Sarasvati split by the spine, and all sorts of gandharvas, apsarases, nagas, and lesser deities around them; the golden vestments of a Greek Orthodox priest, offering communion to a small child on a silver spoon; the intensely saffron robes of Buddhist monks.
By the time I was ten, I think, I had graduated to books with more words than pictures. I recall a book with some black-and-white photos that I think was called The Five Great Religions; Amazon lists a book by that title with a publication date of 1974, which sounds about right. This book had chapters on Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and one other--what was it? Hinduism? Sikhism, possibly? I'm not sure. But books like the Time-Life volume, and The Five Great Religions, and Religions of the World, which must have been a college-level textbook with chapters on everything from Mesopotamian polytheism to Shinto, all taught me one important lesson. They taught me to think of Christianity not as Religion, but as one religion among others--a great and important religion, a world religion (unlike limited and local polytheisms), but still just one of many, and by no means the most colorful or interesting one. The pictures in the chapters on Christianity had nothing on that sensual and colorful spread of the deities of Hinduism.
Another thing that strikes me now is how very dull those books made Buddhism look. I realize now that they concentrated on the Theravada traditions of Burma, Thailand, and Ceylon, which focus on self-liberation through the monastic life. In those cultures, people who can't go off and live lives of monastic renunciation basically can't do anything meritorious except support the monastics and hope for a favorable rebirth in which such a life will be possible. I'd have gotten interested in Buddhism much sooner if they'd offered me descriptions of Vajrayana ceremonies and pictures of thangkas or dancing lamas. (That's "lama" with one "L".)
