Potoooooooo
Contributor
http://io9.com/how-piers-anthony-made-me-lose-my-religion-1747365116
For a fantasy-loving nerd who first entered high school in 1990, Piers Anthony was inevitable. He doesn’t get as much recognition now as Robert Jordan or Raymond Feist, but for a large portion of the late 20th century he was churning out a stunning variety of YA-targeted scifi and fantasy novels, including the pun-heavy Xanth books, the Incarnations of Immortality series, Apprentice Adept, and more. Basically, if you were any kind of book-loving nerd in the ‘80s and ‘90s, you couldn’t avoid Piers Anthony.
Back then, I really didn’t discriminate in my genre reading, and having enjoyed pretty much everything else Anthony had written that I’d gotten my hands on, I assumed the Tarot trilogy would be much the same. From the covers, they looked like any other fantasy novels; there were scantily clad women, 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 cross-wearing hero saving the damsel in distress, as (Earth) religions virtually never entered into the genre novels I consumed so voraciously. But again, back then I would read pretty much anything that had a spaceship or a dragon on the cover, and these three novels—Vision of Tarot, Faith of Tarot, and God of Tarot—had both.
I was expecting just another fun scifi/fantasy series. What I got blew my middle-school mind, because the Tarot trilogy is nothing less than Anthony’s complete and total exploration of religion, morality, sexuality, politics, education, and goodness knows what else. As recently as 2006, Anthony called Tarot “one of the most significant of my career” but then immediately added “therefore largely ignored by the critical and reviewing establishment, which is not equipped to comprehend it.” (In fact, it was supposed to be one massive, terrifying tome but publishers completely refused to deal with it until it was broken into three more palatable, and yet even less comprehensible, books.)
It begins innocently enough. In the near future, mankind has spread through the galaxy, standard procedure, until a group of colonists on a far-off, isolated planet named Tarot discovers it is home to a bizarre 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 grand and horrible, but they can also die. Also, I should point out that Bigfoot apparently lives on the planet. (Not the alien equivalent of Bigfoot; regular Earth Bigfoot. Just wanted to make that clear.)
Besides the aforementioned Sasquatch, the planet is inhabited by dozens of different religions sects, from Methodists to Mormons to Muslims to Scientologists to Satanists to Communists (don’t ask) and they all hate other. They are convinced the Animations are the work of God, but they don’t know which one, and they certainly don’t trust each other to figure it out. So they ask Earth to send an unbiased representative to investigate, and that person is Brother Paul of the Holy Order of Vision, which is a small, monkish, extremely tolerant Christian sect that respects all religions and faiths equally.
In Animation, Paul goes through a series of trials that make Dante’s journey through hell look like a picnic. Paul relives the darkest moments of his pre-religious life, he is dumped in a giant chalice full of excrement, he meets the Buddha and then visits a strange planet where the humans are forced to worship the religion of the local aliens, as an illusion to voodoo. He hangs out with Jesus and Mohammed in hell (don’t ask), attending a Satanic orgy/ritual sacrifice, and while visiting hell has his balls bitten off by a snake. He also, and I swear this is true, is at one point ejaculated through Satan’s penis when Satan masturbates. (These books were available in my middle-school library, for the record.)
For a fantasy-loving nerd who first entered high school in 1990, Piers Anthony was inevitable. He doesn’t get as much recognition now as Robert Jordan or Raymond Feist, but for a large portion of the late 20th century he was churning out a stunning variety of YA-targeted scifi and fantasy novels, including the pun-heavy Xanth books, the Incarnations of Immortality series, Apprentice Adept, and more. Basically, if you were any kind of book-loving nerd in the ‘80s and ‘90s, you couldn’t avoid Piers Anthony.
Back then, I really didn’t discriminate in my genre reading, and having enjoyed pretty much everything else Anthony had written that I’d gotten my hands on, I assumed the Tarot trilogy would be much the same. From the covers, they looked like any other fantasy novels; there were scantily clad women, 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 cross-wearing hero saving the damsel in distress, as (Earth) religions virtually never entered into the genre novels I consumed so voraciously. But again, back then I would read pretty much anything that had a spaceship or a dragon on the cover, and these three novels—Vision of Tarot, Faith of Tarot, and God of Tarot—had both.
I was expecting just another fun scifi/fantasy series. What I got blew my middle-school mind, because the Tarot trilogy is nothing less than Anthony’s complete and total exploration of religion, morality, sexuality, politics, education, and goodness knows what else. As recently as 2006, Anthony called Tarot “one of the most significant of my career” but then immediately added “therefore largely ignored by the critical and reviewing establishment, which is not equipped to comprehend it.” (In fact, it was supposed to be one massive, terrifying tome but publishers completely refused to deal with it until it was broken into three more palatable, and yet even less comprehensible, books.)
It begins innocently enough. In the near future, mankind has spread through the galaxy, standard procedure, until a group of colonists on a far-off, isolated planet named Tarot discovers it is home to a bizarre 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 grand and horrible, but they can also die. Also, I should point out that Bigfoot apparently lives on the planet. (Not the alien equivalent of Bigfoot; regular Earth Bigfoot. Just wanted to make that clear.)
Besides the aforementioned Sasquatch, the planet is inhabited by dozens of different religions sects, from Methodists to Mormons to Muslims to Scientologists to Satanists to Communists (don’t ask) and they all hate other. They are convinced the Animations are the work of God, but they don’t know which one, and they certainly don’t trust each other to figure it out. So they ask Earth to send an unbiased representative to investigate, and that person is Brother Paul of the Holy Order of Vision, which is a small, monkish, extremely tolerant Christian sect that respects all religions and faiths equally.
In Animation, Paul goes through a series of trials that make Dante’s journey through hell look like a picnic. Paul relives the darkest moments of his pre-religious life, he is dumped in a giant chalice full of excrement, he meets the Buddha and then visits a strange planet where the humans are forced to worship the religion of the local aliens, as an illusion to voodoo. He hangs out with Jesus and Mohammed in hell (don’t ask), attending a Satanic orgy/ritual sacrifice, and while visiting hell has his balls bitten off by a snake. He also, and I swear this is true, is at one point ejaculated through Satan’s penis when Satan masturbates. (These books were available in my middle-school library, for the record.)
