The Seven Traits of Fictoscripture and the Wormhole Sacred

Abstract

This chapter discusses how fiction’s religion influences the readers’ own spiritual patency irrupting from an engagement with the fictional. In examining the fictitious scriptures of several comics works, this chapter arrives at a theory suggesting that these imagined sacred texts, these “fictoscriptures,” may allow us a new path for contact with our own sacred. There are seven observed traits of most fictoscriptures: archaic diction, kephalaiacparatext, prophetic revelation, rarity, stylized font, coded gnosis, and actualization. Fictoscriptures may direct an audience’s attention downward, even as they simultaneously redirect focus upward, toward not only the authors and authorities of the would-be prophesies but also beyond to the sacred. The best example, the truest metaphor, may be the wormhole. Drive one’s attention downward toward the fictoscripture, toward the profane and material comic book, and enough of a focus could, theoretically, connect one to the wormhole sacred.