World Building
“Into every generation is born the Slayer. One girl in all the world….” Thus begins the saga of Buffy Anne Summers, the Slayer. In the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, called “Welcome to the Hellmouth,” we are introduced the "Buffyverse," the world of the series. This world consists of the earthly dimension of Sunnydale, the high school, and a group of friends who meet and face some monsters together. Below the high school library is the literal mouth of hell. In this episode, and throughout the first season, our attention shifts between the world above and the world below.
You can watch the original trailer for the show (left). I recommend that you watch the episode wherever you can stream it. There is a summary below.
Religion as World Building
There are as many definitions of religion as there are scholars of religion. Problems with these definitions include their lack of universality, which is often paired with their reliance on familiar religions (e.g., Protestant Christianity) as a kind of default religion, with other religions represented as deviating from that norm.
A bare-bones description (rather than a definition) of religion that avoids some of these issues is the idea of religion as "world building," This is to say that religious people develop systems "to organize their lives in relation to each other and to their land ... united by storytelling and practising the same rituals and traditions as one another" (Pamela Klassen).
The term "world-building" is typically used to describe the creation of worlds in cultural artifacts such as literature, film or video gaming. In those contexts, a fictional world is constructed using many elements, sometimes including imagined religions. For the purpose of our examination of religion in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we are not so much looking at how religion features within the Buffyverse, but how the construction of the world we call the Buffyverse is a fictive cosmos that can be analysed using the tools of the study of religion. The world of the show has its own cosmology (theory of how the universe is shaped), its own rituals and texts, its forms of community and notions of personhood, its own theory of good and evil, and its own practices and traditions.
Episode Summary
The Master trapped beneath the library
In "Welcome to the Hellmouth" (the first episode of the series), we meet Buffy Summers, the Slayer, after her arrival in Sunnydale, California. She has moved from Los Angeles with her mother, Joyce, after Buffy was expelled from high school. In the course of the episode, we meet Rupert Giles, the librarian and Buffy's watcher; Willow Rosenberg, who will become Buffy's best friend, and Xander Harris, a trusty side-kick to Buffy and Willow. We are also introduced to the fact that Sunnydale High School sits atop the Hellmouth, that is, the opening between earth and a hell dimension (note: there are many hell dimensions, as we will learn over the course of the series, but this one is directly below the high school library).
In the lower region, we meet the ancient vampire, the Master, and his servant vampires. They await a specific day, the Harvest, when the Master can be freed from below and rise to earth. In next week's episode, we learn more about the Harvest, and Buffy's efforts to stop the Master's plans.