World of the Dragoons - The Luminary Church

History

The Luminary Church traces its origins to the Age of Blindness, a period at the beginning of the Lundenian Empire. In the empire’s youthful days, it had kept the worship of a broad pantheon of gods and spirits who had predated it in the civilisations that it conquered. But one of the early movements in the empire was that of the Antideii, a coalition of patricians and scholars who vehemently pursued a antitheistic doctrine, holding that gods were not only veritably fictitious, but that worship was harmful to a productive society.

The Antideii were gradually accepted as a tolerable social pattern until the rule of Emperor August Caellius. Not only did Caellius personally believe in the Antideii’s message, but he believed any subversion of it was tantamount to sedition against the state. Thus was religion in all forms outlawed, beginning the age where the empire was “blind” to the divine.

Of all the minor clerics and prophets who ignited in this era only to fizzle when they were martyred and their movement failed to catch on, or when they were cowed by threats of brutal execution, one is now known as Saint Gideon the Prophet. In an act of defiance, Gideon took those who were willing to follow on a long march from his home in Rimewater Vale to the empire’s capital city, Lundenia, intending to preach to the Emperor August Lundetio, Caellius’s great-great-grandson who kept much of his ancestor’s convictions.

Gideon was told he would only be granted an audience in front of the emperor at his own execution, and the prophet accepted these terms, to the shock of the aristocratic class. Gideon was crucified in the traditional manner for the time, upside down with his arms splayed to the side in an upside-down “Y” shape. True to his word, Lundetio watched the execution. All the while, Gideon lashed his wrists against the bindings, extolling the emperor to open his mind to the voices of the prophet’s gods, the “Great Ones”. Finally, moments before he perished, his wrists cut against the ropes and bled upon the ground, and Gideon’s last words were to proclaim that his blood was the blood of the Great Ones, and asking the emperor to drink.

Lundetio, apparently attempting to display the impotence of the gods, did so, and, according to the Book of Blood, the Church’s holy text, he was immediately filled with the light of enlightenment, and transcended to a higher plane in a flash of radiance.

With the emperor gone forevermore, apparently by a divine act, the empire descended into a brief but bloody period of turmoil. Some embraced the martyrdom of Saint Gideon as a sign of the truth of his words, while others saw the vanishing of the emperor as some terrifying ability of the divine. Others still believed it to be a trick, meant only to win the church some place of prominence in the empire.

Whether that was the intent or not, that last fear proved to be prophetic. The people flocked to Gideon’s faith, which was now calling itself the Luminary Church, and successfully forced the Antideii out of power, installing themselves as the official church of the empire.

And so it was for four hundred years, until the empire’s collapse. Whatever the intentions of the prophet were, the Church has now grown into an ecclesiastical and political behemoth in the aftermath of the Veskite rebellion, popular in almost all confederation territories, and holding legal power in some. The volume of the institution has allowed it to become a breeding ground for corruption, while the leadership has turned its eye more towards keeping its hold on power rather than adherence to scriptural tenets. The corruption of the Church is a common subject of critical essays and satirical works in the former empire, works that have a tendency to get their authors marked as enemies of the Church and pursued with legal or extralegal retaliation.

Doctrine

The beliefs of the Church are intrinsically linked to the magic of vis and blood. Vis, according to the Church, bears not just the life force but an echo of its former owner’s consciousness. By consuming this blood, one can commune with its consciousness, and attain a semblance of likeness to it.

The goal of the faith is communion with the blood of Gideon, which is, as is written, the blood of the Great Ones, beings who exist outside of our own base plane in a place that is “lit with the radiance of great insight”. By partaking in communion with the Great Ones, the faithful hope to take on some of their insight and understanding of the cosmos. It is believed that it is this spiritual knowledge, sometimes called gnosis in the writings of Church theologians, which allows an enlightened consciousness to ascend to the Place of Radiance themself, once their physical body perishes.

The Church also venerates a pantheon of saints, former mortals who are considered to have ascended to enlightenment in death. The saints occupy a space just below the prophet Gideon and the Great Ones in the hierarchy of the Church pantheon, and just like Gideon, their blood is preserved so that followers can partake in communion with them. The Church chooses who is worthy of the title of saint, with candidates having to have advanced the purpose of the Church in some way, by teaching a cosmic truth to a large audience, performing acts of arcane magic deemed to be possible through contact with the Great Ones, referred to as "miracles", or by otherwise serving to enlighten the populace.

There are over a hundred saints, with each of them being given custody over a sphere of influence, which usually corresponds to a group or multiple groups of people (places, occupations, dangers people might be dealing with, etc.). This custody represents the saint's specific knowledge in that sphere, and saints are called on by the faithful who fit into their sphere of influence to request guidance and wisdom.

The chalice is the symbol of communion by the Church. Sanctified silver chalices are used during communion to hold the sacred blood, and mirror the chalice used by Saint Lundetio to gather the blood of the prophet Gideon before his transcension.

The Church has a lengthy ascetic tradition, with the first advocates of asceticism appearing shortly after the declaration of Luminarianism as the official religion of the empire. Asceticism is seen as a way for the devoted to obtain deeper and clearer communion with the Great Ones by shutting out all distractions, enabling them to obtain wisdom that they can pass on to the faithful. There are four types of ascetic orders in the Church, divided by whether they are "stable" or "itinerant", and whether they are "solitary" or "communal": monasticism (stable and communal), anchoritism (stable and solitary), eremiticism or hermitism (itinerant and solitary), and mendicancy (itinerant and communal), though the latter is less formalised than the other three.

Cèlisianism

A sect of the Church that is peculiar to western Rimewater Vale is Cèlisianism, named in honour of Saint Cèlis. Cèlis was a contemporary of Gideon, and was a religious prophet in her own right. She travelled the Vale, preaching a message revolving around spiritual purity and upright moral character, claiming to be guided by a heavenly entity she called the "Lantern-Light". She was martyred, pushed to her death by her disciple Alvaros in return for fifty gold coins from the imperial crown. After her death and the rise of the Luminary Church, the followers of Cèlis were quick to integrate her teachings into the new faith, claiming that the Lantern-Light was one of the Great Ones that also guided Gideon.

Cèlisianism has many aspects in common with orthodox Luminarianism, but it also has many key differences. Foremost is its spiritual nature. Cèlis was a spiritualist, believing that the caretaking of the world was the domain of a class of "pure" spirits, which she called "Praeses", a concept that has been merged with the orthodox Luminarian idea of saintly custodianship, resulting in the conception of modern Praeses being that of an enlightened spirit and the soul of an enlightened mortal in union, remaining in this world to teach and protect the faithful who remain.

The second and most outwardly apparent difference is Cèlisianism's emphasis on purity and cleanliness. Cèlis taught that spiritual "filth" was the root of evil in mankind, gathering where morality had decayed and spreading between people like a disease. In her many parables, she likened this filth to the rot that flourishes in stagnant waters, and thus pure running water is symbolic of its antidote. Cèlisianist churches always contain fonts of blessed holy water, which the faithful use to cleanse themselves by washing their body while repeating prayers, and the sect holds a number of springs, waterfalls, and rivers to be sacred, and many Cèlisianists make pilgrimmages to these holy sites to purify themselves. Especially popular is the Pool of Saint Cèlis, a spring in the foothills of the Fountainhead Mountains that Cèlis herself used to cleanse herself when she was first contacted by the Lantern-Light, a tale attested by the Book of Ablution, the sect's holy text.

Holy Orders

The Church has a number of internal organisations tasked with advancing the Church in certain ways.

Templar Guard

The Templar Guard is an order of warriors dedicated to keeping the rule of the Church. Formally, they are tasked only with maintaining the compliance of Church members with ecclesiastical law, but they are in practise also directed to identify nonmembers who break these laws as well. Whether the Templar have the authority to punish nonmembers depends on the region, but the Church keeps ledgers of these lawbreakers regardless. Whether they can directly arrest them or not, the Templar almost always attempt to discredit and punish people who openly blaspheme the Church, spread heretical religious doctrines, or practise warlockry, whether through legal battles, blackmail, or other under-the-table methods.