Before the established religion of the church of Varchic, men lived simple lives and worshipped entities much older and more in-line with their ways of life.
Gods and their spirits were something one might converse with on much more personal level, and they were something you could witness with your own bare eyes. Men had traditions, traditions upheld by generation after generation as well as stories explaining the importance of these traditions. Places had their own local spirits, and spirits had gods watching over them.
If the spirits were upset with people barging into their space or living too greedily alongside the fair folk, they would complain to their gods or revolt against the humans and drive them out. Sometimes clever humans might even commune with the gods themselves rather than deal with spirits directly.
Elves and their rituals are one of the eldest remnants of these ancient religions. Said to be the union of man and spirit, elves do not naturally age or even die. It is rumoured that elves are the result of pagan folks offering their firstborns to the spirits, and this is often claimed to be the reason that elves themselves are not capable of reproducing by biological means.
Where a mere man would die, instead an elf's spirit leaves their body and it begins to age at a rapid rate and their spirit can walk free. The spirit can then slip back into the body after it gains enough hold on it. For this reason, it is believed that elves are much more spiritually in-tune with the world and were often carrying the role of mediums, shamans and druids in communities of the old times.
For this reason, a lot of elven rituals involve different sortf of blood-lettings or poisonings as they deliberately induce damage on their bodies in order to drive out the spirit and cause physical ageing to better represent the age of their spirit.
A lot of other rituals are also recorded to having been practiced by elves, but those are nowadays largely considered heretical under the eyes of the church.
The church of Varchic has also issued a mandate that no elves may employ a high position of power in neither politics or any other seat for they are beings not truly considered children of Varchic and thus not trusted even if they a recognised as intelligent person's of their own free will and mind. An elf caught masking their race to blend amongst humans is a criminal offence and will be dealt with according to the harm a potential slip-up might have caused had the elf not been recognised as one.
Such times are now in the past though, save for places far away from the reach of the church of Varchic. In lands un-touched by modern men and un-tainted by their commerce and civilization there still exists the beliefs of wild spirits and gods that are neither good nor evil, but rather beings of immense age and wisdom.
Nowadays within the reach of the church, these beliefs mostly exist in old wive's tales and stories told around campfires by people in the countryside.
In their efforts to further expand their reach and stabilise the sacred ground their god has blessed them with as they unite all the scattered children of Varchic, the church has aggressively pushed to even more far-off lands from the capital. Expanding towards lands beyond the horizon and bringing us all under one roof just as we stand atop one land, they have tirelessly spread the truth about this world and will continue to do so untill all the children of Varchic one day stand united like they did when they first followed the god-giant Varchic out of the Pit in the earth.
In doing this, the church has trampled over many pagan religions and continues to enforce the weeding of them, seeing them as nothing but the Deep trying to worm it's way to the minds of people. Those caught practicing any other faith are either apprehended and brought to the church to be taught the proper ways or executed as heretics and enemies of the church.
No comments:
Post a Comment