Akadism

Akadism is a religion, a worldview, a way of life unique to itself. To live underground, in one of the great subterranean "Kima Cities " or under-cities of Samvara , is to be Akadian. To be a member of the Kima is to accept oneself as a part of a greater whole, a cell in a greater organism. Akadism is the extrapolation of that relationship to the universe itself. It is cosmic acceptance of one's life and one's role. Life in the Kima is the foundation of Akadian worship- expansion of the underground their evangelism. To carve raw stone into the city is the ultimate act of conversion, to which no mortal turn of heart can compare. One can try to be Akadian outside of the Kima, but a true believer will always feel alone and out of place in surface-societies. One can try to be a heathen inside of the walls of the Kima, but the cramped halls and mines of the underworld tolerate no dissent- no cancer in the body of the world.
Akadist religion praises Kim, or Divine Order, as the supreme force worthy of worship. The Kima embody this Divine Order, and the more perfect the city the more divine manifests onto the material plane. The ultimate embodiments of Kim are the four supreme "Architects" that made and command the world, under which are a great host of lesser gods and spirits.
Akadist living is essentially based around an intricate caste system. Every person is a cell, a strand of living tissue that is shaped from childhood to perform your task. Every task comes with an assigned status and assigned legal rights. It is a privilege to know how your task contributes to the whole, not a right. Only the Gods know the full picture. And, with the Gods silent, the Chambers know best. The Chambers are anonymous oligarchies bound up in their own ritual and formality. None may know who sits upon them, for even the concept of an individual is antithetical to the Chamber's spiritual essence.

Structure

There are four great castes in Akadist society: Priests (Word-Made), Administrator-Regulators (Blood-Made), Artisan-Specialists (Spark-Made), and Laborers (Stone-Made). Within these castes are hundreds of sub-castes, which can vary from Kima to Kima. 
Priestly leadership is political leadership - Akadist priests are expected to lead, to enact their cosmic plans upon the world directly. But rather than train in rhetoric and leadership like other political priesthoods, Akadist priests study architecture and urban planning. A priest's architectural or social engineering ability is a legitimizing force, a way to prove one's superior divine connection. Theology and ritual are still important, of course, but planning skill is a way for lesser priests to rise up the hierarchy.
Among the Priests, the Chamber - the anonymous oligarchy of the four great priests- rules absolutely. Unseen are the "Outer Chambers" that inform and advise the four, and really as much part of the oligarchy as the formal chamber is. The Outer Chambers might be thought of as the upper echelons of the priesthood, and entry into them is more fluid- many seats there are temporary, called in and dismissed by the True Chamber's whims.
Beneath the Chamber are the Authorities, the great priest-architects who carry out the Chamber's Will. They come in two flavors: Organ Authorities, which lead the departments ("Organs") of the Kima, and the District Authorities, which design and bless the physical districts. Both kinds of Authorities are not dictators, but are rather leaders of priestly councils involved in that Organ or District (also, confusingly, called "Authorities"). An Authority must act either in representation of the Chamber or their Authority Council if they want to do anything.
Beneath the authorities, priests come in one of several flavors:

• Earth Priests, who are considered architecturally talented and engage in nature cult - communing with the Earth for its permission to be reshaped.
• Soul Priests, who are considered talented social planners and work more directly with political cult
• Flesh Priests, who are considered talented healers and engage in fertility and healing cult. Heavy overlap with the Organ of The Mouth (magician-heralds)
• Specialist Priests, who fulfill niche functions and are basically their own thing

These specialists vary from Kima to Kima, but among them all, two important kinds are always present and often hold great power: The Reborn and the Listeners.  The Reborn are priests that reproduce asexually (as Prisms can do) and are subjected to ritualized recreations of the life of their supposed original. With identical blood and identical upbringing, the idea is that the Reborn are perfect recreations of the original ancient person. To avoid over-worshipped Reborn becoming icons and polluting the Kima with their individualism, they are then carefully confined into a worshipful priestly council that is given authority to approve or deny new innovations or technologies. The Listeners are the only ones permitted to use The Divine Contact. They are the interface between the Lunar Pantheon and the Kima, essentially living tools to gain information that are kept isolated from other political positions.

Culture

Species Preference: Prism-Made, Prism Led

Kima society was born from Prism innovation, for Prism clans. Akadism, or some kind of proto-Akadism, predates all other Samvaran religions or societies. The cities that dominate the surface are based on the Kima, defined in opposition to it - as are the evangelical religions they carry. And so Akadism has defined itself in opposition right back, eagerly embracing its Prism-made roots. 
Akadist society is based around Prism needs first, and is willing to sacrifice the needs and health of other species to do this. Mining as a central function of society prioritizes Prism food. The lack of lighting is no problem for Prisms, who need none to see; the close quarters of the city does not become a cauldron of disease for Prisms like it does Humans or Dryads. Prism bodies bear force more evenly and do not rely on bones, and so the repetitive work gives them no arthritis or bones diseases. 
Akadist societies may have a few dryads or humans among the leadership, but the extremely slow advancement within the caste system favors the longer-lived Prisms. Similarly, upper castes tend to be majority Prism, with a few exceptions that prove the rule.
This isn't to say that Akadists want other species out: on the contrary, they have taken Halcyon's blessings of the non-Prism species as a sign that a mixed society is a blessed one. The Lunar Pantheon have supported this notion, fearful of an exclusive radical pro-Prism society developing. And so, Akadists recruit those they can into their ranks, promising a safe and stable life. Some Akadists even break tradition and abduct outsiders when they need labor for the mines.

Identity, Gender, and Dress

The Individual is ephemeral and largely unimportant in Akadist society. Elites in particular are expected to be as anonymous as possible- taking on archetypal names or referring to themselves purely by positionality (ex: "the 3rd level earth priest of the upper Kifka district"). For those of The Chamber (ruling oligarchy), anonymity is required to hold the position - a public reveal would lead to that member being kicked out. To prevent this from happening, many ambitious priests refuse to even have a publicly used name (can't leak an identity you don't have!). This breaks down the further down the social hierarchy you go. Even among the lower classes, "individual flair" is frowned on in public. This doesn't mean Akadists are uniform in appearance- a wide cast of traditional art forms and fashions exist for people to make their own. Among the upper classes, ornate crystals of specific composition are aligned to evoke ancient symbols and styles, with a focus on material rather than coloration (material consistency and texture being acutely visible to Prisms and color being invisible). Non-upper-class humans and dryads focus more on bright body paint, to make themselves more visible in the dim lighting. These paints are still done in traditional patterns, but there is a certain joy that the humans and dryads have in being able to police their own definitions of tradition (Prisms have trouble discerning the patterns, being unable to see color). 
Gender expression is similarly "too personal" for the workplace for middle and upper castes. For them, gender is something to be revealed as a sign of intimacy. Lower castes, which live closely together and lack a distinction between the workplace and the home, are completely comfortable with gender expression. Because fashion is controlled and there isn't a gendered work binary, actual forms of gender expression tend to be rather muted. Little things- patterns of speech, preferred tradition fashions, pronouns, chore division- serve as quiet signs of gender. These gender expressions actually constitute many genders in practice: each ethnic group that is assimilated into the Kima brings their own gender traditions that live on among the low-caste.

History

Origins

The Akadism of the West was first. In the beginning, it was a middle ground between religious practices of the Prism tribes that came together: a way to reconcile the ancestors, local gods, and locational spirits they all brought together. The united priesthood stood together and said: "The body is the earth is the dead is the spirit. They are all one." This big-tent pantheism was welcoming to all peoples that came to join in their prosperity, including the neighboring dryad and human tribes. The first Kima cities were somewhat voluntary: during bad years, semi-nomadic farming tribes would seek shelter with the riverside Prisms and would receive housing in their caves in exchange for help mining. When a string of truly bad years started and continued for a decade, this became the Kima: pact of surface and underground, a true permanent sedentary city. These pacts became the model for sedentary life and soon many imitators arose. And, with time, these early Kima locked down the riverlands, walling off the most fertile valleys and preventing migration along the river. Some tribes managed to talk their way by and become merchants- others weren't so lucky and were summarily forced to try and fight their way through. Most were defeated by the Kima and effectively enslaved. This arrangement proved profitable- and profit led to stratification, caste. Akadism started denying "inferior" rituals of subjugated peoples, closing ranks and defining itself. The pact stopped being voluntary, leaving stopped being an option. The river became a warzone. A leader of the opposition arose, named Lily of Red, who raided and pillaged the Kima. The God Halcyon intervened, and negotiated a peace - many abusive Kima were destroyed, Lily became a Lunar God, and the Kima were gifted with Halpara Mushroms to make life more comfortable for its non-Prism denizens. 
Akadism was transformed by this: opposition forced it to articulate itself, to define its Gods and worldview and cosmology. Every Kima was still different, but they now had to hold a united front against evangelizing Suheskivari (proto-Pratasam). This isn't to say that it was always Pratasa versus Akadist: Akadists helped drive out the Halikvar, and plenty of inter-Kima wars involved Pratasa actors on both sides. The two faiths, while defined in mutual opposition, did trade rituals and ideas. Their intricate dances threatened to produce a kind of syncretic faith in places, which proved threatening to both establishments. What killed that syncretic religion and the mutual intermingling was the rise of The Lunar Pantheon and The Divine Contact, particularly the presence ex-Kiman Emesh. Not only did Emesh, Theia, and Lily tactically reveal the identities of anonymous Kiman leaders, but they threatened the very fabric of society with their interference. And so Akadism began implementing information quarantines with the outside world and ruthlessly categorizing its subjects to better track dissent. 

Western Akadism

Each Kima handled the lockdown differently, and different social structures began to bloom in each Kima. Akadism was local again. Slowly, the Kima began to reconnect with one another and the outside world. An order arose in the West: Grand Western Akadism, the religion of an alliance of the greatest Kima that envisioned all Kima united as a network. Grand Akadism saw the Kimas as components of a greater future whole - a body made of bodies. Some Kima were to serve certain purposes: production of certain goods, for example. It was to be a great imperial project. Those who opposed them were dissenters, heretics, individualists. They fell before the Grand Akadists, fleeing in every direction to start their own Kima. By 450 ME, the heartlands of Akadism were all united under one empire known as "The Grand Ekedum". 
The Grand Ekedum was never as total in its control as it believed it was- there were always frontier Kima that did their own thing. But they did create a very firm definition of Akadism in the West. It was culturally insular, militaristic, and xenophobic, viewing all other religions as inferior and doomed to a hellish existence. This very extreme view of Akadism reigned in the West from 450 ME to around 900 ME, after which The Grand Ekedum began to lose control. The original Kima heartlands, Pritinam, were able to secede into a Lesser Ekedum- which was less xenophobic but still very centralized and authoritarian. The Ekedums fought, splintering at every turn. And then, from 1400 to 1800 ME, the earthquakes began. The Trials of Earth and Terror, or so they were named, absolutely demolished the many Ekedums. Thousands, possibly millions, died in the collapses. The dread of a united empire died. Every Kima still carries an idealized version of the Ekedum dream, though: the aspiration to again rise as a united empire. The West also remains the most carefully defined and authoritarian: merchants are despised as possible traitors, printing is considered taboo, and dissent is most carefully crushed. 

Other Akadisms

Eastern Akadism began in the 200s, as the refugees of the Western Empire introduced their ways of life to Eastern prism communities or made their own Kima. Some conquered, others traded, others evangelized. The East is difficult to discuss because it is plurality incarnate. The very idea of some Kima ruling others is considered forbidden in much of the East: each Kima must be an island, they say. In Halikvari lands, Akadism has developed a codified sacred legalism; in the South Sea region, Akadism is full of animated local spirits. 
The North, meanwhile, came from an instance of unique synthesis and heresy. In the 1600s, amidst the Trials of Earth and Terror, an Eastern exile known as "The Vessel" claimed to be a Reborn priest with a vision from the Architects that would save the Kiman refugees and lead them to their destined future. The Vessel gathered as many refugees as they could from the Western Kima and fashioned them into an army- and began extracting tribute from the surrounding non-Akadist states. They were able to purchase a series of fleets to bring their army North- the Great Northern Invasion began. The Vessel carved into the unstable Kingdom of Arami, overthrowing the Pratasa government and marching their people to the hills. The local Prisms were forced to help dig these new Kima, and The Vessel began ruling as monarch of Arami and the Over-Chamber Incarnate. Northern Akadism was born: a more outward, friendly, Akadism that is more willing to accept individuals. Northern Akadism is willing to rule over non-Kima and even establish non-Kima communities that just live in compounds with large underground buildings. One could argue that it is on track to become the Akadist syncretecism that the Prisms of the 100s were so afraid of.

Mythology & Lore

The Creation of the Kima

In the Beginning, there was Kim - the Divine Order. From nothing, it made everything. As its instruments of creation, Four Architects emerged:

• Olsaya, the Divine of Inspiration, Heavens, Magic, and the Embodiment of Elemental Air
• Khobar, the Death Judge, Divine of Judgment, Afterlives, Oaths, Law, and Embodiment of Elemental Earth
• Asuru, the Flame Hermit, Divine of the Sun, Fire, Wildness, Cats, Creation, and Mysteries; Embodiment of Elemental Flame
• Ayvam, the Divine of Change, War, Storms, Healing, and Embodiment of Elemental Water

And the Architects did fashion and order the world. But their creations have them names, and from individuality did disagreement spring. Unable to truly act in united goodness, the supremely good architects created a fallible and imperfect world. They were heartbroken when they saw this, and each went to a chosen people to right their wrongs.
Olsaya came down to the humans and dryads, and taught them ways of joy and magic - but left them in chaos. Asuru came to the cats and solars and took away their earthly needs, but also stole their voices and cursed them to forever wander.  Ayvam taught the Aquatic races strength, but nothing else. Khobar ordered the Prisms into an ideal system- but it was rigid and unyielding as the roots of the Earth. The early Kima of Khobar were too stony and exclusive.  It had no festivals, no fun. Most terribly, it conquered and enslaved the other peoples they did not see as perfect. And so the peoples fought.
Only amidst this reckoning did the Architects finally realize that they were in discord. They descended to bring peace- and in Samvara, where the four great peoples met, a compromise was made. The Four peoples learned from one another, and were for a moment perfect. The Kimas were no longer ruled by Khobar and their spirits, but by a council of four anonymous representatives that can channel the Architects. Only the Kimas have the connection to the past to keep that old perfection alive. Only they keep the ancient ways. 

The Verse Stories

The verse stories are ancient tales, myths explaining the world that are highly variable and generally accepted as ambiguously true. They feature a cast of local spirits that often cavort around the heels of the Architects, causing problems and getting into adventures and hijinks. Aside from the Architects, who serve as the judges and moral centers of these stories, you have:

• Suhet, the Salt-Giver - a salt-spirit associated with plentiful food, also a bit of a naive adventurer
• Markarn, the Hearth Spider, weaver and fate-spinner, responsible friend 
• Shanya the Craft Spark, a Wizard and shapeshifter known for dragging protagonist into trouble
• Atesa, the Mushroom-Spirit, a travelling crop spirit that must wander the earth raising crops - but must frequently outwit those who seek to capture her. Quest-giver and protagonist at once.
• Arsidar, the River Serpent, creator of paths, spirit of underground rivers, and dispenser of secret wisdom
• Kavela the Grave Guide, a cranky old magician and psychopomp 
• Aksem, the Beast of Beasts - a representation of pure wildness, sometimes a monster sometimes a wild person
• Rayma, the Old Mountain - sometimes a wise old teacher of medicine, sometimes a big walking mountain
• Kofea, the Deepwyrm - a dragon that lives deep underground that likes to eat people and sometimes give magic items or blessings for quests

Cosmological Views

Akadism envisions the world as fundamentally alive and interconnected. This includes the planet, which is envisioned as a massive living thing that moves through the universe, breathes, eats, and can even speak. The afterlives are also living things, which must be cared for through worshipful action. The afterlives, it is reasoned, are simply other planet-worlds like this one that have different rules. 
Part of this worldview comes from Akadistic Logic: essentially, a belief that there are fundamental essences that can be defined, measured, and compared. This derives from the sacred body: all sentient life shares critical features that define it, a shared essence of body that is a measuring stick for what is person, what is animal, and what is spirit. 
There is a contrarian element to this philosophy, that complicates all this: the fundamental mystery. Anonymity is not only a virtue because there it destroys pride and dissent-bearing individualism, but it is a virtue in that it represents the fundamental unknowable-ness. This very frequently clashes with the fundamental knowable-ness of Akadistic Logic, a conflict that many a theologian has argued over.

Tenets of Faith

• Obedience is Humility is Piety: Pride is a disease, disobedience is harmful evil pride. Obedience is humility, is harmony. Individual accomplishment and boasting should be suppressed- anonymous heroes are the most virtuous.
• Support Your Fellows: When your neighbor or friend suffers, lend your aid. They are you. You will suffer their pain eventually, so aid them now.
• All Have A Place, All Are Important: Even lower-caste people are part of the same organism. To abuse those below you is to harm yourself
• Think of Tomorrow: The world is eternal. Short-term thinking is a kind of fundamental selfishness that is pure spiritual poison.
• Build the Destiny of the Kima: To glorify the city, to build it greater, is to improve the world and make it more heavenly.

Ethics

Morality is duty based- it is fulfillment of moral social duties. It is action, colored by intent but not defined by it.

Worship

Akadian society is a worshipful society. Ritual is a common way to mediate social interactions between caste, to illustrate and articulate status relationships within a caste-group, and to rehearse in-group community loyalty. The Architects are embodied often, in little ways: one prays to them, thanks them, and becomes them whenever one creates something or somehow shapes the world.

"We are the Flesh of the World"

Type

Religious, Organised Religion

Alternative Names

Kimavar

Demonym

Akadian, Akadist

Deities

• Halcyon
• The Chimera
• The Hidden One
• The Masked One