Mysteries of Esarat (Ess-are-ot)

Beyond the sky is the Great Mystery, that unknowable power that connects all lives and afterlives. The Mystery created the world, and moves it subtly and for unknown reasons. The Mystery is often imagined as a group of hidden Supreme Gods, but even this is regarded as conjecture - the whole point is that no one knows for sure. The more obvious spirits, those with names and bodies and visible personalities, are less important. The more hidden a force is, the closer it is to the Mystery, the more transcendent it is.
The Esarati temple is all about trying to understand the Mystery, channeling its power for Good, and mediating between the magical and the mundane. It is a semi-organized religion, a bundle of secret religious truths, rituals, and beliefs that are shared across Southwestern Sonev. The Esarati priesthood holds relatively few countries exclusively to themselves (and of these, most are semi-nomadic tribes), but they do syncreticly co-exist with many Navanan countries in Sonev's Southwest. Any group that isn't fully sedentary in Navana's orbit gravitates to Esarat as a counterweight.
As a semi-organized religion, Esarat is extremely malleable and can easily co-exist with local traditions or with organized religions. Traditionally, Esarat-Navana hybrid priests are known as Flower Shamans, a term which has also come to apply for priests who syncretize with any other strictly hierarchical religion.
Many people have tried to classify Esarat as a cult of one deity or another, to no avail: some claim it is Hidden One cult, some say Agamine or Haru or Emesh. But the truth is that Esarat specifically categorizes true divinity as something innately non-physical and distant, so any God-being that can be named or measured is by definition not Esarat's primary God. They do tend to hold Agamine and the Hidden One is greater esteem for seeking the Mystery, but they are not to be worshipped as Gods. All spirits, all Architects - they are only people, just dangerous and magically powerful people, and to entrust them with your soul is to surrender to a powerful charlatan.

Structure

There is no grand hierarchy in Esarat and no centralized authority to dictate dogma. There is a standardized local hierarchy, though, between three kinds of priest:

• Sky Priests, or High Priests, are priests who are well-educated, high status, and involved in politics. Sky Priests act as moral and ritual advisors for political leaders, keep sacred secrets, and organize the lesser priests of a community. Sky Priests can vary wildly: some are extremely important attaches to emperors or kings, while some work with their local communities and advise family matriarchs. Sky Priests are extremely exclusive in their authority, and work together closely to gatekeep against outsiders or usurpers.
• Flower Priests are priests who specialize in contacting powerful individual spirits and acting as mediators between magical things and mundane things. These are associated with merchants and mercenaries, and often are religiously syncretic with another organized religion. Half-outsiders religiously and communally, flower priests act as exorcists and sponges to absorb foreign-ness.
• Earth Priests are priests who specialize in medicine, childbirth, animal medicine, and common ritual. Sometimes called "witch priests" by outsiders, for their associations with witchcraft and curses, the Earth priests do most of the day-to-day spirit work of Esarat. They are less prestigious than the sky priests, but they are connected more closely to them than the Flower Priests: Earth priests are commonly called on for advisement by Sky priests and often serve as replacements if they are beloved by the community. Some Earth priests are treated with fear by their communities overtime, and do enter into a psuedo-witch status, but always with some reverence.
• Shadow Priests are extremely rare priests that handle medicine, aberrant religion, and the taboo. They are virtually all enslaved or unfree people who provide services for other enslaved or unfree people. If Earth priests are the low-status reflection of Sky priests, Shadow priests are the low-status reflection of Flower priests - mediators with foreignness and strangeness within the community. While most tribes or states don't have a static enslaved/unfree population large enough to sustain Shadow Priests, it is an old role that remains conceptually present in Esarati religion. Shadow priests are in a curious position - they can act as advocates and healers for enslaved people, though they can also indebt them for their services so that, if that person is freed, they become the Shadow Priest's slave (Sonevan slavery has traditionally allowed slaves to own slaves themselves). They are often co-owned by Flower Priests (who are seen as the only ones able to reliably control them) and during dangerous times they can be people of great respect and power within the community even while unfree.  

Sky Priests are in charge of keeping the communities in harmony with each other, while Earth priests do much of the policing against outside missionaries or cultural invasions.

Culture

Class, Species, Culture

Esarat legitimizes social class (like almost all established religions), but does this in a rather unusual way: by providing each layer of society with priestly representation and establishing a clear class hierarchy between these priests, the clergy act as a model of a righteous society that legitimizes class divisions. Leaders, merchants, commoners, and slaves all have their respective class of priest, who perform ritual and magical functions correlating to that part of society. In Esarati societies that are more finely divided, new classes of priests are created to represent them. In this way, everyone has their mediators with the Mystery that are specialized to meet their needs.
As for species, this religion in some ways favors mammalian species: the focus on animal husbandry and midwives makes it easier for humans, vesper, haltia, cats, kobolds, pangolins, and hybrids to enter the Earth priesthood than dryads, prisms, or solars. This tends to reflect a division across Southwestern Sonevan societies, where humans and dryads who adapt to human ways of life tend to be more socially powerful than dryads who live according to more sedentary dryad practices - where horses represent power, the lighter and more animal-oriented mammals prosper. In prior centuries this has occasionally created species conflict, but the increasing population of hybrids have made Esarat a more dryad-friendly religion over time. While dryads are more likely to enter religious or political positions of power if they have connections to hybrids (so it still isn't exactly perfectly equitable), the religion has opened itself up to include more dryad medical knowledge and priests. Full prisms, who are too heavy to ride horses in most cases, are severely under-represented and are largely seen as foreign by default.
Foreign-ness does not mean total exclusion in Esarat; foreign knowledge is seen as valuable and foreign magicians are seen as useful in their ability to safely handle spiritually dangerous things. Foreign entities are to be welcomed into the community and kept safe, but are denied its closest secrets unless they prove themselves.

Violence and War

It is true that life is considered sacred in Esarat and that the preservation of life is seen as essential to the health of the world. It is also true that many Esarati children are trained in combat regardless of social status, that many Esarati communities consider mercenary work to be a highly respected avenue for young adults to gain status and wealth, that raids are considered normal in many Esarati regions, and that Esarati communities have been known to engage in periodic warfare. Part of this is typical failure to live up to religious ideals, but part of this is something more nuanced: violence in Esarat is seen as a part of the world, dangerous and sacred but not evil. Rather than condemn violence, most Esarati communities classify and regulate different kinds of violence according to the context, rituals, and spaces surrounding it.
Raiding, for example, requires clear ritual justification: a Sky priest, a Flower priest, a Shadow priest, or three Earth priests must bless a raid to make it something that isn't murder. A raid must be given purpose before it is launched. It can be a wealth raid, which is seen as a kind of "money hunt" - rather than focus on killing, warriors on a wealth raid are given status for avoiding death and using either stealth or intimidation to obtain goods. If a target of a wealth raid resists intimidation, the proper next step is a duel if the target doesn't initiate violence - if the target refuses this and violates protocol, violence can be performed freely. Alternatively, it could be a vengeance raid performed to take lives or captives in exchange for a life wrongfully taken from the community. Captives are seen as preferably, as it preserves life and replaces the lost community member; if a captive taken to replace a community member can reasonably replace them (a hunter for a hunter, a child for a child, a smith for a smith, a magician for a magician), the captive is to be offered adoption after several years. Lives are to be taken if taking captives is not feasible for any reason (including a lack of food, difficulty in getting a captive, if the captive is a criminal to be tried and executed, or the presence of an agent of Theia the Liberator ). Raiding in both these examples is still a violent act that often involves taking lives, but it is ritually regulated violence.
Mercenary work is a strange thing theologically: if done for a religious outsider, mercenary work is a kind of Flower Priest-like activity that involves mediated spiritual contact with potentially dangerous foreign spirits. Working for foreigners means working for their Gods by proxy - and those Gods are valuable assets that also happen to want to eat your Soul. Mercenaries don't operate under normal Esarati rules while they operate: they put on foreign skins and faces (ritually, not literally) to absorb some of these God's power and resources in a mediated way, while their inner selves are preserved. So breaking taboo abroad is acceptable if it is being done for a foreign God, as long as distance is placed between the Outer You and the True You.
Space is a major mediator for violence in Esarat. Battles between faithful communities should be fought outside of either's main population center, to prevent indiscriminate violence. If a violent takeover is in progress, children under the age of 12 and pregnant individuals are moved into clearly marked spaces - slaying a child or a person in the process of making a child is considered unacceptable, and slaying any unarmed and nonviolent individual in a space designated for children is also unacceptable.

Sacred Bathing and Sacred Aging

Saunas and bathhouses are considered places of sacred rest and refuge, and violence within them is forbidden under all circumstances. These are areas where medicine is considered particularly blessed, and it is very unusual for a temple to not have a bath or sauna if one is present in the community at all. Bathing and laundry cleaning is considered a major part of community bonding and ritual. Some communities have class-segregated bathing and laundry; others see it as a space of true social equality. For a person to be physically able to bathe and clean their clothes and yet refuse to do so personally (by having servants do it for them) is considered childlike and unholy for an adult. Slaves and those indebted will often assist in the laundry of their superiors in ritual displays of social hierarchy, and it is normal for community members to help one another with the task. This is considered an extremely vulnerable space emotionally and spiritually, and only those who want to be cursed by spirits would violently interrupt laundry time.
More sacred than bathing and laundry is childbirth and what might be called "pediatric medicine" - the treatment of children under the age of 12. The most temperature-controlled and clean parts of the sacred baths are reserved for children, pregnant individuals, and dryads carrying children via pouch. These are spaces mediated by priests and most people are barred from them - it is considered dangerous for all parties involved for the ritual spaces to be breached.
Children under the age of 12 are considered 'true children' - unrefined bundles of life that radiate sacred potential and are beloved by the Mystery. These children are the children of life itself, and must be treated with care regardless of social class. Biological parents have particularly important responsibilities, with particularly damning spiritual consequences for neglecting their kids. When a child reaches 12, it becomes a teenager. Teens are expected to act like adults and eschew childish things, though they are still treated with more tolerance for failure, more mercy, and are to be protected from danger. Once a teen reaches 18, they become a young adult - truly adult, but still discouraged from having kids until they become a full adult at age 21. 

Mystery and Sacredness

Mystery is everything in Esarat - the most powerful things are the things we cannot see and the things we cannot know. Everyone has a mystery to them, a part of themselves that no one else can know - this is part of having a soul. Surrounding mysteries are bits of sacred knowledge: things that can be understood that give us some small understanding of the mystery. Sacred Knowledge must be respected, as both a respect to the holder of the mystery and as a show of respect to the Great Mystery. Everyone has their Sacred Knowledge, bits that they wish to keep close to themselves. Their privacy is a sacred thing, and gossip or other shows of disrespect are insults to the Great Mystery itself.
To know all of someone's or something's Sacred Knowledge is to know its True Name (which isn't so much an actual name but an understanding). It does not mean knowing their Mystery (again, impossible), but knowing a True Name does grant magical and spiritual power. This is a rather vague concept that is rarely ever defined, but that is part of the point - it is an extreme thing, reserved to describe the most intimate of bonds and the most insightful of legendary beings.

History

Esarat is a religion formed by the fusion of three regional traditions: the Mystery Lodge tradition of the Southwest, the Life Current Tradition of the center-east, and the Myriad Gods tradition of the Northeast. Neither of these three were consistent or organized, and they freely mixed between each other over the centuries.

• The Myriad Gods tradition essentially believed that the world was ruled by a conglomerate being known as the Zindaro (or Power of Everything), a sort of composite mind of the combined spiritual force of all the lesser gods and spirits of the world. One nomadic group, known as the Faro, carved out a number of large empires from  the 600s to 900s ME, and carried this tradition with them across the Southwest. In this tradition, knowledge was everything - the focus was on building as many small spiritual relationships as possible to access the greater Zindaro mind. Very syncretic with early Navana and Ekaza. 
• The Life Current tradition believes that all life and spiritual energy comes from the Mihoto, or Life Web, which manifests itself as all living beings. An extremely pantheistic religious tradition that clung to druidism with a passion. As the Myriad God tradition took more and more regional power, Life Current purists pushed back and created the Hidden House Movement. This movement would later pivot towards pushing back against Navanan syncretism. 
• The Mystery Lodge tradition perhaps is the most theologically dominant of the three in the modern day, though it spent much of Esarat's early history on the sidelines. The focus of the Mystery Lodge is a force known as the Mystery, the power behind all other powers that could be invoked for healing. Early Mystery Lodge theology was less about knowledge and more about health and fertility - early priests were midwives who gained priestly authority by proving they could deliver children with minimal casualty rates. 
• In the middle of it all were the Masked Mysteries, cultists of the Elder Leviathan known as the Deep King, though these petered out as the Deep King became distracted by new opportunities further North over time. 

The expansion of nomadic plains empires in the 600s began the merging of these three traditions: Northern plains kings, armed with Miutan steel and well-bred warhorses, spread across the plains with new crops, trade goods, and methods of conducting warfare. As they went, they brought their three-tiered priesthood (merchant shamans, common shamans, and high shamans) with them. The ever-syncretic Myriad Gods tradition fused particularly well with these neighboring traditions (all of them having a shared language group and certain shared rituals). Visitations by the god of healing, Haru, led to druids spreading more quickly through the region and more recognition of the Mystery Lodge midwives - for a moment, there was great intermingling in what might be called the Esarati religious revolution.
Initially, conflict mostly arose between the Life Current traditionalists and the Myriad God conquerors - the worshippers of the Life Web greatly disliked Orchid of Blue's attempts to preach through the Faro merchants, and gravitated towards Emesh instead. This led to the Hidden House movement: an organized effort by fringe mystics and traditionalists to reject the Faro traditions and create something new. This movement despised the new religious distinctions between flower, common, and high priests, and were classified as witches by the new order. When new Navana began seriously evangelizing in the 1400s onwards, the Hidden Houses worked furiously to kill missionaries and organize resistance - eventually reconciling them with the rest of Esarat. 
As the Empire of Miuta colonized the Southern coast and pushed their religion over the 1400s and 1500s, religious traditionalists across the spectrum were pushed together in unlikely alliances. These traditionalists were invited Southwest by the first Empire of Arinum, the first officially Esarati empire, in 1580 - and modern Esarat was articulated for the first time. This moment can be overstated, though - for a good century, this formalized hybrid was just this one country's state religion, rather than a grand religious organization. But, over time, the priests trained in Arinum set a standard for what non-Navanan priests should look like, and local communities actively adopted their own versions of this imperial religion for their own purposes. This has been called the 'New Sky Movement' in retrospect. 
The more other religions encroached on local traditions, the more the new Esarat was adopted and formalized. A singular governing body was never formed, though, despite attempts by the new Empire of Arinum to take control of the faith.

Mythology & Lore

Once upon a time, the Great Mystery made the world. We cannot know how or why. Our version of the world was not the first. The last world was just as vibrant as our own, until it was wiped out by an immense flood. The waters rose and rose and only on the peaks of three great mountains could anyone survive. Only the First People, a group of Shapeshifters, were able to escape the flooding. Using secrets of the old world and of the Mysteries, the First People reshaped the world out of the clay of the riverbed. 
Four of the First People, the most powerful of them, called themselves The Architects and created many new forms of life. They tried to rule the people they made, and had many descendants that they favored and raised to heights of great power. But one by one, the Architects dissapeared. Halcyon made Paradise out of the strings of life that held the world below together, but she was so tired after that she fell asleep for five thousand years. Her favorite heirs, the Lunar Pantheon, borrowed from her sleeping body to enhance their own power until none of her remained. The Chimera tried to be many people, and divided himself too thin - he faded into magic itself. The Masked One ventured too far into the lands of the dead to save a fallen lover, and came back a ghost - they alone can be seen, but never for long. The Hidden One became lonely and decided to pursue true wisdom. They destroyed their own name and ventured up, up, to find the Mystery itself and was never seen again. 
The First People have many stories about their adventures and deeds, emphasizing that they are fallible even as they are wise.

Cosmological Views

The more a being is overtly powerful and divine in our world, the clearer it is not a true divine - true divinity does not need material power, for a true God would simply see the universe align to its wishes. A True God would have to be incomprehensible and multi-faced to be involved in creating something as strange in our world; a True God would be outside of time in order to make time itself.
All spirits, immortals, and lesser "Gods" draw on either a gift from an ancient being or from the energy of the Life Web. The Life Web is the transfer of magical energy between creatures as they are born, live, and decay. The Web can be healthy, can be sick, and can die - and when it does, the spirits will fade and the world will be destroyed in a cataclysm, just like the last one.
Hell and Paradise are born of the Life Web, and people are temporarily assigned there by powerful spirits based on if a person has sinned. One day, these things will fade with the world and the spirits of the dead will go to an unknown fate - the True Death.
The only things truly worthy of worship is the Mystery - spirits are Greedy and will devour your soul if given permission. It is the role of priests to keep the spirits close enough to gain power and security from them, without having them devour your soul.
Spirits and Architects are also always depicted as fundamentally people: a person could reasonably become a spirit with the right magical training.

Tenets of Faith

• Respect Life: Do not slay children. Revere those who bring children into the world. Saunas are a sacred space, where healing is done and children are born - damned forever are those who take life in a sauna, or take the life of a baby, or a pregnant woman, or in front of a pregnant woman or baby. 
• Seek Knowledge: The Mysteries can never be known, but seek to understand what is possible. Knowledgeable people are to be kept alive, to have their knowledge kept alive. Obey your elders who know the secrets of the world.
• Do Not Surrender Your Soul: It is profane to allow your soul to be consumed; never surrender to the false promises of spirits. 
• Respect Creatures: Take meat, break horses, but do not let them go without tribute or sacrifice. On an animal's sacred day, do not kill it. Let your body be consumed by animals, so that you respect all animals you have eaten and so you return to the Web. 
• Honor Secrecy: Secrecy is in imitation of God. When a secret is made holy, only a sinner reveals it to everyone. Invading the secret spaces of someone else is defilement. Do not spy on someone's rituals, intimacy, or oath-making. 

Ethics

Esarati ethics tend to focus on intent over consequence, though intent must be proven through ritual language: did someone seek atonement immediately when they saw their action impacted someone negatively? If so, they are to be treated with mercy; if not, atonement must be earned the hard way.

Worship

Godly worship and reverential worship are clearly delineated in Esarat: a spirit or person can be honored, but never worshipped in the same way as the Great Mystery. To worship a person as a God is to offer up your soul for them to consume, which is a dire sin. 
Most worship in Esarat is reactionary: the ten most sacred rites are performed when significant events occur (like being born, coming of age, having a child, serious illness, etc), rather than for their own sake. The most regular form of communal worship is laundry/bathing ritual, community feasts, and other regular community activities given sacred meaning.

Priesthood

Sky Priests typically wear white and blue, Flower priests typically wear floral garments with coloring to indicate who they are aligned with, and Earth Priests typically wear green and grey. All priests wear a ceremonial lock (typically as an amulet) to indicate their commitment to protecting religious secrets and the unattainable nature of true knowledge.
Priests often pass their titles to their children, but if a child is unfit or unavailable their fellow priests will move to promote someone of their own.

"May the Truth Be Kind"

Founding Date

1580

Type

Religious, Organised Religion

Demonym

Esarati

Location

Sonev