The Way of Brambleshanks

You have a name, a face, a mask, a role, a thing you can't control, but you can if you really know how. You are many names, fluid and crystal at once: parent, child, sibling, subject, ruler, healer, warrior. How can a cat* have so many faces? Are you a liar? No. Not if you follow the Way He left for you. He danced and gambled and meandered through the brambles and the swords and the heaven-hell-sharp-edges and he made you a path if you would follow it. Be everything, be nothing, learn the game and meet it in the middle of a dark night like an old lover.
* Good news! You are and were always a cat, tall thing
The Way of Brambleshanks (the Brambleway, the Cosmic Way) is a religion that combines the wisdom of the Cat Heavens, the Elder Leviathans, and the Prophet Cosmic Lord Brambleshanks. It is more interested in creating a system for personal behavior and navigating the complexities of the heavens than creating a static worldview or singular truth of the world - the goal of the Way is to give believers control over their fundamental spiritual nature. If a person is in control of what they are defined by the world as, they can better control where they go when they die, where their mind/spirit wanders as they live, and where they fit into society.
The Brambleway is not purely philosophical; many adherents worship the Cosmic Lord, the Cat Heavens, and certain Leviathans. That said, the Way is not an exclusive religion and many followers incorporate local gods or even gods borrowed from other neighboring religions. The Kingdom of Kokai, central bastion of the Way, also venerates Brambleshanks' descendants as minor god-monarchs.
The Brambleway is a relatively minor religion as they go, clinging to the Northern end of Nafena. Among cats, however, the Brambleway is much bigger - Bramblecats can be found across Nafena and Maradia, along with small numbers in Eastern Ekraht, Ukaram, and Southern Inahng.

Structure

The Way is very structurally fluid, with local religions compromising and sharing structure with the Way in many places. Every community needs a priest or a medicine-doctor connected with the greater structure; every government needs a Conjurer to guide the royal court and a Heavenguide to lead the country's priests. 
The Bloodkits lead the religion internationally, electing a Cosmic Regent from within the royal family. Generally speaking, a hierarchy of the Way would look like this:

Rank	Role
Cosmic Regent	Leading the holy kingdom of Kokai, representing the faith internationally
The Bloodkits	The Sacred Family who hold the graces of Brambleshanks; managing the faith between countries
The Glory-Words	Sacred leaders of a country's faithful
High Pentakat	Manage regional faith clusters, often from cities
Star Doctor	Agents, military leaders, cult leaders, conjurers
Spirit Doctor	Community leaders, healers, and spiritual guides

The other major structure in all of this are the Channels - sacred guilds of sorts that organize warlocks by patron and regulate their activity while also softly guiding them. Channels are big into masks and are always anonymous when in public, sharing their member rosters only with the priesthood - they are also the state cult of The Masked One. 
The current Cosmic Regent is Drizzlebub the Ascended Being, an older cat descended from Brambleshanks who was married to the prior Monarchy Cat of Kokai (though not the new one, Monarchy Cat Noilstep). Drizzlebub is an extremely powerful warlock, well respected and generally loved despite her easily roused temper and general grumpiness.

Culture

Defining Reality: Names and Boundaries

According to The Way, to define something is to create a controlled relationship between yourself and that thing - it is also to recognize that thing as an entity unto itself, thereby granting it status and meaning. In less philosophical terms, stable definitions are considered extremely important even if they are flawed or constructed. Names and boundaries are seen as the essential units of definition. By naming yourself, you are defining yourself; by agreeing upon shared meanings for certain names, you are given more control over how you are understood while simultaneously reinforcing the name-meanings of others. Boundaries, social and physical, give places and institutions the stability necessary for people to have reliable and healthy relationships with them.
What does this mean for everyday life and culture among the followers of The Way? For individuals, it means that name selection and recognition are incredibly important things. Lying about your name is seen as a spiritually damaging thing; misnaming someone intentionally is not just rude but sinful. This is drilled into children from a young age, and permeates the culture. Major holidays incorporate name affirmation rituals, and wearing one's name is common among merchants and elites. A person has three names, typically: a name from their family (known as a collar-name), a name from themselves defining their role (known as their face-name), and a secret name that they seek over the course of their lives (their penultimate name defining what they will be summed up before Heaven). A family name is both a surname and a childhood name, but upon reaching adulthood the person chooses a self-defining name. A self defining name has two parts: the address and the title. The address might be an adjective like "Charity", an associated thing like "Maple-lily", a translated meaning name like "Geraiva" (or 'laughing one'), or even a "Jellinim" or nonsense phrase such as "Parcynebbles". Cats are encouraged to blend traditional naming (Natural-object-of-same-color prefix plus occupation-role suffix) with Jellinim, and some humanoids do the same. A title is something like "the farming man", "the smiling acrobat", "the friendly merchant", "the medicine cat", "the duke of Basleden" - something that describes the person directly. A title is not always invoked, typically only in formal settings or introductions. A title is somewhat chosen, somewhat given; a name is only confirmed by the community if it is accurate to their social reality (for example, you cannot claim to be the Duke of Basleden if you don't have a legitimate claim to that title). Impersonation is a terrible crime very harshly punished.
Firm social boundaries are necessary for names to even work; what an aristocrat or farmer is exactly must be clearly defined. For this reason, legal ambiguity is associated with illegitimacy in The Way. Lawyers thrive in this environment, and are necessary even in less-developed states. Property boundaries are similarly carefully defined and policed. The purpose and status of everything must be stated and controlled, typically by politicians and priests. Usurpers are seen as particularly heinous imposters, and new regimes must go to great lengths to legitimize themselves on their own terms.
Knowledge and community are the big trends here. Curiosity is lauded; community recognition is key to a person being a person. Community rejection is a kind of living death, and the greatest punishment possible is to brand someone as Blood Broken: essentially a permanent exile, un-personed. A Bloodbroken person is forbidden from accessing family connections or forming new ones - children are taken from them, marriages are forbidden. There is a media genre known as "Brand Tragedy" about children of Blood Broken individuals, who are seen as universal objects of pity for whom adoption by someone else is seen as the only hope.

Cats!

Cats are beloved by Heaven; this is just a fact. No other species has such a persistent and intrinsic connection - cats need neither text nor incense to connect with the Divine. If disaster strikes, cats must be protected; cat communities must be protected to ensure the spiritual health of humanoid communities; cats are best suited for statecraft and priesthood. This preference and veneration favors the small circle of elite cats capable of cross-species communication (typically warlocks), as the average cat community lacks the ability to use tools or language in ways to leverage this social advantage. For this reason, there isn't what we might call systemic prejudice targeting non-cats, though the system does protect and favor cats more generally than anywhere else on the planet.
Cats within the Way are still loosely divided between Jellicles, urban communities, and rural communities, but the divisions are less intense between them than in other lands. The Way provides a common language of ritual, naming, and respect between these groups and encourages population movement between them. The Jellicles are a little more traditionalist, and the warriors are a little more Jellicle, and both have their own Way worship that makes them unlike anything outside of The Way.
A special quirk within the Way Cats are the role of Calico males. Calico male cats (calico being white-belly tricolor cats) are born completely infertile due to chromosomes related to coloration. Some cat communities have not realized this, while others discard the knowledge over time as irrelevant; others have their own cultural approaches to calicos. Before the Cosmic Lord arrived, South Nafena's cats either didn't acknowledge this fact or saw calicos as undesirable lessers. When Brambleshanks rose to power, he elevated the calicos to his personal guard and administration - adopting many of them as his own. Calicos under The Way are mediators, companions of the divine family, beloved by the administration. Calico males in particular occupy a curious space of mystique - they can have no children to inherit, nor is there a risk to the bloodline's legitimacy, and they are almost seen as parentless beings who are children of Heaven rather than children of flesh. While not all calico males choose to join the priesthood (or have access to those institutions), those who do are initiated as Cosmic Orphans, genderless, timeless, beings loyal to Brambleshanks himself.

Everyone Else

Humans, dryads, prisms, choricals, all can get ahead under The Way - the aloof cats are careful to avoid playing favorites along species lines. The important thing for any group under The Way is definition; if you have a clear identity that stays static for long periods of time, the system will slowly grow used to you. Nomadism tends to be the biggest victim of this approach: nomads are inherently disorganized, fluid, and flexible, and they rarely respect property boundaries in the same way as sedentary states. Merchants, mercenaries, and mobile people who classify themselves accordingly while submitting to the sedentary states are acceptable, but full-time nomads who are not temporarily mobile are not welcome by many in The Way. If any species is impacted the most by this, it is Solars - solars in the East are defined by their nomadism and their rejection of common society. They can't even fully articulate words the same way as others, which threatens the naming system entirely. For these reasons, solars are seen as dangerous troublemakers and aliens who cannot be trusted - curious, dangerous phenomena that are better left untouched.
Undersea adherents to the Way aren't quite as bound by sedentary property lines and have interpreted the Bramblewords differently. The focus on spoken names is unfortunate for Cuttlefolk, though, who are forced to stick mostly among themselves rather than being allowed to comingle with octopeople and squiddles.
Another side effect of all this is the favoritism that The Way has towards power cliques. While the community recognition aspect may seem democratic and the knowledge-seeking aspect may seem open-minded, The Way also favors small enlightened elites and tradition in such a way that limits popular action and social change.

History

The Way was built by Cosmic Lord Brambleshanks, greatest warlock of history and a visionary among cats. Brambleshanks lived a long life on the edge of many cat societies, and experienced the best and worst of them all - they learned to both love and hate the Warriors, the Jellicles, and the Exile Cults. They emerged from the far North with a small army of cat disciples who felt similarly disillusioned with the systems of cat religion, and joined in the great warlock rebellion of Kokai - playing a critical role in pushing out both the Final Choir of Vetevism and The Singing Church of Orisha. When the dust settled, Brambleshanks reigned master of warlocks and cats - and while he installed his mate, Frostfar, as Monarchy-Cat, he ruled as the symbol of the new independent kingdom. He demanded religious tolerance and protection of the indigenous religions while he created his new religious superstructure, and the Way quickly spread as a syncretic religion of tolerance and adaptation. 
When Brambleshanks finally died in 1599, the Way was settling into an establishment. The Cosmic Lord would continue leading from beyond the grave for much of the 1600s, before withdrawing to focus on other things over the 1700s. The transition to full mortal rule was inevitable, but sadly did lead to increased corruption and intrigue. The royal family was growing, and many worried about potential schisms. In 1790 ME, a new series of reforms cast out many of the royal family and essentially made entrance into the "true royal family" dependent on accomplishments as well as birth - cats born to the Bloodkits would simply be revered children rather than Bloodkits until they proved themselves through magic, leadership, or otherwise. This created quite a bit of conflict, which almost led to a civil war in 1800, but which was averted through quick action on the part of Cosmic Regent Cherrybone. Cherrybone brought his own reforms, centralizing the priesthood slightly and bringing the other kingdoms of the Way under clearly Kaikan leadership. This system has given way to more elite, detached cat leaders over time, and many have become dissatisfied with the Bloodkits in recent years. 
The cold kingdoms of the Southern tip of Nafena remember a different hero on top of Brambleshanks: Rubyjanna the windway prophet, a warlock and priestess of the Way who taught many in the far South the Way over the 1700s. There was also the controversial figure of Janakama the Turncoat, a Vetevic chorical who led a fleet of Vetevic conquerors into the far Southern tip with the mission to conquer the trading point for the Choir in 1910. Janakama did this, but ultimately converted away from Vetevism after the colony failed in 1925, and led their loyalists to create a bardic college in the South.

Mythology & Lore

Before the world, there was chaos - time and space were fluid, and spirits existed with only shadows for bodies. It was not a world without life, only a world without boundaries. Beyond our world, this chaos still exists - it can never come to an end, for that would be an imposed limit on its expanse.
Within this chaos, two Architects exist:

• The Formless, or the Hidden One, the creative force, the isolating force, the truth, the essence of experience, the force at play when a thing does not change or die
• The Faceless, or the Masked One, the destructive force, the comingling force, the transitional force, transformation, death, movement

And those two Architects are known as the Prime Architects or the True Architects. It is from the intersection of those True Architects that True Heaven was born. True Heaven is the singular point from which all "spiritual worlds" emerge from, be they heavens or hells. True Heaven is a swirling vortex of primordial truth, the source that pours energy and purpose into our reality; the patterns that shape True Heaven dictate the grand structures we live by. All essential, personal wisdom can trace itself to a fundamental truth found in True Heaven, making it the focused point of worship and study for the wise cat.
True Heaven spawned many heavens and hells, which served as a lens for light from the True Architects to project through. The shadows of the shapes beyond our world, overlapping, became Reality As We Know It, or the material plane. At first, this created a dangerous and shifting shadowplay of extremes. But the shadows of the Two Architects came alive, and became the Lesser Architects, who ordered the material plane. They are:

• The Patriarch, The Chimera, who gives magic and gives the wrong questions
• The Matriarch, Halcyon, who gives authority and gives the wrong answers

With this ordering of the world, the Grand Ball began: a dance of forms, roles, names, and actions that dictates the rhythm of life. We are blind to all but its pageantry. While we must obey the rules of the Ball and respect its rhythm, dangerous falsehoods can overtake the mind if you uncritically accept its illusions for absolute truth.
The great dance of spirits and shadow-bodies hosts a number of honored guests - Inside Gods and Outside Gods. Inside Gods, or Inner Gods, are beings who gain their power from the illusions of the Lesser Architects. These include the The Lunar Pantheon and most Immortals. The Outside Gods, or Outsiders, are visiting entities from the Chaos that have come to play - Outsiders carry powerful truths, being unbound by the illusions of the Ball, but they also often don't know or respect the rules and are therefore dangerous. The easiest Outsiders to spot are Leviathans, but others exist. The key to understanding how to interact with an Honored Guest is to figure out if they are an Insider or an Outsider, which will inform whether they carry knowledge for protecting the body, or insight for enlightening the spirit. An Honored Guest always speaks in riddles, so a wise cat knows to never accept their words at face value.

Cosmological Views

The world in total is vast, alien, and incomprehensible. There are two paths to navigating it: the focused path and the endless path. The majority of life wisely follows the focused path, where you recognize your limited universe as a construct (ant-sized and pitiful) and focus on the things that do matter for you - rightful living and community support. The endless path is typically only followed for short bursts, except by the truly hungry, for it is the path of accepting and absorbing the impossible: opening oneself to all of the universe and eschewing the petty world of everyday life to embrace it. Of course, rightful living and community support should still happen - a warlock seeks to walk both paths at once - but there is also now the pursuit of knowledge and an acceptance of the world.
But beyond this philosophical approach, how do children of the Way envision the world generally? Typically, in bubbles. The globe is a bubble of rock in a bubble of sky in a bubble of void in a bubble of universe. The important distinction that this model presents is Inside Influence versus Outside Influence: is this spirit or presence inside the bubble with you, or pressing in across realities?
Inside the bubble, creatures follow rules. Altogether, it is a game (rather like a party, though built for spirits rather than bodies), though it can be cruel to the pieces of that game. The game wishes you to seek victory in it, but victory can never be enjoyed by the pieces. Inside Influences, like immortals or The Lunar Pantheon, will always wish to win the game themselves. Outside Influences are useful in that they have perspective and see the game for the illusion that it is.
There is some disagreement over whether the Game should be embraced(for we are spirits, our bodies are shadow on the walls) or rejected (for we are twilight creatures, shadow and light), but most agree that a wise path is in the middle - identifying your role and compromising with it.
Trapped in a shadow world, a game piece and player both, it is the wise cat who listens only partially to any influence. Knowledge should be sought, but rarely acted upon. Be the vessel of your own spiritual inertia, dance the soul-dance you were born for, rather than an object torn apart trying to follow the motions of another being (such as a Lunar God).
All this talk of shadow worlds and illusions may give someone a false impression that The Way rejects the idea of objective truth, but this would be a mistake: unlike a faith like Sumoxa, The Way believes that the rules governing the world are internally very consistent and are worth knowing.

Tenets of Faith

• Find Your True Name: The great journey in life is finding what roles you were meant to play. This is a negotiation between the selves and the world - what makes you happy? What makes your family happy? What does your society expect? It takes hard work to find a compromise, but it is the greatest work a person can do. True fulfillment requires your best effort in this, and a just society ought to promote it.
• Wear Your Mask Well: The world gives us roles and duties regardless of our wants. While we seek to self-actualize our true roles, we must perform our duties to the best of our abilities and seek to find bits of ourselves in them. Embrace duty, and make it your own; find power in it.
• Embrace Change: The world is one of contradiction and transformation, which requires a constantly shifting perspective to understanding. True wisdom is a process, not a static realization. Be flexible, keep an open mind. New things are a chance for new wisdom.
• Judge Not: Only when harm is done to a person, a place, or a community can one judge them - when someone misbehaves from their role harmlessly, they are simply creating a more nuanced role.
• Respect Names: A name is a sacred thing. Do not take a name that does not belong to you; do not mutilate the name of another. Nicknames are a sacred secret name shared between small groups - do not give or accept them lightly. To brand someone with an insulting name is a spiritual attack, which should be taken as seriously as physical violence.
• Every Voice is Heard: Art is universal; every soul has great creative power. Every honorable member of the community of the faithful has a right to be heard both in their opinions and their art - not all the time, but at least during religious events
• Kneel Before Heaven: Do not presume yourself so great as to know the true nature of Heaven. Listen to your dreams; listen to the omens; listen to your comrades and your priests.
• Theft of Life is the Root of Evil: If a notorious crime cat were to kidnap a revered elder, wouldn't that just be the worst? To make a person an object, a possession, a corpse - that is wickedness
• Respect Boundaries: Boundaries marked between the faithful are holy. Land boundaries, social boundaries, personal boundaries - when two parties agree before the Heavens, they make the boundaries sacred. It is always about lines, not contracts. Doors between these lines are sacred; blood spilled upon them is most profane.
• Everyone Needs Someone: All children need mentors; all elders need support. Loneliness is the ultimate punishment; it is the essence of hell. Hell is a punishment - not allow it to consume the innocent is to invite it into your hearts.

Ethics

Rightness, according to the Way, is measured as a compromise between duty and enlightenment. Your duty is your responsibility to your community; your enlightenment is a responsibility to yourself. Wrongness is defined by causing suffering and losing oneself - creating sowing discord in the relationships external and internal. An action can be both right and wrong, but one should seek maximum rightness and minimum wrongness in a deed. 
Relationships are what everything is made of: a person's identity, a society, a world. All shadows and social constructs that exist between two or more people. Isolation and unreckoned pain are the most insidious poisons and the greatest obstacles for a person to overcome. Evil is made of an abundance of these things. Evil is warded off by boundaries and roles, which define selves and create established norms of relationships and therefore reaffirm one's basic existence.
As for duty, duty is following a set of prescribed behaviors both generally good and defined by role. You have a duty as a believer to be merciful and respect Names, but you also have a duty as a Worker or a Healer or whatever your role is. Roles include:

• Worker: one who works, one who creates, one who upholds, one who strengthens (common for farmers, some artisans)
• Soldier: one who fights, one who affirms the boundaries, one who drives change, one who ends change (common for those who literally or figuratively fight)
• Healer: one who sustains, one who preserves, one who mediates, one who nurtures (common for doctors, nurses, educators, servants, and some parents)
• Deputy: one who watches, one who plans, one who transfers ideas to others (common for managers, leaders, teachers)
• Gatekeep: one who hunts, one who moves like water, a living gateway between boundaries, one who affirms lines by violating them (common for thieves, merchants, or sailors)
• Magician: one who transforms, one who displays, one who performs (common for alchemists, mages, some bards)
• Gourmet: one who specializes, one who learns, one who records (common for artisans, scribes)
• Pompadour: one who demands, one who expresses, one who reveals  (common for some bards, some leaders, artists)

These roles have listed social employment roles, but there are also internal personality roles; one can be a Pompadour personality even as a farmer, and be recognized as a Pompadour-Worker. But there are duties with every role you occupy, and your ethics depends on your success in performing those roles. A Pompadour worker, for example, would have a duty to both uphold the order (as a worker) and step up when a call is asked (as a pompadour). There are no passive roles - a pompadour must explode with emotion and brighten the world with themselves, so must seek out places that want to receive their explosive energy. 
Lastly, it must be acknowledged that all rightness is itself an invention, though one based on the patterns of the world. Everything simply exists; The Way simply recommends the best mutually supportive and constructive way of making everything happy and easy to accept. Utopia is impossible and there is no true font of goodness dictating rightness. But there is Heaven, and the patterns emanating from it - currents of reality that define the Game, that going against will create endless and profound isolation and suffering. This is going with the current without being destroyed by it - a compromise between the world and the individual.

Worship

The Way formats their regular communal prayer rather curiously: rather than doing it weekly for its own sake, the community is called regularly to perform ritual for the birthdays and births that occurred that week. If no birthdays or births occurred that week, group prayer is only called if there is a crisis or major event that needs discussing. 
Aside from the regular birthday prayers, there are a number of holidays scattered across the calendar. Two main holidays mark the year: The Naming Ball and the Heavenward Ball. The Naming Ball is where adolescents present their names for the community and become adults, and is a celebration of individual art and achievement. The Heavenward Ball is a communal event intended to bring the community together in reverence of heaven. During Heavenward Balls, individuals are chosen by the community to represent them as their spirits collectively ascend to Heaven; the individual has their moment before being spiritually erased and dressed to represent the group. Jellicle Courts send this individual up bodily to heaven; everyone else does this more metaphorically.

Priesthood

Priests of The Way wear robes or clothes depicting stars and embordered with their chosen name in a noticeable way. If possible, they wear special glittery makeup during important rituals, and their jewelry or clothes often incorporate powered hematite, galena, malachite, or other glittery pigments. The higher the rank of the priest, the more likely they are to have elaborate shining costumes (some Bloodkits are known for presenting as walking disco-balls covered entirely in shining glitter and magical lights).
Priests typically prepare their own replacements via apprenticeship; most rural community priests are autonomous and have low chances of promotion unless they go out of their way to be a presence in the Starcourts of Pentakats.
Spirit Doctors/Spirit Priests are expected to train in medicine as well as theology and community ritual, and are allowed to request times away from their communities to receive free medical training; these are testing times for their apprentices. Similarly, apprentices are not charged tuition for medical training or theological training at a University of The Way, if they are able to travel there. Spirit Doctors are seen as conduits to the Cat Heavens as well as to the Lunar Pantheon, and are to be presented with any omens or messages for interpretation. Commoners who contact the Lunar Pantheon must communicate their findings to a Spirit Doctor by sacred law.
Star Doctors/Star Priests are specialized in other areas - politics, magic, war, accounting - and are generally divided into two categories: agents of the priesthood and priest-leaders. Agents are loyal to the faith before all; priest-leaders wield the power of the faith more materially. Both dress in black and white, often with crystal lining. There is elegance and finery to agents, showmanship that can appear both fragile and excessive to outsiders; a shared delicate bravado that is, on some faces, sincere.

"The Only Choice is Choicelessness; The Only Way is Out"

Founding Date

1520

Type

Religious, Organised Religion

Alternative Names

The Brambleway, the Cosmic Way

Demonym

Brambler, Bramblin

Deities

• Cosmic Lord Brambleshanks
• The Hidden One
• The Masked One

Divines

• Cosmic Lord Brambleshanks

Location

Nafena

Notable Members

• Cosmic Lord Brambleshanks