Religion and Deities, an Introduction

The continent of West-Argo is a place home to dozens of peoples, hundreds of supernatural creatures and thousands of temples. With all the different deities and religious ideas that are present in the world, this page will not go into detail on specific religions and faiths, but paint a picture on how these different ideas fit into the wider world, as well as describe what gods and fae now exactly are and why it is that there are so many of them.

Fae, Gods, Super-deities and Non-deities

Now before we can understand how religion works on West-Argo, we need to understand what the creatures are that they centre their worship around. To understand what their difference is it is easiest to know a bit about the early history of the world:

Millions of years ago, the world was created by a super-deity in a dark universe. For ages, it was dark and nothing we know today roamed back then. Then thousands of years ago, when the world was still dark and already ancient, the Sun arrived, a palace housing creatures also created by this super-deity long ago. Now shortly after the world was lit up, all that was was erased and all that was to be was created by these creations, called gods. However it proved too much work for the gods alone, so they made children to aid them in their efforts to create a new world. These children, as well as their children's children, would be known as the fae. Now together, gods and their fae children made animals, plants and peoples, as well as design the laws these things should live by. Now not all of them agree, as they frequently bicker and fight as so do their creations made in their image. Now some of the created non-fae creations grow so powerful that they are starting to gain divine powers themselves as if they were, while some creatures of the Old World before the gods survived to become akin to deities themselves. Both of these are classified nowadays as non-fae.

In West-Argo, we thus differentiate between four (technically three) types of deities:

• Gods. Also known as the "Firstmade" These are the original creatures that came down from the sun and started to lay the foundations of the new world.
• Fae. These are the descendants of the gods who are given divine powers, often to spread out the work for the gods. These make up by far the largest group.
• Super-divinities. These creatures are the creators of the gods or theorised creators of the universe outside of the world of Argo. They tend to be uninvolved in the world personally and have no real following, with the Tsorgan faith as the sole exception.
• Non-fae. These creatures were not created with divine powers by the gods but have acquired so by other means. Some of these include powerful spirits, fiends or wizards, who have acquired it themselves, but also the "Voidborn", who have acquired it before the arrival of the gods.

All of these are combined referred to as "deities", which serves as a catch-all term for all creatures with divine powers.

The Divine Spheres of Influence

Now with exception to the super-divinities, all deities are limited in power. Due to the way how magic works, deities collect power from worship and sacrifice. At the same time, it becomes more costly for them spending that power in places far away from where they got it, as it costs magic to transport magic over large distances. This is why gods that are dominant in one region might not have any power in another. These are called the Divine Spheres of Influence. Some places, like in the Empire of Prabai, only a single deity has notable power, meaning that to worship another deity there will seldom result in gaining the same support from that deity since that region does not lie in another deity's sphere of influence. Meanwhile other places, like in the Kingdom of Vexan, many deities hold influence, meaning worship is more likely to result in direct support from a variety of deities. Due to the way how this works, it results in those who travel often and far, like wandering traders such as many of the Halflings, worshipping a large variety of deities depending on where they currently are, holding a different one in supreme regard depending on time and place. This practice is called Kathenotheism officially, but is also known as Spiritual Caravaneering.

Generally, it leads to many different places having many different theologies and unique ways in which their specific deities work. A great sacrifice in once place may be in insult in another and where in some places one is used to talking to the gods physically every week, in others all communication is done indirectly.

"Some deities have never seen their followers, while others visit them every day."

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Deities of the Living and Wardens of the Dead

One of the tasks that one might associate with the responsibility of the deities is the care for the departed faithful. On West-Argo however, this task seldom lies with the deities of the living world. As the departed leave the world through the Inbetween, a dimension outside of the Parallel Planes of the universe, it also leaves the influence of the living deities. Instead, they are handed over to those deities who live on the other side of the veil of life. These deities, called Wardens, are sometimes connected to a faith in the living realm, but most often are entities all on their own, often with their own goals and motivations. While some Wardens are loyal servants of living deities, with their temples having rituals to guide them towards their afterlives, most of the Wardens instead rely on convincing, tricking or outright forcing the departed into their realms, for better or worse. This is because while the living deities gain power from worship and sacrifice, the deities who live in the realms of the dead instead gain power depending on the amount of souls in their realms. This is why many of the Wardens capable of doing so also have emissaries in the living world, leading so-called "death-temples". These ominously named organisations are places that aid the living in getting to the connected afterlife after their death. While they are often banned in places where the dominant religion already has a connected afterlife, in places like Vexan and Urunkhar they are omnipresent in society besides the temples for the living deities.

As the fear of judgement after death for once transgressions is a big reason of people's desire to avoid them, even the independent afterlives, especially the more favoured ones such as the Aether of Nimea, have made agreements with deities of the living that they partly judge those wanting to enter after their death on the basis of their piety to their faith. Agreements like these are highly sought after by deities as it grants a lot of recognition to their cause and thus are often highly paid for by those deities.

Arrakha-Gortor, first god-emperor of Prabai and the most well known non-fae deity.

Faiths and Temples

Now off course connected but not synonymous to the workings of the gods, is the way mortals choose to worship them. We can classify most faiths as either mono- or polylatrist, animist, dualist or nihilatrist.

Monolatry and Polylatry

As the deities on West-Argo often engage physically with their world, true monotheists or polytheists who only believe in the existence of their own are extremely rare. Instead, most fall under the category of either monolatry or polylatry. Monolatrists are those who believe in many gods, but worship only one, while polylatrists worship several deities, and believe in the exitance of many more. Examples of monolatrists are the Temple of Gortor and the Melisternian Sun Church, while examples of polylatrists are the United Following of the Fjennan and the Staravra faith of the ancient Bočetti.

Animism

As the continent is filled with not-divine monsters that still hold an immense amount of power, such as spirits, ghosts, dragons and other aberrations of the deep, it results in many people regarding them as divinity on their own. Especially found in rural areas, these beliefs are generally non centralised folk religions that tend to hold animistic elements. This means that besides their worship of (non-)divine entities they associate spiritual power with a large variety of elements from nature, such as geographic elements like mountains, ecological elements like forest or meteorological elements like rain. The many faiths of the The Foul Races all fall in this category, with exception of the Locker's Temple prominent in the Tribal Union of Melistern. Another example is the Sūhai faith from Saiko, or Fyrhþgáster from Holzmark, the latter one also having dualist aspects.

Dualism

Many, if not most faiths, hold to a dualist philosophical view. In this, there is a belief in two fundamentally true concepts opposed to each other to which all things lead back to, such as good and evil or physical and spiritual. Some go even further, incorporating that aspect in the very nature of their worship. These faiths centre the worship of one deity who has two opposite aspects of equal power. The most well known example of a dualist faith is the Church of Cherbor in Urunkhar, but also the Holzmarker Fyrhþgáster is a dualist faith, although also having animist aspects.

Nihilatry

The finally, there are those whose spiritual lives do not centre around the worship of a deity at all. This belief in many gods but the refusal to worship any of them is called nihilatry. These faiths often hold personal spiritual growth, independence and personal enlightenment as their ideals. Examples of nihilatrist faiths are Kamaarg Sutakayyar practiced by most inhabitants of the East Bank region, or the esoteric beliefs of the National People's Republic of Thenos in the Equilibric Era.