The Visions of Heaven

None know what Heaven is. Some say it is an immense will, the underpinning of the cosmos animated by a boundless and omniscient spirit. Others that it is a grand conclave of transcendent divinities, freed from Worldly trappings entire. Others still that it is a place of some kind, so pure and true it utterly changes those who perceive it. Others that it is an idea, one so profound that to catch the merest echo in one's mind shapes their future forever. And some say it is a force, drawn to the light of the soul as surely as gravity weighs down Worldly matter, dictated not by natural law, but spiritual.

In truth, this matters little.

Heaven is. 

This is all that we require.

 

All the True Faiths spring from Heaven. All the Great Faiths succeeded in spreading across the World. All such things stem from Salvation, the day the reign of the Titans was broken, and a kind of peace could settle upon mankind. 

The Prophets are those who saw Heaven, and so moved were they that a Gospel settled in their hearts. Here, in the Known World, that means Judge Metan, Crowned Pytaus, The Nameless Castigant, Merciful Eusephine, Martyred Ushia, Rapturous Sayya, Innocent Xan, Fated Kharis, and Purest Yohl, the Nine Great Saints, each carrying a profound Gospel taken from a foreign body; one that, crucially, is free from Primeval Sin.

Primeval Sin damns us surely, you see. It infests and influences us in the darkness of our minds. Any great philosophy, any manufactured belief created by man, is tainted by its venom.  Even the most wise of the apostate cannot help but let the subliminal hungers of our oldest crime bleed into their work. A justification, a concession. Something which may be seized upon to allow the bulwark of morality to be eroded in favor of sating one's hungers.

In all of history, no human thinker has ever produced a civilization or way of living that has not turned into a weapon by those who would seek to prey on their fellows. Even if it took hundreds of years, it did grow corrupted. If not all at once, then somewhere. And even if recovered and made righteous again, that philosophy is doomed to bring ruin once more by those who misuse it. Rather, humans are doomed to twist any Worldly way of living into an excuse to indulge their most forbidden urge.

Only the Gospels have avoided this. Only the Gospels have endured without subversion by Worldly or Un-Worldly interest. They stand against the storm, and do not bend or break. They can fray, their adherents can be corrupted and made to doubt, but only when they fail of their own will are their souls imperiled. Humans are so frail, of course. So it is that the safeguarding of the flock is a constant struggle.

The Gospels are not mere ideas, no. Such a thing would be corrupted as any worldly script would. Perhaps it is best to think of them as living things, living text. When they are read, week after week, or day to day, they nest in the mind. Take root and think their own thoughts, superseding those generated naturally by the mind. They guide the faithful on the righteous path, a voice in their heart, a daimon on their shoulder, urging them to do what is right.

This voice is proportional to immersion in scripture. The lay folk of a land within the auspices of a True Faith are pious, and kinder perhaps. Rather, I should say, their cruelty and kindness is as humanity might have been without Primeval Sin twisting their thoughts towards the viewing of others as prey. They may be wicked, or callous, but never so sinful collectively as those who are in the domain of other Un-Worldly things (of course, some apostates have made their populace so different to us that Primeval Sin's hold on them is lessened not through kindness, but through their newfound inhumanity. But that can hardly be considered an improvement). 

A particularly zealous specimen, such as a priest or simply a truly devout individual, may find themselves moved even against their conscious will by the edicts of their Gospel. Their self-control and identity become partially sublimated by their scripture. There are things they will simply never do again, ever, unless their faith is truly broken. Some priests may be charlatans, of course, but this is an easy thing to test when the truly devout would rather face the stake than compromise their principles.

Then there are the heads of the faiths. The archpriest, pontifex, supreme exemplar. They are little more than mouths for the Gospels, their original identities near-entirely subsumed by the principles they have chosen. No matter how twisted, how monstrous they have become, and so many often are, they hold true when a secular equivalent would be a figure of deepest horror.

For often the Great Faiths must too grow distant from humanity. To counter the power of Primeval Sin and other dark things, saints must rise to match them, and a human form may only do so much. Each Gospel offers its own solution, and not all demand transfiguration into an inhuman form, a good portion recommend it. With the Gospel to bind them, these figures become blessed weapons for use against a world cruel enough to make them necessary.

Make no mistake, this is no curse, nor is it forced upon us. These figures accept this willingly, for it is man's only hope of salvation. The world is too strange, our mistakes too great, our madnesses too profound, to ever right the abyss we have dug for ourselves by our hand alone. Submission to a transcendent, inhuman will is our sole hope of preserving decency and saving our souls. Would that the humanism and conscientious materialism which emerged at the end of rational history had resulted in order rather than what it did! But it failed, as all things which spurned the Gospels do. Perhaps if Primeval Sin had never afflicted us this would not be so.

But in these days, faith is all we have.

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The True Faiths in my setting are the anchor of civilization. As you may have surmised from my previous posts, this world, or the Known World as it is called by in-universe writers, is constantly teetering towards fairly horrific ends. Alien dreams lurk in the wilds and a gnawing hunger lurks within the hearts of men, and I have of course hinted at other things.

I am fascinated by religion, and by the idea of its necessity. I am not religious, though I was raised in it. I am pretty comfortable with secular humanism. But what if I were wrong? What if all attempts at improving life by ourselves were doomed due to hubris, short-sightnesses, and a secret wrongness in our souls that damns even those born into it? What if blind, backwards faith not only was the path to salvation, but routinely produced individuals whose own moral principles and will to see them applied far surpassed our own? That is the truth of this world. Even those who choose not to abide by the True Faiths must grapple with it. There are plenty who think otherwise, who sincerely, really try their hardest to forge a better world that does not rely on stuffy old scripture penned by people possessed by memetic viruses from another dimension (not to say the Gospels are exactly that, but it translates how these people may view them). Such individuals are tragic figures, doomed to repeat the failures which came before them, even if it does not occur in their lifetime.

That is not to say you cannot take issue with the Faiths. The loss of one's identity is a fearful idea, even if it does not affect everybody. They can be flawed even with a general core of goodness, and often they are. They can make terrible mistakes. When a member of the True Faiths falls, they fall hard. And of course, for all that goodness they enact, one could make the argument of, does it count? Are you really "good" if an outside force has collared you to its laws, even if you wear it willingly? What matters more? The fact that you chose to do a good deed, or that you did it, that you chose to be made to do it?

Also, individual non-believers can be just as kind and moral as those who follow the Gospels. But as a whole, collectively, societies which embrace the Gospels are less horrible than the ones that don't. They last longer and generally do better at keeping their populations content. They tend not to erupt into orgiastic cannibalism or become ruled by inhuman monsters which care little for those below them.

There are many points of light in this darkness, but these shine longest and brightest, eldritch and eerie though their light may be.

Mechanically, I envision them as classes you can opt into. The more templates you take of a Great Faith, the less free will you have as a character. At some point, perhaps when all templates are taken, I would say that continuing to play the character might indeed be deeply restricting, or come into conflict with a party of less Heavenly inclinations. This should be taken as a hint it is time to retire from adventuring and found a church or something.