Most of you with a piety of higher than 4 or 5 would know this stuff. Lots of it got censored 'cause your piety ain't high enough.
Normally you wouldn't discuss this except with your 'royal chaplain' or whatever but amongst yourselves (and not the serfs) you might discuss it. If your piety is really low please don't meta and talk about this as if you know whats going on.
The Faith in the Celestial Sun (aka the Pancreator) was born not in ancient times as many suspect, but only after humanity (re?)-discovered the jumpgates. It was propagated by the prophet Zebulon, one of the first colonists to jump to Errovus Secondus (then under the control of the Zaibatsu corporation). Like most early jumpers, Zebulon experienced a moment of pure euphoria and hallucinatory dissociation as he jumped (the <<Censored>> effect) but he also claimed to have glimpsed the true creator of all things, the Pancreator and that he appeared as a celestial fire brighter than any sun, the sum of all suns. He also witnessed the demons of hell, which sought to extinguish the celestial light. But unlike the preceding religions, he knew hell to be the dark space between the stars. Upon arriving at Errovus Secondus, he founded the Church of the Universal Light. At the time the people of Errovus were polytheists, believing that many of what we now know to be servants of the Pancreator, were indeed gods onto themselves. Zebulons church, at first, was fairly minor. His teachings ran counter to most beliefs of the day. While the people were entranced by the mundane and faithless miracles of technology, beholden to the greed of coin and slaves of faceless guilds (called corporations then), the prophet Zebulon preached against them, criticizing the worship of technology and money and asserting the role of the Pancreator and his servants as it should be. He also spoke out against the growing cult of <<censored>>.
After his death there was a schism between his disciples. One of his disciples was Amalthea, once a devoted <<censored>>pagan<<censored>>. She had been a hospital nurse and priestess but had heard Zebulon speak and realized the truth of his words, realizing that <<censored>> was a creation of the Pancreator. She argued with Palamedes Alecto who had been a soldier. He was well versed in temporal matters and after the prophets death won the political battle with Amalthea for control of the followers of Zeubulon and amongst many of his critics, in particular amongst the Blossoms of Mercy who follow Amalthea, he is still considered a shrewd politician and manipulator. His church became what is now considered the Orthodoxy. It is Palamedes and his cohorts who collected the teachings of Zebulon and developed the Omega Gospels. <<censored>>
(a note on the disciples. Zebulon is said to have had 7 disciples:
o Lextius the Traveler
o Palamedes the Knight
o Amalthea the Healer
o Mantius the Guilder
o Maya the Scorned
o Horace the Learned
o Hombor the Beggar)
(a note on the Omega Gospels. These are the collective teachings of Zebulon and contain gospels of:
Paulus
Lextius
Amalthea
Horace
Chroniculae III
Maya
Hombor
Mantius
Galaxia
Meditations
Lamentations
Delphians
Innominate
Pilgrims
It is the accepted holy book of the great religious sects. This includes the Holy Gate who consider the Omega Gospels and their own text of equal religious importance.)
During the diaspora the Church of Universal Lights influence spread far and wide, gaining recognition on many planets and amongst many people. There still existed many other faiths, many dedicated to a single or limited number of facets of traditional polytheism. Additionally there was the Blossoms of Mercy, led by Amaltheas teachings, within but separate from orthodox Universal Light.
<<censored>>a bunch of censored stuff on the birth of the avestites<<censored>>
Late during the Diaspora, in the year of approximately 1100 (counting from the first jump as is standard for our calendar), (OOC: so approximately 1000 years after the founding of the Church of Universal Light), a great man, Barbatos, was acclaimed Patriarch of the church. He was a potent theurgist, charismatic speaker and man of unfathomable wisdom and purity. It is said that he was immortal, and had witnessed the dawn of time. Under the leadership of Patriarch Barbatos, the Church was able to spread the truth of the Celestial Light far and wide, quickly overcoming the pagan polytheistic faiths of lesser times.
As the Grand Republic took form Barbatos began to proclaim several prophecies, explaining how mans hubris in his great works, his spiritual poverty would be his own end, how Man themselves would bring unleash its own destruction through this hubris. He also correctly predicted the rise of the anarchists that disrupted the Map, the fall of the Republic, the rise of the nobles and even the fading of the suns. It is then that Barbatos was canonized, the living, undying saint and pancreator.
With the divesture, the Church of Universal Light and the Orthodoxy in particular were greatly strengthened. The people of the worlds had grown suspicious of the intrigues of man and spiritually bankrupt faith in technology. It was quickly realized that the Church would require a military arm and it is at this point that that St. Barbatos founded the Brothers Battle. More and more dedicated themselves to the faith, though many also turned, alarmingly, to the <<censored>> and the <<censored>>.
And then the greatest of demons stuck, as predicted by St. Barbatos, punishment unleashed by own hands as penitence for our crimes against the Pancreator. It is when the Symbiots struck that we realized the true greatness of the Pancreator for it was the theurgists trained by St. Barbatos that were most able to turn back the green tide. At the time there was a <<censored>> known as the <<censored>>. <<censored>>a bunch of censored stuff<<censored>>
In the aftermath of the symbiot attacks and the visit of the heathen and demonic transcedentals, as the noble houses, guilds and even the orthodoxy scrambled to reclaim some vestige of our lost technology, the <<censored>>
<<censored>>a bunch of censored stuff<<censored>> became the Temple Avesti and serve the Orthodoxy. To this day should any Avestite must obey an Orthodox cleric of equal or greater rank than the Avestite.
<<censored>>a bunch of censored stuff<<censored>> they would be visited by the Pancreators Holy Flame.
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p) alliance.
