The Pan-Celestial Cathedral
Like all things Khazigiri, the Pan-Celestial Cathedral is gigantic, overbearing, and impersonal. But it also is situated in a flowing green space, on a soft rise, creating the illusion that one is truly flying over the teeming capitol city, or looking down at the noisy world of men from a quiet place in paradise. Its extraordinary age, and the unspoiled beauty of its white marble spires, light ghostwood paneling and bright lapis details - all materials chosen for their near-immunity to the effects of time - make it a truly spiritual and sacred space for millions of visitors each year.
Architecture
The Pan-Celestial Cathedral dates to the waning days of the Cumaean Empire, and though it has been extensively added on to since that period, the solid block construction combined with arching exterior spires are still a major part of the design. The peaks and onion domes that characterize Khazigiri monumental architecture are also integrated into the design in a much more aesthetically pleasing way here than in other structures that cross over the time periods of both empires, where the additions can seem more haphazard and often were designed to show dominance over the earlier culture's work. By contrast, in the Pan-Celestial Cathedral the different elements are integrated in a simpler and much more unified whole, though the names of the Khazigiri architects who achieved this holistic presentation are lost to history.
The Celestial renovations were centered on the creation of the 73 apses, small inset areas of iconography, votive candles and an intercessory kneeler for individuals to pray for the help (or blessing, or lack of interference) from individual angels. The smaller, though still enormous, narthex is covered from floor to distant arching dome ceiling in scenes mixing all the angels and no small quantity of saints, and in here the worship is dedicated corporately to all celestials, not to any one individual one, and the assumption is that even the 73 are just a small part of the true heavenly host of thousands.
the 73 apses are organized in three large floors, with the Basilidean Prime Nine on the topmost ring, and the remaining 64 broken up into two lower rings of 32 angels each. The different levels are reached by grand staircases. Many other rooms are also part of these three levels - larger chapels for groups of people too large to fit in one of the apses, and living and workspaces for the various Clerics in the building who number over two hundred.
History
On the basis of our knowledge of the Cumaean Empire and the city of Gaz Agaea, we may speculate that a temple of some form stood on this site from the very earliest days of the capitol, and indeed, scholars speculate that when the Cumaeans encountered and conquered the Agaean people, the site was already in use as a sacred space for worship. If this is correct, this has been a place used expressly for the worship of gods for over thirty thousand years - More than long enough to actually be older than a host of deities who have long since been lost to the mists of the Pronoan age.
Its situation on a broad, low hill close to the bedrock and overlooking a fertile and well-protected peninsula give the place a feeling of being more than mundane, and certainly it would have felt like flying over the lands around it, with lightly forested grassland sloping down to the Triad Sea on three sides. It is this solemn sense of presence, perhaps, and the boundaries of a limited sacred space that prevented the cathedral from becoming an architectural nightmare like the Imperial Palace a short distance to the northeast, which every ruler since the founding of the New Empire has felt compelled to add to.
While the royal palace has an overwhelming tangle of walls, angles, columns, windows, porticos, stairways, dead ends and overhangs without any overarching architectural theme or vision, the restraint in building and maintaining a place of worship for thousands of people and hundreds of gods at a time has been consistently conservative and restrained. Perhaps by giving the rulers a free rein in redesigning their own government buildings and homes, the Cathedral has been spared this traditional indignity, and retains a somber and stylish effect that feels timeless in the face of the trendy styles of the day, or of days gone by.
In the late Cumaean period, the cathedral was in use as the primary religious site of the upper classes in the Old Empire; it was the site of all worship activities of the royal families, the imperial nobility, and the Heirodules, Archbishops, Bishops and priests of the primordial faiths. Whjile more than a few of those old gods made the transition to becoming Celestial angels, very little of what can be seen under the dome has survived from the period predating the Khazigiri liberation and reconquest, other than perhaps the appeal and allure of marble and gold detailing. The murals and painted plaster and all the stained glass windows are not only from the modern Khazigiri period, but they are relatively recent restorations of older works. A significant amount of plaster and virtually all the glass was broken in the earthquakes less than a hundred years ago, revealing some of the inner metal and granite ribs of the structure underneath its visible wall surfaces. While much of the decor was lost, the building's structure was undamaged.
Mosaics made of colored glass, lapis lazuli and colored jaspers cover the arching interior spaces of the apses and despite their modern date, recount the exploits of various significant figures from the ancient Cumaean period, including Emperor Placidius II's vision of the Angel Phanuel, and a stylized scene of the Wizard Priest Honororius I signing the peace treaty with the King of Naarod which marked the official adoption of Celestii Magni as the faith of Cumae some 300 years before that empire finally collapsed into the civil war from which Khazig emerged the victor. Both of these artworks show the importance of tradition and from the perspective of the Heirodules, maintaining a continuity from the old empire to the new, and a willingness to synchronize with rather than reject its pagan predecessors.
After the collapse of the old empire, the primacy of Celestialism ensured that any recognizable trace of the old Primordial practices were removed or plastered over long before the earthquake, and this probably took place almost immediately on both the interior and exterior. Outer porticos and the elongated interlocking arches of Khazigiri architecture were added, with apses and statuary added as well as a redesign of the central dome and a massive expansion of the nave, trancept, statutory, sanctuary and ambulatory to accomodate the proliferation of small internal apses, each concerned with a single angel or angel group and numbering 73 in total. Additional narrow towers and domes were added to the exterior as well, containing additional living space for the increased number of priests and support personnel, with new hallways added to connect the structures to the existing interiors.
Tourism
The Pan-Celestial Cathedral is the focal point and primary structure for both Basilidean and Valentinian Celestialism, the majority faith in the Empire and across most of the Eastern Continent. Every cleric of the faith strives to be accepted to its clerical schools, and every paladin of the faith vows to defend it to their final drop of blood. Hundreds of these are buried in and around it, and some of these, now sainted, are objects of veneration themselves.
Empress Barrenyke II, first ruler of what is considered the modern era of the Khazigiri empire, in which the Heirodules hold virtually no political power and the Emperor has no theocratic or divine substance, is buried under the main altar itself in the place of highest honor, though the reality of how this came to be is more complex as she had in life made clear that she wished to be buried within the House Absolute itself, and her fights with the religious powers of her day came, literally, to blows on more than one occasion. The primarch of her time understood the power of symbol, however, and in showing this honor - perhaps because it wasn't her will to do so - exemplified the very Khazigiri concept of self-sacrifice in the cause of a greater unity. Placing her in the cathedral and demanding his own burial in an honorable but not lavish tomb in the City Cemetary in its own strange way codified the separation between religious and political power that has maintained internal peace in the Empire and among all its member nations ever since the Torturer's Revolt was suppressed by Barrenyke II, who became Saint Barrenyke, patron of the city of Khazigur. Not surprisingly then, visiting the altar is a huge attraction for people from across the Empire, in all walks of life.
Empress Barrenyke II, first ruler of what is considered the modern era of the Khazigiri empire, in which the Heirodules hold virtually no political power and the Emperor has no theocratic or divine substance, is buried under the main altar itself in the place of highest honor, though the reality of how this came to be is more complex as she had in life made clear that she wished to be buried within the House Absolute itself, and her fights with the religious powers of her day came, literally, to blows on more than one occasion. The primarch of her time understood the power of symbol, however, and in showing this honor - perhaps because it wasn't her will to do so - exemplified the very Khazigiri concept of self-sacrifice in the cause of a greater unity. Placing her in the cathedral and demanding his own burial in an honorable but not lavish tomb in the City Cemetary in its own strange way codified the separation between religious and political power that has maintained internal peace in the Empire and among all its member nations ever since the Torturer's Revolt was suppressed by Barrenyke II, who became Saint Barrenyke, patron of the city of Khazigur. Not surprisingly then, visiting the altar is a huge attraction for people from across the Empire, in all walks of life.
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