The Singing Church of Orisha

Cult of the Sacred Muse

Truth is not something that simply is - truth is made. That is the sacred truth that allows Bardism to function, the truth that propelled Hiku the Supreme Muse to Godhood. Art reflects and shapes perceived reality, and therefore controls material reality. Shape enough people's perceptions on a grand enough scale, and art could rewrite history, remap the oceans, and shake the very heavens. To do so is the sacred mission of the Singing Church - control all knowledge and all perception to write the world into a perfect utopia under the Godess Hiku. 
To this end, the Singing Church works to indoctrinate their followers to accept only their truths and to reject all other accounts of the world as spiritual poison. Revere Hiku and her reincarnations as the only true Lunar Gods; accept only the Church's history; revere only Halcyon as Architect; believe priests and their art over one's very senses. This duplicity is no secret, but the faithful are encouraged to reject reality and embrace their shared imagination. 
The Singing Church works towards using shared performance to synchronize their visions of reality, using shows of worship to empower the Goddess Hiku, and spreading The Truth to every corner of the world. The end goal is simple: to begin an event known as The Revival or The Final Performance, an apocalyptic event in which the believers will be able to will the unbelievers out of history. With all perception unified into a sacred harmony, Hiku will be able to bodily descend from the heavens with Halcyon, and together they will resurrect every dead believer and use the dreams of the faithful to paint a perfect future. 
As a political organization, the Singing Church is active across Nafena and Maradia, where it proselytizes and seeks political power wherever possible.

Structure

The Singing Church is led by Hiku the Muse and Juchi Ika, who are the absolute authorities on the nature of truth. When they are not available, the Starkeepers lead the church. 

Rank	Role
Starkeeper	Oligarch on the supreme council, spiritually bound to Hiku
Truthsinger	Keepers of archives, supreme judges, and high inquisitors
Spirit Healer	Inquisitors, church agents, executors of Church dogma
Allspeaker	Regional clerical head
Archpriest	Leads clusters of priests
Priest	Communal head
Caretaker	Community-level lay inquisitors, religious police

Culture

Emotion and Performance

Those who look happy, are happy - for all emotions are perceived before they truly are. Emotion, should it be performed, should be performed intensely. While not religiously mandated, these attitudes are extremely common throughout the Singing Church. Sometimes, it can border on a stoic attitude, where one simply adjusts one's personal reality to escape suffering; sometimes, it takes the form intense communal pressure to perform emotional reactions. Many members of the church learn to fluidly adjust their emotional state by their surroundings, allowing them to switch to whatever the community is feeling without even thinking about it (which can be quite a strange experience for them when they travel abroad). 
All individual emotion that does not conform to this is to be reflected through art (though even this art should never contradict church-sanctioned reality - any deviant emotion must be cloaked in metaphor or be woven into church propaganda). Imagination is encouraged, as is creativity; self reflection is aggressively discouraged. 
Those who betray the Church to the point of abandonment, known as apostates, are 'Unmade' - the threat that all Orishans are brought up to fear. Unmade people are ignored, written out of history, and their absence is made a point of focus by the community. According to their scriptures, the souls of the unmade are slowly and horribly disintegrated as they are erased from existence bit-by-bit.

History

Pre-Orishan Religion

Before Orisha, there was Suvadashi ("All-Purpose"), the religion of the ancient Prisms of Nafena. Suvadashi was a disparate faith without consistent leadership or ideology, but was a broad movement to interpret the dreams given by Halcyon to prism-kind. Halcyon had not been particularly descriptive about the cosmology or ethics, but had encouraged the Prisms to cease their wars of non-prism enslavement and to trade with the proto-Vetevic coastal cities. Every tribe had its own take on what this meant for morality: some saw it as a call to non-violence, others saw it as an endorsement of Vetevism as the religion of humans and dryads, and others still saw it as a divine call to commerce. 
When Hiku the first Bard and her disciples first mastered magic, and when Hiku ascended to Halcyon's side at death, she became a major symbol of Suvadashi - an example of Halcyon's love for prisms and the platonic ideal for a Suvadashi monk. Bardic magic spread like wildfire through the priesthood, and Hiku became a goddess second only to Halcyon in many areas. When the Divine Contact arrived in the early modern age, Hiku was seen as the natural best choice of contact and Hiku worship skyrocketed. 

The Lunar Chaos

In the early centuries, Hiku encouraged the plurality of Suvadashi - she and Emesh, God of Knowledge encouraged a philosophical spring of ideological and artistic exploration during the 200s ME. But the disunity of Suvadashi made it vulnerable to a new religion that emerged in the 280s - the Final Choir of Vetevism, a new version of the ancient Vetevic religion that was aggressively evangelical and militaristic. While Emesh wanted the two to syncretically fuse, Hiku felt that the Chimera and Halcyon had left a balance that was being disturbed - and must be restored by force.
While Hiku began gathering the prism tribes together and encouraged them to build their own religion in her name, the other Lunar Gods began staking their own claims. Theia the Liberator, always suspicious of Suvadashi and Vetevism alike, made her own attempt at a religion in her home region of Vysha; Lily of Red began organizing the dryads of the land of Anashoka together in an attempt to teach them the secrets of druidism piecemeal, to make a tiny outpost of Halikvar; Ishkibal jumped into the fray as well with his own cultists in the realm of Shaniku. This gaggle of fledgling cults struggled to move with the speed or efficiency of Vetevism, especially as Vetevism gained its own allies in the form of Emesh and Orchid of Blue. The stage was set for one of the first great Lunar struggles. 

The Prism Wars

From 300 to 400, the Lunar Gods avoided direct confrontation, but in the 400s all sense of decorum went out the window and the cults openly fought for continental supremacy. By the mid 500s, Vetevism had seized much of the Nafenan coast and virtually all other cults were on the defensive except for Hiku's Suvadashi holdouts, which held the prism-kingdoms of the mountains. Peace was settling in: Emesh had encouraged syncretic mixtures of most of the lesser divine cults and the Final Choir, and Theia seemed to have been mostly suppressed. And then, in the 580s, a powerful bard-aristocrat by the name of Maru Lomaki was able to unite a number of mountain Prisms and local bard-lords under her banner, and set out to reclaim the region of Metahn, birthplace of Hiku, for Suvadashi. Maru was successful in her mission, and the Lomaki clan united all of Metahn into the Grand Metaran Federation. The Final Choir was driven out, and Hiku was no longer tempted by peace with Vetevism.
Through the 600s, Hiku rallied a coalition of Lunar Gods to help her keep Metahn safe and non-Vetevic. At first, this was rather popular across the pantheon, but as she made gains it became clear that she was thoroughly uninterested in allowing the others to grab footholds in Nafena any longer. As Jade Atharzen helped Hiku rally the Prisms into a unified, militaristic force, the other Gods became uncomfortable. Some became worried that Hiku and Jade intended to split the continent evenly between Prisms and non-Prisms, potentially dooming the continent to inter-species war and allowing for Prismatic oppression of other species. 
In 702 ME, this worry bubbled into war. Jade and Hiku seemed poised to coup the Vetevic choir and wipe out Lily's still-developing druidic cult. A grand coalition of Gods - Theia, Lily, Ishkibal, Emesh, and Orchid - moved at once to contain Hiku and Jade. While they were able to prevent Hiku from secretly influencing the Choir, they were outfoxed initially on the battlefield, and Lily's druids were butchered (and her archives of work were burnt), incinerating centuries of slow effort to teach druidism via telepathic call. Ishkibal's cult, which was far more fragile, was also wiped out. Emesh attempted to broker a peace deal in which all the pantheon had equal influence over the Choir, but the Prism-gods refused: victory was at hand for the first time since 300 ME. 

The Birth of Orisha

These wars raged on from 702 to 745 ME, and a figure of great skill and power helped even the final odds for Hiku and Jade - Juchi Ika. Hiku in particular was enamored with Juchi, the greatest bardic prodigy since she had woven spells herself. This unstable bard hung on her every word, showered her with praise, and did her bidding with great competency - an impressive artist, a good friend, and her biggest fan all at once! Through Juchi, Hiku wrote her new doctrine for a united Suvadashi, one in which no other Lunar Gods could interfere. 
With Jade's help, Hiku brought all of Suvadashi together with this new formalized dogma. A balance of power was negotiated with the Final Choir, one that was promised to bring eternal peace- whenever one faith spread, the other got to spread an equal amount. This held for a century, but the end of the 800s saw conflict as neither group could agree on how to properly measure the worth of a converted region. Orisha's luck oscillated wildly from 900 to 1060, as Hiku's relationships to the other Lunar Gods fluctuated and the mortal kingdoms fluctuated in their rule. Again in 1060, the Lunar Pantheon gathered to broker "lasting peace" between Orisha and Vetevism; this time, the agreement was to compete nonviolently and focus on eradicating other local religions, not each other. 

Consolidation and Evangelism

Mortals and Gods alike seemed sick of religious war, and most of the inter-faith conflicts from 1060 to 1400 were secular conflicts with religious rhetoric or the two big bard-churches going after smaller religions. This was a period where both churches focused on their respective doomsday projects: Vetevism on producing Choricals and Orisha on perfecting the control of truth. Orisha also used this time to absolutely purge all rival Divine elements from their ranks, giving Hiku total control of the religion.
From 1400 to 1600, Orisha's excessive zeal led to some lashback; local leaders on the fringe of their territory began to rebel against the church, and upstart cults tried to carve out a third faction in Nafena - which ultimately failed, but ended up hitting coastal Orishan territories worse than Vetevic ones. But as Vetevism concentrated on controlling Nafena post-1600, Orisha looked to the horizons. As Nafena consolidated the Western penninsulas, Orisha struck out into Maradia. As existing Maradian religions fought endlessly over the control of the continent's Arcane Factories from 1625 to 1810, Orisha seeped in among the neglected commoners. They were even able to take over a state in Northwest Maradia - the Kingdom of Matoro - and an arcane factory of their own. 
Rather than risk awakening the stagnant-but-potentially-overwhelming power of the Maradians, the Church bought into the existing Arcane Factory system and agreed to allow the Maradian Enforcers to control the secrets of construct creation. The Church was now building the Empty, though - and they could now expand their profits and influence across Nafena and Maradia. 
While Vetevism eventually followed Orisha into Maradia, Orisha has a longer-established relationship with the Factories and a better hold on the regions they are in. Already they look to the horizons for new frontiers of expansion: Ekraht, Ukaram, and the equatorial fringe between Nafena, Inahng, and Suneka most notably. They are even working towards making the first Arcane Factory in Nafena (which the Enforcer's oversight), and have begun hiring Squiddle mercenaries to scout the great Eastern ocean.

Mythology & Lore

Creation

In the beginning, there was the endless chaos of creation. The world was simply a bubble in sea foam, a temporary accident that is but one of many worlds made to exist and be destroyed. The Gods of this cosmic sea of chaos, known as The Deep Ones, ruled as petty and capricious creatures who toyed with mortals and drifted among the worlds with little care. One of their number, though, rebelled against the rest of the Deep Ones: The Great Goddess, who refused the inevitable chaos. The Goddess created law and order from her dreams, and used these to bring stability and goodness to our world. The other Deep Ones fled from her power, though they remained just outside the safe walls of our world. Before they left, they cursed mortalkind with self-awareness, to prevent them from realizing their true potential. 
The Goddess is ephemeral, and is not contained in petty individuality - she is all the Good Gods, all the goodness itself. Her greatest form is Halcyon, also known as Anara. Anara made the other spirits and ordered the world, but the curse of self awareness and the temptations of the Deep Ones prevented it from being the utopia she sought to make it.

The Prophecies

The first order of the world, guided by Anara herself, was destroyed by awareness of difference. People believed the fears of the unknown caused by the knowledge that others were different from them, and these fears took hold in reality to make war. Humans, short-lived and easily scared, dreamt a terrible spirit of discord into being that inspired great evils in the hearts of prisms. Humans also dreamt plant-demons into existence, which were purified by Anara and her prism-dreamers, and made into dryads. Despite the best efforts of the Goddess, the beautiful golden age of Anara's light was destroyed.
To repair the world, Anara made another God, Chiminaros, to harness the fears of humanity into something productive.  She then took on a mortal form - Hiku the Muse, second iteration of Anara and third iteration of the goddess, prophet of prophets and greatest person ever born- to guide the prisms to truth and love. Thus began a silver age.
The silver age was also brought low by human fears. The world's balance between the teachings of Chiminaros and Prism belief was destroyed as many false prophets preached their ego instead of divine truth. Again, Anara's utopian plans were dashed and the world was plunged into five centuries of war. Anara-Hiku knew that this was all according to plan, as the sacred number three ensured success on the third iteration. They manifested again as Juchi the Prophet, to correct the wayward Prisms and clearly outline the path forward to utopia.

Cosmological Views

This world is one of near-infinite worlds, but is a special world that is blessed by the Goddess. The rest of the multiverse will be ascended beyond when the Final Performance (or big magic ritual to end the world and remake it as a utopia) begins.
All who worship Hiku go to a special heaven, known as the Perfect Heaven, while lesser peoples go to the false Paradise or Purgatory.
There are only five gods worth worshipping:

• Anara-Hiku-Juchi: Goddess of justice, freedom, magic, rulership, healing, and knowledge; supreme deity
• Gekira: The Blade of Anara, scourge of the enemy, breaker of idols; also the Cat Heavens
• Dianshi: Hearth-keeper, earth-tender, all-gardener, keeper of every flock; manifestation of Anara's abundance
• Pativ: Ghost-maker, lord of scribes, cavern-builder, master of birth and death; manifestation of Anara's judgment
• Chiminaros: Keeper of fears, lord of nightmares, warden of lesser cultures

But all divinity can be understood as the same Goddess, simply called the Goddess.
Bardism is the Goddess incarnate, the art of her most basic principles. Warlockery is the worship of the Deep Ones, and cannot be tolerated.
An interesting quirk in Orisha's "belief makes reality" theology is that it makes the Gods something of a representation of mortal morality, and gives agency to those who participate. While the Goddess is in total control, she is just as much a product of mortals as mortals are a product of her - her dreams nudge reality just as our dreams alter her's.

Tenets of Faith

• Contribute to the Grand Design: You're either with the church, or you're against it. Only the final performance can eliminate suffering, and only actions that bring it closer can bring true peace. For your sake and the sake of the world, help the church achieve its dominance
• Worship No Discordant Voice: There are many powerful gods, but all but two will bring discord and further the eternal pain of existence. Worship only Halcyon and Hiku.
• Submerge the Self: The self is limited, prone to self destruction and poisonous discord. The self is a construct conjured by attempts at self-awareness (which only exist because mortal-kind is cursed). No one will ever know you, see you, make you more true than a tortured half-spirit in a lonely world. So make yourself what others see as you; ideally, erase that to become one with the performance. Make yourself pigment, that you may become joyous and real.
• Be Lured Into No False Truth: Just because it looks real, don't let that poison your spirit. That is a path to harming yourself and others. Instead, embrace the truth you already know.
• Revel in the Moment: Enjoy the world, enjoy art, seek out pleasure and beautiful things. Let go of pain and embrace the gifts that the Goddess has given you

Worship

Individual worship tends to be sporadic and personalized - adherents are encouraged to build a personal relationship with Hiku and the Goddess, and to interpret the randomness of the world through that relationship. 
Community worship, which occurs weekly, emphasizes the destruction of the self through community song, dancing, and ecstatic connection to the divine.

Priesthood

Priests wear as much color as they can afford, with a grey base. The higher-ranking the priest, the more one's outfit is expected to be a piece of art in itself - ceremonial garb for the upper priesthood can make the priests look like walking shrines.
Priests are taught in theological schools, run by dedicated tutor-monks.

"Our truth is the only truth"

Founding Date

747 ME

Type

Religious, Organised Religion

Alternative Names

Ikan Suvadashi

Demonym

Orishan

Subsidiary Organizations

• The Order of Quiet

Permeated Organizations

• Kingdom of Vysha

Deities

• Halcyon
• Hiku Matsune
• Juchi Ika

Divines

• Juchi Ika

Location

Nafena

Notable Members

• Juchi Ika