Rueka

Rueka is a religion of ritual and process, which imagines the world as a series of roles that they strive to fulfill. Goodness is health is cleanliness is politeness is duty: this is the core thought process that underpins Ruekan faith and culture. This is what separates it from Pratasam, the faith that Rueka theoretically is part of. 
Rueka is known as a cold faith by outsiders, a religion that encourages politeness but discourages closeness. It is also a faith of medicine, as even the non-spellcasting priests are dedicated healers.

Structure

The hierarchy of Rueka is fairly simple and direct. Most of the religious structure is managed by the lower-level priests, and the leadership is fairly small and regional. Archdruids are elected by the regional leaders (Kuhanes) every time the secular monarch changes. 

Title	Role	Selected by
Archdruid	State-level church administration	The Kuhanes of the realm every coronation
Kuhane	Regional church management	The Archdruid or election
Priest/Alkoa	Basic church administration	Kuhane/local election

Alkoa Priests and Standing Priests sit at the same rank, and are the same in their basic responsibilities of temple management. The only difference is that Alkoa priests are divine spellcasters (typically druids), while Standing Priests are not. Multiple priests can co-exist in the same temple, and many choose to have one of each kind of priest. Alkoa priests are preferred for promotion, but the hierarchy is not exclusive.
While some, particularly in the Temple of Pratasam, argue that Rueka is a sub-group of Pratasam and subject to their Archdruid's directions, the Ruekan Kuhanes generally ignore commands from Samvara. Whether this makes Rueka its own faith or simply a regional variant with its own structure is a matter of debate that is extremely important to people in power, useless to the average community, and constantly left unresolved.

Culture

Ritual Life

Rituals are important for every religion and culture. In fact, by some definitions of "ritual", almost all social life and culture is composed of rituals of some kind, so it isn't possible for one culture to be "more ritualized" than another. But what Rueka has that other Samvaran religions lack is an emphasis on frequent, regulated, formalized religious ritual in everyday life: a formalized frequent punctuation of the mundane with the sacred. For Ruekan priests, this is more important than doctrine or belief, it is the fundamental form of divine communion. 
So, for the average Ruekan, this means a very carefully segmented and sacralized passage of time with daily rituals of great importance. You've got your waking ritual, where you pray over a wash basin and use the blessed water to wash your face or body to purge your body of nighttime corruption. You've got your 3 mealtime prayers, each themed to one of the Creator Goddesses (missing one or more of these is dangerous and requires a small sacrifice to be left for them). You've got your noontime praise, where you take a moment to praise the sun and sacrifice a minute of total silence to it. You've got your evening blessing, where you sit under the moonlight in a drawn circle for a minute in a kind of re-enacted Divine Contact while beseeching the current Lunar God to protect you through the night. These rituals change based on the time of year, which is broken into 12 months (3 seasonal thirds for the four seasons). Any kind of slaying of an animal, extracting goods from a living being (harvesting crops, milk, honey, sap, or engaging in commerce) also require a ritual thanking of the creature to be exploited. In any financial transaction, both vendors are to thank one another and enter in a kind of ritual covenant (any transaction outside of this is invalid). When entering a stranger's home, a mutual blessing ritual is to be done by removing one's shoes, and having both parties complete half of a hymn. When visiting a new town or city, one is to loudly praise the place and offer a resident something small as ritual payment (often things like leaves unless the visitor is wealthy and seeks to be pious). 
So rather than have a big weekly communion or service, and rather than having ritualized work, Ruekans have a dozen tiny sacred moments. Community services or communions are reactionary rather than regular. They take place in reaction to an event, typically someone in the community getting sick or injured or bearing some misfortune. If someone's misfortune or illness takes more than two weeks to heal, regular community rituals take place every two weeks until the ill is mended. In large temple communities, this is standardized into communions every two weeks as blanket-events for all significant problems rather than having constant communions for every person who suffers an injury or disease. 

Species, Fashion, and Authority

Rueka is a direct descendant (and, to some, a subgroup of) Pratasam. Certain aspects of the faith have been inherited: bows or knots are to be worn or held during all rituals and are common fashion, a throwback to Pratasam's use of bows to mark the faithful. Similarly, Pratasam's preference for Humans and Dryads over other species is present in Rueka, if a little blunted: the lack of nearby Kima Cities makes Rueka more inclusive to Prisms, and the rhetoric about "Pacts of the Sea and Land" that are for Prisms and Selkies is muted and basically absent here. That said, Prisms are still a minority in this faith and temple education does not focus as much on their biology and needs. 
On the issue of authority, things get a little rocky. In theory, Ruekan leaders agree to Pratasam's 'ethics of obedience': that there is a difference between the elites, who should know what they are doing and be held accountable at all times, and the commons, who cannot be held to any moral standard and should therefore have their goodness be measure through obedience. But Rueka has a much sharper divide between sacred law and mundane law, and has greatly limited the 'ethics of obedience' to areas of ritual. Elites alone should be able to cast spells, set doctrine, and determine what is good ritual, and obedience means following the elite's guidelines for magic use and correct ritual. So a Ruekan wizard will seek priestly approval for their spellcasting and Ruekan commoners seek priestly guidance for how they practice ritual. But in mundane matters, there is less of a legal divide than in Pratasam. 

Cleanliness and Purification

Cleanliness is a major thing in Rueka. Washing regularly is a sacred requirement and is ideally done daily, washing of surfaces and instruments associated with food or drink before another use is sacred, and personal touch is to be reserved for those who you know to be pure (else you must purify immediately by washing). Pork is considered unsafe, the diseased are to be kept away from other people and are never to be touched with bare hands, and corpses are considered extremely dangerous for physical and spiritual health.

History

Pre-Ruekan Religion

Many of the rituals of Rueka date back before the arrival of foreign religious influences. North Larazel was a very religiously diverse land of many gods and rituals, but a common trend in purification rituals and taboos emerged in the 600s ME. This was likely a response to the great number of plagues brought by the arrival of the Selkie fleets in the 590s, as many of the new priestly order claimed legitimacy as healers first and spiritual guides second. Selkies also brought their own stories, rituals, and heroes that mixed with local beliefs through trade and the creation of selkie colonial outposts.
In the late 800s and early 900s, druids from Samvara arrived, proselytizing their religion of Pratasam. These foreign druids made great inroads politically and claimed many positions of priestly power for themselves, but they struggled to really convert people to their cosmology and ethics. And while the Pratasa druids initially overran the local priests with ease, their control began to falter as the 900s went by. The druids really didn't seem to understand that their worth was as doctors more than administrators, and after they failed to contain a coastal epidemic of dryad-blight and local priest-led communities did they started to rapidly lose ground.
In the 1000s ME, this escalated into religious intrigue and conflict; the druids fought each other and the local priests, while the selkies played everyone against each other to benefit their growing settlements. One selkie, by the name of Kamuo Kamaka, is particularly famous for running technology and secrets to the local priests to build an alliance with the Kamaka's coastal colony-town. Kamuo strengthened the priestly alliance and allowed it to unite the mystics of North Larazel. 

Formation of Rueka (1100 to 1315)

From the 1100s into the 1200s, fears of another rising faith (Zesheko ) to the South scared the druids from pushing the locals to convert too harshly. Peace slowly set in between the priestly groups. In 1250, a visionary druid, thinker, and writer by the name of Koshala the Wise formally brought the two religious structures into one. Koshala was herself a native of Northern Larazel, raised under the local faith before moving to a selkie trade colony for work. Koshala converted to Pratasa strategically and learned the druidic arts before returning to her homeland, where she became an advisor for the monarchs of the ascendant Kingdom of Awaki. Koshala, having lived in selkie, Samvaran, and Awakan religious cultures, saw them as fundamentally saying the same thing. To the Koshala and the Awakan monarchs, she was not inventing a new religion but creating an organizational compromise. The compromise held after her death, and formed into a new and unique blend of traditions. The Pratasam circle of archdruids accepted this compromise as a temporary measure, but for the locals it was the beginning of a new age.  
At first, Rueka was just the unique religious compromise of the Kingdom of Awaki. But Awaki was becoming the dominant political power, and that compromise spread through their sphere of influence. Over the late 1200s and early 1300s, the Awakan style of religion crept everywhere in North Larazel that Pratasam struggled to convert local people. 
In 1300, just fifty years after the compromise was made, Pratasam had a major disruption: the Druidic Revolution, which sought to centralize and intensify Pratasa leadership. The chaos brought by the Revolution led to more and more Larazek druids flocking to the druids Awaki for support. In 1312, the Revolutionary Circle of Archdruids revoked the Compromise of Awaki and demanded total dogmatic obedience from the druids of Awaki. Awaki, still thriving in its golden age, backed its local druids and spat in the face of the Archdruid. Local druids unhappy with the Revolution flocked to Awaki for protection and met together in 1315 to form their own Ruekan Circle (Rueka meaning "in possession of authority"). 

Modern Rueka

Even after the Druidic revolution ended in 1320, the Ruekan Circle maintained their autonomy and ran many of their own regional affairs. Their host kingdom of Awaki used them as a political tool, and they received protection and support in return. There were some who strayed from being Awakan puppets, though, and sought their own patrons and power bases. These druids and priests often found an ally in The Khilaia. Khilaian towns often gave Ruekan druids and missionaries safe harbor and received their help getting to and from locations where Pratasam was struggling to convert. This gave the selkies an alternative to the Pratasam, a more loyal religious partner to do business with. The Selkies often used Ruekan missionaries to establish healthy trading relationships with local peoples that had rejected Pratasam - a kind of "loyal opposition" to keep Zesheko from taking people in. 
These Khilaian connections grew more important as the Kingdom of Awaki slowly deteriorated in the 1500s. The selkies were thrilled: they had almost complete control of this religion, but didn't have any liability for its actions. But an unexpected consequence of this was increased Ruekan presence in the selkie colonies, notably the March Kingdon of Kakoru. More and more colonists and even selkies were converting to Rueka. When the March Kingdom entered civil war in the late 1500s, Ruekan druids were the anchor and safeguard that protected many commonfolk. And when a new government in Kakoru finally formed in 1601, Rueka was made the state religion. 
The collapse of Awaki and the civil war in Kakoru was a period of success for conversion, but chaos among the leadership. The circle of archdruids of Rueka splintered as to what to do and where to go, and ultimately faded into obscurity. Rueka decentralized, with local "Archdruids" managing the large states and most of the power concentrating in the lands of regional leaders known as 'Kuhanes'. By the 1800s, this new system was formalized and became a lasting status quo.

Mythology & Lore

The Creation

In the beginning, there were the three Creator Goddesses: Halcyon, Kanaido, and Orain. Halcyon was the empty sky, Kanadio was the churning sea, and Orain was the changeless earth. One day, the three Goddesses decided to try and make a world worth loving and they combined their power to make the world. To order this creation and fill it with goodness, the Creator Goddesses created three tablets made of raw divine power, and carved the laws of the world into them. These tablets, known as the Code of Universal Law, were placed at the heart of the world and used to place it in harmony. This early world was beautiful and kind, and all was right.
The Creator Goddesses made many species and lesser gods to live in their perfect world. The greatest of the three lesser Gods were the Goddesses of the Moons: Zurama, Otala, and Rokala. These three goddesses governed free will and cycles of change, and had the most freedom of any beings below the Creator Goddesses. The Goddesses gave them the power to purify themselves of sin through sacrifice, and to glorify goodness in their rituals and deeds. Rokala did not want to sacrifice, though, and robbed the Creators of their due. She committed a grave sin, and was punished with a terrible illness. She fell from the sky, leaving only two moons.
Rokala was furious and again refused to purify herself. Instead, she crawled to the center of the universe, to the Code of Universal Law. She stole the tablets and tried to rewrite them so that she would be in the right, but the tablets were too powerful for her to hold. She hid them out of the world, and was terribly cursed and transformed by this act. Rokala became the Goddess of Plague, Sin, and Suffering, a great evil that lurks outside of the world of goodness. She is too weak to face the Gods, but she and her monsters consume those who emulate her in sin. In order to protect the righteous, Halcyon and Orain made the afterlives, which were given to Alima the Masked Goddess (a lesser god) to govern. But the world of the living has never been the same, and now it is full of suffering.

Lily's Ascent and the Lunar Order

Amidst the sin and suffering of the post-Rokala world, mortals forgot their rituals and laws of goodness and engaged in all manner of cruel behavior. But Halcyon was not going to simply allow the world to rot, and she wove the strings of fate for ten great heroes to be born. These heroes were destined to ascend, to become The Lunar Pantheon. And the first of holiest of them was Lily of Red, the first druid and the first prophet of Halcyon. Lily fought against the tyrants of the world, and discovered the secrets of the ancient past. In a great ritual, she sacrificed her mortal parts and free will to commune with Halcyon. She rose to become her destined self, the Goddess of Healing, and her free will was restored.

Cosmological Views

The cosmology of Rueka is near-identical to that of Pratasam, with the addition of Vile Rokala, goddess of suffering. Rokala is not a rival to the Gods, but exists as a source for worldly evil that ill-ritual and ill-behavior attracts into the world. 
The Lunar Pantheon is deeply revered in Rueka. Lily of Red is seen as the greatest of them and first, but does not rule unilaterally. The Lunar Gods are split into several general tiers: Highest Gods, Good Gods, and Lower Gods. All are valued, but the higher tiers are seen as more relevant and valuable.
Highest Gods: Lily of Red, Jade Atharzen, and Hiku
Good Gods: Wimbo Aizitu, Emesh, Haru, Orchid of Blue 
Lower Gods: Agamine the Lost, Theia the Liberator, and Ishkibal

Tenets of Faith

• Follow Tradition: Traditions are a way to commune with the past and keep the sacred law alive. Honor the past and secure your future through them.
• Be Pure in Body and Deed: Keep the rituals and do not engage in undutiful violence
• Fulfill your Duty: Goodness lies in duty, and we cannot see the greater picture. Know your obligations and fulfill them no matter what.
• Be Honorable and Respectful: Social ties are reflective of spiritual ties. Social politeness and gentleness is necessary to keep the world running smoothly
• Protect Nature: The land and the past are intertwined and holy.
• Control your Emotions: You have a role to play that transcends your personal pettiness. Embrace your role, suppress your emotions, and become something better than yourself

Ethics

Rueka sees duty as the heart of ethics: goodness is a matter of obligation, a promise to the world and one's ancestors fulfilled. Murder is good if murder is one's purpose and it is done in an honorable and polite way. All is predestined and predetermined to exist in goodness and harmony, if they would just fill their divine roles.

Priesthood

Priests wear plain white robes to demonstrate their cleanliness.

Life is Duty

Founding Date

1250 ME

Type

Religious, Organised Religion

Alternative Names

Insular Pratasam

Demonym

Ruekan

Permeated Organizations

• March Kingdom of Kakoru

Deities

• Halcyon

Location

Larazel

Related Ranks & Titles

• Alkoa