Suneka

The Suneka is a religion, a culture, a way of life, a place, and an organization all in one. It seldom bothers with labels, as "The Suneka" is all it needs.
The Suneka as a religion might be called a kind of "animism", though it has a lot of theological aspects that differentiate it from other animisms. It is true that their pantheon is primarily composed of "animal spirits" or spirit paragons- the first animal of that kind, which is the ultimate culmination of that animal's spirit. For example, Olkum the Fox spirit is the trickster that often slips between the worlds of the living and dead and stole fire from the underworld. Olkum is an individual god in a sense, but a sliver of Olkum exists in every fox. To make things more complicated, spiritual essence is fluid- a person could become a fox, or visa versa. Sunekan religion posits that while Olkum is the most fox-like fox, aspects of Olkum exist in all living things. So you could give sacrifice to Olkum as the Individual God who brought fire, as the Fox Spirit that reigns over foxes, or as the Archetypal Trickster who is connected to the trickster impulse of every living creature. Fox Priests of Olkum give praise to him as all of these things, as trying to separate the parts of Olkum would be to alienate Olkum from himself- they are all intertwined fundamentally. The pantheon is all like that, with a god for every thing deemed to contain a spirit (including mountains and the ocean). There are also intermediary spirits that represent the spiritual culmination of a group or place. The fluidity of spirit means that worship comes in many forms, and a fragment divinity is recognized even in the smallest living thing. Suneka is in many ways a worship of the world: the world as it is and the world as it should be.
The Suneka as a culture might be called a syncretic monoculture: every new converted location is assimilated into the whole, but subsumed utterly in the process. The Suneka seeks one language, one cuisine, one form of government, one perfect form of existence that is equally valid in every place it touches. This is not without significant gaps: High Sunekan language is pretty universally known but shares the household with local dialects in rural areas. Uniform cuisine has been such a failure that most priests have simply given up and accepted that there are multiple forms of valid Sunekan food according to biome that are bound together by "fundamental Sunekan food-values" (which are vague and undefined). In government, really only the Sunekan heartlands have fully adopted the ideal "Sunekan Republic" system, with the fringes remaining thoroughly monarchical.
The Suneka as a way of life is somewhat more successful in supplanting local existence. This is also the most violent part of the Suneka, as it focuses much of its effort on aggressively shaping the lives of the common poor. The Suneka's ultimate goal is harmony, and communities must exist co-dependently in order to be harmonious. No one group should be separate, or they will attempt to create a society that caters to them over other groups. That would be disharmony, and disharmony creates chaos (diseases, famines, curses, monsters, evil thoughts and deeds). To create a truly harmonious society, communities must be in a constant state of self-policing and re-arrangement. A family cannot be allowed to be self-sufficient unless it is either beyond the realm of social control or internally balanced to prevent any kind of "favoritism of form". Internal balance to prevent favoritism of form means that a family is not simply Dryad, Human, Prism, Kobold, or what have you. That balance must be achieved through child-swapping; families adopt one another's children, grow one another's food, and work communally rather than individually whenever possible. Whenever a community, family, or individual is deemed "deviant", it must be removed from its current setting; by taking it to a foreign place and resettling them among strangers, they can find harmony. For areas that are deemed "insular", forced inter-community child swapping is typically the answer. How on Earth is that done without constant rebellion, you might ask? Education is key for the Suneka- the society is built around schooling, both to create a literate, political society and to raise children with proper social values. But it isn't just education: communal work, communal food sharing, and routine involvement of religious ceremony in daily life all work to keep Sunekan communities unified and normative.
The Suneka as a place and an organization are interconnected: Sunekan communities maintain orthodoxy and prevent cultural drift by constantly reinforcing each other. Priests swap communities, pool knowledge, and relentlessly train new priests. The Suneka is more than a cultural code of norms or a spiritual worldview: it is a system of power that requires political control spaces and communities. It is not centralized, but it is evangelical. The Suneka envisions itself as an island of harmony in a sea of diabolical chaos; by spreading to seize more lands and peoples, that island will one day grow to eliminate that chaos entirely. Its lack of centralization is an unusual break from other top-down power structures. This isn't to say it is actually democratic, as regional elite cliques tend to win out over others, but its central religious authority is a large, clunky oligarchic congress of sorts known as the Sacred Assembly that acts more as a regulator of what is "within the Suneka" and what is outside of it. Not since the 600s has anyone actually tried to claim leadership of the Suneka as an individual. The Sacred Assembly also doesn't use war to punish regional deviation except as a last resort- they prefer to encourage priest-swaps to re-integrate regional variants, which are considered temporarily acceptable. Violence is preferably used against completely out-of-harmony peoples.
So in short: if you dislike the Suneka, there are many violent aspects that are clearly objectionable. One could say it is a system of power built around an all-assimilating kidnapping monoculture set to conquer and consume. To areas that are in the Suneka's way, this is probably true even. To areas deep in the Suneka, it is a space for opportunity. Social mobility is high, education is universal, any species can prosper, and while the system of power can be hostile to the individual, it works to include everyone's participation. The moving parts that power the Suneka aren't even the priests- they are the everyday people who enforce, who teach, who participate in it. The Suneka idealizes democracy because it yearns for a world where everyone is a priest, a king, a subject, a servant.

Structure

The official governing body of the Suneka is the Sacred Assembly- a group of 80 elder priests from around the Sunekan lands. 10-30 of these priests hold permanent positions determined by status and influence, and the rest are temporary positions that rotate to allow more regional representation. This body is powerful but takes a lot of time to decide on anything.
The real powerbrokers of the Suneka are the National Priests or Aziletzen. There can be anywhere from 1 to 12 Aziletzen for a kingdom or republic, but they generally serve as the state-level religious managers. They are typically promoted up from the lower ranks based on merit, but many an Aziletzen has had hand in appointing a successor.
Beneath the Aziletzen are the Elder Priests and Holy Orders. Elder Priests are essentially mid-level priests chosen by priestly moots or universities to serve as mid-level administrators. There are often degrees of hierarchy present among Elder Priests, depending on the scale of state administration. An elder priest might manage a region, a city, or a university.
Holy Orders are specialized priests detached from states entirely. They often have specific purposes: Guardians of Hokzin are warriors who defend Sunekan lands from foreign invasion, while Keepers of Olkum manage holy sites and mystery cult. Generally each Holy Order serves a specific patron god, though each are firstly loyal to the Suneka and only secondly to that Paragon Spirit.
Underneath Holy Orders are Local Cults, which manage specific local rituals and tasks that are often bound to one or a few places (like guarding a sacred shrine, managing a famous graveyard or grand temple, making a regionally-favored dye or alcohol, etc). While they particularly cherish the local spirit that represents that place, they generally seek patronage and protection from a greater Holy Order.
Supporting all of this are the common priests, who are community leaders, teachers, and administrators. They generally train their own replacements, who they keep around as assistants.
Last but not least are the citizen-priests. Citizen-priests are essentially non-specialized part-priests who work as shrinekeepers or masters of a specific ceremony on top of their other jobs. These are typically local community leaders, wealthy landowners, and military officers.

History

The Sunekan Traditions began very early on, as early as 4000 DE. They formed largely as a response to early inter-species conflicts and inter-cultural conflicts, which had devastated the local area. Every contact with the extremes and destruction of nearby continents only further entrenched their position and radicalized the systems of power.
By 0ME, the Traditions had formed into a semi-formal religious code that was used as the bar for who was "civilized" and worthy of empathy and who was "uncivilized". In 500 ME, the region was unified first by a group of elite powerbrokers and their leading elite assassin (Amati the First Blade), then under a Ghost Emperor named Yezok. Yezok was exorcised in 605 by a rogue priest and the empire collapsed, but Yezok's imperial court remained as a sort of political-religious mediating space between countries. This became the Sacred Assembly over time, and has moved locations a few times but remained ultimately the same mediating body.
The rest of the history of Suneka is the history of the continent of Suneka. Schools of thought have risen and fallen, debates have been had, borders have expanded. But the lack of hard theological rules have largely kept the religious body from fracturing.

Cosmological Views

The Suneka believes that the World Spirit or 'Nema' is the culmination of all existence, known only to the Gods. Individuals are spirit-fragments of their community-souls; community souls are themselves fragments of nation-souls; nation-souls are fragments of God-souls; God-souls are fragments of the Nema. The Nema exists beyond time- within the realm of knowable existence, the Nema and the individual did not come first or last but simply all happened in parallel. The individual did not come from the community because both exist in parallel- that principle holds true for all life in relation to everything else.
So, life existed in harmony originally. Life was fluid and all things fed one another with contentment and joy; suffering did not exist. Great debate is had over the origin of disharmony. Some say it also always existed but infected the Nema like a disease; others say that it came from ignorance of the world-spirit, leading to infighting between individuals. The origin matters little, but disharmony's effects are important. Suffering was born, and hatred. It is said that Humans in the far west devoured the Dryads there and then each other; in the North, All the species of the world fought to crown themselves king but unleashed a fountain of pure disharmony that devoured the land. In the East, Prisms tried to enslave the land itself and became evil, greedy, and warring. One by one disharmony infected the lands and destroyed them; but in the lakes of Tuzek, the sleeping turtle spirit kept its head and called the Gods together. There, the spirits of the world gathered the mortals, and the Old Mother Human Nukima taught them rules to keep them from evil. What was once natural now had to be learned, but through this learning they became good. And so the Suneka was born.
The lands the Suneka holds are considered "undergoing purification". Wherever discord or disharmony reigns, evil magic will manifest. If evil occurs in purified lands, it is either a sign of latent ancient crimes or someone is secretly harboring disharmony and must be corrected.

Tenets of Faith

• All life is sacred
• All sentient life is equal and shared in spirit
• The individual is beneath the communal, and no individual should rule the community alone
• Communities of the faith are more important than those not of the faith
• Tradition is sacred, though new technologies are gifts from the gods
• Do not destroy what you can reform or re-teach; all things have the potential to return to a harmonious state
• To let your neighbor starve or sin is violence against your neighbor; to fail to intervene is violence

Ethics

Community:

Community work is virtuous work. That is both propaganda and a pathway to a support network. Starvation is a sign of disharmony, so don't let your neighbor starve. In more-developed rural areas, fields are often shared and village/town life rotates around the central mill and nearby cooking area. In the heartlands, an iron mechanical maize-grinder is used to turn the village crops into corn-mush. In more isolated regions, the villagers work together to help grind maize using three-legged stone grinding tripods called metate. In the Northern lands, where wheat is the staple crop, circular stone grinding mills pulled by livestock or pushed by water are common (some even use wind!). Across the board, property is usually held and worked in common. Ownership is typically joint ownership. The larger the property in question, the more carefully its shares will be divided and tracked.

Gender, Sex, and the Family

All children are considered genderless (and linguistically referred to as their own 'child-gender') until the age of 17, when they can select and earn their pronouns. Two main genders are most common: "male", or landless gender, and "female" or landed gender. Gender defines how you present, what clothes you wear, and what jobs you are expected to work - what gender you select is often defined by your intended form of employment. Males are expected to work jobs that are not tied to a specific piece of land such as laborers, merchants, ranchhands, soldiers, and sailors. Females are expected to work in land-tied jobs, most commonly agriculture. Land ownership is reserved for people who are not exclusively male. Other genders exist, but are typically tied to forms of employment that exist outside of the land-unlanded binary.
If you wish to swap employment, you can inform a priest that your soul has changed and you can undergo a minor ritual to swap genders. You can also be awarded genders, and it is considered a sign of prestige to accumulate multiple (as it is a sign of power to have moneyed interests both landed and unlanded).
Sex and reproduction are divorced entirely from gender in the Suneka. It is also not considered an individual trait, but rather a way for the individual to interface with the community. If someone wishes to have a child or have sex, gender is irrelevant. Child-bearing is done by informing a priest that you are willing to have a number of children; you can also request a specific partner if they are reproductively compatible, though that is optional. To bear children is an honor that increases community status and access to resources; you can also volunteer to raise children. In remote communities, it is allowed for parents to raise their biological children, but population-dense areas tend to frown on such requests. You do not have to raise children if you bear them, though wet-nursing is sometimes an expected role. Needless to say, adoption is the norm here. The idea of a family bloodline is basically non-existent; families are fluid structures that often blur with the community. Outsiders say Sunekans don't have families- this is an exaggeration. They do, there's just a lot less focus on descent and a lot more public child-raising. Powerful families are more like large business-cliques.
As for sexuality, the proliferation of contraception means that it is largely unregulated. Out-of-wedlock births are not accepted, but easily forgiven if the child is turned over to a priest. Hidden secret children are a dire sin.

Magic

Magic is a part of harmonious life in Suneka, and is embraced with enthusiasm. Magic imparts status, though it does not instantly transform a priest into an elder priest. Rather, every magician is a citizen-priest here, with specific ceremonial attachments.
Druidism, wizardry, and bardism are seen as the peak forms of magic. Druidism is seen as unlocking the fundamental fluidity of spirit and form that all life once had and channeling one's purity of body and essence. Wizardry is seen as purifying one's mind via the greater puzzles of cosmic unity and using that pure mental focus to invoke the Nema. Bardism is seen as essentially emotional wizardry- focusing one's purity of heart.
Paladinhood is seen as a kind of spirit possession or hosting. This is sacred, but also dangerous - spirits are not all friendly and harmonious. The Lunar Pantheon is seen as fundamentally out of harmony because it reflects the world's lack of harmony. The true Lunar Pantheon is in the moon spirit and therefore inaccessible- the Divine Contact and paladin-dreaming summons a spirit-fragment from them, which can often be out of harmony.
Dhampirism and the Way of the Open Palm are also seen as spirit possession. Sorcery is seen as more of a "spirit gift" than possession, though it is not unrelated (spirits might give gifts to dangerous people to try and stir trouble). Warlocks, meanwhile, embody disharmony and should not be tolerated.

Government

Only Sunekans know the true spirit of democracy, as the one civilized people of this planet. A peak Sunekan state offers every citizen a right to vote at temple (as regulated by the priesthood). Democracy is a sacred ritual of sorts- it is the merging of the wills of individual spirits into a great communal spirit. In lieu of direct democracy, most Sunekan states operate on a theocratic republic system. Most candidates are from powerful families and the entire process is safeguarded by the priesthood, but the entire educated Sunekan population is expected to vote. This legitimizes all forms of state action, as they are embodying the will of the nation.

Priesthood

Common Priests often wear yellow and green robes, skirts, or tunics. Elder priests wear red and blue. Azitelen and Assembly priests wear purple and red. Citizen-priests wear yellow sashes. Holy Orders and cults often wear elaborate costumes in accordance with their patron. Priests and above also usually get sacred white-ink tattoos to formally mark their position.

Sects

There are numerous Sunekan schools of thought that priests study and align themselves with. These can be diverse, and the arguments fierce, but they are not different enough to form fully distinct sects. The most distinct faction worth mentioning is the Tuweska School of the Burning Oil- an aggressive school of thought that advocates for imperialism Northward into Stildane and is popular in irradiated regions of the Suneka.
Several dangerous heresies have emerged in the distant past: the Asuna Heresy of Northern Ikatlan  denied the ability to achieve consciously achieve order and embraced a nihilistic form of surrender that would eventually, through natural chaos, achieve harmony.
The Etiskan heresy of the Nemeka goes in the opposite direction- it advocates for a select group of priests to rule absolutely, asserting that the priests could channel the will of the Nema to rule as the communal mind. This violation of "no individual shall rule over the community" is considered particularly dangerous.

Type

Religious, Organised Religion

Alternative Names

The Suneka, The Custom, The Harmony

Demonym

Sunekan

Subsidiary Organizations

• Guardians of Hokzin
• Keepers of Olkum

Permeated Organizations

• Ayeto Republic
• Federation of Korvakal
• Gatrev March
• Gwalan Republic
• Republic of Akatlan
• Republic of Kiwa
• Republic of Matayan
• Republic of Merishka
• Republic of Otopan
• Republic of Tuzek
• Republic of Zitepec
• The Fire Clans

Official Languages

• High Sunekan

Related Ranks & Titles

• Tlakra

Notable Members

• Amati

Related Plots

• Loving You Hurts
• The Chimera's Law