Church of the Unexpected
The Church of the Unexpected is a religious organization built around the House of the Unexpected, a pantheon of gods and goddesses brought together from the beliefs of the various pre-existing cults within Medial A cube. While each deity within the House of the Unexpected has its own attendant mythology, divine portfolio, rituals, holidays, and holy sites, all members of the pantheon are unified by a shared creation myth and overarching worldview. Many New Voxelians worship several or all of the deities as appropriate for given life circumstances.
Assets
Unexpector temples take various forms, from temples dedicated to individual members of the House of the Unexpected to complexes containing shrines to multiple gods and goddesses.
Ethics
The Church of the Unexpected embraces Linearism as an overarching philosophy. The Church also promulgates a virtue-based system of ethics, with each member of the House of the Unexpected embodying a specific set of virtues tied to their respective portfolios. The greater domain cards in a Vyozha deck depict some of these virtues - for example the Cosmeon intermediate domain, CID. Forbearance. These are by no means an exhaustive list, but, as with the virtues of each deity in religious cannon, allow for a degree of semantic overlap between the virtues.
Priesthood
The Church of the Unexpected employs two kinds of priest or priestess, known as Servants of Ironies: generalists (who provide for the religious needs of all Unexpectors, regardless of preferred deity) and specialists (who provide for the cult-specific needs of those who follow individual deities within the House of the Unexpected pantheon). Some Servants of Ironies become itinerant missionaries; as independent religious figures and providers of charity, with concerns that transcend the temporal, the clergy of the Gods of Irony are often the only Voxelians who can openly travel to the Coalition of Breakaway Colonies without being arrested as prisoners of war.
Political Influence & Intrigue
Like the Navigator's Guild, Servants in the Church of the Unexpected are expected to show a degree of political neutrality when working in an official capacity. This allows members of the church to travel more freely than they otherwise would during the ongoing War of Reunification. Nevertheless, the Church itself enjoys a large degree of political clout within Voxelia, as the cultural unity of that nation involves explicitly religious ties as established by Sokalyx the Learned's Incunabula before even the Old Voxelian Conquest.
Sects
While the Church is relatively unified, there exists within it a number of minor factions which are generally separated from mainstream Church thought by the relative strictness or looseness of their orthodoxy. One notable example of a strict sect is the Daughters of Misfortune, an ultra-orthodox sect of Lyvianne specialists bent on persecuting the Way of the Biocosm for its percieved heresies. The Biocosmists are themselves seen by some as a breakaway sect of the Church, as their forebearers were also followers of Lyvianne who, being of a more liberal persuasion, broke almost completely with the non-Lyvianne doctrines of the Church to embrace nature-worship and Epicyclism.
Type
Religious, Organised Religion
Alternative Names
Unexpectorism
Demonym
Unexpector
Subsidiary Organizations
Deities
Divines
Official Languages
Related Traditions
Related Ranks & Titles
Related Professions
Controlled Territories
Related Items
Related Ethnicities
Related Myths
I love the idea that the pantheon is brought together from pre-existing cults. I hope we get to read more about the political intrigues that go on with the minor factions. Such an interesting article!