House of Dreams
The Fourth Age began with the creation of the gods. The exact nature of these new beings was of immense interest to the world of science and wizardry, which had spent the latter half of the Third Age dedicated to understanding the physical world and the arts of magic. As faith coalesced around the newly-created divines, members of the Late Quhisy school felt their service and worship of them was best expressed by learning all they could about the nature of the gods and their domains.
Continuing a tradition that welcomed all ideas and subjected them to scrutiny, the Quhisy faithful formed a deity-agnostic holy order that expressed faith via enquiry into the world beyond the physical.
Public Agenda
The House's aim was to discover and categorise new and existing deities, identify their realms of influence, and to find reliable methods of communication with them.
Meticulous note-takers, members' experiences were documented, collated, and cross-referenced to determine the most effective and consistent methods of dreaming. These records were stored in the Order's library, which was open to laypeople and become a cornerstone of literacy in the region during the early Fourth Age.
Assets
Founded early in the Fourth Age, the original House of Dreams was the first temple established in that Age. Within ten years, the house had expanded to include a dozen temples across Lwakha, each taking a donation for public services, divination, and other deity-communication. Building on the Quhisy school's reputation, prominent families would pay the school to educate their children in the faith, sometimes bequeathing parcels of land to the House for the upkeep of their experiments.
By 4.86, the House was entirely self-sufficient.
Disbandment
After the Great Drought of 4.423, the House's assets were seized by the Lwakhan government for the public good. The temples continued to serve the people, but their failure to predict or amliorate the drought cast a long shadow over the organisation and a regional decline in religiosity from which the House never recovered.
Without funding and with public opinion tarnished, the temples began to close. The last House temple closed its doors in 4.464
Worship
The core beliefs of the House held that the everything that is can be understood through observation and study, and that - far from being an exception - attempting to understand the gods and their domains is the purest expression of love for Xem.
This understanding took the form of extended periods of contemplation and ecstatic practices designed to release participant's souls from their physical bodies, whereupon they would explore and map the dream world.
The House experimented with the use of dancing, singing, fasting, meditation, and narcotic herbs made into teas, smoke, and salves. Each provided a different experience and a way to personally encounter a specific deity, and was catalogued in the temples' libraries.
The House of Dreams identified, catalogued and taught no less than seven divine languages .
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