Cults and Religious Movements

This article presents an overview of the broad religious movements and prominent cults of the Yunka world.
The Cult of Ni
By far the oldest traditions maintained in the Yunka world are the rites and traditions of veneration upheld by the Pescadora people to Mother Ni, the Great Sea. For millennia the fisherpeople have honored Ni with offerings of staples, prestiege goods, and sacrifice to the sea in exchange for a bountiful fishing harvest. The Cult of Ni is now honored by every Yunka person living in reasonable proximity to the ocean.
The Rural Huacas and Mountains
Likely as old as the worship of Ni is the cult of the individual mountains, boulders, and landmarks strewn across the coast. Many of the natural deities have looked over the landscape for millions of years, and the actual age of their cults among the Yunka populace can only be imagined. The traditions of the individual are cthonic and rural, demonstrating a great variety of traditional character.
The Flooding of Ghis
The Flooding of Ghis is an ideology which spread with the beginning of dry-farming on the coast. Priests assigned to posts as acqueduct engineers became integral to the economy of the region, owing to a philosophical tradition regarding the solid and liquid intermingling of energy of which emerged from the practice of channel construction. While the official cult has long since fallen into irrelevance its aphorisms and the matienance of the waterways remains crucial. It was on the account of the Flooding of Ghis and their worship of the great mother earth that the ceremonial calendar of the Yunka lands came to include regular occasions of ritual combat where blood is spilled in tribute to the spirit of the land.
The Cult of Fanged Things
The Cult of Fanged Things is a religious movement centered in the imagery of wild predatory animals and the shamanic practices of the amazonian forests to the coast by inland populations (the antecedents of the current Muchik and Quingnam populations). The cult centers around an ideology of ecstatic drug-fueled rites and ceremonial violence towards the acquisition of power towards the transformations of individuals into predatory beasts imbued with shamanic potency. The Cult of Fanged Things introduced many of individual deities which now dominate the Yunka pantheon such as: The Puku Man, Old Man Murrup, and Ianchaek .
The Ancestral Mummy Cult
The foreign populations from the east which moved to the coast also brought with them their long traditions of ancestor worship. The powerful dead of Yunka society are not always interred in funerary rights, but often physically preserved and positioned to maintain political, ceremonial, and economic authority in perpetuity. A vibrant cult of officials services the mummies and interprets their will across the multitude of noble houses across the coast.
The Path of The Right and The Left
The Path of the Right and the Left refers to a further philisophical tradition which spread to the coast at the same time as the Cult of Fanged Things. The Path of the Right and the Left posits that there is a cosmic dualism between a force of the Right (masculine, light, gold, day, ethereal) and a Left (feminine, darkness, silver, cthonic) and a conjoining force which mediates between the two extremes (though implicitly favoring the right). These forces are distinctly complimentary and are not at all synonymous as good and evil, but closer to the Chinese principles of Yin and Yang. It is an intellectual obsession among the Yunka people to find balance between these forces in their own lives, society, and the cosmos.
The Pageantry
The Pageantry refers to both an order of clergy who dress in extravagant costumes and engage in ceremonial theatrical performance, and to an oral tradition canon of tableaus and plays which developed from the court performances of the ancient consolidated Muchik and Quingnam kingdoms. Many proverbs and tales familiar throughout Yunka culture derive from these stories.
The Coven Shi, The Silver Lady
The cult of the goddess Shi, the lady of the moon, has been a major force on the Yunka coast for countless centuries. Its all female initiates are trained in the Silver Lady's sorcery and go forth to serve positions of great power in society.
The Xonto Girls
Similar to the Coven of the Silver Lady, yet even more mysterious and shrouded in rumors, the Xonto girls is a religious cult that is also entirely staffed by women. The priestesses dress in black costumes as vultures and claim to worship a distant and lord they call "Aiapaec"
The Kallawaya Shamans
Travelling healers and herbalists from the distant land of the salt wastes who wander the world and offer ritual services to people of all kinds. The shamans in particular attribute their incredible skills and magic to their qualification of having been struck by lightning and survived. There are a few Kallawaya Shamans who have made it to the country of the Yunka people.
The Woven Worlds
The Woven Worlds refers to a kind of domestic magic and the trade of incredible magically imbued tapestries across the world which can bring one, through ritual means, to strange new worlds and dimensions inhabited by a plethora of strange spirits in their own realm. Especially interesting is the foreign goddess, The Saxra, a strange deity who dwells in a woven underworld inverted and turned upside-down filled with darkness and monsters. In the Yunka region in particular, the woven worlds are associated with the spider god, Ianchaek
Pachakamaq
South beneath the Yunka lands is the recently settled city of Pachakamaq, where the great oracle by the same name receives his oracular queries after difficult ordeals. Pachakamaq, a recently founded cult seperate from but recognized by the Yunka cultural sphere, is said to look out from the center of space and time.
The Wisdom of the Full Stomache
The Wisdom of the Full Stomache is a populist ethos which emerged among the wise men of the Yunka peasantry. The Wisdom of the Full Stomache is a series of mostly secular sayings and teachings which generally emphasize the need to enjoy life while you can and to act towards the path of least resistance, especially in response to the insecurities and vicissitudes of everyday life. It is similar to the ideologies of epicureanism or taoism.