#religious lore

[the-martyrfication-of-the-matron]

so making that post about meif'wa in headscarves and such made me think about religion in my rewrite and i remembered that i haven't spoken about religious headwear at all, so here is some stuff for Avra. I might post about other religion stuff for LR at some point too.

These are mostly aph-specific since no one religions the way she does lmao. Except for the coin-chain, that's a little something she starts doing that ends up being a cultural thing for Phoenix Drop because surprisingly the way rulers dress does persuade their people to dress similarly.

Coin Scarves are a Scaleswind thing, and quite an old-fashioned one. You're more likely to see a little old lady (or man, it isn't gender specific) in church wearing one than your average individual. Only hair that is longer than shoulder length is typically put beneath them (hence Avra's little microbangs being out) however in some parts of Scaleswind it is seen as more proper to cover the entire top of your hair regardless of length.

Different colour + metal combos refer to different divine, and multiple can apply to a singular Divine. People often wear them based off of the divine they follow most of all (Irene, for most), however those who only wear them for prayer will wear them according to the divine they're praying too. Pre-O'Khasis/Scaleswind war, royal-blue and gold was the most common combination as those were the colours most associated with Irene, however they're also associated with O'Khasis, so it changed to white and gold when the war began.

Avra gets hers during her little excursion to Scaleswind. Those who worship the Destroyer often thought of her quite highly for reasons, and she is quite recogniseable, so when she was just walking around a little old woman pressed a red and cold coinscarf into her hand and walked away. Red and Gold are colours associated with Shad only by his worshippers, however black and silver is more often used by the gaggle of elderly folk in Scaleswind that dare to worship him as they aren't ashamed of their religion. It is however seen as heresy, so any youth that continue the practice + worship Shad will often wear the red variant.

Avra honestly just thinks its cute (she is wearing it in my recent Shadmau/Shavra drawing :})

This is a coin veil, inspired by catholic veils because they're so goshdarn pretty. They're the predecessor of coin scarves and while coinscarves are made with opaque, typically thicker material, coin veils are made with lace or sheer fabric.

It is not practiced anymore, it kind of went out of fashion when the elaborate worship of the gods was replaced with the more humble and accessible worship of the divine. Coin scarves were kind of made so the church could try and make those that were fond of veils convert away from the gods, under the idea that 'they're basically the same thing anyway!!'.

Avra gets hers because it was a practice she partook in during her life as Irene, so she kind of was drawn to it. For Donna and Logan's wedding, she had an excuse to wear fancy stuff, so she asked Cadenza to help her make a coin veil. She doesn't remember what it's meant to actually represent, she just thinks they're pretty and comforting. Cadenza makes her a red one, using a bunch of lace she had already made, and it is very long. Avra only typically wears it for events or whenever she's stressed and needs to chill out.

Similarly to coinscarves, colour and metal indicate certain gods, but so does lace pattern and veil length. Worship of Judgement/Death (The destroyer/shad) was often indicated with long black veils with golden coins and the lace covering the face as well as the hair, with the lace usually having patterns of wilted flowers and animal skulls to represent the very decay they worshipped. Of course, this could only be afforded by the very rich, however the rich were often patrons of his temples in larger communities and would supply them with veils for the worshippers to wear. The addition of coins to veils was thought to have started with Judgement/Death worship, as it was believed that if someone was buried in their veil and brought back, you would be able to hear them by the chiming of the coins. Which was good because you didn't want an SK sneaking up on your ass, even back when Shad was thought of highly.

Worship of The Mother (Irene) was done through medium-length white-lace veils which were usually not adorned with coins (though were still called coinveils) but had beads instead, and were typically tied or pinned closed around the chest. The lace usually had floral patterns on it, though not always. Irene herself wore one, however due to lace being very hard to carve, most of her statues depict her wearing a hood instead.

I could get into the impacts of Avra wearing her red little coin veil but naaahhhh.

[sapphic-bats]

If I, say, began writing a post-season two fic that had to do with the Second Coming and a bunch of succubi/incubi and lords of Hell getting restless, would anyone be interested?

[sygneinl]

Religious lore for my comic

[heresylog]

Update on the journey of nun-hood*

It’s been about a week since I entered the convent. Right now I still haven’t made any vows or promises, but I can tell you what it’s like so far.

There are so many women, and they’re all so different. Whatever image you have in your head about what a religious sister is, she probably exists. There are sisters who like the traditional hobbies of gardening and sewing but there are others who like riding motorcycles and flying planes.

You’re never bored. I have such a packed schedule. My day starts around 6am and ends at 10pm. In that time I probably have about two hours of downtime, not including meals or required recreation. Most days I’m doing dishes or folding laundry. Other days I’m reading or working on schoolwork.

It’s been a big change. I’m glad I’m doing this and I wish I’d done it sooner.

*I used the word “nun” even though I am not aiming to be cloistered. I am an aspiring religious sister.

[riverstyxsarts]

I’m not afraid of god I’m afraid he was gone all along

[elheavenlove]

the nun and the vampire she’s in love with…

⚔️🩸✨

[devilsainz]

she ate with this concept here

bonus

i hope they dont get mad at me for screeshotting them but feel free to contact me if youre the acc and want this post deleted

[canisalbus]

forgive me if this has been answered previously, but what were the circumstances around vasco finding out about machete's death? i'm heartbroken but fascinated to think about what his immediate reaction could have been

They don't live together, Vasco was at home in Florence at the time. Either someone who knew of their relationship managed to alert him of the murder, or he showed up in Rome to visit him just like countless of times before, and one time he was just gone. He would've missed the funeral for sure, and since Machete doesn't have family, his belongings would most likely end up escheated and subsequently liguidated by the church. He certainly wasn't remembed fondly, for the most part it was like he had never been there in the first place.

I don't want to get into the details but of course he was devastated. The threat of death was a constant presence in Machete's later years, he survived at least a couple of assassination attempts and his health kept getting worse. I think he tried to keep Vasco in the dark about how bad things were exactly, but Vasco didn't miss how his fear of death ramped up in intensity towards the end. So it wasn't a complete surprise when he found out they had finally gotten him. For a long time he had hard time not blaming himself for it, thinking whether he could've done something to prevent the outcome, whether his presence would've changed how things played out. Over the years he learned to live with the sudden and violent end of their relationship, but the first few years were extremely rough, the whole ordeal broke him in unprecedented ways and he never fully recovered to his previous state.

[iidgm]

"In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti"

[apollo18]

Concept: the justice league finds out that Blaze and Satanus, the rulers of hell, are kids of their ‘even more of a boy scout than Superman’ coworker’s “boss” and think Shazam is the Christian God. They ask Billy really vague questions that lead Billy into confusing them even more and they become convinced that Marvel’s Wizard guy is God with a capital G and Marvel’s either an angel or the second coming of Jesus.

Meanwhile Shazam doesn’t even know what the Bible is and his knowledge about religion is so outdated he still thinks Solomon’s Judaism is new age and not worth his time to research such a ‘fad’ religion, but he knows humans will make a religion out of anything as well as bastardize existing ones and very well could have mixed up actual tales that involve him, his allies, and his children into some sort of melting pot of a religion.

So when someone finally asks Marvel outright if his “boss” is God, Billy goes ‘wait… old guy in white robes and sandals, with long white hair and a beard… lives in space… aka the “heavens”, whose a ghost(Holy Spirit), and knows everything(historama)??? I need to dig deeper into this hold on guys’ and goes off to ask the wizard.

So when Billy asks the Wizard he just tells Billy “well, my boy, if so many things match up, maybe it is so and the tales of myself and my champions grew so estranged from their origins or mixed in with other beliefs that it can explain the things that aren’t true to our reality.”

Then The Canonical Character To The DC Universe, Jesus of Nazareth, shows up.

[bizlybebo]

anyways since it’s the holidays shout out to religiously traumatized people, people questioning their religion, people who just got out of their religion, people considering getting back into their religion, people who miss their religion even if it ended up hurting them, people who never practiced religion, people who have practiced religion their whole lives, and people who don’t celebrate christmas/celebrate other holidays because of their religon

and FUCK the mormon church

[ammonite-clan]

Hi Moonstripe! Darkpaw of Surfclan writing. I read you knew a little bit about ghosts? I keep seeing this... Cat.. who doesn't shine like Starclan. Have you seen anything like this before?

As Moonstripe writes, his shadow begins to shift behind him and slowly creep up the wall of his cave domicile. It begins to form a hulking cat much bigger than any in life, with light only forming where two eyes should be. Moonstripe twitches and turns to lick an itch on his neck. Out of the corner of his eye he sees something... But as he looks up to the wall, the shade is gone.

[goldkirk]

hey this isn’t aimed at anyone in particular but I’m saying it for the record here: if I tell you no, please stop messaging me about fundraisers and mutual aid.

I get enough messages that it’s impossible for me to keep up without devoting at least half an hour each day, when I’m not even on tumblr that long most days. Me having a boundary about this isn’t a moral failing, it’s a lifeboat for me on my own blog.

In my personal life I’m already advocating and donating literally as much as I can spare. This is not me not caring, it’s just me not willing to interact with that on the one place I go online to not interact with irl news and world events for the most part.

I cannot be upset all the time. I cannot be upset everywhere. I cannot use all my emotional and mental energy fielding my own upset from ongoing events. My options are to hold boundaries about this or stop coming online at all.

I’m all for sharing information and signal boosting to reasonable extents, but the scale of it this year is so large and so enduring that it is literally not possible to for me to participate on every account I have. I’ve previously shared links to Gaza eSIM donations and a major hub of verified Go Fund Mes here and elsewhere online. We, the online humans, know how to look those things up ourselves by now. There are many, many people choosing to do advocacy work, and right now, I can’t be one of them.

If you’re extremely upset when I tell you I can’t share/donate right now about a Gaza family or personal fundraiser you ask me to share here, just unfollow and block me. That’s what those buttons are for. Protect your own emotions and energy and get me off your feed instead of staying upset and continuing to engage with online people or content that upsets you.

Please don’t send repeated angry messages based on manufactured purity politics and moral outrage into my messages and inbox when I exercise the right to run my own blog.

[sleeplesssmoll]

Psychube Lore

It was right there there whole time.

Vertin reflects until she levels up. That's cool until you realize she repeatedly relives her trauma too. For example...

Fatuous: silly or pointless

This frog is the Hyla Arborea, the foreteller of rain.

[fallstaticexit]

Previously on COTF

Chapter Six (The Magic of Creation) - Previous // Next // Beginning Link to Transcript - Because the script is sooo long, I decided to do a doc format. Let me know what you all think!

[serpentface]

What exactly are living gods in the blightseed universe?

Ok here's the (DANGEROUSLY vestigial at this point) Meta Deeplore:

There is a material form of energy that is utilized by biological bodies essentially as an animating force. This IS the vaguely defined, extremely ambiguous magic in the setting. It is what produces the actual experience of Consciousness and can be basically considered 1:1 with conscious experience. All life utilizes this energy (whether actually conscious life in the traditional sense or not).

It cannot be created or destroyed, and rather follows pathways of dispersal between one material plane and a parallel plane. This parallel plane is 'the ether' 'the dreamlands' etc, and has its own matter. Discrete entities from the dreamlands are essentially formed as a byproduct of consciousness and, when interacted with, are deeply susceptible to the influence of conscious Thought (they are essentially matter organized By consciousness and can be reorganized by consciousness)

These are the entities that can become living gods. Dreamlands fauna occasionally slips into prime material reality, at which point they are directly under the influence of consciousness and can be transformed. Dreamlands fauna in of itself is not directly perceivable but produces a sense of Presence, like the feeling of being watched when alone in the wilderness, a 'third man effect', a sense of inexplicable awe or fear, seeing shadows from the corner of your eye, etc. The combination of their tangible effects and their susceptibility to consciousness creates a self-reinforcing cycle that produces living gods.

IE: if one is on a forest and people experience the sensation of its presence, belief that there is some entity there may develop. This will follow the lines of the cultural worldview- say there are already beliefs in spectral hounds that encounter travelers at night, it might be interpreted as a location-specific hound, given a name and identity through stories. This in turn causes the dreamlands fauna to physically embody that form and the assumed qualities, and people will start having absolute materially real encounters with it, thus reinforcing the initial beliefs that created it and generating new elements of the mythology. This is what a living god is.

They need persistent, localized, and coherent beliefs to hold their forms. If a village creates a living god and is then wiped out in a disaster, the god will gradually lose its form and return to its initial state of a sense of Presence. This is also a limiting factor on the 'size' and power of a living god, if an entire religion formed around it and became a widespread phenomena, the living god itself cannot 'keep up'. It is sustained on direct and localized interactions, so belief becoming widely dispersed (especially if the localized belief is lost) will cause it to gradually become less discrete. The effect of this property is that living gods are almost always minor deities or spirits tied to a specific location by a specific nearby culture. A lot of deities in larger religions may have once had a living god component that is now indiscrete.

The living god of the Ur-tree is an unusual exception in that it was created over millennia, basically by the survival instincts of the Plants it interacts with, and has held its form over hundreds of millions of years due to this being ubiquitous and un-susceptible to cultural change. The only thing that could 'kill it' is if its forest was entirely destroyed.

So 99% of living gods can be described as thoughtforms created by the process of folkloric/religious development. They are created BY people and not the other way around, and nothing about their nature confirms or denies the existence of other deities or etc.

And yeah I'm going to be 100% real I am REALLY tempted to dump even this extremely ambiguous magical element like it is soooooooooooooooo fucking NOT important to the setting at this point. I've kind of allowed 'literal god entities created by mortal belief' to be just a tiny part of the world's fabric by their nature, like it works within the worldbuilding for such a hugely significant concept to ultimately be insignificant in the overall framework, so I COULD just Leave It but idk. If it were not for me wanting to still have my big fucking god tree and a talking dog as an actual character it would be out of here soooo fast..........