Corps

The Corps is the religious tradition of most of the former territories of the Omban Empire, and many adjacent areas. It emerged around 800 years ago out of the earlier shamanic ancestor-worship traditions of the region. It is non-theistic, ancestor-focused, and centered around death and what comes after death as central foci of interest.

Cosmogony

There are no Gods or beings like gods as part of the Corps tradition. The universe is eternal and self-created; it was once a formless mass that came together into an ordered Coherence, and then began the process of Unfolding - an ongoing, neverending process of revealing the coherence of the universe. Humans are part of, can observe, and even participate in the Unfolding. They are not capable of transforming its broader patterns, but can, at the scale of a lifespan, play their part and shape its individual channels and grooves. Different theologians and poets have understood the Unfolding as the cracking of a cosmic egg, the blooming of a flower, or the shimmering of a curtain of light (the aurora). The Unfolding is unpredictable - as life itself - but its patterns can be understood once they occur.

Within the Corps, there is is a belief in the First Ancestors, who are ancestral to all humans and to some other sentient beings. The First Ancestors emerged out of the primordial chaos but do not themselves have an ancestor / creator. They are unnamed (at least, by humans) mythical entities that may have been extremely powerful. Species that have First Ancestors are persons and are capable of sentience; other species, including most nonhuman animals, are not persons, do not have spirits, and are thus secondary creations. The growth of the body (i.e., from fetus to child to adult) is the individual’s expression of the Unfolding. Bodily death is not the end of the Unfolding, but merely a point of disjunction or inflection in the course of any given pattern.

Practitioners of magic differ on how the use of fos relates to the universe, but most believe that it is used to create minor new folds / alterations in the Unfolding, tapping into the Source of the universe and giving it new coherence that it would not otherwise have.

Some believe that at the end of the Unfolding, everything will collapse back into chaos / disorder. However, this is not central to the theology as currently understood. Rather, most hold that the ultimate goal or endpoint of the Unfolding is unknowable, if it exists at all.

Religious Practitioners

The Corps is divided into two complementary sex-segregated priesthoods, each with their own temples, traditions, and roles, the male Voice of the Dead and the female Hand of the Dead. Both the Hand and the Voice are celibate, and while they are permitted to have sex, may neither marry nor have children once they take their vows. Each branch has its own leader - the high priest of the Voice is known as the Head, and the high priestess of the Hand is known as the Heart. The intention, and usually the practice, of the two branches is that they should be complementary, but inevitably conflicts do occur. Adherents use the services of both priesthoods and it would be nonsensical to describe oneself as a believer in one but not the other.