Some world-buildy thoughts on the Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh.
My PC gang has managed to get on the bad side of the Church, so I thought I should know a bit more about them.
tl;dr: yoga, some drugs, no orgies, big on big families.
They’re a mystery cult, which implies lots of small groups led by individual holy people. On the other hand, it’s a large scale organised state religion, which implies something much more formal and regimented. It also needs to support the “standard social goods” that keep societies ticking over, such as supporting long-term stable (monogamous?) relationships, care of children, and obeying the established power structures.
What springs to mind is something like Tantric practice, where the emphasis is on bringing the “godhead” into the human and personal. As this life is the only one people have, the Church will encourage people to live healthily, exercise, eat well, and all that. I can see people finding enlightenment through meditation and yoga-like practices, or ecstasy through intense physical activity like the whirling dervishes or even ravers.
Church services will probably involve short-acting narcotics or hallucinogens, because that’s the first thing I thought of when describing a service. It needs to be something that most people can do without huge amounts of effort, which keeps the ecstasy-through-exercise limited to a small number of devotees. The idea of huge hedonistic orgies is superficially fitting, but I think too much of that would undermine the social cohesion function of the default church (but it’s definitely something that happens in some of the non-denominational churches).
The Cataclysm means people can’t achieve immortality through mystical means. That means the old saying that “you achieve immortality through your children” is just about the only way people can live after their death. I think the Church will encourage large families and people caring well for their children.
I’m not sure what the Church will think about the undead. On the one hand, it’s a very obvious form of immortality. On the other, it’s against all the teachings of living your one life well.
Anyway, that’s my first few thoughts. What does anyone else think?
Cities are packed to the brim inside the lightning barriers, so large families maybe aren’t what the state wants. Maybe you achieve your immortality with Great Works (which also puts the nobility on a pedestal).
John Harper That sounds right. It also relates to horses, which came up in the last session. If there are lots of people, perhaps there’s less room/need for horses as beasts of burden in Duskwall. Instead, lots of people acting as porters, moving goods by carrying or with handcarts, etc. Horse-drawn vehicles tend to be restricted to large bulk items or for high status.
Depending on how much horror you want in your game, the Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh could be so seriously into self-actualisation, that in striving to combine the power and wisdom of those who went before us, the secret holiest of holies involves eating the brain or heart of parents (or artists or intellectuals or such). Parents might actually endorse this, wishing to empower their single offspring.
A.J. van Spanje I’m sure there are some almost-heretic priest-types that lead that. It could also be an important part of funerals: passing on artefacts representing achievements, so they’re remembered and the recipient can draw power/inspiration from them.
It was said that late communist Moscow was the most erotic city on the earth at it’s time. Why? Because people always need a release valve, all the more when they feel that much more pressure and have lost that much more freedom. The idea that sex among humans is largely a form of social cohesion, not only procreation, makes more sense to me than the it’s procreation only story (we have a lot more sex per child than most animals). So yeah, I agree that too much orgiastic stuff is questionable as a state religion. This has bothered me from the beginning, to be honest. I could see “sex with the high priest or priestess is an honor” and I could see secretive high ranking societies in the church doing orgies. But yeah, I could also see, and may likely use, a little bit of the idea of clergy being holy prostitutes as well. That idea goes better with less patriarchal societies but, well, whatever. I’ll make it work. In general though, I really like what the original post said, and happy we’re talking about it.
The name does sound orgiastic to modern ears, yeah. But it can also be read in the archaic sense of ecstasy. “Rapture from the contemplation of holy things.”
The main idea to use with the church is how they abhor the corruptions from the spirit world and promote naturalism over the occult.