How does the Church celebrate mass or similar rituals in your doskvol? How do they preach to the public?
How does the Church celebrate mass or similar rituals in your doskvol? How do they preach to the public?
How does the Church celebrate mass or similar rituals in your doskvol? How do they preach to the public?
Lots of oils, incense, ritualized food-sharing and wine-drinking, and other feasts for the body’s senses. Lots of parables whose morals celebrate the physical form saving the day. Weird fetishization of women’s bodies for making more physical bodies, probably, and a creation myth about the first spirit possessing the first child and making everyone be born with a spirit inside them. I figure there’s a lot of nudity. There’s probably a ritual or sacrament that everybody gathers for, when the church removes the spirit from someone’s body so they can become a Hollow in service to the church. Maybe everyone prays in the direction of a great spirit/devil-slaying martyr. Maybe there is a place where there used to be idols to Old Gods and Devils, but they’ve all been replaced with an idol of the Immortal Emperor and once a year adherents walk circles around the shrine until their bodies physically give up.
Just spit balling some random stuff; just, a lot of lavish devotion to physicality.
For me: I don’t imagine a lot of public ceremony that does not involve burning someone at the stake, at which point the whole community is invited. But otherwise, most church events are really just excuses for private parties. When they do a public event, it’s usually a showpiece of charity or a show of force. It is not an institution seeking to sway the hearts and minds of the people – it’s more of an anti-religion, filling space to keep another large organized religion from springing up, and that is just how his immortalness want is.
And while that works on a large scale, faith still grows like weeds
In the better off neighborhoods, I imagine that church is rooted in mystery cults, where the difference between diocese and secret society is very thin indeed. There are dozens – hundreds – of “churches” with small attendances and private patronage, and most of them are harmless gatherings but that is what makes the true secret societies so dangerous.
In less well off neighborhoods, you’ve got a handful of institutions (like the Hospital of the Night) which have their own rituals which get some buy in as a trade off for their role in the community, but beyond that you have individual preachers and their followings. Some are crazy beggars with a bowl, but some are genuine charismatic believers who can establish crowds and followings.
When one of these preachers starts getting a following, there are a couple possible outcomes.
First, they may attract attention from higher up the food chain, along with promise of sponsorship, and they get moved into a nicer neighborhood and are either absorbed by or start a new mystery cult.
Second, they attract attention form higher up the food chain and get themselves vanished
Third, their local following is sufficient to get ad hoc sponsorship locally, usually from an organization. These might become “respectable” enough to establish some tradition and superstition, even becoming secondary organizations under the umbrella of the parent organization. The most common example of this is Our Lady Of The Waves, the semi-church of the Leviathan hunters. Some say they actually have some faith, others say it’s just a cynical play on the superstition of the rank and file sailors, but it provides a place for community ceremonies (Weddings, memorials), valued services (blessing ships, chaplains) and a place for some internal competition within the community (see S2:E1 of The Wire). The churches in The Docks and Coalridge are both noteworthy organizations.
Fourth, They gather enough personal following to form a cult, and what they do next is anyone’s guess.
Cults, of course, abound, and the line between religion and superstition varies greatly, but that’s a whole other topic.
In our game it’s very reminiscent of the Anglican church, mainly because I did a lot of world-building narration with my PC who was raised by a particularly religious family and so was heavily influenced by it in her youth. With the focus on “the flesh,” there’s lots of emphasis on cleanliness (of mind and body), good nutrition (such as one can get, both physical and mental), and fertility. There are a lot of charity organizations among the gentry that go out among the people and offer alms in the form of food, clothing, etc. in exchange for just utterly judging the shit out of you. There’s very much a sense of “sin is as sin does”- not quite Calvinism, but if you’re ill, hungry, etc., it’s probably because your body is reflecting the sins of your mind, or vice versa. Virtues like chastity, tidiness, honesty, and such are highly prized, and are acted out by the very poor as an alternative form of social prestige. The church also acts as an arm of the child welfare system, and since it is directly maintained by the Governor, everyone in the cloth is essentially a government agent (or at least a loyalty officer).
The Old Gods are serious no-nos, and will get you arrested, rehabilitated, or worse. Church services, for a largely illiterate population, mainly involve singing a lot of easy, memorable psalms and confession while bathing naked (cleanliness and humility and potential shaming both within and without).
It’s worth remembering that presentism makes it easy for us to look at medieval and premodern Western organized religions as patently absurd and tyrannical, but the people within those communities didn’t see them that way at the time; they were a source of hope, joy, and usually community aid in a very shitty circumstance.