Church of Kirva

The **Church of Kirva** is a major religion following the goddess Kirva of the Great Pantheon.

## Description

Kirvanism, the worship of the goddess Kirva, is the largest single religion in the cosmos, encompassing billions of worshippers across countless sects. Kirva’s Church teaches her followers a dogma of absolute loyalty to her and of absolute physical and mental purity to protect the minds of the faithful from the insidious influence of other divinities. Kirva is portrayed as infallible, splendid and eternal, with a utopian promise of total cosmic unification and prosperity under her endless reign. The benevolence of Kirva’s message is rarely without a wrathful counterpart, and most iconography associated with Kirva or her angels depicts them as wreathed in or literally consisting of cleansing flame.

### Lore

While it is generally accepted by occultists and religious scholars that Kirva is the most powerful surviving individual deity of the Great Pantheon, the degree of her power is prone to exaggeration by local sects. Various regional scriptures hold, among other tales, that Kirva forced Valdos to author the Partition, so that the Pantheon War would end and spare billions of lives, that Kirva is in fact the mother of all humans, and that Kirva overthrew the Elder Gods so that mortals could exist. Of course, in all Kirvan scriptures, most other gods are insidious, dangerous liars who would lead mortals to ruin (the usual exception is Idolmar the Healer, whose church has historically aligned with the Kirvans). Of the gods making up the Great Pantheon, Kirva is also perhaps the most totalitarian. Valdos cares not what his servants think as long as they fulfill their contract, but Kirva and her Church want true believers.

### Doctrine

The vision the Kirvan Church sells to its disciples is of a benevolent society in life and a beautiful oneness in the afterlife. The weak are to be shielded, and the strong who did not get there by Kirva's will (or who do not suitably debase themselves with a highly public conversion) cast down to feed the hungry. Kirvan religious ideology is thus one of communitarianism and care for the poor under the kind but decidedly firm hand of its clergy. Mainstream Kirvan communitarianism (there are endless variations and splinter factions which run the gamut of philosophies) is decidedly not egalitarianism, but rather paternalism. Chosen leaders and heroes guide the masses of the faithful, who must be instructed and exhorted, and Kirvan mythology is replete with exemplary figures who demonstrate the narrow acceptable range of individualism in service to the whole. Naturally, any attempt to dislodge or reform the Church’s hierarchy is cast as grasping power-hunger.

### Practices

The Kirvan clergy take responsibility for the good order and health of their congregations and their societies: purification rites are common, and though rarely intended to literally call down divine intervention (such matters are the province of a complicated theology of “need” and “will”), they are intended to promote “correct modes of thought” which improve the harmonious operation of the community as well as benefiting the mind and soul of the individual. Kirvan abbeys and other large land-grants produce economic and social communities which *de facto* or (especially in the Shantine Empire) *de jure* admit the clergy as the principal arbiters and enforcers of law. More “urban” Kirvanism usually retains strong community elements, with many Kirvans enjoying discounted residences within Church-owned residential buildings, provided that they adhere to strict rules for behavior and affirm the careful management of their own internal life (e.g. by confessing impure thoughts to the clergy). Crucially, the Kirvan Church abhors and rejects all (non-religious) discrimination, demanding that its followers “live as the eternal day of Her reign had arrived.”

## Council of Patriarchs

*Main article: Council of Patriarchs*
In the mid-5th century A.U., the “Council of Patriarchs” represents the largest body of mutually recognized Kirvan churches and authorities.

## Knights of Adarnum

*Main article: Knights of Adarnum*
The Knights of Adarnum are a highly secretive, borderline heretical religious strand of the Kirvan Church, devoted to Kirva's archangel Adarnum.

## Notes

1. ↑ This characterization is not necessarily unfair, and it is certainly one shared by secular idealogues in the Fialta and Aeldman intelligentsia.
2. ↑ During the Pantheon War, Kirva’s angels were great and terrible to behold. They would throw themselves into ending tyranny, but some would just as readily immolate any who had the misfortune of serving the tyrant too closely