Khatism or the Khatti

## Special Terminology

**Khatism/The Khatti** - Monotheistic worship of a singular mother goddess, Khat.  Sometimes Khat is depicted as an embodiment of the world of Caligos herself.  Popular primarily in southeastern Belore east of the Vhargas Mountain Range.

**The Khatti** - A phrase that describes not only the religious teaching but also the adherents. The Khatti is often used as the deonym of description, "The Khatti priest climbed the bluff to visit the monastery above."

## Worship

While the Khatti allows for a variety of methods of worship, asceticism, hallucinogens and practices of simple earthy worship with fetishes.

**Daily Worship**

The common practices of daily worship include daily meditation, exercise to honor the gift of life, and hymnody feature heavily in the daily religious celebration of life.

Uniquely, participation in puzzles, brain games, the telling of riddles and jokes is seen as an act of honoring the goddess, as surely as singing a hymn to her bounty and strength might be.

The Khatti honor earthy activities. Farm work, mining, metal work - tending, tilling and handling earth is seen as a sacred act.

**Geomancy**

Parah or geomancy is a method of divining among the Khatti. Interpretations are made in markings on the ground or the patterns formed by tossed soil, debris and other earthy materials. Palmistry may be part of the practice of "Viewing the cracks in the land," since the hand of a human is interpreted to be born of the soil of the goddess as a child of the Woman and the Man.

**Healing and Physick**

The Khatti place primacy and import in the study of the alchemical. The discovery and use of physick agents to heal as well as for religious purposes is well known among many of the branches of the faith.

**The Hunt of Tending**

Khatti teaches that Khat first made the spirits of female then the male, gave them shape in the mud and made them to look like her.  And the man was young, and baffled how to show his love to the woman, so Khat took him to the wood, and showed him the buck, frothing, excited, pursuing hunting for the doe.

The buck drove through the night, tearing through the wood battling away threats, battling away other buck.  When he captured her, he tended her, and the man sang the first song, the Hymn of Life, for through the example of nature, Khat had taught man everything they needed to know.  And you took upon his brow the fallen horns of one of the roebuck, and smeared mud upon face like the stripes of the deer, and he went and he Hunted the woman.

When he captured her in the wood, he sang her the Hymn of Tending and showed to her what nature had taught him.   So was born the Hunt of Tending, the ritual of rebirth, the ritual of life among the people of Khat.

**The Hymn of Life**

A ritually sung hymn.  While it is referred to as one hymn, it it is actually hymnal, of a number of songs, usually extremely proverbial in nature, making reference to lessons learned from the world around the People of Khat, the Khatti. These ritual songs propound the wisdom of Khat available for all to see.

Concepts include the Hymn of Tending, a song that describes the sexual congress of a stag upon a doe, and the subsequent following of an example by the first man. Additionally the Hymn of Bounteous Dripping describes an old priest's meditations on the drips of water that fell from his cavern home, which eventually wore a spot in the stone below. This is spoken of as Khat teaching the people persistence.

**Traditional Wear**

While the traditional wear listed below describes ceremonial wear worn during the ritual of the Warrior and the Doe, elements of these sacred garments have grown in popularity. The imagery of the axe wielding, Horned Warrior plays heavily in the culture.

The Horned Warrior - the horned Warrior, or the horned King is a figure where the young man participating in the ritual will wear either a deer's rack or an entire deer's head or skull and must, on a night in fall hunt the "Holly Browed Doe."  When he catches her he must sing to her the Hymn of Tending, a ritually sung retelling of the Story of Woman and Man.

The Holly Browed Doe - the young woman participating in the ritual will wear luxurious brown robes tabbed on either side of her hips, with a soft, petaled chemise of white beneath visible through the front and back hips of her brown tabbed robe, like the stomach and the tail of the doe.  She will wear a garland of holly in her hair, a symbol that winter comes, but that life can be renewed. She must run through the wood, and attempt playfully to evade her male partner.

This ritual often is the proceeding to Khatti marriages, however, the ritual does not require the couple so engaged to marry.