Religion

### Divine Magic and the Gods

The Gods are the different aspects of the Dreamer's personality. The Good Gods represent Her hope and love for her people. The Evil Gods were born from Her doubts and fears. The Lawful Gods were born from her calm and resolve. The Chaotic Gods were born from her creativity and wonder. The Gods are served by beings (Angels, Demons, Archons, and so on) of their own design to help with their individual causes. Some see themselves as protectors of humanity, others as enemies of them, some view themselves as guides of the world, while other feel the world is best left with little interference. Their goals are as conflicted as the Dreams themselves and they (and their worshipers) are very often at odds with one another, even within the same alignment.

The Gods and their most powerful servants can grant power to their worshipers and followers. Usually this takes the form of Divine Magic being granted to their most pious clerics in exchange for prayers, though this is not always the case. In particular, the chaotic Gods' blessings can be sporadic and can take many forms, and for reasons that are not always clear.

The true form of the Gods is heavily debated among religious scholars. Each culture that worships a God tends to have an image of the God that most closely matches the dominant race in that culture, while the largest temples in the world represent most of the Gods as being human-like in appearance. A common theory is that the Gods have no solid form but simply take the form of their followers when communicating with them.

### Archons

The Gods created servants and imbued them with their power. While they were created to help further the God's goals and ideals, some of most powerful developed individualized ideals (usually a very specific subset of their creator's ideals, though some abandon their creators and even change alignment). These become Archons, Lords of Angels and Demons, with powers second only to the Gods.

Archons are often worshiped alongside the Gods and can also grant divine power. Some confuse the two, particularly in cultures that developed on strict Archon worship. There is a clear difference between the two, though: Archons are not immortal, and have sometimes been killed by mortals.

Some commonly worshiped Archons are **Swiftus**, Archon of the Seas and Winds (a servant of Gowneas), and **Evanter**, Archon of Knowledge (a servant of Era).

### Holy Books

Sometime in the early years of the Dreams of the Sun, Marquis Phillipe set off to create the ultimate guide to the Gods. He was frustrated with the current state of the temples who often had conflicting ideas of worships even among the same Gods. Even the presence of divine magic wasn't necessarily proof of being close to the Gods as charlatans and fakers ran rampant. Phillippe had the goal of personally talking to each and every God, learning what they wanted from their worshipers, and writing it all down.

He dedicated himself to the worship of each God in succession and prayed for a personal word from each. Phillipe committed acts both great and evil, gave great charity and performed grotesque sacrifices, brought his mind to calm and then to the brink of madness. And it worked. Over the course of 200 years (an usually long lifespan for a human) he spoke to each God and wrote the primer on their ideals and their wants of worship. He wrote everything he learned without reservation: the sibling rivalry of the sisters Aasis and Myenta, the grudging respect between rivals Patron and Paign, the lengthy lectures of Era, Jeneas's start as a slave of Braekker, the nearly incomprehensible ramblings of the mad Matruer Agjun. He compiled it all in a massive tome he called **The Divine Lexicon**.

The book has known many different forms as it was translated, abridged, and distributed. Religious scholars found the sheer size of the tome unwieldy, and they abridged it down to the core tenants and ideals of each God without many of the personal details. This was called **The Divine Primer.** Many clerics of the 'good' Gods did not like the teachings of the 'evil' Gods to be so be so easily accessible. They created a version of the Primer without the words of the Evil Gods, as well as removing Matruer Agjun's mad ramblings. This became **The Holy Primer,** which to this day is the most common and widely recognized holy book in the world.

Other popular versions include **The Holy Word,** which includes only the words of Sucemis, Akarus, Fealdia, and Dyna (very popular 'good' Gods who are known to commonly work together), and **The Black Lexicon,** a version of the Lexicon which features only the words of the 'evil' Gods (banned in most nations). Ironically, the original *Divine Lexicon* has been lost to the ages and only translations remain, leading to some scholars to debate if certain phrases may have had different meanings in the original tongue.