Transcension cult

In Vaestism, a transcension cult is a cult devoted to a particular person who is generally believed to have attained transcension, that is, the escape of their soul from the war of Light and Dark and the process of shattering reincarnation. Transcension cults receive varying degrees of official approval, and may be established or recognised by any Banner, above all the Prophetic; merely tolerated; or in some cases subject to state repression. Rituals of devotion to particular figures form an important supplement to the central apportation rite in ordinary Vaestic religious life. Just as Scholars lead the way to transcension for ordinary Vesnites, the putative transcended are held to have marked and illuminated the path that must be followed.

Practices

The ritual practices associated with transcension cults are quite numerous and more diffusely regulated than the rite of apportation. In general they consist of meditation on the life and works of the transcended, primarily either in silence or assisted by the repetitive expression of formulae associated with the cult object. The most elaborate ceremony is that of 'mediate reparation', sometimes known as 'pseudo-apportation' in the West. This follows a template quite similar to apportation itself: a panegyric dedicated to the transcended is followed by a series of questions and responses similar to ordinary reparation, but the responses are phrased as indirect statements in the third person that represent the teaching of the transcended, often including direct quotations of formulae and other works. In contrast to apportation, the officiating cleric at a mediate reparation does not touch the reparant directly; instead, they are touched by pictures or, sometimes, relics of the cult object. This custom has become quite general outside this particular liturgical context, and touching one's own head with a picture of the transcended is a common form of cultic devotion.

An elaborate mystical hierology has also developed around transcension cults that encourages the direct worship and beseeching of the 'shadow' of the transcended, that is, their living path to transcension, considered almost as an animate being in itself, as well as the contemplation of their 'holy impression' in the metacosm. Though such practices lapsed to some extent by the mid-20th century and received critique from reformed Strong Externalism, they remain popular and have seen a notable official revival under the auspices of the Sage Precepts movement.

History

The historical origins of transcension cults are heterogeneous. The greatest and the original such cult is, of course, that of the Prophet himself, whose transcension in the Battle of the Holy Storm marked the definitive establishment of Vaestism and, according to Vaestic orthodoxy, the first transcension of any human in history (the Breaking of the World-Gates). The Sacred Prophecy can be considered the transcension cult of the Prophet: in the enormously influential formulation of Dana, the Prophet in his transcension lit the 'flame' of the Prophecy to guide all Savants to follow him, and all the attributes of the Prophecy may therefore be considered the living consequence of this originary moment. Over the course of the 15th century, however, other individuals, notably the Prophetic Marshals and especially those who served as the earliest Universal Prophets, became objects of popular devotion. The consolidation of a Vaestic orthodoxy under the pressure of the Wars of Heresy provided the first impetus for the making of official determinations on the liceity of particular cults. The first formal Prysostaic decision to ban certain personal cults appears in the anti-Equilibrian 'Judgement Against the Aberration of Constancy' (1472) of Viswald II, pertaining in this case to the Equilibrians' so-called 'cults of annihilation' which are generically listed and condemned, though this does not appear to have carried the full weight or specificity of later such decisions.

The development of these diffuse personal cults into official transcension cults depended on the dual influence of the Occidentalisers, who were influenced by the worship of the Ascended which had been elaborated in some detail in Anabbine Siriash, and of the Chotarianisers, whose establishment of the principles of character judgement provided a means by which the question of a deceased individual's possible transcension could be understood and formally examined. The Mirror of Characters, the highly Chotarianising compilation that served as the outline basis of zaconic law in Great Neritsia and was promulgated as part of the 1511 Assembled Theoretics, includes provisions regarding both the legality of reverence of the deceased and the establishment of whether an individual could merit such reverence—in the former case relating to the character of the cultist, in the latter to the character of the object of the cult. In 1538, an Imperial Edict of Sobiebor II empanelled a group of Scholars in Great Pestul as a special character tribunal to investigate existing cults and determine their respective merits, known as the Tribunal over the Dead; this commission continued its work under subsequent Prophet-Emperors and, in the drive towards standardisation of Scholarly practice at the turn of the 17th century, was eventually given the additional mandate to supervise the conduct of apportation rituals and established as the Grand Imperial Office of Cultic Regulation under Lyudodar in 1610. In the mid-16th century the argument also became current among Theoreticist clergy, not entirely distinct from the doctrine of Ultragnosis, that the power of the Sacred Prophecy was such that each Universal Prophet was bound to transcend merely on account of holding the office, and cults of deceased Prophet-Emperors were officially encouraged.

For the remainder of the Neritsovid era, the Office of Cultic Regulation oversaw the recognition of popular transcension cults, the centrally-directed establishment of new ones, and the bestowal of official patronage upon both. In many cases it was pre-empted by local Scholars, who allowed the construction of shrines and the worship of personalities associated with specific Schools, and after Lyudodar the distinction between official and unofficial cults was never black-and-white. Lyudodar did, however, initiate a hardening of official repression of politically unacceptable cults in the aftermath of the heretical movements of the Errancy Era, and Scholarly suspicion of popular cults would never entirely die down. After the dismantling of Great Neritsia, the Radiance in fact saw a progressive elaboration of the legal procedure for establishing and regulating transcension cults and a more intensive interest in the question on the part of the nascent Banner-States; Spytihnev the Great centralised the powers of cultic regulation in Terophan in his Office of Schools, and in 1760 Prophet Zafuvniprourkah (r. 1756–83) instituted the Prysostaic Office of Cult and Rite to take over the work of the Neritsovid Grand Imperial Office of Cultic Regulation on behalf of the Prophetic Banner. By directly establishing through one of his first Prophetic Utterances an officially sponsored cult of his predecessor Borovest II, Zafuvniprourkah also laid down an important precedent of interventionism for future Prophets, which would reach its height with Tarmo's (r. 1872–90) Prophetic establishment and recognition of cults of various Radiance reformers and other popular figures soon after his own accession to the Throne-that-Ends.

In general, however, and especially with the Desecration of the Prophecy since 1926, the regulation of transcension cults has come to devolve on individual imperial Banners. Their decisions are often not shared by others: politically controversial objects of veneration in one Banner may be reviled in another, and determinations by the Prysostaic Office of Cult and Rite on such questions are relatively infrequent, and usually tentative. Many loosely regulated folk cults continue to exist across Vaestdom, with repression focusing primarily on the veneration of officially established heresiarchs (the cult of Zamor the False among the Recalcitrants offers a striking example). The modern orthodox understanding of approved transcension cults is, in any case, rather pedantic, and defined in a more restricted way than what might be understood by the ordinary Vesnite. With very few exceptions, the transcension of the deceased is not susceptible to definitive empirical verification, and the official approval of a transcension cult denotes only that the object of the cult had a character that fulfilled the formal criteria for transcension, and, at least in many of the cults that receive official establishment beyond mere toleration, that there is circumstantial evidence in the form of miracles to suggest that this may have been accomplished.