The Numenists find the sacred writ small and large in places across the galaxy. Wherever they find an upwelling of mysterious power, they call it a numen and conduct prayer and meditation to recognize and welcome it and to seek its blessings. Numina occur as trees, as mountains, as the lingering presence of a dead hero, and as gods. Numenists celebrate them all and seek their blessings.
Numenists are very social. They celebrate with prayers of praise and gratitude, with music and poetry and incense and cooking. (The cooking takes place within sacred precincts: the aromas ascend to the numen, and the worshipers partake of the food in ritual appreciation. The food preparation begins with ritual purification and is often timed by reciting particular pieces of sacred poetry.)
When a numen is not immediately manifest, a shrine is built around some talisman that is considered to possess a fraction of the being’s essence. Talismans are usually possessions of a person who has gone on to become a numen, or a piece of art created by a worshiper. Shrines are usually large fixed structures, though portable ones may be carried around by worshipers during festivals.
Sacred precincts are marked by an element associated with the numen: tangled hedges and vines and archways of greenery, stone pillars and keystone arches, spears and swords made into metal fences and gates, diverting a river around both sides of a mound, blazing lights...
Devotees claim that the numina sometimes visit them in dreams with helpful advice, or that they can feel their blessing (game mechanically, they have gained a temporary aspect for a few hours or days).
One of the most unpleasant religious validations the Numenists have ever received is assault by Kissai priests, who have a habit of showing up at the shrines of numina associated with the metaphysical territories of Sith gods and torturing the Numenist priests to death in the hearts of their shrines. Numenist priests subsequently report that all the talismans of that numen became inert or even began radiating the aura of a Sith deity.
I’m borrowing heavily from Japanese Shinto here.
The Ithorians believe that planets are living beings; they see the Gaia hypothesis as a matter of physical reality reflecting a deeper spiritual reality, rather than the spiritual being emergent from the physical. Ithorians are devoted to Mother Jungle, the spirit of their own planet, Ithor, but they would regard it as odd for any other species to show that devotion. Other sentients learning the precepts of the Listeners are encouraged to show respect for any world-spirit they visit and devotion to the one to which the species is native; ecumenopoleis are seen as accursed places where the world-spirit has been buried under duracrete and ceramasteel. Species native to such worlds are seen as orphans. A Listener who achieves communication with their planet is termed an oracle.
No Listener will go willingly without some small ecosystem to nurture, even if it’s just a one gallon terrarium in their scout ship; usually that ecosystem is their species-native one, sometimes that of their home planet, sometimes both or even a hybrid. Their spiritual discipline begins with open-eyed meditation in an ecologically balanced setting, which could be anything from a well-tended garden to deep wilderness. They then begin visualizing the workings of the ecosystem, starting with the simplest expressions of the food chain and then moving on to greater elaborations until the ego vanishes before the vast intricacy of a living planet. The insights gained from reaching this state are considered to be the voice of the planet.
There is a mild schism among the Listeners. (With Ithorians setting the tone, this means that people on opposite sides of the schism respectfully disagree with each other and don’t invite them over to their own gardens. A holy war would involve outright shunning and refusing to do business with each other!) Humans (and a few other orphan species) have taken up careful and thoughtful creation of new ecosystems based on carefully selected species from a hundred worlds, often with the intention of using these to terraform other planets. People on one side of the schism see themselves as gametes by which world-spirits are sharing genes and having children; people on the other side see this as an artificial, Frankensteinian act and believe that ecological repairs should be performed using species native to a planet. The former side are more effective at cleaning up after ecological catastrophes.
Listeners claim their faith affords them physical and mental health and well-being.
The Church of Davku was started by the Prophet Davku on Coruscant in early days of hyperspace travel. Davku preached a vision of an ideal world in which the sacred was everywhere and all people acknowledged the presence of the sacred, and all roles in life had associated religious trappings. Virtue consists of loyalty and obedience to your superiors and provide wise leadership for your inferiors, and is rewarded with increasing purity and prosperity. Every role on life— within a family or a workplace— has detailed religious prescriptions, which provides structure and certainty that many people find comforting. The church is a very hierarchical organization with clear lines of authority: children should obey their parents; wives should obey their husbands in matters of the walls, wilds, and marketplace; husbands should obey their wives in matters of the hearth and fields. They are very fond of titles: Hierarch, Arbiter, Paladin...
Davku taught that people are reincarnated among their descendants as long
as they have any descendants; souls waiting for reincarnation watch over
their families. A measure of a parent’s virtue is bestowed on their
children, and successive reincarnations in a family in the Church bring
greater and greater virtue. (Build your house well,
that your great-grandchildren will bless your name.
) Should a
family line die out, all the souls must start out in new families,
and experience a considerable setback in their purity.
The majority of the Church’s adherents, led by a man they believed to be the reincarnation of Davku, left Coruscant a few centuries later to found a colony world, which was run as a theocracy until the Sith conquered it.
The Church’s emphasis on wise long-term planning is supposed to be about responsibility and prosperity. Under the Sith Empire, it has slowly grown corrupt and become more about greed and nest-feathering.
About 3200 years ago, one of the Prophets (the eleventh incarnation of Davku) proclaimed that humanity was a sign of his purity, and that all species are in a progression toward that virtue: near-humans are clearly virtuous, parahumans are works in progress, humanoids are just beginning to make spiritual progress, and nonhumanoids are intrinsically evil unless they are devoted to the Church. This means that the natural place of nonhumans is in service to humans, and that virtuous, obedient nonhuman families will gradually lose their nonhuman traits until they have become entirely human. The Sith are believed to be a punishment sent to the Davkuites for failure to spread the Word of Davku with sufficient alacrity, and that when a sufficient portion of the galactic population have become virtuous Davkuites, the Sith will be in such awe that they will join the hierarchy and begin the long progress toward humanity.
The Davkuites pride themselves on being benevolent slaveowners, giving their slaves every opportunity to gain in virtue.
Why? Why Not? Not everything is black and white.
The Church of Toydaria welcomes all.
The Church of Toydaria is a rather popular and pragmatic religion that claims it is a celebration of life; its detractors claim it is an excuse for people to throw parties and feel good about turning profits. The truth is mixed: the Toydarians have been a Hutt client species for thousands of years, and have arrived at their view through natural selection.
A devout Toydarist is in pursuit of the Win-Win Deal, where everyone in a transaction comes out far enough ahead that they can buy a round of drinks or appetizers. Spiritually, this is seen as an incremental improvement to the universe, binding it together in a virtuous cycle. People are believed to accumulate this kind of wheeler-dealer karma over their lives and to be able to spend it after death to incarnate into this or other realms; this essence is seen as a form of spiritual construction material, and they advocate that heaven is literally what you make of it by stocking up construction material in this life. People who negotiate in bad faith, however, are sinful and there is no shame in swindling them for all they’re worth; only by achieving bankruptcy will they have a chance to start on the path toward virtue.
The closest thing that the Toydarists offer to a transcendental experience is the stage of revelry (often chemically assisted) in which one feels universal love for one’s fellow revelers, and some devotees consider it important to develop the skill for achieving this state. (This requires both good judgment in companions as well as in gauging one’s rate of consumption.) They see getting so tanked that you pass out or fail to remember the party the next day as a failure, and a sure sign of a good friend is one who makes you guzzle plenty of water and buffered analgesics to avoid a hangover the next day.
The Church does not have a strong central dogma; it does have a strong central marketing department. Tithing at various levels gets you into special circles of business connections. At 1/1296 of your income, it’s a useful network of collaborators. At 1/216, it’s a special group of movers and shakers. At 1/6, it’s an amazing display of luxury for putative titans of the financial world... but the most shrewd businessmen never seem to join.
A panspecies religion with an aggressive program of proselytization;
they require tithes of 1/9 of
a member’s income, but provide connections with fellow church
members for colluding to drive competition out of the market.
Their theology is that all beings have souls, but only those who are
members of the Church have awoken to a state of radiant unity
;
those who are not yet awakened should be brought to that state by any
means necessary, which means creating incentives wherever possible.
A Human-centric religion, usually regarded as highly xenophobic and racist, which believes that Humans were created in the image of the Creator deity, and cite Coruscant (and its lack of record of evolution) as the world where they were created. All of the parahuman species are the result of the Progenitor’s bodily secretions being lapped up by beasts as he walked worlds to stake out the eventual dominion of his Human children.
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