The Outside (Religion)

Summary
The Outside is a belief mainly followed by the people of Cribdahl, but also worshiped by large populations of people in foreign lands. It is purported to have originated roughly 600 years prior to the start of Welcome to The Multiverse, which would put it at around 1400 A.D. in Earth's lifetime. That does not mean, however, that the Cribdahlians were or are as advanced technologically as most European societies on Earth were in 1400 A.D. The Outside is built mostly on the premise that two gods called Father and Mother have visited Cribdahl before, to purge them of the Impure and the Unchosen, and that those two gods will one day visit again to do the same.

Creation Myth
Long ago, only the gods existed in a world of bitter dark. The gods fought to prove who was the strongest, killing each other in a war that lasted many thousands of years. One day, a beautiful goddess saw in the darkness a faint, dancing blue flame. She drew near it, though she knew the danger of approaching a god, and she found a handsome and powerful god who sought not to kill or harm her.

The two gods fell in love and chose to make children, and subsequently a world for their children, and they named this world Kudar. For many centuries they sheltered the children of Kudar from the other gods, leaving them to learn about the world on their own and teach themselves right and wrong. But one day, a terrible, Impure god found the world and entered it, and immediately tricked the greediest of the children into worshiping him. To stop him, Mother and Father entered the world and revealed themselves to the small kingdom of Cribdahl, where the most devoted and honest of the gods’ children lived.

The Gods called themselves Father and Mother, and told their children that those who followed the Impure one were unchosen. They had been rejected, and it was the children of Cribdahl’s duty to purge them from Kudar, leaving not a single one left. Cribdahl went to war with the unchosen. When the war ended, Father and Mother were only merciful enough to let the Impure one leave with his life. He fled back to The Outside with the rest of the lesser gods. All over Cribdahl commenced a celebration that lasted many months without cease. When it was over, Father and Mother announced to their children that they would be ascending to The Outside.

The Cribdahlians begged Father and Mother to stay, but they promised that they would be watching forever, and that one day they would return. To maintain order until that day finally came, Father and Mother chose a matriarch to guide the people, a patriarch to protect the people, and a king to rule the people. And then they left.

Father

 * Watches from above, and visits the worthy in their sleep, to communicate to them their purpose.
 * Protects Cribdahl from even the most dangerous and powerful of foreign threats with his hidden presence.

Mother

 * Guides the dead to The Outside, where they may live amongst the gods.
 * Watches over the weather, crops and animal migration personally.

The Grand Festival
Every ten years a grand festival is held to remember the victory that Father and Mother brought to Cribdahl. By law, during the grand festival all crimes committed are punished with double sentencing--that is, if you would be given a 5 year sentence normally for a crime, committing it during a festival will give you a mandatory 10 year sentence--and all domestic and international conflict must be put on hold. This general armistice must last the entire length of the festival, which typically lasts no fewer than six months.

There is no legal requirement, but any man or woman of artistic talent is expected to produce exclusively religious works during the festival. Depictions of the Father are allowed, but it's illegal to depict the Mother with facial features. As a result, there are many paintings around the kingdom during the festival that show a dark-skinned woman dressed in an ornate, jewel-encrusted, embroidered and finely stitched tunic, but with a completely flat face; no eyes, nose or mouth.

Other forms of artistic celebration including body paint, dancing, and Self Purification.

Self Purification is the act of dousing oneself in a highly viscous, flammable wax-like liquid called Pure Fire which emits a blue flame when set on fire. If sufficiently covered in Pure Fire, a naked person will only be burned by the heat and not be touched directly by the flame. The flame eats its way through the chemical and then burns itself out. Still, many have lost their hair and eyebrows attempting the trick. Its significance is to show faith in the Father's judgment. It is said that those who die from Self Purification were secretly Unchosen. Their funerals are considered bad luck to attend, and their families are typically shunned from the community.

One more important feature of the Grand Festival is the King's circuit. The King usually travels around the kingdom, following the same path Father and Mother did when they visited the various areas of Cribdahl after achieving victory against the Impure. The kingdom was far smaller back then, which means people have no choice but to travel to the towns the King will be visiting if they want to see him in person and hear him speak.

Innovations in transportation, including the recent addition of the Whiskle and the Pif Cat as standard inner-city travel options, have made it much easier to follow the king. However nothing has had as great an effect as the steam powered train, which to Cribdahl is cutting edge technology but to most other universes would be extremely crude and rudimentary. Passenger trains tend to carry no more than forty people at once.

The Pyre
This tall, narrow tower usually stands roughly 100 meters high and is made of both sandstone and Blood Sand glass. A stairway spirals around, against its inner walls. Each landing opens up into an expansive room with glass cases that hold relics or books from before Father and Mother's arrival.

Running through the center of the building, from the bottom floor through the roof, is a tall, crystalline glass cylinder. Heretics and criminals are forced into the cylinder at the basement level, pressed against each other shoulder to shoulder. When the twin suns begin to set in the sky, the heretics and criminals are burned. The flame is fed with pipes which run through the floor and pump gas into the cylinder. The fire surges up the glass chamber all the way to the top and spews out through the roof, burning in the twilight sky like a massive torch.

The Womb
There is a snowy mountain range far away from the Patriarch's Palace city, where the peaks reach thousands of meters into the sky. These mountains are called The Womb, because according to legend, Mother would go up into these mountains to create many of the animals and plantlife that populate Cribdahl today. During her time in Cribdahl, Mother allowed no one to visit the mountains. They were meant to be her private area. To this day, her privacy is respected, and a small group of guards is kept around the foot of the mountain range within the Patriarch's territory, in order to dissuade anyone from trying to climb them.

Holy Rituals

 * Self Purification - Burning oneself with Pure Fire. See The Grand Festival for details.
 * Self Destruction - Self immolation. Because this is considered an honorable form of suicide, the cause of death is rarely investigated. It is rumored that murderers sometimes burn the bodies of their victims to make it look like a suicide.
 * Tribute to Mother - Prepare a home-cooked meal for an animal. Typically there are local animal sanctuaries where one can take these home-cooked meals. Whether or not these meals are actually fed to the animals and not taken by the staff is still debated.

Power Structure

 * The Matriarch - A woman who represents mother's will.
 * The Matriarch ensures that the people of Cribdahl are unified at all times, even at the expense of offending or harming foreigners. The Matriarch also helps Cribdahl maintain a peaceful relationship with the animals and the environment, as Mother would have wanted.
 * The Patriarch - A man who represents father's will.
 * The Patriarch maintains the strength of Cribdahl by encouraging its young men to join the royal army and its young women to have children within the kingdom rather than with foreigners. The Patriarch is generally the ambassador of foreign relations for Cribdahl; his goal is to ensure that the kingdom is ahead of all foreign nations, as Father would have wanted.
 * The King - The ruler of the people.
 * Though in recent times the king's political power has been waning, giving way to the Patriarch's, the king's default role is as the commander in chief. He controls the army, the land, the food and the money in the kingdom. The Patriarch and Matriarch have the ability, in special circumstances, to undermine his power, but in general his rights are practically unlimited.