Religious Orders

The Superpowers worship too, though they call their gods progress, prosperity, parity or whatever word makes power sound like a public service. Corporations have money. PMCs have reputation. Everybody has something sacred enough to ruin lives over.

Smaller religions do not get that luxury. Nobody writes reports about the quiet little congregation feeding its neighbours, preserving old songs, or meeting every seventh day to contemplate the universe. They get noticed when somebody starts self-mutilating or worshipping genocidal ancestors.

So keep that bias in mind. The orders in this section are here because they are unusual, influential, dangerous, or useful to an Armournaut. Usually several at once.

Strange does not mean stupid. I recommend learning that before saying something clever about another person’s gods within stabbing distance.

Dyophidianism

Dyophidianism is a pluralistic faith centred on the Twin Snake Gods, Astagon and Myggerron, and rooted in Vakil religious traditions from Aquilmendî. Astagon represents bitter truths, knowledge, hunger, cruelty, and the moon; Myggerron represents sweet lies, art, fertility, compassion, and the sun. The two are often depicted as one mutable body with two heads, embodying contradiction rather than resolving it.

Most Dyophidian traditions hold that other religions are valid expressions of the same gods. Heresy and apostasy therefore have little meaning: even atheists may be understood as worshipping through reason, science, or rejection. Major denominations include Yilanity, the Ophite Papacy, the Daughters of Astagon, the Orphicovum See, the Shining Caduceus, and the Church of the Scaled Heart, many of them represented at the pilgrimage world of Prudence.

The faith’s central appeal is not salvation but ambivalence. Its stories return constantly to the same idea: the gods offer bitter truths and sweet lies, and people must decide what allows them to live. That can mean accepting death while choosing legacy, accepting isolation while choosing love, or accepting meaninglessness while choosing something worth doing anyway. I was raised around Dyophidians on Conran. I still practise, mostly when I’m scared or lost. Maybe that counts.

Dyophidian sects disagree constantly, and some pursue knowledge, doctrine, conversion, or political influence with considerable zeal. Twin-snake imagery appears everywhere from Vakil forces to Papal Guards and Armournaut insignia. They may believe everyone worships the same gods in the end. That does not mean they agree on how you should behave before then.

Enazcan Dreamers

The Enazcan Dreamers are a religious tradition descended from the warrior and priestly cultures of Zek. They deify the Lha’Maggeans, believing some Enazcans carry their blood and may be possessed by their spirits for wisdom, strength, or violence. Their own histories cast the Lha’Maggeans as divine rescuers who brought technology to a people reduced to near-Neolithic survival after the Scattering. Outside accounts are less charitable, pointing to evidence of enslavement, genetic alteration and cannibalism.

Dreamer practice centres on bloodline, possession, endurance, and sacred violence. Convulsive seizures have religious significance and may be induced through deprivation and psychological stress. Adherents are expected to remain armed, though modern restrictions have pushed many towards small blades, symbolic weapons, or deactivated firearms. Unions between partners require religious sanction, children are regarded as belonging to the congregation, and smoking ceremonies adapted from older rites remain common in non-Union space.

The faith also preserves much of the old Enazcan warrior tradition. Dreamers favour coordination, patience, and sudden overwhelming violence, wearing opponents down until an opening appears and then exploiting it before withdrawing. Enazcan Armournauts decorate their vehicles with murals, fetishes, and images of Lha’Maggean angels, and many clans operate throughout the Frontier as raiders, escorts, or hired warbands.

I’ve met Enazcans a few times. “Met” is generous. It was more like two feral animals noticing each other across a clearing and agreeing not to test the distance. They are hard to read, and history does not help. Still, treat the stories about sacrificial cannibal cults as stories until you have evidence. Calling them primitive is even stupider. They survived Zek, adopted modern technology without hesitation, and kept the habits of people who learned about guerrilla warfare very early.

Storianism

Storianism is a transtheistic, techno-animistic aural tradition centred on the Galactic Maestro, a personification of fate. Storians believe reality repeats in cycles: different performances, on the same stage with the same rules. Oracles interpret probabilities, dreams, and signs to steer followers towards favourable outcomes. Their old saying is simple enough: Everything that can happen has happened, but it doesn’t have to happen to you.

The faith is messy in practice. Storians borrow from other religions, appease local gods, hang charms over toilets, ward machinery, consult oracles and argue viciously over which superstitions are obviously ridiculous and which ones will definitely kill everyone if ignored. They also believe in Distant Ones beyond the observable universe, Monumentals who built the Pillars, and a will or temperament in all things, including machines. Dreams are treated as memories from other iterations of the self, and only oracles are supposed to interpret them.

Spacefarers are especially susceptible. Venti and Union crews observe Storian rites in Corridor transit, the LaGrange Nations Assembly recognises Storian holidays and maintains a ceremonial Sophian Oracle, and Gunnar Hollister’s reputation as “Vision” has done him no harm politically. I’ve watched hardened mercenaries turn into obedient schoolchildren around a charismatic oracle. Lost a few babynauts that way too. They simply stopped turning up for work because somebody had convinced them fate had better plans.

Storian fighters can be either wonderfully stubborn or catastrophically fatalistic. A predicted victory may justify almost any cost; a predicted defeat can become self-fulfilling just as quickly. Armournauts especially tend towards strange tactics designed to “manifest” the right outcome. I used to laugh at all this. Then you survive enough impossible things and watch enough sensible plans collapse for no reason. Maybe there is something out there. Either way, faith is only armour when proper armour isn’t available.

The Gene Flagellants

The Gene Flagellants began on Morganna after the collapse of unified government, when eleven teachers built an open shelter in the middle of a world being carved up by warlords and syndicates. They refused fortifications, shared food and water freely, and taught that knowledge should be used for the betterment of all. Their followers eventually codified five core principles: shared knowledge, critical passivity, unconditional compassion, inurement to suffering, and personal agency.

Over time, those shelters became monasteries and the faith developed into two broad paths. Pursuants of Utopia, usually marked by saffron, try to reduce suffering through teaching, healing, protection, and social improvement. Pursuants of Enlightenment, usually marked by sable, seek knowledge, experience, strength, and inner peace. Both understand existence as a cycle of suffering and see ignorance, hatred, and attachment as its principal shackles.

The name “Gene Flagellant” came from Venti observers who mistook ritual scarification and deliberate exposure to pain for punishment. It is not. Inurement to suffering is central to the faith, and generations of practice on Morganna have produced practitioners with frightening physical resilience. On the battlefield they are patient, difficult to exhaust, and exceptionally hard to stop. They rarely start a fight, but they’re more than willing to make one brutal.

I’ve deployed against them once. Bloody Monks, or one of their aligned colonies. We realised who we were facing and immediately reconsidered our professional commitments. Thankfully, the scarred old monk opposite us offered better terms. I took them. If Zunbox had been there, I would have surrendered before he finished introducing himself. There is no prize for dying honourably so some accountant can revise the next contract.

The Xanthic Cloistered Scholars

The Xanthic Cloistered Scholars are a decentralised network of self-described esotericists, philosophers, alchemists, and volitionists obsessed with hidden truths, the Pillars, and what they call the Prime Permanence: a form capable of surviving eternity. In practice, they are mostly a Cluster Net subculture built around virtual chapters, elaborate personas, Old Earth occultism, conspiracy theories, and the conviction that everyone else is too dull to understand what they have found.

They are not entirely useless. The Scholars have preserved one of the Cluster’s largest archives of Old Earth literature, film, music, and folklore, and some members become exceptional interfacers and cypherpunks through years of obsessive practice. Their avatar identities carry genuine religious weight, and many servers preserve deceased members as heuristic chatbots assembled from years of recorded interaction. Some “dead” servers continue operating long after every original user is gone.

Their worse habits involve iatrogenic media: stories, images, virtual experiences, and rituals designed to convince viewers that exposure itself is dangerous. Most are elaborate ghost stories. Some have still caused panic, injury, and enough hysteria to attract bans. The Giraffe King remains the most famous example, though its reputation probably harmed more people than the experience itself.

What a name, though. Xanthic Cloistered Scholars. Makes you expect terrible revelations from an ancient order. Mostly you get unwashed basement dwellers arguing in VR about acausal numerology. Still, every so often one surfaces who can run circles around a professional interfacer team. Feed them something greasy, keep them away from the self-cursing videos, and they can be invaluable.

Ylemomanism

Ylemomanism is a dead Odelken religion that has attracted renewed interest because parts of its cosmology happen to resemble fringe attempts to explain Pillarite. Its god, Ylemoma or the Throned Growth, was said to be the source of magic and divinity. The old cult believed fragments or “grains” of Ylemoma could be taken into the body, granting visions and power at the cost of health and life. Accounts describe sacrifice and rituals that may simply have involved radioactive material from colony-ship shielding.

The interesting part is the overlap with modern theory. Pillarite has been described as seditious matter: material that appears not to obey the normal laws of physics. Some theorists extend that idea into Ylemoma as seditious spacetime, a region where causality, gravity, and other forces cease behaving consistently. The old religion called a similar realm the Inbetween, a place without ordinary time or distance where lost things waited beyond reality.

Resonance Theory offers a vaguely comparable idea: an interstice between universes, accessible in principle through the right kind of resonance. That resemblance has encouraged endless attempts to connect the old faith to the Pillars, though the connection is speculative at best. The original Ylemoman texts remain untranslated, the cult itself was nearly destroyed during the Yscenic occupation of Odelke, and even the name may be coincidence. 

Every few decades someone rediscovers the Throned Growth, the Inbetween, or the Grain and decides the old Odelkens knew something the Temple didn’t. Maybe they did. More likely, a dead cult accidentally wandered near a theory that is itself still mostly nonsense. That’s never stopped anyone before.