The Old Faith of the Precursors

[crisper]

And thus the Gods decreed:

Now shall you go Out

in every direction
    to every distant star
    on every planet
  Now shall you go Out

like seeds from the blossom
    like fish to the sea
    like shadows cast by the sun
  Now shall you go Out

with your flesh you shall multiply
    with your tools you shall build
    with your faith you shall worship

And so the Gods decreed,

and thus did we go Out.

- The Exo, 1:7

Submitted to the Convocation by Ambassadite Twill

Though virtually nothing remains of the physical evidence of Precursor civilization (if the term may be applied loosely), we nonetheless know a great deal about them through the literary works and traditional practices which survived transition from whatever long-forgotten, blasted cinder of a world originated them, into the wider venue of stellar survival, crawling over slow centuries through the Void. And what they primarily brought with them were the Works and Rituals of their Faith.

Reputable archaeolinguists agree that Precursor notions of the divine were largely pagan in nature, and that they went through three distinctly recognizable phases of pantheistic belief during their diffusion across the stars.

Elementalism

Originally worshippers of simple Nature, protohumans recognized the existence of, and divided their Universe into, four primal Elements: Energy, Gas, Liquid, and Solid. It was their belief that these "elemental states" represented a progression or procession of "refinement", from lowest Solid to highest Energy, to which all materios should aspire - and through which, if left to its own devices, all existence would invariably descend. It is important for the reader to understand that this was not merely a metaphorical model for personal self-improvement, as it so clearly appears at first glance. No, the Ancients actually believed this was how molecules worked. To be fair, they recognized the existence of shades and nuances within this simple structure, and they did apply fairly sophisticated rituals to its philosophical exploration. And before one dismisses this proto-belief out of hand, be aware that application of this simple model was sufficient to get them to the culminating revelation of Elementalism, the fission reaction, that process by which (in their eyes) crude, banal, degraded Solid could be transmuted instantly into bright, enlightened, perfected Energy. This direct experience of the divine as they understood it was so profound that, in their first wave of interplanetary transit (so far as we can determine) they predominantly relied on atomic drives, forgoing any number of obviously superior alternatives, carrying their precious Transmutative Process with them like a superstitiously-held good-luck charm.

Prismatics

At some point - whether by gradual change or through some drastic social upheaval we do not know - the original idyllic thermonuclear Nature worship of the Ancients was replaced by a rather more abstracted one. It does not appear to have been a simple schism of the Elemental practice, and may have in fact already been an extant belief, practiced in parallel with Elementalism and simply replacing it as the dominant paradigm once humanity became more space-fluent. At any rate, its adoption seems to coincide with a shift in drive mechanisms from the positively Druidic combustion of fission/fusion to the more elegant beam drives of Scientific Idolatry, with a corresponding adoration (if not actual worship) of electromagnetic energy in all its various uses. To these humans (and fully Human they were at this point) beams of light were everything: they pushed massive sail-vessels between the stars, they carried messages from one colony to another, and they pacified aggressive or rebellious rivals. Light limited the very boundaries of their expansion and defined the difficulty with which they moved about within three-space. Through the fundamental altar of the refracting prism, they perceived Light to contain within it six "Chromatic Aspects", the so-called "Color of the Spheres", which came to be known by a wide range of names (only a very few of which we know) across the dozens, and later hundreds, of primitive worlds that grew ever more out of sync with each other during this Prismatic Period of Colonization.

• Crimson - Blood - Cherry: identified with the Body and its Appetites
  
• Citrinelle/Saturnelle - Sunrise - Beauty: identified with the Universe and its Movement
  
• Topaz (?) - Gold/Geld (?) - Charm: identified with Society and its Commerce
  
• Viridian/Venus/Vivid - Kelly - Sage: identified with the Mind and its Knowledge
  
• Navy - Azure/Ares - Indigo (?): identified with Conflict and its Resolution
  
• Porphyria (?) - Amaranthus: identified with the Soul and its Salvation

The early Colonists identified themselves with color combinations that indicated the values they held in terms of these six qualities. Dega, for example - a highly academic world devoted to advancing the art and practice of defensive war, whose constitutional creed was "In Knowledge, Safety" - carried a standard of blue shield on green field. (Dega was so successful in their focus that they remained entirely unconquered until the FTL age of Imperial Consolidation, one of the few Precursor cultures to retain any sort of legitimate link from Proto-Human to Post-Human existence, and thus one of our best models for the study of these distant ancestors.)

Pantheon

Finally, religious schism finally came to the many and varied worlds of Colonial Humanity in the wake of the first truly widespread disassembly plague, known to the Precursors as the Grey Nothing, which (unlike typical runaway goo) could lay dormant in STL transports for the long decades required to transit between stars, then proliferate non-destructively through a new biosphere upon planetfall, insuring silent infection of "escape" vessels before finally going feral. The panicked populace would invariably carry disassembler seeds with them into cryo and on to whatever world they were fleeing to. (If the Grey detected evidence that the destination Culture intended to quarantine or destroy inbound refugees, of course, it would active and reconfigure its host vessel into a form better suited for stealthy approach and insertion.)

Some scholars consider the Human mastery of counter-assembly - and the attendant technologies for holographic extraction of the Consumed back out of loose goo - to be the turning point from Proto-Human to truly Precursor civilization. But another facet of this shift in the species was the splintering of the Chromatic Aspects into scores of secondary concepts (typically referred to in the Histories as "Idealized Archetypes"), which were then winnowed down to a compact but full-featured Pantheon of perfected anthropomorphic super-entities.
(There are two notable competing theories which shall be dispensed with here in the interests of disclosure. The first, primarily expounded by the more reductionist elements of Retrocognitivism, is that the Pantheon was simply produced by designating each possible pairing of the Four Elements, one to another - a reasonable theory and one worth continued analysis, but probably too simplistic to be true. The second, held dearly by the more paranoid side of Apocalypsolism, is that the Pantheon was invented by the Grey Nothing, successfully inserted into the Human subconscious deeply enough to resist counter-extraction, thus effectively manufacturing a racial memory out of whole cloth. That the Apocalypsolists are unable to suggest any purpose the Grey might have had in doing this should quickly put the value of the theory in proper perspective.)

Like the Chromatic Aspects of the Prismatic Period, the New Gods of the Pantheon came to be known by many different names, but here we will reproduce only the ones that will be familiar to the typical reader - the ones that have survived into the Imperial Age and became what most people think of as Old Precursor Paganism:

• Brutaine
• God of Violence, Crowds, and Ownership. Patron of Soldiers, Collectors, and spontaneous Mobs. Appears to have had a considerable (relatively speaking) following among the early Pragmatists. Still widely worshipped along the Fourth Arc of the Frontier.
• Leticin Fillianne
• Goddess of Weather, Friendship, and Paralysis. Patroness of Sailors, Athletes, and all who must convince another of something. Strong hints of old Elementalism. Brought her own self into the Universe by convincing Reality that she should Exist.
• Phallot
• God of Sexuality, Work, and Gravitational Fields. Patron of Farmers, Prostitutes, and the Poor. Likely a recombination of Prismatic practices of Cherry/Charm. Traditional sacrifices were orgiastic in nature, performed in the fields at key seasonal times.
• Obsculumi
• Goddess of Secrets, Language, and Decay. Patroness of Aristocrats, Doctors, and all who Write. Little else is known; her followers apparently did not admit their practice to outsiders, and no ritual or mythology about her has survived, if any was ever documented at all.
• Drussko
• God of Pleasure, Uncertainty, and Disaster. Patron of Newlyweds, Gamblers, and all who have suffered physical or mental handicap. In myth, often the victim of trickery and deceit by the other Gods, which he would usually find a way to turn around to his own benefit.
• Justicamie
• Goddess of Choice, Pain, and History. Patroness of Scholars, the Sick, and all involved with the Law. Surrounded by a great palace of clockwork, guarded by homunculi, she tracked every motion and event in the Universe and documented it in a book made of glass.
• Kontradijia
• God of Paradox, Infertility, and Humor. Patron of Twins, Entertainers, and the Elderly. May have split from Prismatic Charm. Traditional sacrifice is that of human companionship; the devout engage in periods of extended solitude.
• Triptopyne
• Goddess of Numbers, Silence, Wealth. Patroness of Criminals, Money-handlers, and all who suffer from Madness. Spoke only to herself. After falling into an eternal sleep, she was encased within a flying pyramid made of blued aluminum.
• Vortosk
• God of Time, Inventions, and Absence. Patron of Scientists and all who have lost something. According to myth, entirely lacked outward-facing senses of any sort. Followers typically practiced potlatch-charity and self-amputation.
• Dropp
• Goddess of Foolishness, Longevity, and Success. Patroness of Children, Animals, and those who are Guests. Consorted with Drussko; their epic fights were the explanation for natural disasters such as earthquake, tsunami, meteor, etc.
• Harmina
• Goddess of Music, Bandwidth, and Open Space. Patroness of Architects and all who were made by another. (In the Precursor Era, this was a somewhat less common state of being.) She was the youngest of the Gods. Myth says she "blurred as she moved".
• Og Arcnigmatro
• God of Light, Death, and Direction. Patron of Travelers and all who Rule over others. Almost certainly derivative of previous Saturnellian worship. When Justicamie's clock inevitably ran out, it was Og who was to destroy the Universe.

The Pantheon served Precursor Humanity quite well for more than a thousand years, undergoing revision or mutation or modification here or there as needed to fit with local custom. It wasn't until the advent of near-luminal direct-burn drives, which made interstellar applications of force feasible for the first time, that the Pantheon found itself challenged. As the Amathean Bloodline began its inexorable rise to power by taking one star system after another, so too did their own peculiar form of tribal duotheism - the Clan-based worship of Man and Machine - find itself gaining ground against the rather more diffuse Old Faith. The Gods were simply too specialized, too distinct, and unable to serve the primally satisfying urge of a bifurcated "us/them" "black/white" view of the Universe.

However, rather than supplanting the long-established practices of almost two millennia, the Cardinalia of the new Imperial Church simply fused it with their own Clannism, scattering attributes of biology and mechanism among the Gods, assigning them new names, and eventually bringing the Pantheon into a somewhat comfortably reduced state of demigodhood as the legionarii custodiae beatus, the Beatified Guardian Heroes who nicely fit the bill as the new patriarchs and matriarchs of the Clans.

With the establishment of the Immortal Reign of Amatheos and the inception of the Imperial Calendar (Tempus Imperium), the new system was codified and put into practice. The Pugoran Exemplarate was born.

------
For consideration: the Perception of Choice is a Necessity for all Thinking Beings