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the Powers that Be

Heresy in Two Parts

written by Derek Guder
February, AD 5000
Volume I, Issue I

As a child
As a child living in the more mountainous regions of Midian, Rachel had the misfortune of falling through sink-hole into an extensive series of caves underneath the hills she played on daily. She was missing for nearly a week and a half, and search parties had found nothing, even in the caves.
She eventually appeared at her home, safe and sound except for a great hunger and some bruises. Her parents praised the Pancreator for the miracle He had bestowed upon them and dedicated her to the Church the next holy day.
Of her ordeal, Rachel said little except that as she wandered amid the caves, a vision had come to her just as she had given up hope. A beautiful woman clothed in blue appeared before her and said "I shall guide you..." Rachel has said many times how similar it is to the Disciple Amalthea's own vision, and it may have been the major factor when she decided to join Sanctuary Aeon. The Men (or Women) of Peace

Rachel Lung Li Halan was born on Midian to a mid-level family, one of the ubiquitous bureaucratic families in the Li Halan worlds. One of the later children by birth, she was groomed for a life in the Church. She attended Orthodox schools, prayed in Orthodox Churches and fasted in Orthodox Monastaries - and in the end she joined the ranks of Sanctuary Aeon.

Her family was not nearly so disapproving as she had feared (or others would have expected). After all, Sanctuary Aeon was a noble and respected arm of the Church - and at least it's not the Eskatonics. Rachel threw herself into her work and her training, often surprising her teachers with her willing to put herself in danger to save the sick and injured. She actually had to be restrained when she was on Leminkainen during a skirmish with woodfolk.

As much as her dedication to her job was praiseworthy, her disregard for authority and commands got her assigned to successively worse and worse positions. First it was the Leminkainen woods. Then the slums of Byzantium Secundus. Finally Pandemonium. Working under Sister Elishea DeSalvo in the shanty towns surrounding the Hub, Rachel grew darker and more sullen, less driven.

She did not, however, lose her dislike of authority and eventually she was sent out into the Badlands with some monks to build a monastery across the Oldeppa Sea in Kuzuldome, to tend those homesteaders who refused to leave despite the earthquaqes and failure of the terraforming engines.

Instead of using the money to build a new monastery like the Church had sent her to do, Rachel simple set up shop in one of the many, many ruined libraries that fill the near ghost town of Kuzuldome and used the small fortune to purchase medical supplies from Scravers who were more than happy to remain silent.

Through a combination of brilliant planning and sheer overwhelming charisma, Rachel has excelled in her new position of leadership. The brothers and sisters below her (36 in all, now that several of the priests from the surrounding area have joined her) are all nearly religiously loyal. An increasing number of them believe that she is a prophet sent by the Pancreator and Amalthea herself to bring them into a new age of enlightenment. The Church's plan to rid themselves of the rebellious young Amalthean did not work quite so well as they had expected.

Rachel and her flock operate out of the run-down campus of an old unversity, which is abutted by several other libraries and museums. Using the dormitory space to house both priests and patients and the small school medic center as a hospital, Rachel has created something that is almost a tiny living city within the dead ghost town of Kuzuldome. Amaltheans farm the former sports fields of the university while classrooms are used for sewing and crafts. Gymnasiums are arranged for dances and tiny "feasts" cooked in th kitchen by pious priests and devout patients. Surrounded by so many books, the priests often spend as much time teaching people how to read as they do actually healing the sick.

This air of peace seems to have extended further than the university even. Since Rachel and her entourage claimed the school nearly two years past, the city has been free of earthquakes, dust storms and the mysterious dark fog so common to the rest of Pandemonium - outside of the safe zone the Hub's terraforming engines provides. Nearly all of the patients who come in from the Badlands have decided to stay and become a part of the growing "commune" forming around the strength of Rachel Lung Li Halan.

The books the Rachel and her companions were immersed in did lie unused. An avid student of history and theology, Rachel spent nearly all of her tiny amount of free time reading in the libraries around Kuzuldome. Her flock found her asleep amid a pile of books as often as they did in her room.

She read, and then she preached.

The Church was wrong about the world, about sin, Rachel told her flock. The Pancreator is powerful, and He is pure goodness, He is the source of all virtue and divinity - and He could not have created such worlds of sin that comprise the Known Worlds. That sin-filled task fell to Belial-Moloch, the Demiurge who sought to duplicate the perfection of the Pancreator by creating a universe of his own. In doing so, however, Belial-Moloch created a prison of sin, trapping reflective souls in a tarnishing pit of evil.

Our bodies are made of the Demiurge's inept fumblings. They are mere collections of dust, claw and shit, slathered upon our immortal souls. Try as he might, the Belial-Moloch cannot change our souls, the pieces of Divinity gifted to us by the Pancreator. The flesh and the spirit are seperate, and no sort of sin or taint of the flesh and matter can taint our reflective souls. That is what Rachel tells her flock. She preaches doctrine of duality, of a seperation of the spirit and the flesh. One real does not - it cannot - transcend the boundary between the two. The flesh, the world of sin, was created by Belial-Moloch, the Dark King of the Qlippoth. It is a dark world filled with darker men and beings of worse nature.

This is heresy enough in the eyes of the Church and the Inquisition, but Rachel's wisdom to her followers does not end there. She points to the Omega Gospels to prove her theology. When the Prophey Zebulon came to the healer Amalthea (who Rachel somtimes calls Zo Fia) to be absolved of sin, he carried a heavy burden, the burden of flesh. Amalthea, a being of pure spirit sent by the Pancreator to give man a way out of the prison that the Demiurge has trapped humanity in. Through her sacrifice of blood and her speaking the Word of Wisdom - Luxia - she absolved the Prophet of the weight he carried, the flesh he wore. She transformed him into a being of pure virtue, like herself. Without sin - and without flesh - the Prophet of the Pancreator was free to move through the Empire and preach the Word of Truth.

Even a whisper of this would be enough to light innumerable pyres under Rachel and her companions.

At present, Rachel and her new disciples are content to farm their land and live their lives as best they can. They deny their flesh - they eat little and they engage in self-flaggelation, acts of bodily denial and refusal are common practices on the grounds. In the future however, Rachel's followers may not be so content to simply fast themselves unconscious.

Historically, there are two broad categories of gnostic views. In one, the most "innocent" variety that Rachel Lung Li Halan has taken on as her own, the flesh is to be denied. It is sinful and can only bring damnation. The other school of thought, holds that since flesh and spirit are inviolate and seperate, the flesh should not - cannot - be denied. No manner of atrocity or sin can ever stain the soul that reflect the Pancreator's life.

Metaphysical truths and lies aside, this can be a powerful truth. It brought a Crusade within France when it appeared in Urth's history. The affects such a movement may have in the Known Worlds is compretely unpredictable - and frightening.