User:TheImperios/Sandbox

"Of the many things that bind people, worlds, and empires together, few are as powerful and universal as faith. We all have different understandings of beauty and honour; our governments are often constructed on entirely different principles, but no civilisation, no matter how barbaric or advanced, lacks that universal reverence towards the spiritual and the eternal. Even the irreligious, deny it as they might, still know deep down that the universe is always one step beyond rational understanding: reason, though a powerful tool for understanding our reality, is ultimately limited unless bolstered by the spiritual eye."

- Excerpt from Ponderings on the Nature of the Divine by Phenri Neseras ae-Hejali

The Supreme
A shared belief amongst many faiths across the Galaxy, from Crown to Spin, is that the universe itself is either divine itself, or is permeated by divine spirit. The traits associated with this deified cosmos vary from culture to culture, and there are many names for it - Void, Heaven, Chaos, the Primordial, the Celestial - but this variety only highlights the similarity of all these concepts. The Grand Synod thus refers to all of these pantheistic deities by a single name - the Supreme - and regards them, at least in public, as the same entity.

It is not clear when the idea of the Supreme first appeared. Some fringe treatises during the Era of Diamonds appear to allude to the idea, and the Fourfold Church postulates that the Universal Truth of the rades was in fact the same as the Blessed Void. Either way, belief in the Celestial only truly materialised during the Interregnum period, from the synthesis of deonari and draknir beliefs. The more personalised Void of the early deonari, it seems, came into collusion with the draknir philosophies of cosmic justice such as Eche, and the two concepts became conflated. The Void became more like the Heaven, impersonal and present in every living and unliving thing, and the Heaven became more like the Void, possessed of a will and spirit. From these two species, the idea later spread across the reconstituted Imperium, serving as a framework to unite the faiths practiced by its many cultures.

The most common interpretation of the Supreme is a panentheistic one. According to this doctrine, the material universe is a part of the Celestial, and all things are mere aspects and attributes of this unfathomably vast entity. Yet the Supreme does not end with the material: it also comprises afterlives, domains of gods and spirits, and other realms beyond one's comprehension, all equally permeated with divine spirit. This is not the only interpretation sanctioned the Holy Synod, however: some follow a purely pantheistic doctrine, where nothing else exists behind the material universe, while others reduce it to a form of monotheism, where the universe was created by the Celestial but now exists outside of it.

Another aspect that varies from faith to faith is the level to which the Supreme is personalised. For some, such as the Cult of the Void, it is a sentient divine force, possessed of a will, which directs the universe and judges the faithful. It is the sole object of worship, and whatever deities that may exist in the cosmos are mere aspects of it unworthy of respect. The beliefs of the Path of Drak'han are not as strict: the Supreme is seen not as an individual but merely as an unseen divine aspect of the cosmos. Heaven postulates the cosmic laws of justice, but is not in itself an object of worship, which is given instead to the deities and spirits that dwell there, such as the blessed ancestors and Drak'han himself.

Belief in the Supreme is one of the keystones of the Imperium's religious ideology: a broad theological concept which accommodates many forms of religious thought and subordinates them to the central government. The Imperium is seen, to some extent, as a an earthly representative of the divine cosmos: a bringer of order which enforces peace and justice in the galaxy and thus assures divine favour. It is no coincidence that one of the Paragon's most honoured titles is "Elect of the Supreme".

Yet the concept of the Supreme is not limited to the Imperium, and has been adopted, to some extent, by many cults outside of its borders, including even some of the pouz-jok Freeholds - even if their understanding of it may be vastly different to that of the Holy Synod.