copyright © 2006 Dennis Paul Himes
The contents of this page are preliminary. They won't become canonical until the first version of the Tale of Tifa Walbatnuwa Siina is up. - DPH
The earliest recorded religions on Umuto were polytheistic, worshiping the sun, the moons, the ocean, and the islands as sapient beings. Some rituals from this time survived into the Imperial period, and, indeed, even to today.
The Pomonian civilization of the early Second Age extended this to worship of abstract qualities, such as power, beauty, and honesty. By the Second Era of the Second Age various cults to specific gods had emerged. One of the more popular was the cult of the god Polpinoit.
Polpinoit was the god of order, or progress. He had originally been a god of travellers. His cult, by the end of the First Epoch, had come to consider him the prime god, to which all others were subordinate. Later he was considered the only god, and other supernatural beings were considered to be of a lesser order. This is all assuming that the Seezzitonian word ainu/aina/ainit is translated as "god".
Note that although I've been referring to Polpinoit as "he", although the Seezzitonian word is in the transportable gender. The Pomonians (who called him "Polpino") considered him male, though.
When Neetta SSildifuwa was educated in Ponomo in the late First Epoch the basics of the Polpinoitist theology which would become the official religion of the SSildifian Empire were in place. According to this theology, the universe began as chaos. Eventually (and how this came about was always a major point of contention between Polpinoitist sects) a force for order arose. That force was Polpinoit. Polpinoit devised a plan to convert the complete chaos into complete order. That plan is still being implemented in the current universe. Asiit were created by Polpinoit to assist him. Those who do their duty and help Polpinoit acheive his plan will be rewarded after death.
Soon after Neetta SSildifuwa established the empire he made Polpinoitism its official religion, with the added dogma that the unification of the archipelago under the empire was part of Polpinoit's plan to bring order to the universe.
Polpinoitism included the concept of demons (bafiit). These explained disasters. Athough the inevitable march of progress would eventually result in the elimination (by destruction or conversion, depending on sect) of the demons, until that happened they had the opportunity to make things locally worse.
During the late Empire the belief arose that Speesa, a prominent demon, was Polpinoit's equal, and that the history of the world was a neverending struggle between Polpinoit, fighting for good and for order, against Speesa, fighting for evil and for chaos. The relative strengths of the two would vary over time, but neither could every completely conquer the other. (At least according to the main school of thought, others had either Polpinoit of Speesa winning in the end, but always in the distant future.)
The Waizunee Religion became very popular during the Post-Imperial Period.
The Naadadian Religion was originally simply sun worship. Later the sun came to be regarded as just the most visible manifestation of an omnipotent god Nonee. The Naadadians believed that all heat and life (and, in some variations, all matter) are just side effects of Nonee's greatness. They did not believe that Nonee particularly cared if asiit thrived or not, but if an asit aligned his or her life with the ways of Nonee's power by performing the proper rituals and obeying the proper rules, he or she could tap into Nonee's power, to the extent of surviving death.
The SSildifians and the Naadadians avoided the problem of the clear nonexistence of a benevolent omnipotent god in opposite ways. Polpinoit was not omnipotent and Nonee was not benevolent.
It's surprising that humans never did the same, except early on (the Greek gods, for instance, were neither omnipotent nor particularly benevolent). The asiit are especially surprised by this. When informed that some humans believe in a god who is both omnipotent and benevolent an asit invariably assumes that the human she's talking to must not understand the meaning of her language's word for either "omnipotent" or "benevolent".
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