Gnostic Aseity

The Gnostic Aseity is a hypothetical class of deities (usually represented as a single deity) which, if it existed, would be senior even to Primordial Dieties like The Almighty or The Fire-Keeper. The term refers to divine entities older than the creation of the universe, and possibly those who might have created the universe (or even the primordial dieties); anything younger would obviously be primordial. The name of the Gnostic Aseity is derived from the scholarship of Torserd Magnussun, who wrote of the "Daern olor xoth", which can be translated as the "thing which knows itself" or "That Knowing Knowledge". Unlike the other dieties worshipped on Ahren, however, the Gnostic Aseity appears to have no material influence on the world. Of all the world relgions, however, only the church of Anghara teaches a Gnostic Aseity exists - Anghara itself.

In World Religions

Church of Bastonia

In Bastonia, the Gnostic Aseity is recognized formally as a foreign heresy, originating with the dwarves. The official position of the church of Bastonia is that neither The Almighty nor the Enemy created the universe independently, but that they represent the inbuilt drive for justice, and depredations of sophont nature, respectively. That is to say that the existence of the gods and the existence of men is viewed to be a fact of nature, neither requiring an explanation.

Sylvestrian Orders

The cults dedicated to San Sylvester take a broader and more liberal view on foreign scholarship and suggest that the Gnostic Aseity may exist in the form of the Source, the magical current which underpins all reality. Under this reading, they would say the Gnostic Aseity is not a god as much as the capacity of a sentient universe to observe itself. How much of this position is simply held to satisfy the requirement that no god can take precedence over the Almighty is unclear. The members of these orders who have an overlap with Ars Magica scholarship are responsible for coining the term Gnostic Aseity out of the original dwarvish phrase.

Church of the One

The forbidden church dedicated to the service of the Enemy holds that the Gnostic Asiety is a recognition of the Enemy's primacy, and suggest that the Enemy may be older than he is willing to admit. They extrapolate the Enemy's act of creating humanity by imbuing intelligence into beastly men into a possible allegory for having created the entire universe, by breathing reality onto the formlessness of the unconverged Ahren.

Dwarven Religion

Despite the original term having come from Dwarvish, and the god who had coined it being of the Dwarven Pantheon, most Dwarves are not theologians, and the topic is not widely taught or discussed among most of the dwarven cults. The Dwarven creation myth doesn't usually include any discussion of the convergence or of the influence of the planes on the material world; instead it originates as the work-product of Magnus All-Father, who is said to have created the world and everything in it. In that sense, when first exposed to the idea, most Dwarves would associate it immediately with Magnus, though Torserd's writings were very clear that Magnus is not the Gnostic Aseity.

Cult of Torserd

The topic is taught heavily in the actual cult of Torserd Magnusun, as it was one of the Final Revelations that is believed to have ultimately driven that god into his final madness and demise (or departure from the world - scholarship, even in his own church, is split on whether or not the fall into the Rift of Duesterkrak was enough to kill him). The Gnostic Aseity is one of many musings on the nature of divinity that the God of Divinity stumbled upon, and apparently occupied much of his thinking in his final years on Ahren among his own people.

Crucially among this specific church, even the best theologians and scholars cannot identify the Aseity. Those who claim communion with Torserd say his efforts are bound to such a search even to this day, without useful result.

Cults of the Elven Ancestors

Neither the Atarlie nor Carcolie put much thought into a creator deity. For the latter, the culture does not support a serious professional scholarship in abstract theology. In the former case, though the Empire has scholarship to spare, the cultural religion of civics is so tighttly-wrapped into the Cult of the Ancestors that the ancestors themselves are considered divine beings from which the Atarlie have more or less directly decended. Those aware of the concept through contact with the dwarves or with Sylvestrian anchorites consider it an interesting, though trivial, thought experiment. Some Elves suggest that the Gnostic Aseity may be the unspoken consort of Pyria Valeptor, with whom she would have conceived Rophalin Imperator, Lycanthir Lugalor, and the First Elves. Other elves (especially trained clerics) reject the idea that any such consort is unncessary, insisting that if there had been a male progenitor of the elves, he would have been as well-remembered as the Mother of All.

Teachings of the Awakened One

The Awakened One teaches an understanding of divinity-as-awareness and suggests that any Realized Deity is effectively the Gnostic Aseity, though not in so many terms. The Awakened One further teaches that he is merely the first among men of his Kalpa to attain this divine apotheosis, and proposes that the universe itself attains the estate any time sentient life is present within it.