#while you're just chopping spruce wood or whatever

[shadeswift99]

Ok i saw your tags on that last post and i am BEGGING you to elaborate on your Minecraft villagers' religion/mythology that sounds amazing 

HELLO YES. I have a limited amount of time right now but let's see how much I can get through by the Power of Insufferable Nerdness

(Edit: apparently that amount is A Lot, I'd apologize for this absolute essay but I am in fact not sorry at all, woe, lore be upon thee :))) ) (there's pictures too I promise)

Okay so. Welcome to the village of Abyss. I discovered it while I was exploring the 1.18 update and I somehow managed to leave my shulker box of rockets in a cave along with my enderchest, essentially stranding me here with what I had on me until I could resupply. I could have just saved the coords and died, come back later for my stuff, whatever else, except that. The village spawned like this.

Directly next to this massive, abyssal ravine filled with impenetrable darkness. Upon closer inspection, there were only three villagers left in the place. Upon even more inspection, several of the village paths seemed to lead...directly over the edge.

Hm. I wonder where the rest of the villagers went.

The lore developed slowly as I fixed the place up and built it out more. Abyss is the "god" of the village in the same way rain falling is music - it's not, really, but the act of observing it as such makes it so. The longer a villager looks into that darkness, the more they realize that it's not just darkness: it is inhabited, made of hundreds of rattling bones and groaning once-living throats, crawling the floor of the canyon just out of view through the shadows. Together with the darkness itself those voices make a will, and that will thrives in the unknown, and the longer one spends looking out and down, the more that will can be felt and understood.

The closest building to the ravine got turned into the Church of Abyss. Inside is more of a town hall than a place for religious services - Abyss doesn't really have values that can be verbally taught - but its most important purpose is as a lead-in to the observation platforms:

Where the priests of Abyss sit and look into the ravine. There are three levels (screenshot only got the last two). A priest moves down a level when they feel they've gained enough knowledge of the unknowable, and unknown enough of the knowable, to move into a deeper space of reflection. One of the three key principles of the Abyssians is that there MUST be at least one person observing Abyss at all times.

[tw: death talk in next paragraph, stops after that]

The lowest level of the platforms is the walkway. The Abyssians believe that the greatest fate in death is to join the infinitely knowable unknown, to become one part in the collective un-soul of the mob hoards in the darkness, in unity becoming both everything and nothing at the same time. The walk is their final destination. A body will be carried there and released if a villager dies elsewhere, and a lot of people who can feel their death coming will go down there and meditate for a few days while their loved ones make them as comfortable as possible until they die. However, elder priests and people who have either achieved high honour or done a great deal of harm that they regret will walk the precipice themselves, disappearing into the forever-dark.

In practical terms for day-to-day living, there is an Abyss shrine in most households. I haven't built an example to show yet, but it is a very deep, narrow hole in the floor, dug deep enough under the house to create a piece of the same shadowy can-stare-into-it-forever effect as the ravine has. Villagers will put small offerings down the shrine on special occasions, like a birth in the family, or they'll give a tiny part of a harvest or mining haul. That way, the event or good/bad fortune can be symbolically connected to the whole and added to the depth of the knowledge Abyss stores within its unknown.

Above every household Abyss shrine is a copy of the Tome of Abyss, which outlines the three main pacts of Abyss (which if you don’t care to read six pages of my drabble, roughly amount to “do NOT light up the ravine” “Abyss is revered as an afterlife or sacred lack of afterlife” and “at least one person must be watching Abyss at all times”)

As for the motto in the back, I have a feeling that I used a slightly different translation than the common usage for at least one of these words, but I can’t for the life of me remember it now. -_- Just by running it through latin to english translation though, it roughly amounts to “Without light, without end, without fault”.

You could call Abyss a death god, or a knowledge god, or a type of void god (although it's really quite the opposite, with the Void being an entity of paradoxically absolute nothingness and Abyss being the infinite multitude and possibility contained in darkness), but it isn't really any one of those things. It's a bit debatable whether it even existed before the villagers found it, or if their observation gave it its will in the first place, but whatever it is and however it came about, it exists now. It exists, and I like it the normal amount. Yup. Definitely the normal amount. :)

#ask #village of abyss #tw religion #sort of? #anyway please feel free to ask me any more questions about abyss or the town or the world #i didn't think I had much lore in it but now that i think about it I've been passively worldbuilding this place SO much #it's so easy to accumulate random lore and wonder how it all fits together and then fit it together #while you're just chopping spruce wood or whatever #it's so fun