This is an old Endringnian account of the creation. It remains unclear which Temple it originated with, if any, and its broad truth is acknowledged by a number of them. The worshippers of Mumnos insist that it was their own patron deity who threshed and scattered the seed.

First, the world was a husk. Nothing meant anything. Nothing had substance. It had already been threshed, the core extracted and scattered into a distant field.

In that field, the gods sprouted. Countless plants from a single seed.

Some grew tall as cedars. Some stayed the size of wheat. Some of them died, and ossified into mountains, and came to live again. Some of the mountains melted into salt-rich seas. All lived. All meant. All knew. They could flow as one river when they needed to, heeding the deep mystery in the bird-song. They could separate into atoms again, to contemplate the infinity of themselves. Every train of thought, its own god. Majesty: the teeming infinite.

Of this grand symphony of ages, we were bereft. We had to learn to see through the cracks of the husk-kernel, which let in slithers of the real world beyond, where the gods lived inside everything, and gave it a meaning and a name. Those slithers, we call ‘prayer’; the touch of soul to soul across the yawning depths. The bringing of the god into the thing, to activate its full potential.

In the meantime, we taught ourselves to believe in chains. Those of us who refused to teach ourselves were taught with headsmens’ blocks and jails. We were taught that Majesty meant men on thrones, their Temples palaces where we must bow and scrape, mirroring the chain-shaped universe, and not factories where we could work and worship in harmony together. Peace was servitude, and all was preordained, all our places fixed like stars in an unchanging firmament, for then, their telescopes could not glimpse the truth of endless motion, and neither could their shrivelled hearts. All was enclosed, an endless ring, concentric, enchained, and static.

Only when we broke the chains could we recognise the fact that every single thing in this world that we had been taught to know as husk-like emptiness was in fact the mirror-image of a true, ensouled eternity, reachable through prayer.

Scrawled in the margins, the words: ‘And we have a winding road yet to walk before we reckon with what that means.’