#marcelism

One of the many peculiarities I remember in all my years living in these tunnels is the sheer number of recruiters from new religious movements here and there. There’s at least one or two of them in some corner of every station (major converging stations can have up to 15). The first time I encountered them was traveling with my friends Aurelia and Todd about six years ago, who at the time lived in the same capsule hotel as I did.  Aurelia told me to dodge them, as she finds them exceptionally bothersome. They usually were in loose communion with the Order of Sigismund, a council of polytheistic sects.

Aurelia is Pascalese and Todd is a Meridian, practicing their own religions that they feel very strongly about.  Aurelia is an ardent follower of Pascalese monotheism, a religion heavily tied to the Pascalese cultural identity; she doesn’t take too kindly to new religious movements, claiming them to be cult-like, but that may also be because it jibes against her monotheistic sensibilities.

Todd tends to avoid talking to them as much as he can; he is a Mapotherian, lapsed when he first came here but gradually became more observant as time went on. Mapotherians and members of the Order of Sigismund are not known to get along all that well due to a colourful history of discrimination and persecution between the two that gets flipped depending on who was the minority at the time and place. Outside major cities like the Galt metropole, Mapotherian discrimination is even stronger due to anti-Meridian sentiment; Mapotherianism is the state religion of the Meridian Empire.

My family had at one point attended a Sigismundian Temple, with my aunt Nancy still being an ardent worshipper of the Fire God. Over time, however, my grandfather Torvald converted to Marcelism, by and large the most popular religion in Galt and the Mainland today.  Part of its popularity with most people was that it wasn’t exactly a fixed religion and people have periodically followed it without truly de-converting from their old beliefs; most Sigismundians today are themselves Marcelites, my grandfather having been one of them.  

Marcelism, as its name suggests, originated in the Marcelian regions of South Jejima; it continues to have a presence there despite the irreligious atmosphere prevalent in that Canton today. The core Marcelite belief is that of the concept of balance; people find virtue, prosperity, and healthy growth in a balance between complementary forces: stability and flux, life and death, creation and destruction, faith and reason, liberty and duty.  

Much like how nature eventually reaches a self-sustaining equilibrium, so should human life. Our job is to strike a balance between what we need to improve ourselves and how we need to serve society, while society must balance its own self-preservation with the wellbeing of both its constituents and other societies outside it.  

The search for balance is not fatalistic, so the ministers say.  We don’t let ourselves be consigned to a role to keep a balance, since our own dissatisfaction with it would be bad for both ourselves and the people we serve. After all, can we truly be in balance if the things we do are ill-suited to our talents? Instead, we look for our own place in the balance; we blaze our trail, find our spot, and fit into the greater balance of things from there.

Marcelism is a religion widely accepted by a morally grey world, not fixated on the rewards after death or pleasing the Creator (though many would like to think achieving personal balance does just that), and yet it is not without people misunderstanding it.  Outsiders and not a few Marcelites alike tend to see balance as one between good and evil, with moral greyness being an ideal to strive for. It isn’t. You don’t use past virtuous deeds as a free pass to willfully do evil things.

In the days I’ve spent living largely underground, I’ve started to understand why the recruiters choose to preach in stations and why Todd, once rather uncaring of his own convictions, would rediscover his own faith.  Living in the stations can do terrible things to your body and often when you’re literally forced underground, things can look bleak and disappointing. Holding on to the hopes given by these beliefs helps people get through the day. For people like Todd and Aurelia, who live so far away from their homelands, their faith could also make them feel that they’re never truly alone.

Todd will never admit to being homesick, but he’s fooling no one.