Taiping lightning worship

Every alt-history writer has their favorite lost nations; one of mine is the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, because it was so quirky.

They loved stamps and seals, for reasons unknown, and passed out hundreds of thousands before the Rebellion was over. They loved flags; their military rules devote tons of space assigning specific colors, sizes and numbers of flags to specific ranks. None of this flows from Taiping theology; it just flows from how quirky their leadership was. And that means that I'll need to reinvent a lot of it, because what doesn't flow from their theology is entirely up for grabs.

The Skete of Orsa

IRL, the Taizé Community of ecumenical fame is founded in and based out of Taizé, a small town in Bourgogne where, to the best of anybody's knowledge, nothing interesting ever happened until 1940. (Brother Roger went to Taizé because it was isolated enough to escape military attention, and stayed because its population was lonely enough that he felt called by God to address it.)

As of Andalusada's present, the Taizé Community would still be twenty years in the future even if it was going to happen, which it most certainly is not, because the world's going to be wildly different enough that there won't be Nazis, or a united Germany, or an occupation of France at that point. Unless something else happens there, that little commune would be forever unknown to the world.

Fortunately, however, there is something that can happen there: Taizé is an hour's march from a neighbor whose claim to fame is secured before things even start. Because (Old World) places are far more likely to exist than people, and the Wars of Religion are still only a sketch, I asked a friend last night: "How would you feel about a Battle of Taizé?"

His response took me by surprise: "What would that do to the service style?" This is my answer.

The Günther Bible

Historically, the Ordensstaat actually used a dialect of Middle German in their chanceries. Why I'm not sure, because the lands of the Teutonic Order apparently didn't use it as a vernacular; IRL, after the secularization of the State into Ducal and Royal Prussia, the Teutonic Kanzelrei was completely abandoned in favor of the Low German spoken in daily life.

In Andalusada, of course, the Monastic State isn't secularized; it's overthrown. Monastic Middle German wasn't abandoned ITTL so much as consciously supplanted by the language of the rising urban population, and the Günther Bible (by establishing their Low German as a written language) was instrumental in doing this.

The Farrellite dynasties

For the first 1500 years, Christianity was made of episcopal hierarchies, all of whom agreed that they were the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, rightwise heirs to the upper room on Pentecost. The Reformation did a bit to disrupt that, but the attitude was still there, and contributed in no small part to the Thirty Years' War. As far as I can tell, denominationalism only really arises in America, where none of the colonial state churches became hegemonic in the federal period - forcing the churches to coexist, compete as equals, and acknowledge that they don't have exclusive monopolies.

This complicates things a bit, because Andalusada's religious history is different enough (for one thing, England and Scotland are still Catholic...) that the "I'm okay, you're okay" consensus of American religious life won't evolve. And yet the world would be a somewhat less interesting place if the variety of religious experience was less varied, no?

So, in a leap of logic a month or so back, I blurted out a solution: the Farrellite dynasties.

The Gonzalan Rite

One of the problems that Saint Dominic faced was the fact that there wasn't really a standardized liturgy his friars could preach. There may have been, but there were enough regional variations from convent to convent, diocese to diocese, parish to parish that they couldn't celebrate it together. So his successors set about making their own, which was enshrined as the Dominican Rite and was practiced up until the 1960s.

Saint Gonzalo, his replacement in Andalusada, has the same issue, and handles it approximately the same way. By the time it's compiled, though, the differences on the ground are enough that they're reflected in the superstructure. And because theology is one of the things I geek about, I'm going to write about it.

What is Güntheritism?

"Güntheritism is the functional analogue of Lutheranism IRL."

That's the short answer. Theologically, though, it's a case study in steampunk social science.

What is Farrellitism?

The "definitions" tag was created in part because Andalusada is relatively high-concept. I'm reworking ideas as well as events, so the content of those ideas needs explaining; and while this whole blog is a Sternbildung, that doesn't justify leaving its readers in the dark. So I'm going to start with Farrellitism, for no reason other than that there's a tag for it already.

Much like IRL, there's two wings of the Reformation* - a northern one (Baltic, in the case of Guntheritism) and a southern one. That southern one, as I hinted when I introduced its pivotal figure, is the one called "Farrellite."