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.

Some things do flow from the theology, which is why it's still "the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom" at all. Taiping is a chiliastic concept going back to the Three Kingdoms (which predates the world by a thousand years); Tianguo, an obvious calque of the New Testament "Heavenly Kingdom." Enormous parts of IRL Taiping thought (their Spring and Autumn fandom, for one thing) are logical consequences of their translation of God and the Decalogue.

But a fetish for chops, and a thing for flags? Those don't. Super-long hair and bound breasts? You're not getting there from the understanding of the Ten Commandments. Without a Qing, Ming, or (maybe) Yuan dynasty to overthrow, the Taiping will need to get their quirks from somewhere else.

Pentecostal vs. Taiping pneumatology: fire and weather

When IRL charismatic Christians talk about the Holy Spirit, the metaphor that comes up is fire. Baptism in water for repentance, but the one who came after baptized in the Holy Spirit and fire. See for yourself.

When IRL Taipings talked about the Holy Spirit, the metaphor that came up was weather. In their doxology they worshipped it as Tianshenfeng, "the Heavenly Divine Wind." (Yes, "Divine Wind" is written the same as kamikaze. Personally, I think it's a decent translation, or at least more easily defensible than how they translated God.) I say "weather" rather than "wind" because the metaphors they used to describe its power were much less wind-specific: "[weather phenomenon] of the Holy Spirit" was a pretty common honorific for their first-generation kings. (Shi Dakai was "Lightning of the Holy Spirit." Shi Dakai was awesome.) And in Andalusada, that concept of the Holy Spirit as weather is going to be even stronger.

Because, looking for a family name to replace Hong "flood," I found one that I liked: Lei. "Thunder."

Lightning as gift of the Holy Spirit

I'm not entirely sure how it gets started; it's a story for another day, I suppose. But lightning is definitely a Taiping distinctive by 1930:

• For ceremonial purposes, the only fire that's acceptable is lightning fire: fire given by Heaven. (Early in the Heavenly Kingdom, all fires were ordered to be doused and re-lit with lightning-lit temple fire to make sure there would be no shortage of it available.)
• Taiping accounts of Pentecost are extremely naturalistic; the usual consensus is that the tongues of flame in Acts 2 were something like Mazu's fire. (In part this is because of Taiping theater, which de-emphasized the fire for the rushing wind, which was easier to fake. But it's also spelled out pretty explicitly in the glosses.)
• Being hit by lightning is a typical allegory for religious experience; it features very prominently in The Military Chronicle of the Beautiful Marshal, where all historians agree it was allegory. (Miraculous healing of bound feet was widely reported during the Taiping wars, but Sima Li's healer doesn't seem worried about, you know, electrical burns.)