Nevadokhia — the New Hope
is the principal religion of Varvarossa. The work of a secret society of Vasilissian professors of theology, it was imposed by Pantsar Iluyanka XI at the end of the sixth century. By then, the ancient hope of Basilisk had split into several mutually hostile churches. With its refined ritual, freed of the dark contradictions of blurred antediluvian texts and furnished with an easily borne morality and laws, the new faith triumphed within two generations and came to rule almost the entire empire.
The Nevadokhs rejected polytheism, denied the Triad and Viy the creator, and worshipped a single radiant deity, Pan: unknowable, all-good, who had created humankind to share in creation and tend the garden.
The Nevadokhs held six sacred; in their iconography, all divine beings had six limbs or six eyes. Thus they borrowed their imagery from the little world, the world of insects, where wingless creatures—spiders, centipedes, and worms—embody the demonic realm. Beetles and ants represent people: among ants the queen can fly, and even cumbersome, flightless beetles have wings beneath their shells. Beetles are the various kinds of godkin; ants, who need a winged queen, are lyudichi. In this picture, the angelic realm, the world of the holy dead, is represented by flying insects: bees, butterflies, and above all dragonflies.
Although the old Basilisk faith, founded upon the cult of the Triad and Basilisk, yielded power and popularity to the new, many rykar tribes and certain warlike human peoples preserved the old custom and the veneration of Basilisk.
Now only priests of the new faith could ratify contracts, marriages, oaths, and curses before the god Light.
Followers of the New Hope, the Nevadokhs, regard six as the number of divine completeness. In their iconography, everything divine has six arms or six eyes. They have a cult of flying insects. In their rites and sacraments they use honey and flowers. Wingless insects, spiders, and other arthropods are their image of the demonic world. People are symbolised by ants, whose queen can fly, and by all manner of crawling beetles that nevertheless possess hidden wings. Butterflies and dragonflies are the image of the angelic realm.
The priesthood of remembrance belongs entirely to the old Basilisk church, the faith of the Vasilians. The Vasilians retained only the funeral rite at crematoria and holy places, and only among godkin. The Nevadokhs, with their New Hope and their beautiful, undemanding cult, seized the other domains, including the less sombre ones: weddings, the washing and girding of infants, the witnessing of transactions, and service at court and among the people.
Yet old Basilisk churches still stand throughout Borea, and services are still held in them in the now little-understood tongue of Ancient Pelazgia.
