|
The Doctrine of Baushpar
We
the Brethren, incarnate Sons and Daughters of the First Messenger of Ârata,
leaders of the Âratist faith and guardians of the Way of Ârata,
do promulgate these seven principles, which we hold and assert to be the
true wisdom of the church:
1.That the capacity for shaping is the gift of Ârata, a reflection of
his own power of creation, and therefore divine and precious.
2. That the use of shaping
is governed by human will in service to human desire, and
therefore fallible and dangerous.
3. That because it is divine and precious, shaping must be honored;
that because it is fallible and dangerous, shaping must be guarded.
4. That men and women who have vowed the Way of Ârata,
having sworn their lives to Ârata’s service and renounced in his name
the failings of doubt, ignorance, greed, complacency, pride, and fear, are
of all human beings best suited to accomplish both these tasks; and that
all shaping, therefore, shall be gathered within the church.
5. That of all uses of shaping, the most proper is the glory and remembrance of Ârata through ceremony and observance.
6.That no practitioner of shaping shall employ it otherwise,
lest any come to follow the dark ambition that has lately brought such a
plague of death and misery upon Galea.
7. That no practitioner of shaping shall own more power than
any other, that there may not come to be rivalry and contention between them;
and that this equality shall be accomplished through use of the drug manita.
Thus the god’s gift will be employed fittingly and by those fit to its employment,
and the conflicts lately ended will never come again. To this promise we
the Brethren set our hands, in the holy city of Baushpar, in the land of
Arsace, on the continent of Galea, in this ninety-second year of the second
century Post Emergence.
|