Wizards as Clerics of Magic

The crops grow well, the emperor's reign is just, the lives of the people are long and healthy - are these not signs of the favour of heaven?

At your command flowers blossom, fire rains down, and the dead rise up and dance - are these not signs that you are heaven's favoured one?

In the GLOGosphere and beyond there has been dissatisfaction at the idea of clerical magic as something distinct from wizardly magic. Let popes and priests be not inherently magical, let wizards worship the gods.

Yet we can collapse this distinction in another direction. In a world with wizards and magic, who is to say that the idea of gods would develop as we know them? Might not religion develop with magic as the object and rites of worship itself? How might that look with GLOGish magic in particular?

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https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2020/06/fixing-religion-augury-blasphemy-and.html

https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2019/10/osr-glog-based-homebrew-v2-many-rats-on.html

https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2017/11/osr-how-much-is-spell-worth.html

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So, the facts:

• Magic is a process, the combination of energy (Magic Dice), the actions of spiritual fauna of which our own souls are one example (spells), and training to contain and apply both (for the wizard themself)
• This energy is tied to the sun, and may be directly emitted by the sun. To a lesser extent it is tied to sleep, perhaps to dreaming.
• Using too much of this energy at once is likely to go badly for you.
  
• Spiritual fauna are tied to information, whether it's in a brain or a book. As the information in a book is static, the information needed to retain spells in the mind seems likely to also be static.
• The training of wizards is thus likely to focus on rote, as well as techniques such as the construction of memory palaces.
• Wizards' training also divides them into various schools, which determine how they can or can't cast spells, their inherent cantrips, and so on.
  
• Spells wizards can cast are dumber than people by a wide margin.
  

These facts form the central dogma of this religion of magic, beyond dispute, except perhaps if one claims they're illusory (which some certainly will).

In the hazy beginnings, when knowledge of magic and perhaps humanity itself is young, it is passed from one generation to the next in many threads, in family lines, mystery cults, bardic apprenticeships, and suchlike. Certain trends spring up across these threads - worship of the sun and related astrology (observation of the zodiac and decans), mnemonic devices both on their own and encoded in oral traditions, pictographic representations of spells which might form the basis of all written languages, keeping apart from non-wizards to avoid false blame for mysterious disasters, rightful blame for mystic mischief, the preservation of their secrets (and thus ability to charge a high price for them), and so on.

Over time the threads are drawn close, their knowledge shared and formalized. States are likely to demand wizards' extraordinary service in war, or the immortalization of their heads, and so wizards also band together for mutual self-defense. What were once hermitages expand into institutions that are schools, temples, and fortresses all at once. The threads become a web; the institutions a cartel, of sorts. Some bring their power together to cleave correct action from error, orthodoxy from heresy, chartered wizard from outlaw - and this with righteous intent. At last the threads are fully woven together into one body, one church.

These are the teachings of this Church of Wonders:

• Magic is the beginning of the world, and the highest end of those within it.
• As befits wizards, their ethic is more practical than moral. Error comes in two forms, for the low and for the high. For the low, error is foolishness, to lack the diligence to learn magic, or the humility to make oneself of use to those who can. For the high, it is hubris, to lack measure and proportionality, to bring doom on oneself and others.
• Students are expected to be loyal to their master, and masters are expected to expand the knowledge of their students, and knowledge of magic more generally, and to apply their power to the betterment of the Church and the world.
  
• The world is in a gradual process of cosmic enlightenment - beginning in ignorance, darkness, in spiritual chaos, then ordered by the great sages attested to in scripture, who've passed on their teachings in blessed chains of succession to the modern Church, and now dwell among the stars.
• The sun is the work of the greatest sage of all, a transcendent genius without equal on earth or in heaven, who opened its shining aperture to make magic accessible to all with the will to pursue it.
  
• Natural forces and bodies - the winds, the ocean, volcanoes, etc. - are moved by the spells of the great sages, or are their spells, and so to worship them or entities that claim to embody them is foolish heathenry.
  

Alas, where an orthodoxy is instituted, heterodoxies spring up like grasses between pavement.

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The Southern Schismatic Temples deny the ascension and primacy of the great sages. They teach that the world entire is a primordial giant, the first and mightiest wizard, and that all souls are spells flitting about this giant's mind. Furthermore, they teach that a life of virtue will motivate this giant to translate one's souls into its spellbook, a paradisaical afterlife (and one is otherwise condemned to reincarnation), and so virtue more important than personal mastery of magic. For this they are scorned by the Church, and beloved by common folk.

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During the years of the War of the Spider and Monkey there was an assembly convened by the Church on the matter of the number and nature of human souls - a matter considered urgently important due to the mounting numbers of war-dead. It had been conventional wisdom since time immemorial that humans possessed seven souls, yet in a moment this inertial majority was overturned by the wizard Chikaput (soon after to be tenured as Archwizard Chikaput of the Spiritual Scalpel), who by masterful application of the Control Emotion spell demonstrated the divisibility of the red soul of a cupbearer who had spilled wine upon his robe three times over.

Since then similar divisions have been successfully performed with every human soul save for the highest and the lowest, proving to the satisfaction of the Church of Wonders that the apparent seven souls are in fact epiphenomena of the combined action of some yet-to-be-discovered number of smaller sub-souls.

A century and some spare change later, on the Isle of the Moss-Tappers, conjoined twins were born to the humble home of a woman who had invented cusses never heard in the world before their delivery. Aun-Nua is what the twins were named, and they were delivered to the Isle's wizard so that he could determine whether they were prodigy or monster. This wizard, a disciple of Chikaput, declared them to be neither, and took them under his wing to continue his study, and begin theirs.

Aun-Nua took to magic swiftly - as they had two bodies that were also one, so too did they have fourteen souls that were also seven. Like their teacher Aun-Nua read the works of Chikaput. Unlike their teacher Aun-Nua's thoughts turned to reversing the course of that archwizard's work: "If souls can be divided indefinitely, then (like mine - like ours) might they also be combined indefinitely? And if division results in diminishment, would not combination result in exaltation such as none have heretofore known?".

By the time the Church became aware of Aun-Nua's hubris and organized a response, a third of the Isle's population had been devoured by them (joined willingly, their cult protested), and many of the remainder loosely connected into a hive-heart (like a hive-mind, but emotional instead of mental). Aun-Nua was flung beyond the world, or fled, becoming a comet. Their escaped followers, calling themselves The Conjugal Order of the Doubly-Apportioned Sage Granted Awakening to Fullness as the Sole True Heavenly Way, prophesy Aun-Nua's return and subsequent unification of all souls.

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The Encircled Spine is a secret society of aspiring liches. They believe that the Church's great sages attained their power and immortality through lichdom, then created the Church with its strong prohibition against achieving the same to prevent competition.