Emergence 3.0
A Novel – In On Page Per Day
Day 296, Tuesday
October 23rd, 2018
Chapter Two: Pietas
He
participated with full devotion in the great charade of temple life.
He never let
on that he did not believe in the things he studied and the things he taught,
after all, he was the subject and the beneficiary of the greatest miracle that
had ever been engineered in the living memory of the Empire.
He had
returned from the dead.
The perception of holiness mattered more than the
reality.
Everything was pageantry, performance art and deception.
This did not bother him.
The most important thing to the hierarchy is what people
believed about the priesthood.
The rituals were like veils, they obscured reality but
they were also translucent, if you practiced mindfulness you could peer through
them, one by one, remove each veil and advance in knowledge.
Image was everything; rhetoric not logic, not truth, but
rhetoric was the measure of the day.
The truth, if it was known, would only harm people,
confuse them. So the priestly cast believed.
It would tear the Empire apart.
Given the powers belonging to the priesthood, it was a
relatively easy task to deceive the masses.
The priesthood controlled the Imperial schools, and more
importantly the cultic rituals that governed every moment of the day to day
lives of the citizens.
The controls the priesthood exercised were not taught as
vehicles of deceptions, but as a guided rituals, intended to slowly bring
people to a place of sanctity.
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