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Kaharnism is a traditional Charnean religion associated with Tamashek speaking peoples of the Zahra desert and today practiced by many groups across Charnea and Scipia. Core aspects of Kaharnism as an organized religion were established through the amalgamation of the traditional beliefs of Tamashek speaking nomads and the faiths of many ethnic groups residing in southern and eastern Charnea as the former came into contact with the latter through migration and conquest in the 10th and 11th centuries. Modern Kaharnism arose through syncretism of this medieval Kaharnism with White Path beliefs introduced through osmosis from Mutulese interests in Scipia, followed by the appearance of mendicant proselytising entities such as the semi-legendary Desert Oracle. It is not known when these processes of syncretism and partial conversion of Kaharnists to Sakbe beliefs began as the earliest surviving record of these activities are an early account of the Desert Oracle's activities dating to the mid 16th century, indicating that Sakbe must have been present or known in Charnea for some time prior. However, it is widely accepted that the heavily syncretic Sakbe-infused beliefs recognizable in modern Kaharnism had been well established around the mid to late 18th and early 19th centuries in many regions, and became widely although not universally practiced after the reunification of the Charnean Confederation in 1816. Kaharnism and similar Amazigh belief structures are also known to be syncretic with the Azdarin faith, various Christian denominations, and Judaism.
Kaharnic practice focuses on the correct treatment and veneration of an extraordinarily broad pantheon of deities, known by many local terms including kel essuf and rada among others which typically translate as gods, spirits or geniuses. Many deities in Kaharnism are the souls or iman of important ancestors which live on past death and are able to influence the physical world. However, it is believed that the iman of living people are also able to leave their bodies during dreams and interact with the divine plane or spirit world in some way. Animals are also believed to have immortal souls similar to humans, which may be influenced by ancestral souls or the souls of dreaming humans. Kaharnism is an animist belief structure and also ascribes a sort of soul or divine entity to inanimate objects and phenomena, such as mountains, rivers and storms. Some gods worshipped in modern Kaharnist practices may also be divinities borrowed from other religions which are practiced in parallel with Kaharnist beliefs by many diverse groups of Scipians. In other cases, foreign gods may simply be interpreted as other names or manifestations of Kaharnist spirits or deities. The Kaharnist pantheon is not universal, and may feature a different cast of deities which vary from tribe to tribe.
Many variations and syncretic sects of Kaharnism exist across Charnea and Scipia, practicing at times markedly distinct and differing liturgical orthodoxy and rites. The central constant which unifies Kaharnist practice and distinguishes it from other forms of Scipian traditional shamanism and ancestor worship is the deified figure of Mother Kaharna, a legendary queen of the ancient Amazigh peoples who was posthumously deified as a powerful ancestor spirit and later a higher order goddess as Kaharnism continued to develop. Kaharna, often referred to as Mother of us all, is worshipped as a powerful ancestor spirit and matron god presiding over the pantheon of other spirits in all variations of the faith. Kaharna is not always seen as the most powerful divinity, but is typified as the champion of the cause of humankind, the most widely concerned with the conditions of human life and the fate of nations. Although the historical Kaharna was distinctly an Amazigh foundational figure, her deified image is today treated as a universal ancestor to non-Amazigh nations and, theoretically, all of humanity. In syncretic practice of White Path, particularly in Charnea, Kaharna is syncretized with the god Chaak. In Azadrin practice, Kaharnists pray to Gedayo as Kaharna, even though the Azdarin deity is a supreme monotheistic god while Kaharna is not the creator nor the supreme being of her own pantheon.
Beliefs
Kaharnism espouses the belief in a supreme being which created the universe, leading to the religion being mistakenly identified as monotheistic historically. The creator being is identified as the sun, alternatively as a dual entity encompassing both the sun and moon, Sham-Mawu meaning sun-moon. In the latter interpretation, the creator Sham and the demiurge Mawu are distinct facets of the same overarching supreme entity, conceptually similar to the tripartite nature of God in the Christian concept of the trinity. For Kaharnists, Sham-Mawu is a distant and transcendent god who is uninterested in human affairs and therefore is not prayed to or directly venerated, as humans cannot contact it directly. Sham-Mawu can sometimes be personified as either a male or female entity, sometimes even as both male and female, but is more commonly portrayed as a non-human, intangible entity represented by the solar disk. Sham-Mawu is differentiated from non-transcendent lower deities which are both animistic spirits of the land, natural elements and conceptual embodiments as well as the empowered spirits of both living and ancestral dead souls. The heavenly divine realm of Sham-Mawu and the earthly divine realm of the divine spirits are often contrasted through mitigated duality. Duality is central to the Kaharnist concept of transcendent divinity, as the supreme being incorporates both "light" under Sham and "dark" under Mawu. The concept of complimentary opposites, or a natural balance of opposites which define each other, is considered the root of divine creation. Most Kaharnists believe that the mortal world decayed into its present mundane state from its original status which was more closely intertwined with the magical and divine spirit world, and that these examples of duality manifested in the earthly world are lingering signs of Sham-Mawu's original creation, within which the spark of the divine can be found.
The other gods, sprits or geniuses, are the polytheistic deities of Kaharnism. Depending on the sect or syncretic beliefs of practitioners, the gods will alternatively be referred to as K'uh, temanaa or as saints, "mysteries" or "invisible ones". Spirits interact with humans through positive influence by offering help, protection, or guidance as well as through voluntary possession and negative influence such as causing disease or inflicting tamazai, a form of negative possession akin to depression. Kaharnists generally believe in spirit possession, which is usually practiced through dancing rituals where the possessed is usually a priest or ceremonial officiant dressed in a costume specific to the deity being invoked. Through these séances, clerical figures claim to speak directly for the gods as anything they say or do while under the possession ritual is believed to be the literal word of the divine spirit being invoked. Negative forms of possession also exist, and powerful emotional states like profound grief are usually attributed to such instances of unwelcome possession, which Kaharnist spiritual healers are trained to remedy using special rites and paraphernalia. Broadly speaking, Kaharnists believe in reincarnation as the souls of recent or old ancestral dead may return to mortality and be reborn into flesh once again. Spirits which were once human may be reincarnated as animals and vice versa, hence the reverent religious treatment of animals as equal beings to humans in Kaharnist practice. Unlike many beliefs based around reincarnation, Kaharnists believe that the soul does not necessarily reincarnate immediately after death, and will most often linger as an untethered non-corporeal entity for long periods of time between mortal incarnations. Very powerful spirits, such as the goddess Kaharna, are believed to be of such divine strength and size that they are not capable of inhabiting a mortal body any longer, and so are not believed to reincarnate and may only briefly and temporarily inhabit a mortal body through possession.
Although the term "god" is often used freely in reference to the divinities of Kaharnism, scholars of the faith distinguish between gods and spirits as the divinities observed may range from major gods comparable to those of other polytheistic pantheons to very minor entities representing a specific dead ancestor, a specific river or tree, or the spirit of an animal killed in the hunt. According to the common tradition, a god is any deity that holds a central position in ten or more separate shrines. Kaharnist scholars believe that Kaharna herself was once considered a common ancestor spirit after her death, albeit an important royal ancestor, and was only elevated to the status of a very important central god many years after her death, when her reign and death became legendary to her descendants and her spirit became more widely revered as a result. Kaharna is not the only example of an ancestor spirit surpassing the threshold to become a greater divinity, but she is by far the most important ancestor spirit turned god in the Kaharnist faith, as she went from a minor ancestor spirit to the central deity of the entire pantheon. In a similar vein, gods which are widely worshipped may at times wane in popularity and be downgraded to the classification of lowly spirit as a result, or even go extinct altogether as they are no longer worshipped. Modern scholars have proposed that the Kaharnist view is that divine entities are stronger or weaker depending or the number of people and shrines dedicated to their worship, although this is not entirely corroborated by the actual practice of Kaharnism and remains a largely unsubstantiated view on the subject of Kaharnist cosmology.
Deities
Kaharna
Also known as the Great Mother, Kaharna is the central goddess of the Kaharnist religion and is one of the few to be universally recognized and worshipped in all local variations and syncretic sects that fall under the umbrella of Kaharnist worship. As a goddess, Kaharna is best defined as an earth mother and is worshipped as the universal ancestor figure of all of humanity, occasionally being depicted as the mother of all life in the world. Generally, Kaharna is observed as the divine matron of humanity and the principal deity presiding over human civilizations and the daily affairs of people around the world. In Kaharnist cosmology, Kaharna is not the supreme being and is merely the chief human ancestor deity, considered to be roughly equal in power to many other deities under the transcendent creator god Sham-Mawu. However, because of her integral position in the pantheon as it relates to human affairs and the daily process of worship and interaction with the divine, Kaharna is treated as the de facto chief deity of the Kaharnist pantheon and because of this lends the religion her name. Mother Kaharna is primarily a goddess of life and death within the pantheon of major deities. She is believed to preside over the souls of human beings and is deeply involved with the religious aspects of birth and death. Adherents believe that souls that are born into the human race are those which reside within Kaharna's domain in the spiritual world or divine plane, whereas animal souls exist within other spirit kingdoms. In the Kaharnist view of reincarnation, human dead which have done misdeeds, behaved poorly or even lived a poor and unfulfilling life, may be reincarnated as animals after their deaths. This is because souls which are unworthy of entering Kaharna's spirit kingdom in the beyond are cast out to the other kingdoms instead, causing them to join the souls of the animals. People having severe genetic disabilities, including physical deformities or mental disorders, are believed to be souls incompatible with the human body, which Kaharna will guide to another kingdom so that when they next reincarnate they will inhabit a body better suited to them and live a happier, more fulfilling mortal life.
Kaharna's position as the matron of humanity, queen of the human afterlife and judge over the souls of the dead puts her at the center of all rituals and beliefs involving communion with an adherents ancestors, a central part of Kaharnist worship. Notable or powerful ancestor spirits are sometimes contacted directly through prayer, however the most common practice especially for more mundane dead spirits is to contact them by praying first to Kaharna to act as a divine intermediary and relay the adherent's messages to the soul they are trying to reach and vice versa.
Practices
Worship
Funerary Rites
The majority of Kaharnist funerary practices center around excarnation, based on the practice of the Tamashek nomads to leave their dead for the elements and desert scavengers to break down and return to the weave of the world. In the ancient past, the Amazigh groups, some of which would later distinguish into the Tamashek, practiced burials and built large tomb complexes to house the bodies of the dead, as is believed to be the case with Kaharna herself. The only remaining echo of this tradition is the practice of keeping relics of a dead person or animals skeletal structure, usually a finger removed before the destruction of the body and preserved as a talisman through which the person's soul may be contacted or may likewise reach out from beyond death and interfere with the living world. In general, however, Kaharnists believe that disposing of the body by reducing and destroying it in a way that is considered clean and pure is proper treatment of the dead. The principal methods of disposal for cadavers is either sky burial or cremation, although they are not interchangeable and are usually each applied to specific circumstances. It is noted that because Kaharnism holds that animals posses an iman or soul just as humans do, the same principles of human funerary rites are applied to the disposal and treatment of dead animals as well. All Kaharnist mortuary practices are rooted in the belief that putrefaction and decay are profoundly evil, and any body that is in the process of decay will taint and make unclean everything around it.
Human cadavers are most often submitted to sky burial in Kaharnist communities, which consequently consider scavenging birds and especially the Sacred Vulture, occasionally referred to as a "Kaharnic Angel", to be holy in nature and sacrosanct as integral spirits of death and the passage of a soul from inhabiting a living body to existing freely as an ancestral god. The oldest sky burial traditions involve simply offering the whole cadaver to the vultures, hawks and crows at a mortuary field, which is usually marked with multiple stelae consecrating the ground and invoking the spirits and the gods. Often, a stele will be erected at these funeral fields to record the names of important or honored dead which have been excarnated at the site. More complex forms of the same practice are employed near major population centers, where a Kaharnist necropolis may be erected, consisting or one or more Towers of the Dead, which replace the open stelae littered funeral fields of more rural settings with much more compact, space efficient means of sky burial. In these towers, bodies are arranged in concentric rings, usually with the bodies of men placed on the outside ring, women in the middle ring, and the bodies of children and animals in the inner ring. Once the bodies have been stripped of flesh and bleached by exposure to the elements, they are placed in an ossuary pit at the center and set to disintegrate with the assistance of lime before being washed away by rainwater which is then filtered in specially built wells adjacent to the towers. In modern day Towers of the Dead, mirrors are used to accelerate the elimination of flesh and decay from the bodies in a process termed "solar purification". Additionally, due to some decline in the population of vultures and other scavenging birds, breeding programs are implemented by some Kaharnist organizations to help maintain the populations of these birds, especially of the Sacred Vulture, which remain the most effective way to remove and dispose of the flesh from the cadavers assembled in the towers.
The second and less common means of corpse disposal is cremation, which traditionally is carried out in an open air pyre but in the modern day is most often conducted within a furnace in a crematorium. In many ancient societies in Charnea, the dead were ceremonially burned and cast into nearby rivers as ash, which was done regardless of social status. However, in mainstream Kaharnist practice, only the bodies of those considered unworthy or impure, such as criminals or people considered to have done great evil, are burned. Some scholars suggest that this is due to the belief that evil is a metaphorical putrefaction that affects the soul rather than the body, and that the purifying quality of the fire will help to eliminate the rot from an evil person's soul so that their existence after death may not be affected by their misdeeds. Alternatively, the bodies of evil persons or unimportant or verminous animals are burned simply because they are considered unworthy of being fed to the vultures, which are venerated and respected animals. In extreme cases, the houses or belongings of such persons, especially anything that might have been used in the commission of their evils, such as a murder weapon, are burned with them and destroyed as thoroughly as possible. Because of this belief, being taken to a Tower of the Dead or a mortuary field for sky burial is considered a form of posthumous forgiveness of any accumulated sins a person may have committed, as being fed upon by vultures and "returned to the Mother" (Kaharna) is considered a redemptive act. In the modern day, cremation may be used as the default means of funerary treatment due to the constraints of large population centers which may render the preferred Kaharnist treatment impractical, in which case the context of moral judgement and purificati0on is considered inapplicable.