Amberleaf Religion

Collective Spiritualism

Collective spirit

Each community, colony, and country has its own collective spirit. It is their history, their culture, their ancestors. It influences and is influenced by its members. This collective can be nested. So a household may have its spirit, which is part of a village, which is part of a nation. For more esoteric variants, it may also be a political faction, or any type of group that can be distinctly identified.

The boundaries of the collective may be vague. Cohesion can be enforced with defining symbols, narratives, culture, and a clear in-group out-group mentality, with widely-understood rituals for accepting or removing someone from the community.

Ancestors

The spirit of a member colors the spirit of the collective during its life, and when a member of the collective dies, its soul may enter the collective. This form of spiritualism often takes on a kind of ancestor worship, as they are seen as living on in the soul of the community. It contains the wisdoms and attitudes of the ancestry.

Avatars

A community or culture may also develop its own avatars, which may be treated like deities or folk-heroes. These avatars may be modeled after real people or mythical ones. They may be a conglomerate of many different characters and concept, unified by some shared idea.

The Avatars exist within the collective unconscious of the community, representing aspects of its culture and history. They may be prayed to or used in storytelling. Most often they are a pillar of a virtue, but archetypes of vice can also be manifested this way.

Avatars don’t always have to be people, they can be locations or objects of significance, or other esoteric things.

Conservatism

Because the individual’s spirit becomes part of the collective, cultures that practice spiritualism often are very moralistic and collectivist. Individuals are to keep their soul pure and full of virtue, and stay clean of what is considered vice. It typically enforces a culture of traditionalism and conservatism, which tends to see the new and foreign as a threat to the order of things, and a stain to be washed off.

In attempts to keep the collective spirit pure, one might be in favor of removing individuals seen as viced or corrupt, as their spirit has an effect on everyone else. Rebellious ideas entering the collective spirit can spawn new rebellious ideas down the line.

Practice

Spiritual individuals may attune their own spirit to the collective, via a ritual, to gain insight from current or past knowledge and attitudes of the community. One can either attune to the current state of mind of the community, or delve deeper into the past, contacting ancestors or surveying the old histories or collective memories of the community.

The collective spirit has its own will and momentum and may take initiative, guiding its members or pushing the collective into a certain direction, maybe via avatars. The decentralized structure of it all makes the motion of it unpredictable and sometimes diverging and contradictory.

Clerics are the people with the people with the task of understanding and tending to the collective spirit. They may hold sermons to instill values, hold ceremonies to strengthen rituals and culture, or invoke the power of the collective spirit for more supernatural effects.

Symbolism is very important to provide a community’s culture with a cohesive structure. A community with a vibrant and defining culture has a more potent and easier-to-access soul. A community without a strong culture lacks anything tangible to grab onto for a cleric.

The power of a collective spirit comes from the strength of its culture and vastness of its history, and the size of the number of its members, which includes ancestors.