Symbolism and Significance
Like the Caldari Way of the Winds, Achur sects tend to be pretty respectful of natural forces. Our shrines tend to honor or placate (if you’re of a more spiritualist bent) the spirits or (if of less) natural forces. They also serve, in a way, as reminders to watch the sky and sea-- and as memorials to those lost to them.
That’s mostly by implication, mind. Like most other stuff on Achura, shrines break, so setting a community’s shrines back up is part of the normal process of rebuilding. Mostly, they’re made completely of stuff you can put together in an afternoon, given even like a gaggle of children and one or two adults to handle the trickier parts. That varies a little in the monasteries, where spiritual stuff tends to meet resources, but especially for animistic shrines-- why would you use graven images to honor something that seems to really hate stuff that’s “built to last”?
A lot of symbolism’s not all that anthropomorphic; we’re not particularly enchanted with our own importance in the world, so, our spiritual images tend to be abstract or animal more often than human.
Stars are a symbol of special importance to the Achura. If you think about it, it’s not at all surprising: in a world where nothing lasts, and nothing can be fully trusted except to be exactly what it is, the stars hang in the sky, predictable, peaceful-- seemingly eternal, and shared by everyone. They’re not just a comfort, either. You can navigate by the stars if your boat gets blown out to sea. You can watch them to see what the sky is doing at night. If the sky is full of stars, usually you can feel safe from the weather.
No wonder our Stargazers rely on them for their divinations and our monks often use them as a focus for meditation. Finding out they’re not quite as peaceful or as eternal as they seemed doesn’t seem to have dampened our enthusiasm very much, either.
More later.