Excerpt from a paper written by an Earth-born lycan in late 2014 and titled ‘Domus Spirituality: A Fundamental’
To break it down to absolute basics, the spirituality of those on Domus came down to four simple principles:
- Form: A thing is defined by the shape that it currently is
- Change: All things are in constant flux (unless specifically cut off from it such as vampires). What defines a thing as a singular being is the continuity between its different forms.
- Absorption: Things do not stop existing, they simply become part of something else
- Life: On Domus, magic and life were the same thing, not having separate words for them. Everything was infused by magic therefore everything was alive. Death was the stage where a being’s continuity ended and the corpse was devoid of magic until it was absorbed by other things with magic.
To best explain this, it is perhaps helpful to describe the lifecycle of a hypothetical Domus rabbit.
To begin, the rabbit does not exist. Then a part of the father becomes part of the mother which is the growing foetus. At this stage the foetus is very much still a part of its mother, they are not considered separate entities. The mother rabbit has changed form from not pregnant to pregnant, this is considered its own type of transformation just like anything else.
Then the mother gives birth and her various children separate from her and become their own beings. The baby rabbit we are focused on takes milk from the mother making it a part of him. Then when he is older, he eats grass and leaves and berries, taking from the planet and making it a part of his body. He grows from infant to adolescent to adult, changing and in flux. There is continuity between the rabbit’s forms, he remembers the lessons he learned as a kit but he cannot be described as being the same rabbit. Then, our rabbit meets a very charming rabbit and he impregnates her. His seed becomes part of her body and while it contains his genes, it is not him anymore. There is no magical imprint of him upon it.
After this happy experience, our rabbit is sadly caught by a hunter. A dusk vampire drains him of his blood and he dies. The rabbit has ceased to be a rabbit and the corpse left behind is a dead thing devoid of magic as that magic reintegrates with the planet. But this is not the end of the story.
The blood becomes a part of the dusk vampire. That vampire takes the mostly dessicated rabbit corpse home and butchers ir for their lycan friends. The meat becomes part of a stew, that stew becomes part of all who eat it.
The fur becomes part of a coat. The bones become beads which become a necklace. The teeth become pendants and then part of that same necklace. Each of these things is now infused with its own magic. They are now alive in their own distinct way but they are not the rabbit.
Finally the leftover offal is buried and is re-absorbed by the soil and the planet. It becomes a part of the planet again.
The rabbit is gone. There is no rabbit ‘soul’ that hangs around anywhere. The building blocks of the rabbit have changed form. All that remains of the rabbit is perhaps the memories in his lover’s mind that she might whisper to her rabbit children.
Stories and memories are all that remain of a person after death on Domus. There is no afterlife, there are no ghosts, and even corpses do not remain for long. And everything around them is alive.
Imagine then, for a moment, what it is for one who was raised their whole life on Domus to come to our planet. There is little magic in anything and to them, that means it is a corpse. We build our world out of corpses, we store our dead in stone and build monuments to them all the while insisting that, to an extent, our dead are still alive somewhere that we cannot see. It would be akin to someone from Earth walking into a desolate wasteland of bones only to be told by the people who scrape a living there that there IS a lot of life because of the few sparse brambles, and actually the bones talk to them.