# Transcript of Lecture on Witcherism ## by Jeremy Harper about the UFE-TM 'Afternoon Sunshine' Hello everyone, my name is Ensign Jeremy Harper. I am going to be giving today's lecture on the topic of Witcherism. It's an important topic and one that has been discussed a lot in the Federation, of course, but this ship is a very Jedi ship and I feel like people here really don't understand witcherism very well, so I'm going to try and take some time to just explain a few of the many things we do so you can try and get a better understanding of us in relation to yourselves. Because, you know, we've been serving together for a while and I think this would be useful. So, let's get started with a few foundational and basic things about witcherism. Like, what do we believe? Well. I will use some generalizations here because I mean, look I grew up in my society. I spent first about 50 years of my life on a Witcher world ship. I was born in a Federation planet, spent five years there, and my parents moved onto a world ship. And then when I was 57, I moved to the keep world associated with that ship. and spent about 120 years in the monastery there studying. So I know a thing or two about witcherism. Now, after a while I started to question it, and while I haven't renounced my faith, I'm still a witcher, I have moved from one of my more devoted areas to being much more open-minded in a lot of my considerations, hence why I'm out here travelling with all of you and joined the Federal Navy and the like. And then switched to the Merchant Marines. Anyway, point B, and... we should have a discussion, right, about this stuff, but I might use a few generalizations at times. I apologize for that. I'm gonna try my best not to use too many of them. But to understand probably the most important foundational difference between, say, From our perspective to the Jedi, and then why we're different from the Sigmarians and possibly even the Versians. I don't know too much about the Versians, but I know a lot about the Sigmarians, so I'm going to talk about them and why we're not like them. Boils down to some pretty basic conceptual reasons. So, you Jedi and the Sith like you, the Sith really, not you Jedi as much, but the Sith, you know, they're really more relativist when it comes to the planes. We as humans know the Material Plane is sort of... Well, I know some people code it as good, it kind of depends on your version of Witcherism. Mine takes it as being pretty morally neutral, as I think most other religions tend to. Where I know sort of the Jedi agree the Abyss is pretty bad, you guys don't really attach any moral significance to the various planes, you just acknowledge sort of the impact and harms of daemons and demons and the other creatures of the Abyss. Devils and the like. End of the Nether. So when us people look at- and- and like, uh, Sigmarian's attached, of course, a high moral significance to this, and the Sith are outright sort of even positive towards those things which you attach at least some level of moral value, of not necessarily negative moral value, but still a general negative sense towards. And I acknowledge there are versions of Jediism which have sort of moral values to them, but uh, look, I know you're ********. Sometimes I like to argue, but hopefully not today. So pondering for a minute here this difference, right? You don't have moral valiances. We and Sigmarians, we do have moral valiances. To my order, the void, you know, heaven, the highest realm, the warp, according to some, that place, we say that is good. We say the realm of souls, purgatory, or the aether, as it's also called, is also morally good. We say the material plane is neutral. We say the nether is not necessarily bad. Just as the Aether isn't actually necessarily good, but where the Aether leans more good than evil, the Nether leans more evil than good, but has redemptive elements to it and positive elements to it as well. Finally, there is the Abyss, which we agree with the Sigmarines, is evil. We believe the realms are connected not in the pentagram shape, I believe, you guys do, or in the stacked way the Jedi do, but in a collection of rings, intersecting circles with one another, which create temporal crossover zones either directly with one place, possibly with two or even three places, and that these intersect zones are really where sort of things go crazy. and tend to be the major battlegrounds between the different dimensions and planes. So that's the basic sort of foundational difference between us and the Jedi. Where do we differ from the Sigmarians? Well, from our perspective, the Sigmarians are idiots who actually just don't understand things. Sigmoria is a god we recognize. There is a Sigmoria in our religion. The Witchers took that from us. Not the Witchers, sorry. The Versians took that from us. I know that much about them. But the whole Sigmorite idea of Sigmoria... I mean, it was a confused story to a guy who just didn't understand what was being told to him, who had barely developed the Void capabilities. It's not real. It's insanity. And they develop a whole bunch of complex beliefs around this to justify and hold up this completely untrue, or not misunderstanding, not untrue, but misunderstanding, misinterpretation of broader Witcher theology, which, I mean, if you look at the guy, he was a Witcher before he started his whole mystical cult thing that broke off and took a bunch of people with it, so, you know. Maybe he just wasn't a good student. I'm sorry for being petty, I know, but they're none of those ******* freaks here. Let me see how much the pirates have done to us. Never mind how many of them we fought in the war. Anyways, back on topic. Those fools, the Deutchies, they all... late guys. They all... believe that their guy, Sigmoria and his light, is the last god and they need to reassemble it, right? Well, we know that he's not the last god. There's actually a bunch of other gods, and they've come to accept that position in a lot of cases, but not all of them have. But what are the actual differences between us, besides all the sort of, like, theological disputes, of which there are many. For example, when you get down to the idea that there's almost sort of monotheism, which you don't deny there's like one supreme god above all the others, there's a king god, if you will, the god supreme. It's more that... They believe there's only one left. So this is going to get into where the real difference is. They have a set of orthodox beliefs that you kind of need to adhere to. Not kind of, you do need to adhere to. You need to adhere to the codex in each of the codices. Sigmar lived until he died, which sounds like an obvious statement, but his death was after a long and virtuous life where he led his people. This creates a whole moral category, if you will, not moral category, moral demand that what he said is true. That his codex, written after the death of his best friend Laga, or not written, but codified after the death of his friend. And then there were future codices that have been created since. But the idea was, look, this was the lived truth. Our religion is real because our prophet survived this long. He was continuously informed by the light. He continuously built this civilization. And the thing is, they're not wrong. they just do have to adhere to the orthodoxy of their religion, because so long as they adhere to it, Sigmoria is actually going to guide them. It's just that that's witcher religion in an oversimplified kind of nutshell, and with an insane over-interpretation of it. But the institutionalized church, and the singular institutionalized church that's unique to Sigmurism, and specifically to Orthodox Germanian Sigmurism, This specific institutional church, as opposed to the traditional churches, or the Sigmarian, sorry, the Catholic multitude of interpretations, the singular church, enforces orthodoxy and maintains it through scriptural terms, through tradition, and through a bunch of other mechanisms. that essentially establish what is Sigmurism. This gives the church a lot of institutional tools. This gives, of course, a lot of the actual flavor to society. But when you consider the other side of this, well, we can say this like this. When you ask what is Witcherism, Witcherism is not enforced through Orthodoxy. We don't have one central Witcher committee. Yes, there was the Emperor Geralt, but that's a complex historical discussion. Geralt was the Emperor of the Witcher Empire, and that was a political entity that had, admittedly, some relation to the broader religious entity, but really wasn't actually all that connected to it. The religious entities of the Witchers are primarily rooted in the Keep World/Keepship relationship. There's a world and a ship, and the world has a monastery and a whole massive network of stuff to support it, a massive spaceport and the like, often huge cities. And then there's the keep ship that's out flying around that is a massive, massive essentially world ship in modern Federation terms, or a Galtran possibly even. I mean, we've traded with them before, but at the same time... Like, tens of billions of people are living on them, of which there are hundreds of millions of witchers who have full powers or licensed hunters, etc. And this is what one keep is, and that keep... is generally dedicated to some specific region for patrolling and monster hunting and the like to uphold the Witcher code, which is this whole other thing that isn't related to the religious side, but is related to the, like, job side of the Witcher order as a set of orders and sort of institutionalized group, separate from or directly related to their Witcherism, but more specifically, considered an obligation of the Witchers as a category of people. Because the term witcher is a very broad term that doesn't have a direct, clear, and immediate meaning. Is it referring to the group? Is it referring to the government thing that now exists through the Universalis Confederation? But really, is it a singular entity? What exactly is the order? It's not clear because it doesn't really exist. Who does it contain? Is it clear? Is it the citizens of these things? Again, witcher is a broad term. Is it anyone who's in the religion? This doesn't help us understand the religion very much. But what it does help us understand is that Witcherism does not have the centralized orthodoxy of the Sigmarian faith. What it does share is broadly a vague set of interconnected myths and stories, we have a broad agreement on what the creation myth is, we have a broad agreement on who sort of our key gods are, and who the key sort of figures and different types of creatures and beings are, and sort of the broad metaphysics of Witcherism beyond just the rings has a shared, has a thing to it, is there and is uniting in all of us. But witcherism, more or less, is about having an enforced set of rituals that everyone orthopractically follows, so it doesn't the same practice as opposed to following the same beliefs. It's all about having the same understanding and replication of what the book says, that the church says the book says. It's about making sure that when it's time to do the ritual, that when you go to a planet, you have to make an offering to the god of that planet, and probably to several other gods. The idea that every ship has a god, but also there is a god of the ships. And there's probably several gods of the ships, depending on where you are, and you should try and pray to them too. And basically, it's a large respect for a great multitude of gods and creatures and divine entities across a great variety of spaces and beings, each of whom have their own mythos and ideology associated with them. And different keep worlds will establish their own devotion, to the local gods, and then probably to some greater gods. And generally speaking, these things will be intersected by what divine creatures they're also fighting, whether they're from any of the planes that isn't, of course, the Void. The one holy plane of which it's believed there is no wrong creatures that can come from it, only those which can invade it because the Void is implicitly and automatically good and trapped in a forever struggle against the evil of the Abyss. The abyss is constantly sending out its corrupting influence and corrupted the nether that used to be good. It is trying to corrupt the aether. And both of these places are a battleground being fought over the material plane. This is our basic metaphysics, which we broadly share with the Sigmarians and the firstians. I know to the I know you Jedi, this all sounds insane and stupid. I mean, come on. gods and you have to pray every time you get off the ship on every planet. And sometimes when you get in a vehicle and sometimes to every building you enter, there are Witchers and Witcher religious followers who do that. The broader part of it is shared rituals, shared festivals. We have lots of festivals if you'd like. It also offers a protection, a set of people you work with. You have sort of your local Witcher temples and Often they're competing with each other, but at the same time, they all agree on things in much the same way the Jedi do. And in that way, we actually are much more like you, Jedi, than we are like, say, the Sigmarians. We really do believe in this sort of separated, largely dispersed religion and federation and argument through that. It's unlike you guys who don't really share orthodoxy or orthopraxy and in fact almost valorize heterodoxy, but do broadly share at least the same sort of broad metaphysics, we're the same way. Our metaphysics is just deeply religious and ultimately the same broad metaphysical assumptions as underpin Sigmarism, though as far as we see it, Sigmarism is a bastardization of our religion. So I throw this off today's lecture and you guys can ask me some questions and hopefully help me prime up what the next lecture will be in this series. Thank you.