Mallach
Mallach is the patron god of bards, artists, and lovers. His avatar is a catboy, dark-haired and wielding a golden citole. He is mostly known as the god of love and/or lust, but there's much more to him than just pursuit of carnal pleasures. According to Cait "you'll never see a Mallachite shying away from a good lay, especially with a good friend.".
Worship
According to Cait:
"Mallach's a god of everything beautiful in the world. He delights in passion, and encourages all his followers to love deeply and to nurture artistry as much as they do romance. Many Mallachite priests are renowned poets or painters, you know! And the rest of us, well, we try to at least be familiar with the arts."
Mallach has multiple temples erected to him in Jassira. The clergy there make the temples sanctuaries, practising and proselytising his ideals and principles within them. Most famously, this involves giving their bodies to their god, in the form has having sex with visitors who want it.
Known ranks/positions of Mallach's clergy are:
- Ordained Cleric
- Sacred Courtesan
- Lay Priest/Priestess
- Temple Acolytes
Clergy who's job involve sleeping with temple visitors are sometimes known as "temple harlots", such as Cait's mother.
Clergy's children are often raised together in the temples, and treat each other as siblings.
To become part of the clergy, one must take sacred vows to Mallach. In the case of clergy's children, it seems it is traditional to take these vows on the first day after their 18th birthday. The vows to Mallach bind body and soul to his temple (whether magically or just metaphorically is unknown), and requires one to be undressed.
Magic practised within the temples mainly revolve around sex or childbirth.
Mallach has few followers in the north such as around Hawkethorne, and as such there are very few temples to him there. Cait thinks it may be partly due to his avatar being a catboy, because the north has more lupine than catfolk. His worship is not outlawed, however.
Known Followers
Trivia
- His name is sometimes invoked as an exclamation, i.e. "Mallach's balls. Either this stuff is really fresh, or it's really potent", as used by Leorah.
- Followers of Mallach are called Mallachites, which is similar to the name of the real-world green crystal malachite.
- In ancient Egypt the colour green (wadj) was associated with death and the power of resurrection as well as new life and fertility. Ancient Egyptians believed that the afterlife contained an eternal paradise which resembled their lives but with no pain or suffering, and referred to this place as the ‘Field of Malachite’.