The Snaitsirch

Yet another strange world religion

They worship three main gods that can take human form, speak from the sky, and even combine into one figure, similar to Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu in Hinduism. Some adherents consider the gods to be separate entities, while some assert they are simply different manifestations of the same being. According to their sacred texts, these gods created days and nights before even making the earth, and animals before people. Magical animals are highly regarded in their religious tradition, as snakes can talk, unicorns are mentioned many times, and dead fish wondrously multiply.

As in most pagan myths, the main god resides in the sun or sky. He divinely impregnated at least one human, similar to other figures such as Zeus, Romulus and Remus, Perseus, and Osiris. Just as Greek gods often mated with mortals and produced ‘superhuman’ offspring, the god of the Snaitsirch fathered a son attributed with supernatural powers, including the ability to levitate, reattach amputated body parts, and bring the dead back to life.

Again in common with Krishna (and at least 11 earlier mythical-historical personages such as Osiris, Indra, Prometheus, and Mithra), the god figure suffered a temporal death, returning to the world of the living after a symbolic period of time in the underworld. Similar to animistic religions, which focused closely on the spiritual idea of spring equating with rebirth, the time of this death is placed on or near the spring equinox.

Interestingly enough, unlike some older religions that believed in making blood sacrifices to an altar (using virgin humans, bulls, lambs, etc.), the Snaitsirch religion centers around eating actual flesh. While cannibalism seems to have died out in most other areas around the world, high priests in several of the more widespread sects insist believers consume pieces of human flesh and drink human blood on (at least) a weekly basis. These priests dress up in elaborate costumes and surround themselves with pictures and songs celebrating misery, death, and blood.

The main religious texts themselves are believed to have originated from the folklore of nomads who wandered the deserts thousands of years ago. The stories that emerged from this oral tradition were handed down through subsequent generations and ultimately written down in now-dead tongues. In the modern era, the books have proven to be of great interest both to historians specializing in ancient tribal cultures and to people with problems.  Although the books tend to be little more than stories inscribed by itinerant Middle Eastern shepherds many millennia ago, many believers hold them to be divinely inspired and holy. Many people believe them to be the actual words of their gods and base their life decisions on the advice contained in them, since the texts deal with all kinds of important topics, such as what meats one should not eat due to mankind's lack of refrigeration technology to the pre-Iron Age accounts of territorial disputes.