M I S U N D E R S T O O D

Tell your stories say goodbye – feast today for tomorrow we die

A religion must start with a god, and that god must start with an idea. The idea of fire, or wind, or the wilderness and the color of moonshine, or first breath of a new born child. A religion must start with a god, and that god must start with an idea, and that idea must start with a dreamer. Only poets and madmen dream of new gods, because they see the virtue of a thing and not the use of it. People do not listen to poets and few would admit to listening to one insane, but sometimes the idea of a god becomes a seed in the mind of some creative individual. It could take months or it could take generations before that seed germinates and starts to grow, and the plant that is the idea gives flower to the god, and a religion is born. It spreads, slowly at first but gaining momentum until it has crossed the minds of all. Sometimes the religion dies, or the god dies – or at worst, the idea dies, and the religion becomes a hollow shell that its leaders use to manipulate its followers. Or perhaps the idea is misunderstood, and the god of fire becomes the tyrant of battle because those who now dream of him forget the fire that warms their homes, cooks their meals and wards off the darkness.

Starclan began with an idea. The poets and the madmen dreamt that their dearly departed watched and advised from beyond the great void between life and death. Starclan was dreamt a god of bridges, linking the land of the dead with the land of the living over the great black river Styx. The idea that was Starclan journeyed with gypsies and nomads across the world, and it met with the idea called the Tamerlain, who was the idea of the moonshine, and the freedom of the wilderness, and the beauty of the transition from life to death and death to life, birth and death.

Misunderstood wants to take you back. Before the kitty-pet called Rusty was even convinced – before kitty-pets existed, before Starclan watched from silverpelt. The two-legs call this time the Dark Ages, but for the feline population in the primal forests it was an age of light. A moon-worshiping religion that adhered to the idea called the goddess Tamerlain was spread through the world and Starclan was just a vague idea in a poet’s mind. The religion of Tamerlain was one of warrior priests, hunter-gatherer priestesses and educated plebeians.

But the poet spoke of his idea, and his idea grew, and it spread, and it became Starclan in the mind of a prophet, who brought it to the stygian glades of the forestborder of the winterwood. From there, it spread . . . .

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