Religion (or spirituality) is one of the most beautiful things that connects us to the divine and the sacred, but alas, it's also often the source of abuse and control by ill-intentioned people.
So as humans, how can we be sure that we're staying on the right track in our quest for the divine and the sacred, in the face of all the spiritual swindling that's going on in this world?
As a gaming studio, we don't claim to have the ultimate answer to this lifelong quest and there are better theological experts from different backgrounds dedicated to it.
However, when we were building the Aurion universe we focused our lore on the human's existential quest. In a classic Fantasy universe, people obtain powers by training, by prophecy, or by gathering sacred powers/artifacts in sacred places. In the Aurion energy, power is directly connected to your capacity to answer the question “Who Am I”?
The more you know who you are, the more your convictions channel the existential particles in the universe and that’s how you assemble your Aurion.
With this in mind, it was inevitable to dive into the religious and spiritual questions in our world. We decided to show the dichotomy between the positive and negative sides of religion/spirituality.
The good side of religion/spirituality: Connecting us to the Truth and essence of things.
One example of the positive aspect of religion/spirituality can be seen during the Kori-Odan wedding scene, where the 4 notables are positioned like 4 pillars around our heroes.
Unlike a lot of real-life weddings where there is often only one priest representing a monotheist deity (and authority), in the city of Zama and many other tribes of Aurion Universe, humans believe (in fact they feel) that all cycles (nature, marriage, life) will need 4 winds to be sustainable. Four winds represent the four poles (north, East, South, West) or others aspects of Harmony.
What we wanted to show there is that religion and spirituality may give the best when they are like a game of symbols organized to remind us of the “wisdom” of the Creation and why we should understand the balance of the sacred to mimic it in our life.
There are of course other aspects to this relationship with harmony and the surrounding cosmos, that you can find in Aurion. Every page and every screenshot has a symbol for something (funny or serious) that we invite readers, players to “decode”.
The bad and the Ugly of religion/spirituality: Giving control of your life to the wrong people.
Religion itself is not the problem, but some people will use it to abuse others. In Aurion, you can see an example when our heroes arrive in Isao's city and meet the false prophet who exploits the desperation of the citizens during an economic crisis.
This false prophet sees it as a business to make money, he explains that “hope” is a commodity that people want and that he offers. For him, people don’t want the truth if the truth is not “nice”, so he gives them what they ask (A B2C entrepreneur!).
Of course, our heroes will respond to that and fight him to stop the spiritual scam, but in real life, there are a lot of humans caught in vicious spiritual exploitation cycles.
I remember my grandmother speaking about couples who were broken when she was young because of the catholic versus protestant church competitions. It was a real thing 80 years ago. Some families were broken because of these inter church fights. Let’s not even talk about men enslaving women in a lot of places in the world because of religious justification.
The melody of possibilities
This is just a glimpse of our religious analysis in our universe that goes much further than that. We have built a whole cosmogony that goes back over 5,000 years.
In the PC game, there is a discussion of the griot ENIKI SOULEYRIS, who explains the origin of life in our universe, and how this is strangely linked to the heroes' quest, or the Aurion itself, which is ultimately a force that reacts only to the quest for who we are and to the relationship with the human soul.
That is to say, in our universe, religion/spirituality is more oriented towards the soul reaching its full potential than towards divinities and human prophets.
And somewhere along the line, as creators, we have the intuition and feeling that this focusing on the soul-sacred quest, is a path that, without being a guarantee or better than others, can perhaps inspire and help us stay connected to the sacred and divine within ourselves.
Aurion is an epic story about the challenge and struggle to stay a good and virtuous human in a cynical and selfish world. How do you believe in the light without being naïve and abused by the darkness?
Do not miss anything about our next epic adventures...
Come and experience the progress of the work in real time and also discuss with us on our Discord discussion forum with anime and video games fan like you.
Aurion is an awarded crossmedia Fantasy Universe with epic combats and one of the best story about changing the world.
Dive into the Aurionic Experience in our website and get 3 Volumes for Free 👇👇👇https://join.aurionverse.com/
