SH: The Order
May. 20th, 2018 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
isamerryjubeyThe Order believes they are the "one true faith" and "one true religion", and that all other religions on planet Earth are deceptions and false lies. It is ambiguous if this is true, or if it is make-believe fantasy manifested by the ancient power of Silent Hill. It is also unknown how much of the Order's mythology and beliefs are actually rooted in truth, or merely man-made fabricated fantasies and fables used to brainwash its followers.
The Order has their own set of "holy" books and scriptures which they claim is the word of God, a sun deity often depicted as female. The Order believes these writings are "truth" and was "divinely inspired", using phrases such as "And God said...". Whether these books are truly "holy" remains unknown. Who wrote these scriptures and for what purpose is currently unknown. It is unknown if the writers of these "holy" books and scriptures truly believe in them, or simply wrote them in order to manipulate and control followers. They also have their own set of prayers.
The Sect of Valtiel, one of the branches of the Order, has forced children into reading these scriptures worshiping their sun God every Sunday. The continual indoctrination of children, who lack critical thinking skills and are unable to question and challenge the adults, is primarily how the Order continues to survive and operate over centuries in an unending cycle. They use their extensive influence, propaganda, manipulation, fear mongering and divine claims to entice members to join them.
The cult's seal is known as the Halo of the Sun and is often used or seen in the presence of cult members, particularly while conducting rituals. The Order is involved in esoteric occultism, black magic, dark art, arcane rituals, and blood sacrifices, among other things.
They are responsible for:
The deaths of several people who developed the town, the anti-drug mayor and his private investigator.
Protecting drug dealers in the town that sold PTV to tourists.
Kidnapping young girls for their ceremonies. These abducted girls were intended to be used as prospective surrogate mothers. It is possible they were eventually murdered afterward.
Alessa Gillespie's immolation and rise to power, as well as the subsequent attempts to contain it.
They ran the Wish House Orphanage and were responsible for Walter Sullivan's descent into madness. His murdering of almost 21 people became known worldwide as "the Walter Sullivan case".
The damnation of Shepherd's Glen (drowning/suffocating/dismembering/burying babies and children alive)
Creating multiple Books of Memories to imbue the writers with God's will.
Pyramid Head takes the form of an iconic figure of judgment and punishment of the Order's mythos, Valtiel. The creature itself even makes an appearance to follow Heather Mason (the reincarnation of Alessa) and the dormant god still sleeping in her womb.
When people refuse to convert to the Order, the cult often resorts to brainwashing, kidnapping, drug trafficking (like PTV), child abuse, acts of violence, torture, and even murder. The Order uses each method to achieve distinct objectives. Loyalty, discipline, and the rebuilding of their flock and faith requires many approaches to ensure that no one attempts to leave the cult. At the same time, the Order has certain goals to achieve in order to seek the path of the old ways as well as certain needs to fulfill. Without total control over the town and the people living within, the Order would be unable to achieve its true goals.
Some Order members threaten eternal damnation and use violence towards non-believers who question their religion, especially those whom they consider as pagans, heretics, sinners, blasphemers, and mockers. This extends to child abuse, such as the priests of Wish House who would beat children for questioning, among other parental figures within the organization.
However, not all of their members are necessarily antagonistic. Many of them are brainwashed, making them mentally and spiritually sick while occasionally also being twisted and depraved. Members such as Michael Kaufmann and Andrew DeSalvo have aided the Order, but choose not to be involved with the religious side of it. Some members, such as the Confessor, are treated sympathetically. As with a real cult, some members are not so much evil as they are born into the environment of a cult. While the Order itself can be considered evil, not all of the people within are as well. In truth, the Order genuinely believes that what they are doing will create a Paradise for what they believe is a corrupted humanity.
Other Order members fear certain members among them with special powers, which was possibly given to them because of their "great faith".
The Order seems to follow a philosophy of moral nihilism and moral relativism; they do not believe in the concepts of "good" and "evil", only chaos and order, and feel this justifies their ways. They believe in God, Paradise, sins, souls, Purgatory, and Hell. They also perform and believe in gyromancy.
The Order believes that humanity and society are corrupt, full of suffering and a lost cause and that they are among the elite "chosen people" to bring about a new world unstained by evil. Claudia believes that happy people are most often the cruelest and humanity has been contaminated by greedy and earthly material and base desires.
The Order appears to be Gnostic or Ascetic, which shuns the material physical world, instead embracing the spiritual world.
A memo in Silent Hill 4: The Room implies that the Order refuses to use the term "America" or "United States of America", and instead, simply and derogatorily call it the "Nation of Sin". This may imply they do not believe in the concepts of states and governments and embrace anarchism. By extension, this gives the possibility that they do not pledge allegiance to flags, or refuse to believe in the concepts and notions of militia, countries, nations, states or presidents and the like.
Another memo implies they believe humans are born in sin and "filth", and only by following their faith and "cleansing the flesh from their bodies" can they hope to become pure.
The Order worships the entities of the Otherworld of Silent Hill, which they believe house their faith's incarnation of God, which is often depicted by believers as a Caucasian orange-haired woman with red robes (or a male demon by opponents); it has been stated that this belief is the foundation for the whole cult. Their mythos has a wide variety of angels and gods (polytheism), as well as saints, including:
God: the Holy Mother, Creator of Paradise, Lord of Serpents and Reeds. Possibly also named Samael according to a note, but it is unknown if this is an actual name for the deity used by its worshipers or an insulting name given by opposers which are said to occur in a note
Valtiel: angel
Metatron: angel
Lobsel Vith: Yellow God
Xuchilbara: Red God
Nicholas: saint, a Doctor of God
Jennifer Carroll: saint (Unwavering Faith under Death's Blade)
Alessa Gillespie: saint, Holy Mother of God, Daughter of God
According to the Order's beliefs, humanity existed before God. Here, people knew only pain, war, despair, and hatred, and they were immortal. Seeking salvation from the world around him, a man offered a prayer and a serpent to the sun. A woman, offering prayer and a reed to the sun, asked for joy. Taking pity on a world consumed by sadness, the pleas of these two people breathed life into God, and from them, She was born.
The world, as it was then, had no understanding of linear time so the first thing God did was establish a linear, measurable time, separating it into night and day. After this, She outlined to humanity the road to salvation and gave the world joy. Since people weren't able to die, God took away their immortality. The reason for this was so people could know the freedom and release that comes from death.
Her next act was the creation of other deities and angels, those most notable among them being Lobsel Vith, the Yellow God, and Xuchilbara, the Red God. This was done so She would have help in leading humanity to follow Her in obedience. Her final gift to the world would be Paradise after Judgment Day.
With Her creation of the world completed, God set about creating a peaceful utopian place where people would be eternally happy with no pain, hunger, sickness, old age, greed, or war. With its creation, though, God's strength was used up and She collapsed. All the world's people grieved this unfortunate event, but with Her last breath, She promised She would come again. She is then said to have "returned to the dust". Since God was not lost, the world's people offered their prayers and did not forget their faith, waiting for the rebirth of God so that the golden gates of Paradise will open.
The Order's main goal, as many of its members state, is to usher in the apocalypse and deliver the faithful to Paradise. This Paradise means many different things to different members, but the goals remain the same; this is brought about in ways that vary from sect to sect. Some try to actively aid it while others simply prepare for the inevitable. The prevalent belief of the Order is that a true God can only know salvation and offer utopia via being born and exposed to an aura of madness and agony, hence their belief that the Otherworld is a just existence and the work of God.
The Order believes they will witness the second coming of God, who will cause the apocalypse by cleansing the entire world with pure fire, bringing mankind to extinction. Then after the judgment and atonement in Purgatory, God will make the final decision to send human souls to eternal damnation or to an eternity of bliss. Many of their beliefs are seen in the Prayer to God memo.
Vincent claims Claudia's desire for God is a product of her abusive dysfunctional childhood. The memories of her father's abusiveness and cruelty towards her are forever burned into Vincent's mind. Vincent claims that what Claudia, and possibly the Order, calls "faith", is nothing more but a child crying out for love, which is why some members like Claudia are lonesome.
As stated on several occasions, the Order does not believe in terms of "good" or "evil", only "chaos" and "order". Their ways are cruel and brutal, to ensure order remains in place. To ensure loyalty and discipline, many children under the Order's care are cruelly treated and disciplined harshly. Ironically, despite murder being one of the greatest sins in their faith, human life is essentially inconsequential to them, as evidenced by their willingness to sacrifice and kill to appease God.
Alessa Gillespie, Claudia Wolf, and Alex Shepherd were physically abused and punished by their parents, who are members of the Order, and they never loved their parents. It's possible they were punished because one of the sins in the Order's beliefs may be to "honor thy father and mother", which does not say anything about loving their parents. Because they believe in sins, the Order may believe in fighting not the sinner itself, but rather, the sin.
The Order is divided into several sects.
Sect of the Holy Woman:
This sect is centered around a high priestess named Dahlia Gillespie.
They believed in the resurrection of the god by impregnating a woman, who has concealed special powers, with the child god within her womb. However, Dahlia had attempted to hasten God's rebirth by using an immolation ritual which involved using her daughter Alessa as a sacrifice.
Later, it seems their belief system changed from "God will be resurrected via a womb" to "God will return to Earth one day and we must await Her coming faithfully", as evidenced in paintings in Silent Hill 3. They believe that once God has come, She will cause the apocalypse and usher the faithful to Paradise. Not all of their members are active in this, however, such as Vincent. Claudia believes that a God born from pain and hatred would thereby be more sympathetic.
Notable members of this sect include Dahlia Gillespie, Claudia Wolf, Vincent Smith, and Leonard Wolf.
Sect of the Holy Mother:
Members of the sect of the Holy Mother (not to be confused with Alessa Gillespie, known as the Holy Mother of God) used their self-run Wish House to raise a conjurer. They respected a giant stone called the Mother Stone (which the natives called Nakheehona), located in the Silent Hill Woods, as something sacred and as a holy entity. The natives used Nakheehona in their ceremonies for talking to dead ancestors (whether or not this actually worked is unknown). The name "Mother Stone" was given by the Order members and they used stones for their rituals.
They called the god "Holy Mother". This sect believed that the Holy Mother would be brought by a conjurer performing a ritual, possibly to descend the god into a sacred object (possibly Nakheehona).
They are slightly more pacifistic than the Sect of the Holy Woman, though their cruelty is still directly shown by their treatment of the orphans in their care, including a young Walter Sullivan. They also held a ritual for the resurrection of the dead, which James Sunderland may find in Silent Hill 2.
Members of this sect include Toby Archbolt and Walter Sullivan
Sect of Valtiel:
This sect is centered around the priest Jimmy Stone, who holds the alias "Red Devil". This sect would don red pointed hoods and act as executioners in honor of Valtiel, since they worshipped Valtiel as the one close to god and also an executioner.
The Sect of Valtiel was responsible for the intermediation of the Sect of the Holy Woman and the Sect of the Holy Mother, which were in opposition to each other.
Members of this sect include Jimmy Stone and George Rosten.
The Order's churches are decorated with stained glass windows, paintings, crosses, altars, bibles, baptismal fonts with holy water, confessional booths, and sirens that were used to alarm Order members of the Otherworld and to seek shelter in their churches.
However, underneath their churches and orphanages, there tend to be dark lairs where they torture, threaten, brainwash and kill both adults and children who will not conform to their views.
The Order has their own set of "holy" books and scriptures which they claim is the word of God, a sun deity often depicted as female. The Order believes these writings are "truth" and was "divinely inspired", using phrases such as "And God said...". Whether these books are truly "holy" remains unknown. Who wrote these scriptures and for what purpose is currently unknown. It is unknown if the writers of these "holy" books and scriptures truly believe in them, or simply wrote them in order to manipulate and control followers. They also have their own set of prayers.
The Sect of Valtiel, one of the branches of the Order, has forced children into reading these scriptures worshiping their sun God every Sunday. The continual indoctrination of children, who lack critical thinking skills and are unable to question and challenge the adults, is primarily how the Order continues to survive and operate over centuries in an unending cycle. They use their extensive influence, propaganda, manipulation, fear mongering and divine claims to entice members to join them.
The cult's seal is known as the Halo of the Sun and is often used or seen in the presence of cult members, particularly while conducting rituals. The Order is involved in esoteric occultism, black magic, dark art, arcane rituals, and blood sacrifices, among other things.
They are responsible for:
The deaths of several people who developed the town, the anti-drug mayor and his private investigator.
Protecting drug dealers in the town that sold PTV to tourists.
Kidnapping young girls for their ceremonies. These abducted girls were intended to be used as prospective surrogate mothers. It is possible they were eventually murdered afterward.
Alessa Gillespie's immolation and rise to power, as well as the subsequent attempts to contain it.
They ran the Wish House Orphanage and were responsible for Walter Sullivan's descent into madness. His murdering of almost 21 people became known worldwide as "the Walter Sullivan case".
The damnation of Shepherd's Glen (drowning/suffocating/dismembering/burying babies and children alive)
Creating multiple Books of Memories to imbue the writers with God's will.
Pyramid Head takes the form of an iconic figure of judgment and punishment of the Order's mythos, Valtiel. The creature itself even makes an appearance to follow Heather Mason (the reincarnation of Alessa) and the dormant god still sleeping in her womb.
When people refuse to convert to the Order, the cult often resorts to brainwashing, kidnapping, drug trafficking (like PTV), child abuse, acts of violence, torture, and even murder. The Order uses each method to achieve distinct objectives. Loyalty, discipline, and the rebuilding of their flock and faith requires many approaches to ensure that no one attempts to leave the cult. At the same time, the Order has certain goals to achieve in order to seek the path of the old ways as well as certain needs to fulfill. Without total control over the town and the people living within, the Order would be unable to achieve its true goals.
Some Order members threaten eternal damnation and use violence towards non-believers who question their religion, especially those whom they consider as pagans, heretics, sinners, blasphemers, and mockers. This extends to child abuse, such as the priests of Wish House who would beat children for questioning, among other parental figures within the organization.
However, not all of their members are necessarily antagonistic. Many of them are brainwashed, making them mentally and spiritually sick while occasionally also being twisted and depraved. Members such as Michael Kaufmann and Andrew DeSalvo have aided the Order, but choose not to be involved with the religious side of it. Some members, such as the Confessor, are treated sympathetically. As with a real cult, some members are not so much evil as they are born into the environment of a cult. While the Order itself can be considered evil, not all of the people within are as well. In truth, the Order genuinely believes that what they are doing will create a Paradise for what they believe is a corrupted humanity.
Other Order members fear certain members among them with special powers, which was possibly given to them because of their "great faith".
The Order seems to follow a philosophy of moral nihilism and moral relativism; they do not believe in the concepts of "good" and "evil", only chaos and order, and feel this justifies their ways. They believe in God, Paradise, sins, souls, Purgatory, and Hell. They also perform and believe in gyromancy.
The Order believes that humanity and society are corrupt, full of suffering and a lost cause and that they are among the elite "chosen people" to bring about a new world unstained by evil. Claudia believes that happy people are most often the cruelest and humanity has been contaminated by greedy and earthly material and base desires.
The Order appears to be Gnostic or Ascetic, which shuns the material physical world, instead embracing the spiritual world.
A memo in Silent Hill 4: The Room implies that the Order refuses to use the term "America" or "United States of America", and instead, simply and derogatorily call it the "Nation of Sin". This may imply they do not believe in the concepts of states and governments and embrace anarchism. By extension, this gives the possibility that they do not pledge allegiance to flags, or refuse to believe in the concepts and notions of militia, countries, nations, states or presidents and the like.
Another memo implies they believe humans are born in sin and "filth", and only by following their faith and "cleansing the flesh from their bodies" can they hope to become pure.
The Order worships the entities of the Otherworld of Silent Hill, which they believe house their faith's incarnation of God, which is often depicted by believers as a Caucasian orange-haired woman with red robes (or a male demon by opponents); it has been stated that this belief is the foundation for the whole cult. Their mythos has a wide variety of angels and gods (polytheism), as well as saints, including:
God: the Holy Mother, Creator of Paradise, Lord of Serpents and Reeds. Possibly also named Samael according to a note, but it is unknown if this is an actual name for the deity used by its worshipers or an insulting name given by opposers which are said to occur in a note
Valtiel: angel
Metatron: angel
Lobsel Vith: Yellow God
Xuchilbara: Red God
Nicholas: saint, a Doctor of God
Jennifer Carroll: saint (Unwavering Faith under Death's Blade)
Alessa Gillespie: saint, Holy Mother of God, Daughter of God
According to the Order's beliefs, humanity existed before God. Here, people knew only pain, war, despair, and hatred, and they were immortal. Seeking salvation from the world around him, a man offered a prayer and a serpent to the sun. A woman, offering prayer and a reed to the sun, asked for joy. Taking pity on a world consumed by sadness, the pleas of these two people breathed life into God, and from them, She was born.
The world, as it was then, had no understanding of linear time so the first thing God did was establish a linear, measurable time, separating it into night and day. After this, She outlined to humanity the road to salvation and gave the world joy. Since people weren't able to die, God took away their immortality. The reason for this was so people could know the freedom and release that comes from death.
Her next act was the creation of other deities and angels, those most notable among them being Lobsel Vith, the Yellow God, and Xuchilbara, the Red God. This was done so She would have help in leading humanity to follow Her in obedience. Her final gift to the world would be Paradise after Judgment Day.
With Her creation of the world completed, God set about creating a peaceful utopian place where people would be eternally happy with no pain, hunger, sickness, old age, greed, or war. With its creation, though, God's strength was used up and She collapsed. All the world's people grieved this unfortunate event, but with Her last breath, She promised She would come again. She is then said to have "returned to the dust". Since God was not lost, the world's people offered their prayers and did not forget their faith, waiting for the rebirth of God so that the golden gates of Paradise will open.
The Order's main goal, as many of its members state, is to usher in the apocalypse and deliver the faithful to Paradise. This Paradise means many different things to different members, but the goals remain the same; this is brought about in ways that vary from sect to sect. Some try to actively aid it while others simply prepare for the inevitable. The prevalent belief of the Order is that a true God can only know salvation and offer utopia via being born and exposed to an aura of madness and agony, hence their belief that the Otherworld is a just existence and the work of God.
The Order believes they will witness the second coming of God, who will cause the apocalypse by cleansing the entire world with pure fire, bringing mankind to extinction. Then after the judgment and atonement in Purgatory, God will make the final decision to send human souls to eternal damnation or to an eternity of bliss. Many of their beliefs are seen in the Prayer to God memo.
Vincent claims Claudia's desire for God is a product of her abusive dysfunctional childhood. The memories of her father's abusiveness and cruelty towards her are forever burned into Vincent's mind. Vincent claims that what Claudia, and possibly the Order, calls "faith", is nothing more but a child crying out for love, which is why some members like Claudia are lonesome.
As stated on several occasions, the Order does not believe in terms of "good" or "evil", only "chaos" and "order". Their ways are cruel and brutal, to ensure order remains in place. To ensure loyalty and discipline, many children under the Order's care are cruelly treated and disciplined harshly. Ironically, despite murder being one of the greatest sins in their faith, human life is essentially inconsequential to them, as evidenced by their willingness to sacrifice and kill to appease God.
Alessa Gillespie, Claudia Wolf, and Alex Shepherd were physically abused and punished by their parents, who are members of the Order, and they never loved their parents. It's possible they were punished because one of the sins in the Order's beliefs may be to "honor thy father and mother", which does not say anything about loving their parents. Because they believe in sins, the Order may believe in fighting not the sinner itself, but rather, the sin.
The Order is divided into several sects.
Sect of the Holy Woman:
This sect is centered around a high priestess named Dahlia Gillespie.
They believed in the resurrection of the god by impregnating a woman, who has concealed special powers, with the child god within her womb. However, Dahlia had attempted to hasten God's rebirth by using an immolation ritual which involved using her daughter Alessa as a sacrifice.
Later, it seems their belief system changed from "God will be resurrected via a womb" to "God will return to Earth one day and we must await Her coming faithfully", as evidenced in paintings in Silent Hill 3. They believe that once God has come, She will cause the apocalypse and usher the faithful to Paradise. Not all of their members are active in this, however, such as Vincent. Claudia believes that a God born from pain and hatred would thereby be more sympathetic.
Notable members of this sect include Dahlia Gillespie, Claudia Wolf, Vincent Smith, and Leonard Wolf.
Sect of the Holy Mother:
Members of the sect of the Holy Mother (not to be confused with Alessa Gillespie, known as the Holy Mother of God) used their self-run Wish House to raise a conjurer. They respected a giant stone called the Mother Stone (which the natives called Nakheehona), located in the Silent Hill Woods, as something sacred and as a holy entity. The natives used Nakheehona in their ceremonies for talking to dead ancestors (whether or not this actually worked is unknown). The name "Mother Stone" was given by the Order members and they used stones for their rituals.
They called the god "Holy Mother". This sect believed that the Holy Mother would be brought by a conjurer performing a ritual, possibly to descend the god into a sacred object (possibly Nakheehona).
They are slightly more pacifistic than the Sect of the Holy Woman, though their cruelty is still directly shown by their treatment of the orphans in their care, including a young Walter Sullivan. They also held a ritual for the resurrection of the dead, which James Sunderland may find in Silent Hill 2.
Members of this sect include Toby Archbolt and Walter Sullivan
Sect of Valtiel:
This sect is centered around the priest Jimmy Stone, who holds the alias "Red Devil". This sect would don red pointed hoods and act as executioners in honor of Valtiel, since they worshipped Valtiel as the one close to god and also an executioner.
The Sect of Valtiel was responsible for the intermediation of the Sect of the Holy Woman and the Sect of the Holy Mother, which were in opposition to each other.
Members of this sect include Jimmy Stone and George Rosten.
The Order's churches are decorated with stained glass windows, paintings, crosses, altars, bibles, baptismal fonts with holy water, confessional booths, and sirens that were used to alarm Order members of the Otherworld and to seek shelter in their churches.
However, underneath their churches and orphanages, there tend to be dark lairs where they torture, threaten, brainwash and kill both adults and children who will not conform to their views.