Hundred Gods Heresy
The Hundred Gods Heresy is not a single faith or organized religion, but rather an Immaculate catch-all term for an assortment of different cults, religious institutions, sects, and traditions found in every corner of Creation.
Strictly speaking, it refers to a system whereby mortals provide prayer to specific gods or elementals in exchange for favours or services, rather than the Immaculate practice of a carefully-allocated calendar of prayer as thanks to gods for fulfilling their duties. Such a heresy corrupts gods by causing them to forget the duties they are meant to fulfill... this in turn, speak Immaculate firebrands, threatens the very survival of Creation, and inflicts terrible suffering on the very people whose prayers to such gods are its cause. It also corrupts mortals, leading them to fail in their duty of supporting the proper functioning of the Celestial Bureaucracy through proper prayer, and to falter on the path to enlightenment.
Immaculate histories tie the Anathema to the attitudes supported by such heresies, mortals who cease to grant proper worship to the Incarnae slipping ever further until they selfishly steal the power of the gods for their own vile ends. They speak that the great tragedies of more recent history, the Great Contagion and the Fair Folk Invasion that followed it rendered possible by mortals and gods alike failing to live by the principles the Immaculate Order upholds, falling to corruption until their ignoring of duty allowed such great evils to force their way into Creation from the horrors of the Wyld. Naturally, many gods and mortals involved in such corruption argue that it is a wholly appropriate relationship, or that it is not as terrible a thing as the itinerants from the Palace Sublime seek to claim, with alternate theories on the causes of Creation's greatest disasters.
As a pejorative term, many Immaculates, and even more laypeople (both Immaculate and not), tend to lump all non-Immaculate faiths and non-calendar prayer under the parasol of the Hundred Gods Heresy: worship of the Exalted, Ancestor Cults, Yozi Cults, village hedge-faiths praying to local shamans, salvation faiths such as the Cult of the Illuminated, even though a strict student of the Immaculate Texts knows each of those heresies is wrong for entirely unique reasons. Some Immaculate theologians are particularly vehement in fighting this lumping tendency within the Order, feeling that it gives the impression the Immaculate Order struggles against a grand competing religion, rather than being a monolith of truth grinding down a thousand different pebbles of heresy.
Amongst non-Immaculate faiths, most do not accept the term Hundred Gods Heresy, use of which is likelty to elicit confusion or offense. A few however wear it as a point of pride, the 'Faith of a Hundred Gods' which stands against the oppression of the Dragonblooded and their Immaculate oppression.
