Temple



The Temple (神殿, shinden) is both a place of religious worship and the sole religious institution in Yurgenschmidt.

The people of Yurgenschmidt worship a pantheon of gods, with religious ceremonies held throughout the year as a cornerstone of daily life. Each duchy has a single dedicated temple building located in its capital city. In the Duchy of Ehrenfest, the temple is located in the city of Ehrenfest.

In Ehrenfest, the Temple is located on the border between the Noble's Quarter and the lower city, where commoners reside. Nobles enter and exit through the main gate in the north, which can only be opened using mana. Meanwhile, commoners enter and exit through the back gate in the south.

The vast majority of priests live on the temple grounds throughout most of the year and only leave when they are required to handle religious ceremonies in provinces around the Duchy, such as Spring Prayer or the Harvest Festival.

Most of the day-to-day work of the Temple is done in the larger administrative building, located just north of the chapel and orphanage. It has three entrances, one leading to the Noble's Gate in the north, one front entrance to the east, and one set of doors leading to the chapel in the south. There is also a stairway used by temple attendants.

Blue priests and shrine maidens reside on the second and third floors of the administrative building. Their attendants typically use rooms on the first floor, so they can be available promptly when needed.

Generally this area is referred to as "the noble section". Unbaptized grey robes are strictly forbidden from entering this area.

In addition to a variety of atria, meeting rooms, and waiting rooms, the administrative building contains:


 * The High Bishop's chambers.
 * The High Priest's chambers.
 * The temple book room.
 * The ceremonial hall where the Dedication Ritual is held during the winter.

Despite the name, the book room of Ehrenfest's temple stores primarily wooden boards and scrolls, with only few actual books being present. What books are there, are primarily of a religious nature, like a variety of translations of the bible. The most valuable books are chained to reading desks in the middle of the room, while the others are stored in the shelves. Apart from storing material meant to be read, the book room also serves as an archive, in which old reports and budgets and such are kept, which makes up the majority of the scrolls and wooden boards.

To prevent the valuable books and sensitive information to be accessed by unauthorized people, the entrance of the book room is secured by a magical barrier, that acts like an invisible wall to anyone who isn't registered as a priest or shrine maiden of the temple, while letting authorized people to pass through it completely unimpeded.

Like most book rooms and libraries in Yurgenschmidt, it also contains a small statue of the Goddess of Wisdom, Mestionora.

All public religious ceremonies in Ehrenfest are held in the Temple's chapel, which has an altar and a dais where the High Bishop stands during ceremonies. There are no pews or seating - attendees are expected to stand. Behind the altar, statues of the Supreme Gods and the Eternal Five are carved out of white stone.

The chapel building is also home to the repentance chamber. Because violence and corporal punishment are forbidden in the Temple, priests and shrine maidens are sent to reflect on their actions in the unadorned chamber. Additionally, the orphanage is adjacent to the main chapel.

During ceremonies entry is strictly prohibited to anyone not being part of it. Not even guard knights are allowed to accompany their lords or ladies inside.

See Orphanage

With the temple increasingly becoming a place to connect nobles and commoner merchants, an additional parlor room was added for exactly such meetings, seeing it as more convenient than always using the orphanage director's chambers. It is located near the front gate and currently outfitted with the furniture that used to belong to the previous High Bishop Bezewanst, which had been gathering dust in a storeroom, after his family refused to claim it and none of the blue priests dared to take any for fear of political ramifications.

Male and female living quarters are separated onto different levels of the building. There are also different stairways for men and woman.

Within each level the rooms are of different sizes intended to fit the status of the family of the priest or shrine maiden in question. Like the noble's quarter of the city itself, these rooms are organized with the biggest ones for the highest status archnoble family members to the north, closest to the noble's quarter and the smaller, low status places in the south of the building. It is noteworthy however that the room a blue robe is assigned is not necessarily dependent on their family status, but on the funding their family provides. As such it is possible that a blue robe has to live "blow their status" if their family isn't willing to provide the necessary funds for the bigger quarters.

The Temple has a large ice house, kept cold using magic, which it uses to store perishable food such as milk. It is typically used only by attendants and those who prepare food. Water is drawn from a well located outside, near the chapel.

Unlike the rest of the Noble's Quarter, the Temple does not have toilets in all living quarters. Instead, the priests and shrine maidens use chamber pots, which are emptied in a communal disposal area that uses a toilet slime to destroy the waste.

The High Bishop's and the orphanage director's chambers are fitted with individual sanitary facilities, but it is unclear whether this extends to the rooms for all blue priests.

The people of the Temple are educated to be compliant and quiet. Everyone, even the commoner gray priests and shrine maidens, are educated in the manners and etiquette of the nobility.

At the Temple, it is tradition for everyone - from the lowest grey robe to the High Bishop him or herself - to speak a short prayer to the gods before every meal: “O mighty King and Queen of the endless skies who doth grace us with thousands upon thousands of lives to consume, O mighty Eternal Five who rule the mortal realm, I offer thanks and prayers to thee, and do take part in the meal so graciously provided.”

see Temple Hierarchy

"Divine gifts" (神の恵み, kami no megumi) refers to the Temple's system for distributing resources among the clergy. Blue priests are expected to provide their attendants with the "divine gifts" of food, clothing, shelter, and other essential supplies, such as soap.

Food distribution follows a strict protocol. Blue priests eat first and cover costs related to the food (purchasing ingredients, hiring chefs). Any leftovers from their meal are then passed to their attendants, and then the leftovers from that meal are served to the grey priests in the orphanage. Finally, any remaining food is provided to the unbaptized orphans.

Due to the sudden outflow of clergy at the Ehrenfest Temple, there was much less food prepared for blue priests. As a result, both grey priests and those in the orphanage suffered from having very little to eat.

Harvest Festival. The Temple receives funding from the Duchy as a proportion of the taxes collected during the Harvest Festival. A portion of the tithe goes to the blue priest who performs the ceremony, and the remainder goes to support the general operation of the Temple. Consequently, performing the Harvest Festival in prosperous provinces is a highly sought-after position.

Donations. Money donated to the Temple as a gesture of goodwill (such as the ten small golds donated by Myne as a condition of becoming an apprentice blue shrine maiden) is added to the temple budget. It is first used to provide for operational expenses, and the remainder is then allocated by the High Bishop among the blue priests and shrine maidens.


 * At the Ehrenfest Temple under Bezewanst, the largest share of donations went to himself, and the remainder was given to blue priests and shrine maidens who earned his favor.
 * Under Rozemyne, the division was standardized. Although she wanted to give everyone an equal share, she eventually compromised with Ferdinand to give 25% to the High Bishop, 25% to the High Priest, and the remainder split evenly across the blue priests. She later revises this system to provide extra compensation to blue priests who assist Ferdinand with his administrative duties and paperwork.

Workshop Revenue. (Ehrenfest only.) After Myne becomes an apprentice blue shrine maiden, 10% of the profits made by her workshop are donated to the Temple. When the orphanage workshop is established, the revenue from it is also used to provide funding to the Temple.

Private Income. Blue priests and shrine maidens generally have some financial support from their noble families. Additionally, they can secure further revenue by performing religious services (such as a baptism) at a noble's estate. Higher-ranking priests and shrine maidens — such as the High Bishop or High Priest — are in high demand due to the added prestige. However, their services are also proportionally more expensive.

On the Temple's accounting ledgers, a variety of terms is used to refer to different forms of income and expenses :


 * Divine will. As an expense, it indicates compensation paid to the High Bishop and blue robes. On the income sheets, it refers to the budget received from the archduke.
 * Offerings to the gods. This comprises ceremonial expenses such as flowers, incense, and cloth.
 * Flowers for the gods. This refers to clothing and fashion expenses for flower-offering (concubine) grey shrine maidens. This was originally factored in as the cost of preparing the Temple for noble visitors.
 * Water for the gods. This refers to hosting fees, such as wine and feasts for visiting nobles.
 * Divine compassion. This refers to the expenses of maintaining the orphanage and purchasing supplies.
 * Gift from the gods. This indicates any source of revenue that doesn't come from the archduke's budget. Different sources of income are then differentiated using descriptions like "Gift from X".

As a security measure to prevent any futher harm of coming to Lady Rozemyne while she is asleep in the jureve, entry to the temple was severely restricted following the attack on her and Lady Charlotte. Not even family members of blue priests were allowed entry.

In the winter of Rozemyne's third year at the Royal Academy, Aub Ehrenfest enacts a purge of the former Veronica factions. Thanks to Rozemyne's compassion, it is decided that the children too young to swear their names to the archducal family will not be executed with their parents, but rather taken in at the temple to be raised and educated roughly equivalent to a mednoble. They will also get a chance to earn a place as true nobles if they excel there.

The purge also affects the blue priests. While none of them have been found guilty, and thus have been spared the death penalty with their families, their financial support gone, and they can no longer remain in their current position and thus are imprisoned in the castle, until Ehrenfest's leaders can decide what to do with them. Since they did not commit any crimes, their temple attendants were also not punished. They were all given the choice to either stay with their master and accompany them to their imprisonment, or return to the orphanage. They all take the latter choice.

This influx of priests and shrine maidens comes as something of a blessing to the few people assigned to care for the children, since in the few days between their return and the arrival of all the new children, they were quite overworked and got far too little sleep. With more personnel available, the duties can be better spread out, drastically reducing the strain on each individual grey robe.

Of the newly arrived children, ten are old enough to accompany the other orphans to forage in the forest and gather parue.

After the purge of the former Veronica faction, the already low number of blue adult robes went down to just seven blue priests.

To address this shortage of manpower and mana, Rozemyne intends to have the apprentice blues participate in spring prayers and harvest festivals. Apart from the advantages for the temple and the duchy as a whole, this will also be of advantage to the apprentices themselves, since as participants in the ceremonies, they will also get a cut of the tithes, which is very welcome for those who no longer have any family to support them and who need to live entirely off of the subsidiaries from the castle.

Furthermore she plans to have them observe ceremonies for commoners in the temple's chapel, so they can witness them, before they are expected to perform them in upcoming autumn and spring, even though traditionally apprentices are forbidden from entering the chapel for any ceremony other than their own baptism, prior to coming of age.

Situated in the Sovereignty, the Sovereign Temple is the center of power of the local religion, from where the Sovereign High Bishop rules over all the temples in the duchies. Traditionally they also poach the most mana-rich priests from the temples of the duchies.

In the beginning of the country, the fonder of the country occupied both the positions of King and head of the religion. However a Zent of a later generation split the religious side off and assigned one of his sons to the newly founded position of Sovereign High Bishop. At some unknown point in time, the tradition to assigns a member of the royal family to the position was abandoned, which very likely contributed greatly to the decline of reputation, power and influence the Temples suffered over the centuries, to the point were in modern days, they are seen as a place to put unwanted children into.

Upon the ascension of Zent Trauerqual to the throne, despite not having a Grutrissheit, relations between the crown and the church deteriorated drastically and the movement of the Biblical Fundamentalists arose, espousing that nobody, not even the Zent, was above the teachings of the gods, as put down in the bible.

Following the insights that the joint research project of Ehrenfest and Dunkelfelger into the importance of Religious Ceremonies and their connection with the chances to obtain divine protections from the gods brought to public attention, the Sovereign High Priest Immanuel, began a push to have his superior Relichion replaced with a mana-rich noble - preferably Lady Rozemyne, Ehrenfest's acting High Bishop.

This split the Sovereign Temple into two factions. Immanuel's faction seeks to exploit nobles to bring the temples back to their old glory. The opposing faction, rallying behind the Sovereign High Bishop is concerned about nobles using this to steal the last duties and prestige still remaining to the Sovereign Temple away for themselves.


 * In the anime, the temple building is referred to as the "cathedral," and the temple as a religious institution is called the "church."