Mythopoesis and family cults
Mythopoesis involves describing and elaborating another world; the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia is merely the largest, most public, and most prestigious of these projects.[3] Almost every family in Mlejnas (other regions differ) has at least a cult of its ancestors and a mythopoetic tradition internal to itself; these are not to be shared with outsiders and, in fact, if you know enough about someone's family mythopoesis you can curse them. Married couples construct a private mythopoesis that is only shared with them and certain health specialists from magician lodges, which may diagnose problems with their children as stemming from mythopoetic errors - defects from inconsistencies, weaknesses from lack of elaboration, and of course curses from inappropriate sharing.
Each family also has a very large blanket representing every member as a section - newly expanded for children, cut off and the sewn into for husbands, and delicately cut off and used for garments in the Laughing House for the dead. (It is in fact individual disclosure from someone who is part of the family garment that allows mythopoetic curses; hearing it second-hand doesn't count. What's more, hearing it under duress doesn't count. However, even this kind of second-hand sharing is seen as highly socially inappropriate, very similar to how we would see the sharing of revenge porn.) Those who share family mythopoetry and expose the family to
curses are ritually expelled in highly emotional rituals - pelted with
dung, their section of the blanket cut off, never to be accepted in polite society again. (This may be how you became an adventurer.)
Magician lodges
Magician lodges are understood as a substitute family, and in fact when someone joins one, the lodge pays their family a dowry. Each magician lodge has its private mythopoesis, private rites, often has a private cult, and so on, which must not be shared with outsiders. (While sharing familiy mythopoetry results in shame and expulsion, revealing the secrets of a magician lodge typically results in being tortured to death and put on public display somewhere in the desert, your spirit warped into some kind of awful monster.) In Mlejnas, magicians are generally understood as so far outside the normal system of family life and reproduction that they are seen as being genderless regardless of anatomy, though many magician lodges have been implanted from elsewhere and have different ways of looking at this. (If you feel uncomfortable with your gender identity and/or role, you can probably find a magician lodge that more closely matches what you're looking for... but you can probably also get that through moving to the city of Mlej, where middle-aged people are mostly foreigners and have all kinds of conceptions. Joining a lodge means cutting all pre-existing ties, being subjected to far worse hazing than you're likely to get from your family for just about anything, and engaging in a variety of dangerous and dubious practices. Don't join unless you want spiritual limit experiences and/or power.)
Most magic-using classes are part of magician lodges, but not always - particularly skilled hronir-seekers may be diviners or illusionists, and disciplines like astrology, dowsing, and engineering are understood as difficult skills to master but ones that can be practiced by the general public. Mythopoetic curses can be practiced by anyone. There may also be weird stuff like the bacteria-drinkers.
"Civic" cults
The city of Mlej, like most major cities through Tlön, has a civic cult; these city cults are remarkably like sports fandoms in that (1) they have an anthropomorphic "mascot" figure at their center (2) they may be brought in to deal with athletic and other cultural events or contests (including lawsuits and diplomatic overtures) between other cities, as well as matters of formal civic events like the opening and closing of the senate, (3) they help organize the calendar, (4) they are the center of mass rallies and slogans at certain festivals.
The mascot of Mlej - who is also called Mlej - resembles an ichtyphallic, three-eyed cortical homunculus painted yellow and green, with long red and black hair that is woven into a bun in times of war and mourning and hangs loose otherwise. The Captain of the Senate (a position rotated between the matriarchs of the major families) marries him at the beginning of each year, and divorces him at the end at a humorous ceremony where each engage in staged bickering. (Prominent poets look with envy on the right to write these, which represents not only a display of wit but also one in which criticism of both the leadership of the city and city as a whole can be criticized - within, of course, certain limits.)
f.n.
[1] There is one arguable exception in the soteriological aspects of the the Sublime Philosophy. According to the Doctrine of Modal Realism, every possible world exists, according to the Doctrine of Counterfactuals of Freedom, transworld identity is established by being the sort of being who would act in such-and-such a way under such-and-such conditions. You will always be you and act in the way that you would, holding external conditions the same (after all, once we take away, that your internal character is all that's left.) Now, obviously, worlds full of good, kind, cooperative people are better places to be than ones full of inveterate jerks. But an inveterate jerk is likely to end up in a world only in proportion to how often inveterate jerks appear there. What this shakes out to is that there are an infinite variety of heavens and hells, of which Tlon (or Earth, and so on) is just one, and on average, the better version you are, the better the place you'll be reincarnated.
[2] You might ask if anyone has put these to an empirical test. Of course they have. While all acknowledge that the effects are probabilistic, researchers setting out to prove hronir have found it, while researchers subscribing to no-hronir Nine Coins Heresy have found evidence that this is all illusion. This itself is taken as excellent meta-evidence for the orthodox position, as is the difficulty of the later in accounting for printer glitches (see question 3), Earth isekai, and so on.
[3] Yes, this does mean that people can know about religious and political doctrines from "our" world; no, this does not mean they take them any more seriously as plausible methods of worship or organization than we would most fictional works, even if they take the project as a serious religious and cultural one. Isekai dream ghosts from Earth sometimes do appear and try to proselytize these, but the fact that these usually end up in miserable failure only reinforces that they're ridiculous. Of course, maybe your character sees things differently.)
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