Dwarven Religious Practice

Dwarven religion centers around the obligations and responsibilities of dwarves to Bahrazel, and the rights and privileges granted by the Bahrazel in return. To many outsiders, dwarven religion often appears strange, or even to be not really a religion at all. Unlike most religious humans, dwarves are usually not particularly prayer or ritual oriented, and few dwarves have any kind of personal relationship with any of the Bahrazel. Nonetheless, the relationship between dwarves and the Bahrazel is the foundation of dwarven society and power. As the dwarves might say, the Bahrazel are like the mountains: you depend on them, they are the foundation of your society and wealth, but you generally can’t, and don’t, expect any kind of personal relationship with them.

Obligations and Favors

The main idea and guiding principle of dwarven religion is based around set of obligations and debts in exchange for power and favors.

The most fundamental of these obligations is the blessing of the naming rite, when a young dwarf becomes part of the dwarven community and accepts the obligations owed the Bahrazel. In return, the young dwarf gains the connection that sustains dwarven racial magic. Dwarves who never complete the ritual are seen as variously traitors and deserters, or, more benignly, non-citizens or even non-dwarves. And abandoning your clan, thuhr, and obligations to the Bahrazel after the ritual is a much greater crime than simply never making the exchange in the first place. 

The obligations that flow from this exchange are centered around accepting one’s role in dwarven society, and one’s obligations to one’s fellow dwarves, that all dwarves must have enough before any dwarf has an excess. The supposed reputation for greed of dwarves is largely imposed outsiders who don’t understand the culture.

Beyond the basic obligations to dwarven society that flow from the divine grant of runic magic at the blessing of the naming rite, the other common obligation that dwarves bear arises from the granting of a miracle of divine intervention. Such miracles, though rare, are not unheard of. However, those who are granted such miracles incur a debt to the Bahrazel, that must eventually be paid. Because of this, prayers often seen as dangerous, in a way. The Bahrazel might grant your prayer, but if they do they have power over you. And they can yank you out of your life to serve their purposes. So prayer is what you do when you are truly desperate. 

This sense of obligation and debt in exchange for the favor and power of the Bahrazel often, although not always, leads those who wield divine magic to a relationship with the Bahrazel that may seem akin to the relationship between a knight and their lord.

Rites and Rituals

For most dwarves, the Bahrazel are ever-present, even in the absence of particular prayers, rites, and rituals. The Bahrazel are the source of dwarven runic magic, which most dwarves can perform to some degree, and in this way they are a constant presence in dwarven lives. Many dwarves see the Baharzel as the kind of glue that holds everything together, that in some sense enforce the debts of honor and obligation that hold dwarven society together. But, as the dwarves might say, you don’t really worship glue.

There are, therefore, very few dwarven holidays that are explicitly religious in nature – dwarven societies are much more prone to celebrate their past than the Bahrazel directly, and commenoration of the heroes of past wars are common.

That said, ceremonies around birth, death, and especially the transition to adulthood do have explicitly religious elements. The ceremony of name-taking, marking the transition from a child to an adult, is a deeply personal, private religious quest, where a young dwarf finds the Heart of the Mountain, the home of the Bahrazel, and is granted their name, thuhr, and runic magic in exchange for accepting the obligations of dwarven society.