The Lunar Heartlands are home to almost 5.4 million humans. This is the center of Lunar culture and the Lunar religion, a fact made omnipresent by the presence of the Red Moon looming over the Crater.The largest cult in the Lunar Heartlands is, not surprisingly, the Seven Mothers. If we combine their worship collectively and individually, we come up with a grand total of an amazing 850k cultists. That easily makes the Seven Mothers one of the largest cults in Glorantha, and one of the Big Three in Central Generela. Not bad for a desperate cabal of heroquesters!
After the Seven Mothers, the largest cults in the Heartlands with over 100k cultists each are:
- Lodril 500k
- Oria 350k
- Dendara 170k
- Oslira 165K
- Yelm 150k
- Hon-eel 135k
- Surenslib 115k
Now that last one is a bit surprising – that’s the ancestress of the Darjiini, and is a rather big cult. She didn’t make the cut in the Cults Book despite her size because her influence is totally localized and she’s not really of cosmological importance outside of Darjiin and Doblian. We can think of Yelm + Lodril + Oria + Dendara + Oslira as being the backbone of the old Dara Happan civilization before the Red Goddess. But the Seven Mothers have now definitely eclipsed the old Solar Pantheon. They are still there, but more in the background. With the Red Emperor recognized as the avatar of Yelm Imperator, the old gods of Peloria now serve the Red Goddess.
Are the individual cults of the Seven Mothers counted together more numerous than the Seven Mothers as a collective? you are far more likely to see the individual cults in the Heartlands than the Provinces, but as to the specific breakdowns that’s not what I want to get at in this post. That being said, the collective version of the Seven Mothers is likely more popular in the Heartlands than any individual Seven Mother, and possible more than all the individual cults combined.
And when we add the Lunar Provinces and the Western Reaches we easily get above 1 million members (probably above 1.1 million). So that is one BIG cult.
What would the numbers of cultists of the Red Goddess proper be like? Probably somewhere in the total of 8000 initiates. If we say that there is 1.1 million Seven Mothers members, plus another 500k or so other qualified cults, then maybe half a percent are Red Goddess initiates.
There are a LOT of smaller cults in the Lunar Empire. But with 3.5 million adults, I think you’ll find that those listed cults are almost 70% of the adult population.