It is easy to become a lay member of the Seven Mothers. Just tell the priestess of your desire to join. The new member’s name is then entered on the Paper Lists, and kept there until the next Full Moon, when they are burned, and the lay member must rejoin. Lay members may request that their names be inscribed in the Wood Lists, whey they are kept for five years.
To be initiated in the cult requires that you must have been lay members for a year. You get quizzed on about the basics of the religion, on your attitudes, expectations, and intentions. If you pass this questioning, you get accepted as an initiate of the Seven Mothers.
Sacrifice that point of POW and gain that Rune Point!
And so it is REALLY easy to be a lay member.
How many people leave their cult to join the Seven Mothers? Is that the question?
The Seven Mothers primary function is to prepare people for the Red Goddess. Most of the cult’s activities are in the Heartlands, and always have been.
In occupied Sartar, probably two-thirds of the 21,000 initiates of Lunar cults were from the army, the provinces, or the Heartlands, leaving about 7,000 local cultists. As of 1627, there are perhaps 5,500 Seven Mothers initiates in Sartar, the vast majority of them native Sartarites.
About 2/5ths of those are in Boldhome or Alda-Chur.
In most cases they joined, because the Seven Mothers offered them something that Orlanth, Ernalda, or the other Lightbringers did not.
Sometimes it was because you wanted to ingratiate yourself with the Lunar occupiers, but also poets, artists, visionaries, dreamers, or free thinkers who found the Lunar way liberating or resonant.
There is no one reason why people decide to initiate into the mysteries of the Seven Mothers.
