Rastram Kanaqa

Themes: Imperial India, solarpunk, glass & gold, Sanskrit language

• "The Golden Empire" made up of six of the nine planets of the system, though they control all nine (the other three are a colony world, a penal world, and an uninhabited protectorate).
• Advanced civilization that produces and uses most of the thevaqan in the Four Suns.
• Once a solar theocracy, their culture has long since separated its thevaqan-technologies from its religious orders, forming the Suryavarna faith, and the Sunwrights, the engineers who craft thevaqan into useful ships and tools.

Cultural Mores

• Favor androgynous appearance. Garments are culturally unisex.
• Men tend to wear their hair long, and if they grow beards at all, they are close-shorn; "longbeard" is a term denoting savagery, barbarism, or even insanity.
• Women occasionally have long hair, but most often wear it cut short or even shorn completely.
• Rastramal opinions on nudity are not shame-based; the body is considered a gift to oneself and those whom one is intimate, and showing it to others without their consent is a violation.
  • The breasts, however, are not considered nudity - only genitals are. It is not uncommon for women's fashions to artfully bare a breast, or for women to strip down to the waist while working.

Religion

Suryavarna

• Main holy text is the Ravimarga, which uses the metaphor of the lemniscate solar winds to describe the Path To Brilliance, the inevitable spiritual path of spiritual fulfillment.
• Its central tenets are solar in themed: light is goodness, from light comes love, and from love comes life - a progression referred to as the Three Suns (the Sun-in-Sky, the Sun-in-Breast, and the Sun-in-Union)
• Teaches ascetic practices to be done in sunlight, including prostrations (yoga-like body limbering performed at midday), fasting during the day and the wearing of thevala (henna-like paint made from the leavings of qamani that heats up to quite hot temperatures in direct sunlight, providing a low level of burn)
• Adherents never wear hats or other head-coverings
• Spirit Pyres: Injected with a substance that causes the skin to ignite and burn away the body entirely, leaving behind a weird statue of golden glass. Fate of all "sainted" folk in the solar religion, including all Emanations.