The people have Cru’un have been conquered countless times throughout their history, and only fairly recently in world history have they had their own independence as a people. This history of conquest and re-conquest has seen many gods come and go, their worship following the people who gain and lose control of the island. This constant change in religion has instilled in the Cru’unish people an overall lack of faith, not in any particular god or gods, but in the idea of gods to begin. If there were gods, why were their followers constantly losing to followers of other gods? How could Cru’un’s own gods not even manage to protect its people from foreign invaders? Thoughts like these eroded the peoples’ faith over time, and instead their focus shifted.
The one thing that the Cru’unish people could always count on was not a god, or any cosmic being, but magic. The people who managed to thrive during occupation had always been mages, and it was their strong culture of magic use that earned their ultimate freedom. Their current place as a leader in world magical knowledge has only furthered to cement Cru’un as a culture of magic and mages. It completely permeates society, and so out of this omni-presence of magic developed the worship of magic itself.
The people of Cru’un, or at least the vast majority of natives and virtual all of its magic-users, believe that there are no gods, only a constantly shifting pool of magic energy that inhabits the planet like air, though not physical in nature. They believe all supernatural phenomena can be explained simply by anomalies and shifts in this energy pool, sometimes in conjunction with interference by sentient races or effects of nature.
Some believe that the pool of magic – the Aether, as some refer to it – is somewhat sentient, and can be influenced in the same way that someone may beckon a god for assistance or preferential treatment. Such mages believe that certain rituals can ‘draw’ the Aether, increasing its concentration in a given area, and thus increasing the potency of magical effects in that area. Others reject the notion that people can affect the Aether, and that such rituals are merely allowing their caster to harness more of the energy that is already present than what they might be able to harness under normal circumstances.
Despite these, and various other, differences in specific believes, all who worship the magical energy of the world agree that it is the single power governing all magical effects in the world, ‘divine’ or otherwise. Likewise, they believe that the amount of energy present in a given area has direct influence on the natural order of that area, such as causing the creation and mutation of powerful creatures, causing drastic weather effects that fall outside of the norm for an area, and anything else that is generally attributed to magic or to gods.