New religion: Therennial Cycle

[Superfluous Crow]

Hey guys
It's been a while since i've posted anything on the forum, mainly because i had quite a writer's block as far as my campaign world went, but now i'm back in the game, and here is one of the things i'm working on.

This is one of the two main religions in my setting, and the idea is that this is the older, already well-established religion which is fighting against the new popular one (which i won't deal with in this post; maybe a later one). It should be said that the gods of my campaign aren't especially active (unless you ask the believers of course), and that there is no proof of their existence or planar homes. Basically, religion works pretty much like in our world.
The religion is called the Therennial Cycle. I have no good explanation for the first word; i just needed something that sounded good with cycle, so any ideas would be appreciated. The religion does have something in common with cycles though, seeing that it's based on the seasonal cycle, with four gods, each connected to a season. The idea is, that this religion was formerly a pagan farmer religion, with divine creatures the farmers could pray to for good harvests. The religion though, evolved with the society around it, and as cities were constructed, it's inhabitants turned their  minds to more esoteric questions, and the religion was there to provide the answers. So now, the religion is not only a religion for farmers, but also for citizens, soldiers, craftsmen, philosophers and nobles, providing them with answers and solace. Its four main gods are androgynous beings of immense power, though their dominion only extends to their own domains. The myths never detail the lives of the gods, but only their interactions with mortals, and therefore the gods remain more or less enigmatic. In any way, the gods are fickle; they don't follow the rules of mortal men, and salvations lies in appeasing their temperamental nature. If i were to describe this religion by comparisons, this would be a type of dark polytheistic Christianity with a twist of paganism.

 The gods:
The four main gods are the only real gods in the pantheon. The 'others' are aspects of one of the gods, as he is envisioned when taking care of a specific domain, or simply lesser, more or less unimportant, demigods with small or limited domains or jobs (e.g. angels or Valkyries in Christianity and Norse mythology). Anyway, only the four main gods will be detailed here. As said before, each god is keyed to a season, but though this should be noticeable if you look for it, they are not seasonal gods anymore, and the focus should be on the things they stand for, not the seasons they represented. The gods have both good and bad sides, and are as malevolent as they are benevolent, and generally don't care that much about humanity unless they are given reason to do so.

MEILOS
Meilos is the most fickle of all the gods. It is the god of passion and change; of future and opportunities. It governs the beginnings of new cycles, and is therefore the god of births and sowing. It is also the god of chance, and controls gambling, the weather, and natural catastrophes. Being the god of passion firstly, it is just as much the god of love as it is the god of anger. It is also associated with madness. It is often depicted as a beautiful human with blank white eyes, windswept long hair, a sly smile, and a bow of living wood and vines with a thunderbolt as an arrow. Sometimes it is also depicted as storms, waves, tornadoes and the like.

SARARKEN
Sararken is the strictest of the gods; it is the arbiter and the judge, who strikes against those who dare oppose him. It's is the god who takes most interest in mortals, and it was the one who gave them civilization and strength to conquer. It is both the protector of all believers and the destroyer of all who oppose them. It is mainly a god of laws and war, bringing justice to citizens and soldiers alike. It's depicted as a soldier in splendid golden plate armor.

ESHMEL
Eshmel is the god of consequences and endings. It is the god of rewards and punishments. Mostly revered at harvests, it is also a merchant god, a god of history and the past, and the god of age and decay. It also marks the people who are to travel to the Winter Kingdom (die), something that is referred to as 'receiving the mark of Fall' (or if a person is doomed it is just said to have the mark of Fall. It is most often depicted as a tall, thin man with pale flesh, or a man or a cloak composed of fallen leaves.

ORORON
Though all the gods are enigmatic, the most enigmatic of them all is Ororon. It is the lord of death and the afterlife; the world beyond and all the mysticism it entails. It is also a god often associated with knowledge, since it according to legend carries a book detailing the lives of mortals. This also makes him a god of magic and the occult, in that it is the keeper of that forbidden knowledge. In legends, it is often stoic and cynical, showing little or no emotion. When depicted in temples, or described in the few legends in which it appears, it is either a somber aged man with grey robes, a long grey beard and a thick leatherbound tome under his arm, or a creature of shadows with long slender clawed arms that steals the lives of mortals.

I have also based a few expression on this religion:
If Eshmel serves me well/If Eshmel doesn't deceive me: If memory serves me well
The mark of Fall: The mark of fall is the mark given by Eshmel to those who are to die. It can be used both as a threat, or to say that a man is going to die. Can also be used to describe a very unlucky person.
Ororon's Embrace: Death.
The Winter Kingdom: The afterlife
Meilos favor me! : said before random events, like coin tosses, so as to give you good luck
Only Ororon knows'¦ : used either to tell people that you don't know something, or to emphasize how unbelievable something is (Only Ororon knows why you'd do something so stupid/Only Ororon knows how they built a city so great)
Through Ororon's eyes I saw: in my dreams I saw/ I dreamt that
Sararken watches: Partly an expression for wishing for good luck, and partly a warning not to do anything illegal/dishonourable. Also sometimes used to seal deals.

I'm probably going to write something on the structure of the church too, sometime, but for now, just imagine it to be somewhat like christianity with an ecclesiastical hierarchy and large stone churches and cathedrals (just with four shrines). They don't perform human sacrifices, but they do perform sacrifices in general, mostly animals and food.

My issues with this: First, the names. I'd like some of the names to be based around the words for the seasons in other languages, but generally, i suck at that kind of research, so if anybody knows some good foreign words for winter, summer, spring, autumn, and season, please do tell. Also, i don't like how Sararken works at the moment; he isn't really dark enough, and he seems somewhat flat. Other than that, any and all ideas are appreciated, and constructive criticism is of course welcome.

Other than that, i hope you like it!
P.S. do we have some kind of standard form/structure for writing up gods and religions?

[Xeviat]

First I want to say I am quite impressed. Not to insult others, but this is the first religion I have read (including rereading my own) that I am instantly interested in. I didn't feel like I read anything unnecessary. I especially liked the aphorisms; that adds a lot of flavor to the world without being needlessly complex.

I do have a few questions:

What does "Therennial" mean? You said that it was a random word, and that coming up with a meaning was something you wanted help with. The "al" seems to be like words like "annual" or "oral", so I'm to assume it's a sort of "referring to" suffix (I'm short on sleep, so the English major in me has long gone; I can't remember the exact meaning of the suffix to save my life). Thus, "Theren", with some vowel on it, needs to a meaning. I suggest the name of the culture who first created the religion. Then it seems to mean "The Cycle of (our people)". Hope that helps.

What does chance and madness have to do with spring?
What does justice and war have to do with summer?
What does mercantillism and the past have to do with autumn?
What does ... actually Ororon makes sense in all regards.

An observation: you don't seem to like Sararken as much as the others, as you've come up with fewer aphorisms for the god.

To your issues: Don't worry about the person names. If I remember correctly, language doesn't work the way you're thinking. The greeks called the sun god Helios because that was his name, and thus the sun's name, not because the word meant "sun". I may be wrong there, but that's the way I see it.

Thus, the names of the seasons for this religion should be reflective of the gods' names. I suggest choosing a suffix to end them all with (note that Summer and Winter end in the same suffix; spring and autumn don't, but just go along with me here), and maybe change one if the sound is weird. Like Meilar, Sararkar, Eshmar, and Ororar ... Ororar sounds weird, so maybe Orona or something ...

As for Saraken, if you want him to be darker, here's an idea: Those who are judged guilty by Saraken's priests must experience a loss equal to the loss their crime caused. Each body part would have an intrinsic value, so you would lose a part based on the value of what you took or destroyed. If your crime was murder, your punishment is your life. From a removed position, this seems "just", but from within it is fairly gruesome.

As for standard form, I think I see the form from Deities and Demigods used here mostly. Here's that form:

NAME
Honorific
Rank (demi, lesser, intermediate, greater, over ...)
Symbol: Description (drawing if you can too)
Home Plane: Where their realm is.
Alignment: -
Portfolio: What they govern or embody.
Worshipers: Who worships them.
Cleric Alignments: -
Domains: - (often with non-core domains in parenthesis).
Favored Weapon: For clerics, not the name of their personal weapon.

Brief description.

Dogma
(What the church teaches)

Clergy and Temples
(Discuss the god's priests and temples)

Stats
(If that's your thing, sounds like it isn't)

Also, I'd detail some of the myths; that would be a good addendum to this format, since you seem interested in writing them.

[Superfluous Crow]

I'll try and answer some of those questions and comments Xeviat.
First, thank you very much for the praise :)
You suggested that Theren should be the name of the people. I was thinking that Theren could also be either a prophet/major  religious person, or possibly a reference to the creation myth (the "Theren" started the cycle).

As far as the portfolios of the gods go, i just started out with a seasonal god and tried to expand upon it. Meilos was a spring god, so supposedly it had something to do with sowing, which is the start of a cycle. So it became the god of beginnings. When you begin something, and you pray for it, you're hoping for a better future, so therefore it was supposedly a god of the future as well. Seeing that the future is especially unpredictable, it made sense that it was the most fickle god, and the god of all that is unpredictable; chance and madness amongst other things. Generally it is a chaos god; a god of what can possibly happen.
Sararken... well, we figured that if the spring storms hadn't destroyed the crops, then the summer was the spare time of an agricultural society (i'm not an expert on agriculture, so if you have another opinion please tell me). And in this spare time, other types of non-agricultural culture and civilization blossomed. So that made him the god of civilization.  Also with Meilos as the god of the future and Eshmel as a god of the past, he's the god of the present, but that's really only to fill out the hole (Ororon is god of "no time"/death). As the god of civilization, it made sense that he would be the god of justice as well, since that's pretty much what keeps cities together). So he is associated with order, which is associated with discipline which is associated with the army, which in turn makes him a god of war. Also, armies enforce "justice" on others. But really, i don't what other things the god of summer should be about... especially if he has to have a dark side (no flowery summer god here).
And Eshmel. Well, again, Seeing that he is the god of harvests, the end of a cycle, he is the god of endings, and therefore consequences and rewards (as stated). A consequence or a reward is something you carry with you, and therefore it's associated with the past; It's what happened because of different actions you took in the past. So that's why he is a god of the past/history. As far as the trade goes, me and my friend tried to figure out what traits we could associate with the various seasons, and we figured that after harvest, you'd trade away your excess of crops. So this doesn't have any connection to his role as a god of the past, but only to his role as a god of harvest.
If any of this still doesn't make sense please say so.
As far as the names go, i would just have found it funny/interesting if some of the names were based on real-world words, but that's not super-important; these names are okay.
As far as connecting the names to seasons go, i would like to keep the basic premise of the gods connected to seasons, without having their current incarnations directly connected to them. But i could just avoid this issue by having the official calendar be made so it isn't linked to any specific religion, though there could of course be a religious calendar with seasons named after the gods.
And it's true that i don't like Sararken as much as the others, but that's mainly because i don't really know what to do with him :-/ The lacking aphorisms are just because i couldn't really come up with any. But feel free to contribute to the list.
I was actually considering making Sararken something like the god of capital punishment, but that would just look a bit weird to have written that :D
Hmm, other than the D&D-ic parts of it, i guess that form isn't halfbad, though it's still a bit hard to get a very quick overview. Thank you!
Hmm, turned into quite a long answer. If you have any ideas for what i can do about Sararken they are much appreciated.
Oh, and i'll write some myths when my imagination kicks in and gives me some.

[Xeviat]

Heh, that was tough to read; next time double return after each mini paragraph. I got it all though.

The only reason I asked about those specific elements of their portfolios is because they were the ones that didn't make sense to me. I'm glad to see you have explanations, and with your explanations it makes sense. Don't worry that they didn't make sense to me right away; some of the Catholic "Patron Saints of X" don't make sense at all to me either.

I only suggested their names being the names of the seasons to these people because that's what it probably would have been in the past. Look at us; we're not Roman, but there is a fun Roman oddity on our calendar. September means 7th month, October means 8th month, November means 9th month, and December means 10th month ... why is that? When Julius Ceaser added July (his month) he stuck it in the beautiful season of Summer, and eliminated a winter month. Likewise, when Augustus Ceaser added August (his month) he stuck it in Summer as well, losing another winter month. Additionally, both wanted their months to be 31 day big months so they'd be important, so they stole days from February.

Most people don't think about the numbers of September through December being off; I notice it constantly because I'm slowly becoming a linguist student. I really think the names of the seasons should be related to the names of the gods, or at least their old names or something, as they used to be seasonal gods.

[Hibou]

I understood your reasoning pretty quick, and think these guys are really cool. I was a little disappointed though, because at the start it sounded like you were going to give us a little guessing game as to who governed which season :D.

For Sararken being darker, you could add some sort of wrath related to drought and too much sun or something, and have it be supposedly because too many people in the world are disobeying laws, avoiding drafts to war, defying their lords, etc. In summer around here, we sometimes miss out on rain for so long (and we're in a temperate zone) that the fire departments ban bonfires/burning grass/etc. and will provide fines -perhaps Sararken could punish people for being too lazy or chaotic by causing unbearable heat and their crops to fail from lack of sustenance.

[Midgardsormr]

Another bit of spin on Sararken: Perhaps heat is a common form of punishment.  Criminals might be branded for minor crimes or staked out in the sun to die of exposure for major crimes.  The sun is a source of light, and it illuminates the truth.  Those who are not shaded by their righteousness will be scorched and withered by its heat.  

I also live in an area with harsh and dry summers, so it's easy to imagine the "dark side," so to speak, of the season.

[Superfluous Crow]

heh, i actually had another religion that i worked on which involved a semi-evil sun god who enforced strict discipline. I think he developed some kind of punishment where the criminals were strapped naked to polished metallic parabols in the middle of the desert and then left to simmer... well, anyway, it makes sense that droughts and the like should be the work of Sararken, and the idea about brandings are pretty good. It almost begs for another aphorism. but i guess "Touch of Sararken" for a brand is a bit too much of an euphemism, eh? But i guess i should just enforce his "no mercy"-attitude.

[Xeviat]

The Wound of Sararken sounds good. I like brandings for that.