Editing Degenesis (section)

===Anabaptists===
The core principle of the Anabaptists is Neognosis. God is good, reality is not, with humanity being the unholy fusion of divinity and sin, mind and matter. Death releases the psyche from the body, although it easily becomes bound in matter again. Only through the teachings of Rebus, the founder of the Anabaptists, could a man learn how to forsake the flesh and rejoin God in Paradise upon death.

Rebus taught his followers how to farm and work the land, a much needed skill after the apocalypse, for this honest and simple life was a part of the path to enlightenment in his eyes. The fields of wheat that they produced drew the attention of bandits, who they had to learn to ward off. This led to the duality of the Anabaptists, the two castes of farmers and fighters.

Another belief that Rebus had was that four rivers ran through Paradise, rivers that he believed to be metaphors for various aspects of a man's psyche. So he studied herbs and seeds and experimented with them, observing how they caused these rivers to swell and how they brought both euphoria and enlightenment. This knowledge was passed down to the caste of farmers, which became known as Ascetics, the mind of the Anabaptists, who were defended by the Orgiastics, the body of the Anabaptists. Yeah, they kind of have a thing for dualism.

With the passing of Rebus, the teachings of the Anabaptists became a little muddled. The four rivers are not just metaphors for a euphoric state of being, but they're actually real rivers that the Cult must seek. Paradise isn't just beyond death, it's also something that the Anabaptists are meant to turn Earth into.

Combine all of these traits and you've got an expansionist death cult that fetishizes living honest, simple living, with one half that farms wheat and psychotropic flora to feed the bodies and minds of the other half, the barbarian-paladins that seek to both reach paradise after death and conquer it in life.