The Great Schism of the Musical Religion and Rule of the Music-Souls was a crisis within the Holy Empire of Music: believers disputed whether salvation lay in personal experience of divine music or obedience to its formal laws. The dispute widened into a struggle over how society should be organized and what kinds of people it should cultivate. Its eventual rulers, bred for exceptional musical sensitivity, became a tyrannical caste; their ascendancy ended not in a renewed religious order but in social chaos and civilizational collapse.

The Empire and the Faith

The schism came toward the close of the millennium in which the Holy Empire of Music had given order and purpose to human society. The religion had originated in the teaching of the prophet, who presented music as the reality beneath appearances and as an enduring form of life beyond bodily death. The prophet’s melodies and doctrine had spread widely, helping to remake social arrangements; the Universal Church of Harmony grew into a world institution, and the sayings attributed to the prophet became the foundation of an extensive legal system.

In practice, the empire had long since translated religious language into administration. Its laws treated each person as an organism with needs, rights, and social obligations, but expressed these principles through the fiction that every human being was a melody requiring completion within society’s larger musical theme. That arrangement gave the faith a practical civic function. It also left room for a dispute over whether the institution served music itself, the believer’s spiritual experience, or the convenience of the established order.

The Schism and Counter-Revival

The rebels argued that ecclesiastical authority had stifled the faith’s original purpose. In their account, the prophet had taught salvation through an individual’s intense, emotional communion with divine music. Over time, the church had displaced that inward experience with an interest in objective musical forms, especially the rules of melody and counterpoint. The rebels further charged that churchmen and statesmen had bent those supposed divine laws to suit social convenience instead of shaping society to express them.

Their challenge did not go unanswered. A counter-revival mocked the rebels’ self-concern and emphasis on saving their own souls, urging devotion instead to music’s ordered forms. The resulting divide was therefore not simply between religion and its opponents: both sides claimed fidelity to the faith, but disagreed over whether its center was the listener’s emotional experience or music’s formal order. In the broader history of the empire, a faith that had supplied a common framework for law now became the ground of competing claims to religious and social authority.

Breeding for Musical Sensitivity

Among the rebellious peoples, biological interests became increasingly important. Some devout women began choosing mates in the hope of having children with exceptional musical brilliance and sensitivity. Although biological science remained rudimentary, selective breeding was understood in principle. Within a century, a private preference had developed into a racial obsession directed toward producing musical talent, described as breeding for soul.

The policy succeeded in creating a more common type of person, whose heightened responsiveness to music set its members apart from ordinary people. They were so sensitive that the song of a skylark could cause them serious distress, while music they approved could induce a trance. Music they disliked could provoke violent reactions against its performers. These traits were not merely a matter of individual taste: the people shaped by the breeding policy acquired the devotion and approval of the wider population, giving their exceptional sensitivity social influence as well as religious meaning.

Rule and Collapse

The account passes over the detailed stages by which an infatuated population submitted to these beings. Their rule was brief, but they became a tyrannical ruling caste within a musical theocracy. Rather than resolving the schism, their ascendancy turned the authority claimed through musical sensitivity into political domination. Their rule reduced society to chaos, and an age of confusion and murder eventually brought humanity back to its senses.

That recovery came with profound disillusionment. The population lacked the determination to redirect its collective efforts, and civilization fell apart rather than being reconstructed under a new settlement. The race remained fallow for several thousand years before civilization was rebuilt. The schism thus marks both the end of the empire’s long period of order and the failure of a movement born from genuine aesthetic experience to preserve its promise once belief, biological selection, and political power became entangled. The account regards the delusion as pathetic, yet preserves its crazy nobility: the original experience was potent and sincere even though its historical outcome was ruinous.