Annals of an Old Religion

During his rigorous research in the early seventies to prove that all philosophies and religions could be classified as either East or West, the late Dr. Richard Brume, professor of comparative religion, came across a strange book detailing a religion hithero unknown. The practicers of this religion evidently went by no name, but Brume--having abandoned his original research and devoting himself wholly to documenting this new faith--began referring to it as Archacultus or, Box Worship.

The most enigmatic ritual of the archacultans, Brume found, was a lengthy sacrament in which adherents crafted a box which, once completed, could never be opened. Although examples of the box have never been found, the annals of this strange religion carefully instructed archacultans on how to build the box from distilling the small amount of gold required to hammering the box into its true form. The process took weeks, and archacultans understood that in creating their relic, they were also undergoing a form of worship in itself. Once the box was finished, they worshiped it as well. They believed that once the box was sealed up permanently it then held what they knew to be God. The archacultans, Brume was careful to note, were not so disillusioned to think that there was something in the box; they knew it was empty as they had sealed it themselves. But to them, God existed in the box's very emptiness, in its lack of content.

At first, Brume was baffled by this belief. The book he discovered seemed to have roots in no other religion he had studied. His early conclusions were that the book was a parody or the product of a sole person's insane visions. But as Brume peered deeper into the book, he came to the conclusion that this was a sort of hybrid atheism/theism religion. The box, Brume explained, for archacultans held nothing, yet in this nothingness it held everything that existed in the universe, and thus god. In the archacultans belief that God did not exist, God did exist.