Meta:Cult of the Dawnflower

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Retcon/dissolution

According to James Jacobs, the Cult of the Dawnflower was included in the Pathfinder campaign setting in error and is no longer to be referenced in canon works.

June 15, 2021:

The Cult of the Dawnflower claimed to worship Sarenrae while in fact they were just warmongers who paid lip-service to the goddess and in doing so damaged the faith's reputation. Also, this was a world element that shouldn't have been included in the setting in the first place; it's a writer error that won't be used going forward because of its racist undertones based on Qadirans being jihadists who threaten the nearby Eurocentric nation with their aggressive behavior." Gross.

March 17, 2021:

The original author of Sarenrae is me, remember. I've been building her story up in a fantasy setting since the late 1980s. If anything, the lack of respect to the past authors is exactly what the Cult of the Dawnflower was doing, and in part why it bothered me so much.
It also came into print during an era of Pathfinder where we did NOT have anyone in a position of being responsible for setting lore. I was pretty much just working on Adventure Paths and that's about it when this unintentional and regrettable element got into print.
I've been trying to "errata it and move on" for over a decade. It's not working yet, obviously, since it keeps getting referenced in threads as being canon. Which returns to why I'm so frustrated with our lack of a proper and viable method of correcting lore errors in print. Best I could do was to "resolve it in-game" as best as possible. For many years I wanted to do it as an Adventure Path so that we could have spent six months showing how it was an error, but that never got to be.

September 10, 2016:

But one that IS still in the game is the whole "Cult of the Dawnflower" element of Sarenrae's worship, which is at the root somewhat nonsensical. Sarenrae is the greatest agent of good in the core 20 deities and a goddess of healing and redemption, but some early authors misunderstood this and set up her faithful, in the form of Qadirans, as super aggressive warmongers. So that's why we have this schism going on in the church now, with the warmonger side being "wrong" and the traditional church being frustrated by them; they want to redeem the Cult but the cult is stubborn.

Lost Omens Gods & Magic 42 emphasized that actions like those of the Cult were anathematic, and that Sarenrae removed powers from such people:

this puts many of her followers in conflict with those in power who allow or even support evils like slavery—in recent times, she has stripped her blessings from those among the faith who condoned such evils

Jacobs confirmed that this referred to the Cult of the Dawnflower in March 2020, and also confirmed that they were added in error and were now "gone":

the Cult of the Dawnflower stuff was resolved when its overly militaristic sect (which honestly never made sense to me at all, considering Sarenrae is NOT a martial/war deity but a healer and a redeemer—the whole element of her worshipers being warlike was an element that crept into early 1st edition products without my knowledge or blessing and I'm glad it's gone) lost support of the church and the goddess.

Unincorporated sources

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