Hearth Mother Religion, Loretober Day Seventeen!

The religion that Clara was raised in believes in reincarnation, that if a body is burned at burial their spirit will return to the creator of humans, the Hearth Mother, to be remolded like metal being reforged into something new in the next life.

How long you are kept in her fire before being reincarnated is dependent on how "tarnished" of a person you were throughout your life. This is measured by lustrous traits like kindness and honesty tarnishing traits like selfishness and sexual immorality ie. homosexuality. Being an involved parent and having many children is seen as living a lustrous life the way the Hearth Mother approves of since you are allowing more of her creations to exist. People who are pure/lustrous get to be reincarnated quickly (fantastic/intuitive mothers tend to be told by others that they must have been reborn as a woman multiple times). If a human dies completely free of tarnish, they get to ascend from reincarnation and stay with the Hearth Mother in her realm to live in eternal warmth/bliss. The impure either wait a long time within the mother's scorching flame in order to become human once again or return as baser creatures/insects. (There is of argument over the particulars of this in different areas of the northern kingdom which built hierarchy and laws based on the Hearth Mother's teachings).

If a human body is not burned after death, it is believed their soul/essence will stay stuck in the earthly realm and never return to the Hearth Mother to be remade. Some also believe that being burned while still alive will lessen the weight of your tarnished traits as you return to the Mother, so this can be a "kind" punishment for severe crimes in the northern .

Followers of this religion believe that magical creatures/beings are either separate from this reincarnation process since they are not children of the Hearth Mother like humans, or that magical beings are the lowest forms of the Hearth Mother's creations that do not get to be reincarnated when they pass, no matter how lustrous they lived their lives because of the heaviness of their tarnished magia.