The core philosophy of those in the shattered place has a major post-evolutionary slant: technology is used to enhance and improve people, and has been for a long time. There are lots of splinter groups that disagree, of course; the entire Gryphon dynasty emphasized caution and control, as have Wind and to a lesser degree Music (where magic was suppressed.) While the reality that technological support is ancient to a Telau, the modern incarnation of this ideology manifested first in the personal genetics industry, when it occurred to the Lyrisclensia that, since perfection is unattainable by definition, the ultimate inexhaustible product was self-improvement. This led to the invention of the phenotype respecifier and the major political crises its widespread use caused during the 4th and late 3rd millennia iky. After the shattering, this rather consumerist formulation of a great truth metamorphosed into a new philosophy which we would recognized as transhuman. The old phenotype specification industry disintegrated under the positivism-driven command economy of the Reed dynasty.

In such a philosophically developed environment as the Reed dynasty, religion had little involvement, but it played a significant role in the Iron, Gryphon, and Wind dynasties, as during those periods the public was generally discordant with the academic world, and were happy to turn to other sources for their answers.

Prior to the Shattering, the species of Thessia Major existed primarily in separate nations, and did not much intermingle, giving them plenty of room to develop their own teachings, and preserving the rich cultural and religious traditions of their immigrant ancestors. This gave them the opportunity to produce a huge bounty of items of archaeological importance, much of which has since been recovered.