Everyone - or at least, everyone Around Here; there are distant heathen lands, but the less said about them, the better - knows how the Church came to be. 

In an ancient time indeed, little remembered now - for it was before the days of ice and madness and creeping death that buried all the libraries and slaughtered all the scholars, before even the days of the Old Kingdom - out of the foul and genie-haunted wastes of the desert there came a man, the wisest and greatest of mortal men -

(He himself would have been furious at that title, at the idea that nobody could ever exceed him; his fondest wish was for his church, his children, to one day surpass him; but if there is anyone alive who remembers him as the person he was and not as a legend, they are silent)

- who wandered all the world in rags, with only a crude wooden bowl and an earnest expression; and he made the lame walk and the blind see and the cruel thoughtful and the kind cunning, and he spoke truthfully to beggars and to kings; and he wandered all the world and endured many hardships and temptations, speaking softly and truly and kindly, and he talked with men and elves and dwarves and genies and fairies and ghosts and dragons, until at length he came to speak thoughtfully to the gods Themselves. 

From out of that time there came the Five Gods, as They are known. 

How the Church came to survive unbroken to today is a very long story indeed, but in the beginning, there were only a few friends and companions of the Prophet, and a lot of very different, very old and cruel and wild, and very strange cults - who at the urging of divine omens reluctantly went along with this fledgling Church. 

Under the circumstances, the Most High Priestess sometimes thinks, it could have been a lot worse - but one can understand why Church orthodoxy is less than transparent at times. It is a difficult thing indeed for a mortal mind to even look in the general direction of the divine.