Thoughts on religious development prior to Davism

[Wolfie]

While working on the Consolidation narrative, it became apparent that the issue of magic and religion goes back a long way in the history of TI. The events at the Spring – a crisis in which the Godhead was broken between feminine and masculine elements – has a history leading back to the pre-kingdom days of warlords.

While I have described the Holy Order of Dav as a monotheistic, water-based church that centers on an ineffable non-anthropomorphic, non-creator deity, I believe that there is a creator deity in TI’s world. As stated in the Song of Motion, a female deity emerges from the sea of potentiality much like the Babylonian Tiamat and produces 5 younger elemental gods. In the age of warlords before the coming of the Sun Cycle, it is more than likely that the fire / warrior deity named Arien would have been highly valued by men like Allard Man-At-Arms, my fictional predecessor to the Harmon line. The water-based Church – which is based in communal, agrarian rites – would have been of little use to warriors.

The dichotomy between fire and water has interested me since I began work on the Charali. The mythology of Horse the First Man centers upon the divine sibling Fire being consumed by a starving animal. The horse changes amid suffering much like the world and his Goddess. He emerges pale and naked, deprived of every possible advantage given to his animal brethren yet contains the Fire within his belly. This connection between a warrior culture and fire is any easy one to make.

So how did we get from Allard and Horse to Davism?

1) Goddess creates Siblings (Song of Motion)

2) Siblings create World

3) Goddess breathes life into Siblings creations

4) Horse devours Fire and becomes Man

5) Man uses godly gifts to erect massive cities and contracts demons for the first Magic

6) Goddess smites man, flattens Plains, initiates diaspora

7) The proto-races split off into three factions:
a. Charali – shamanistic nomads
b. Daravi – magic-users that transition from matriarchy to patriarchy after settling
c. Unnamed migrants that intermix through Vavardi, Vandago etc.

8) Migrants do not use magic as a whole because of its disruption of balance
9) Path of Fire is born amid intermixing of proto-races

a. Reaction to war produced by migration and territory consolidation once technology threshold is reached
b. Mirrors proto-Charalin traditions in preservation of balance, suffering into enlightenment (Horse the First Man) and focus on a symbolic, sacrificial Goddess in the Lady of suffering
c. Primarily a religion of nomads or settlers. It is not a religion for warriors

10) An unnamed religious cult offshoots from the PoF, centered on Fire and soldiery
a. Cult of Arien, the restless wandering warrior moon
b. Touched upon in the Old Arien Folktale

11) As the wars continue and settlements begin to develop out of the established territory, the tenants of the Path of Fire begin to incorporate agrarian / fertility / communal rituals that celebrate balance and peace
a. The Path of Fire becomes the Church in opposition to the Cult of Arien
b. Celebrates water, fertility and peace as opposed to fire, death and war
c. The water elements are possibly inherited in trade from either Tubor or Farin, given their affinities / veneration of water.

12) Likewise in Darav, the matriarchal society that venerates magic begins to drift toward patriarchy as it is established in settlements.
a. Eventually as new territory is acquired, the foundation of the Sultanate is laid down, potentially by a warrior that is much like a proto-Dav.
b. A reasonably passive society is catapulted amid crisis into a war machine.

13) Lloryth ab Harmon becomes first King of Lithmore

14) The cult of Arien may have been incorporated into the military as an order of Knights, though no remnants remain.

15) The Church comes to spread far and wide across the peaceful sections of the kingdom.

16) The Skilled begin their development in the city centers, creating a new destabilizing force in the region

17) The Order sect emerges from the Church

18) Dav, like the patriarch of the Darav and the cult of Arien, splinters away from the Church and eventually integrates its teachings into mainstream culture

So again, it seems that religion and magic are very old issues. Not that magic was always stigmatized - far from it. The xenophobia cultivated by the Order sect sought to temper a fairly old set of traditions that arose when magic was decidedly weaker. To wit, I would say that the Path of Fire represents the foundation of the Mother Church in the way that the present Order was built from foundation of the Church. For those unfamiliar with the separation of terms Church and Order, I am referring to the Pre-Dav Church – a pacifist, communal / agrarian group of water venerators and the Order, an anti-magic sect of said Church that later took over the main body with Dav’s establishment as Patriarch and Prelate. The idea of a cycle of stability in the power of magic comes from Az, though I may have taken it much farther than intended and it will be the pivot for my argument.

Az’s idea to justify the limitations on magic in modern TI is known as The Fall. The reason that we do not have access to the higher circles (aside from code and balance reasons) is that the archmages internalized a lot of the balancing into themselves. It might be reasonable to say that the number of trained mages is proportionate to their power, allowing them to operate as parallel processors. With so many working to balance the moons, refinements could be made to the thaumaturgic processes and new more powerful Circles could be composed upon the foundations. After reading Eric von Neumann’s Jungian text on the developmental history of consciousness, I think it would be very fitting to have the development of magic on the global scale be equivalent to that of a single mage’s progressive mastery. A mage cannot cast 4th Circle spells out of the box, so why have magic as a high-level constant in pre-history?

The high-stability of the pre-Consolidation magical environment seems to indicate that each mage had their particular element. Five mages would act as elemental pillars and two more would act as chthonic and celestial anchors, respectively. The Fall, as Az described it, was apocalyptic in terms of backlash. The tears in the fabric of magic made by the deaths of low-level mages in the early parts of the 2nd century SC could have laid the foundation for further destruction. As I have written it, Thandok and Aquiel splinter from the Academae in early 109. Their absence from whatever ritual sustains the Seven as the pillars of magic could have weakened it further and when Archmages started dying, the balancing work load of the moons would have been violently distributed among every mage in the region, if not the world. The weaker circles stayed intact, as did a few of the regional cantrips that the Seven put into place – torches flaring blue and rhyming rats.

So, if this sort of cycle occurred once, it could have happened before. The alternative is that the Sun Cycle represents the first magical awakening, but I do not believe that is true. While the Path of Fire help file says nothing about the use of magic in its ritual, it does possess a key attribute – the suffering deity mother. The Charali woman in the original tale acted as a surrogate for her deity, drawing the suffering of the world onto herself so that others might live happy lives. Does this not sound like a mage turning their body into balancing mechanism for the moons? I worked with this in writing the Charali creation myth. The goddess undergoes the process of birth in order to create the elements, and therefore the world. Like Her, the Lady of Suffering contains as much within herself so that the balance of joy is given to the rest of the world. Likewise, the five elemental siblings created by the Charalin goddess are embodiments of their particular element allowing them to be expressed and combined freely in the new world.

Further hints of a link can be found in the Cathedral itself. In spite of the Great Burning, the Eld on the walls still remains and attests to the ancient rituals that the Church was founded with. Though time and the xenophobic stigma of the 2nd century purged the magic from these rituals, the Chalice – a feminine symbol – was used to draw down, channel and distribute the power of the moons for the masses. It is possible that the Church as it existed before Dav evolved from the Path of Fire and that the Chalice was the mechanism used to facilitate magic prior to the cycle of Awakening at the turn of the age. Other symbols, such as the Eastern Star, and the Fountis also occur in a known Path of Fire church outside of the city, showing other a progenitor relationship or a blending of rituals.

In any case, the bottom line I was trying to reach before beginning the Consolidation timeline was to illustrate the position that the Academae could have been in. In spite of being alien and aloof, the mages were possibly venerated in a similar fashion to clergy because of their – if even subconscious – attachment to the Old Ways. Some of the awe which the original Chalice bearers could have clung to these people who had a personal connection to the beyond. To have them operate in the courts under the pretense of sheer intimidation seems too easy for me; sometimes it is good to have absolute villains. Our theme broadly operates off of that theme while it is up to individual players to bring to life exceptional PCs that may or may not spin the grand theme. By linking them to the roots of the ancient religion, the xenophobia transforms beyond a political agenda and speaks to a fatal division between the Spiritual and the Mundane. While some practitioners were able to directly experience and manipulate the otherworldly forces, their siblings were left behind with the shadow play of ritual that they had left behind. Who could blame the mages for being aloof to the Unskilled? Who could blame the Unskilled for distrusting and hating these creatures? That fissure in the psyche of Urth fascinates me as a player and a writer.

It is difficult to write anything contrary to what Order dogma states without undermining canon when it comes to the exact events of Dav’s Trevail. In my opinion, there are two things that occurred at the Spring that day in Aprilis. First, Dav, having experienced a great despair, attains a level of clarity akin to the Charalin Mother deity, Horse the First Man and the Lady of Suffering. We can call this a traditional spirit quest, though it is forced by the hands of the hostile archmages. The Cyclists would also pick up on this notion after Father Ellam Trajan speaks to his new view of theology during the conquests of the Consolidation (per my belief that the multiple Cycles are indeed for the cultivation of the soul so that the creator might be healed not just for the escape from the Cycle). We can call this a traditional spirit quest, though it is forced by the hands of the hostile archmages.

Second, the neutral creator deity, possibly characterized pre-Dav as female because of the ability to create (as opposed to our real life male neutral) undergoes a cataclysmic division of the Godhead in order to reach out to the pivot point for the age: Dav. The division between masculine and feminine already existed in the region because of the cult of Arien and the developing Church, however, it is likely that this division became manifest because of the cracks in the weave and the impending backlash of The Fall. The Chalice and the Voice are two sides of the same coin, divided at the Springs. I think this odd situation may be the theological reasoning behind the lack of any further official communication from the deity.

In summary, the Order path of peace and balance was tempered by Dav’s “new” ideas of war and purity that were actually quite old, reminiscent of the war-like cult of Allard and the other pre-kingdom armies.

[Geras]

Could you clarify how much of this is intended to be myth and how much is intended to be history? Particularly w.r.t points 1-6.

I like them as mythos, but I personally think it's important that the truth of the existence of any Goddess or Gods be left ambiguous.

[Wolfie]

This little blurb was written from an absolute OOC timeline perspective, trying to line up a possible development based off of what evidence exists in the helpfiles and what other stuff I have tried to add in my narratives before. I think it's important to define it from a storytelling perspective, but not for the sake of IC knowledge. While the theme is low-fantasy, I enjoy trying to preserve fantastic elements in the story, even if they are minimal, in order to differentiate this from a historical environment.

Trying to tell someone that doesn't know the details about the game usually boils down to saying "It's like the middle ages where the Christians killed pagans and magic is real but persecuted." By emphasizing the fantastic elements of our narrative in our backstory, even if they are only available OOC, I think we can move away from the automatic association and develop some new language for what our game is about.

In any case, this is all mental exercise for me. I doubt any of this would ever be revealed in-character. There are few instances of a PoF church on-grid along with some historical IC events such as the recovery of the Chalice by the Knighthood in recent game history.

[Geras]

I'm just not very comfortable with laying out even OOCly that one specific deity or group of deities is "real" and that one religious interpretation is more right than another.

[Wolfie]

I can see the wisdom in that. I certainly cannot say that 1-6 are true, even OOC. The Charalin may believe it, but as we have established, there are many other proto-cultures that went into making the world as it is. I suppose I write it since I am trying to validate the mythologies I have already built from that perspective.