Old Religion of the Steed
| Overview | |
|---|---|
| Type | Polytheistic ethnic religion |
| Deities | The five gods of the Steed: Gydron, Heross, Furtio, Sawra, Uita |
| Central figure | The Sacred Steed, a white unicorn |
| Clergy | The elders of the Steed |
| History | |
| Practiced by | The Aem of northern Keltia |
| Flourished | From roughly three millennia before the founding of Caputia |
| Suppressed | The reformation of St. Josaphat |
| Successors | Yerenism; Therosism among the Tae; the Melusinian Faith |
| Extinct as an organized religion; carried forward in the Five Currents and iconography of the Melusinian Faith | |
The Old Religion of the Steed, known in its own day simply as the Religion of the Steed, was the polytheistic religion of the ancient Aem people of northern Keltia. Followed from some three thousand years before the founding of the Kingdom of the Union of Caputia, it centered on the veneration of the Sacred Steed, a white unicorn held to have chosen five gods and granted each of them a miraculous power. Its year turned on five pilgrimage feasts, one for each god, and its customs included a form of marriage detached from reproduction and open to any two people, blessed under the god Furtio. Under the Hammish emperors the Steed became the standard of the state, and the imperial purple, traced to a dream of the emperor Taelinn, outlived the religion itself.
The religion was destroyed as an organized tradition by the monotheizing purge remembered as the reformation of St. Josaphat, which burned its books and folded its five gods into a single godhead. In the east of the Hammish lands that reform matured into Yerenism, which recast the five gods as the five virtues of one Overgod; among the Tae of Taeland the cult of Heross alone survived as Therosism. The Melusinian Faith, the living religion of the Caputian diaspora, regards itself as the ancient veneration of the horned sacred beast reborn through the sea, and carries the five gods forward under their own names as its Five Currents.
Because its own literature was burned, the religion is known chiefly from archaeology, above all the tomb of the king Osiphus and the festival documents recovered near Port Kilbay, supplemented by the fragments preserved in Yerenist commentary.
Name and people
The Aem inhabited the peninsula at the mouth of the River Caledon, the land later called Hamland; their name, in the usual scholarly account, is the word which became "Ham," and the land itself was anciently known as Caput, a name preserved by the city of Porapa. Aem society as the sources show it was a country of small river and coastal towns, raided from the sea by the Tae and trading upstream with the neighboring kingdoms of Schönland and Scottania along the Caledon's two tributaries, the Petryn and the Linds.
Sources
No book of the religion survives. Its scriptures were kept by the priestly caste, the elders of the Steed, and burned with them in the reformation of St. Josaphat, which purged knowledge of the old ways so thoroughly that the names of the five gods went unspoken for centuries. What is known has been recovered from three directions.
The first is the tomb of Osiphus. Excavators working at the southern tip of the Hammish peninsula, guided by imaging that showed habitation deep under the mud and clay, opened a cavern beneath the remains of a fortress and found a burial chamber untouched by the purge. Its walls were painted with wars, conquests, theater, and daily life; its floor held jewels, shields, and golden swords; and at the back stood a coffin carved with a white unicorn. Its inscription names the dead man as King Osiphus, blessed by the sacred steed and the five who rode upon it, and dates his death to the summer of the twelfth Harakon, an era of the untranslated Aem calendar; the remains themselves have been dated to roughly three thousand years before the Caputian founding.[1] Beside the coffin stood golden containers, each worked with a face believed to be one of the five gods, holding scrolls and scriptures of the Aem.
The second is a later find near Port Kilbay, a cache of documents in the old script whose partial decipherment supplied most of what is known of the festival year.[2] The third is the body of fragments quoted in the commentaries of Yerenism, whose gentler eastern settlement with the old religion preserved much that the west burned, together with the traditions the Melusinian Faith keeps about its own deepest roots.
The Sacred Steed
At the head of the religion stood no god but a beast: the Sacred Steed, a white unicorn, the horned divine animal that chose the gods rather than being made by them. Each of the five was picked for a purpose and granted a miraculous power over the part of life given into its care, and together they rode upon the Steed's back. The gods dwelt with their households in the hall of the Gods, into which the most blessed mortals might be taken up. The elders of the Steed kept the cult, and the beast itself, rather than any one of its riders, was the mark of the faith on standards and tombs.
The image outlived the religion. The unicorn remained the national animal of Hamland into its final era, and the official entrance of the parliament at New Kirrie was built as the Grand Arch of the Unicorn. The Melusinian Faith teaches that the horned sacred beast of the Aem and the divine cattle of Bovinism were at last recognized as one horned divinity, feminine and marine, in the goddess Melusine.
The five gods
| God | Domain | Principal feast |
|---|---|---|
| Gydron | Diplomacy | Autumn, on an island in the River Caledon |
| Heross | War | Spring, at the site of the later city of New Kirrie |
| Furtio | Love | First feast after the summer solstice, at Eel Bay |
| Sawra | Humor | At Orno, or at the neighboring village of Uitara |
| Uita | Wisdom | Midwinter, at Guronga |
The five were not a pantheon of equals so much as five companions of the one Steed, each honored in his own place and season. The Kilbay documents record that the feasts commemorated the anniversaries of the Steed's visits to each of the five, and that pilgrims marked each holiday with the giving of a gift.
Mythology
Two of the god-myths were recovered whole. In the story of Sawra, the god of humor, then a mortal of the town of Haertic, wagered the god Heross that no one in the town of thirteen hundred souls could keep a straight face against him; he told every joke he had, and one old man who had not laughed in years did not so much as smirk. Heross claimed Sawra's life as his prize, declaring that the world had no place for fools and that war was what made a people strong. Then hooves sounded behind them: the Sacred Steed caught Sawra up on its horn by the seat of his clothes and galloped him through the town, and the whole town laughed, the old man hardest of all. Set down again, Sawra answered that there is always a place for humor and happiness in the world, and the myths hold that he alone of the five never rode upon the Steed's back, having been carried instead upon its horn.
In the story of Furtio, the god, then a poor man, loved a woman named Fraera, whose father would not let her speak to men without wealth. A general offered Furtio a place on a ship that would sail for eternity, carrying the ways of the Aem to the far lands of Apollonia and Benacia, and Furtio refused it, saying that a life without love is not a life worth living. That night the Steed woke him where he slept in the street, judged his love pure, and bade him ride; at his beloved's door the unicorn's brightness overwhelmed the father's greed, and Furtio and Fraera were wed; the myth ends with the two living on in the hall of the Gods. The tale was read as the charter of Furtio's feast, at which marriage was solemnized.
Festivals
Furtio's day fell on the first feast after the summer solstice at Eel Bay, where the god was believed to have lived and been visited by the Steed. The town swelled to three or four times its size, and the camps on its edges grew into satellite celebrations of their own, imitated as far away as the western regions of Lindsmouth and Kirnoa, whose cheaper local fairs spared pilgrims the cost of the eastward road. Weddings were performed on the eve of the feast in houses blessed by the elders of the Steed, and the families of the newly married joined the fair together the following day.
Sawra's day belonged to the theater. At Orno the god was honored in playhouses indoors and out, where the great comedies of Yela and Theno were staged; the neighboring village of Uitara, which kept its own celebration in the years when Orno lay sacked by the Tae, lacked theaters on the Ornoese scale and answered with the Yerani, short plays of twenty or thirty minutes for small casts, wild of plot and broad of humor, that could be played to small crowds all day long.
Gydron's gathering, in autumn on an island in the middle of the River Caledon, was the most international of the five, as befitted the god of diplomacy: tents from every part of the kingdom and feasts of the foods of Schönland, Scottania, and the river country of the Petryn and the Linds; custom encouraged families to eat at every table but their own. The peace of the island was not absolute; the documents record a year in which the Tae, shunned by the southern Hamlanders until their stocks rotted, burned half the festival and followed the insult with raids.
Uita's festival, midwinter at Guronga, was the quietest and least attended, guarded by distance and snow. It was kept within the family, at tables set by the host household, and it varied most from place to place; at Lindsmouth, whose poor could not afford the great meals of Guronga, the feast of the god of wisdom was kept, the documents note without comment, chiefly with inexpensive treats.
Heross's day, in spring at the site of the later city of New Kirrie, drew the largest crowds and the most blood: running, riding, and fighting, city against city, each putting forward its ablest soldiers. Its most popular sport was also its most violent, a wrestling in which surrender came only by submission of the body, and the bravest, or the most foolish, sometimes fought to the death. The Hirtam dance festival customarily followed on the next day. The feast was most beloved of the Tae, and Heross of all the five was the god they kept.
Marriage and custom
Marriage under Furtio was detached from reproduction and open to any two people, a blessing of the bond itself rather than of any issue it might produce. The custom is the oldest documented root of what the Melusinian Faith now teaches as Divine Fluidity, and the faith insists on the inheritance: its affirmation of love across every fixed category is presented as an observance some three thousand years old rather than a modern accommodation.
The imperial purple
Under the Hammish emperors the Steed became a symbol of state. The emperor Taelinn, remembered as a devout follower of the white unicorn, dreamed that the River Garie ran purple; on waking he took the color for his house and made the Steed the imperial standard. Purple remained the imperial color of the Hammish thereafter, and in the last era of the kingdom it kept its political force: the flag of the Purple Movement flew beside the King's over the Salt Palace at New Kirrie. Its afterlife has been longer still: it passed to the crown of Caputia, survives as a national color of Nouvelle Alexandrie, and is kept by the Melusinian Faith as its second sacred color, worn by the Matriarch of New Zalae at the highest feasts.
Suppression
No foreign conquest ended the religion of the Steed; it was unmade from within. The movement remembered as the great reformation of St. Josaphat purged knowledge of the old ways, burned the books of the elders, and taught that the five gods had always been one. What had been five riders on one Steed became one god with five faces, and the open practice of the old feasts ended in the Hammish heartland. In the east the reform matured into Yerenism, which taught one Overgod, Tiron, with the five gods reinterpreted as his five virtues.
The purge was thorough enough that the religion is known today largely through its enemies and its heirs. Melusinian tradition treats the destruction as a real wound in the history of the faith, and venerates the reformer himself only uneasily; his feast is the faith's one day of sorrow.
Legacy
The Old Religion of the Steed is extinct, but an unusual amount of it survives inside its successors. Among the Tae the cult of Heross endured as Therosism, organized in later ages as the Tae Church of Heross and present, in the last surveys of the Commonwealth, throughout the Isles and the Pirate Coast.[3] Yerenism preserved the five gods as the five virtues of Tiron, and the Melusinian Faith carried the same five forward as its Five Currents, keeping for each the name of the god it had once been: Furtio's current of love, Heross's of bravery, Gydron's of generosity, Uita's of wisdom, and Sawra's of piety. The lesser observances of the Currents in the Melusinian year are kept as a faint echo of the five pilgrim feasts, and the Yerani plays of Uitara are remembered as the seed of a comic tradition still known in the successor lands.
The Steed itself endures in the spiral horn the faith paints on the brow of the Sea Cow, in the devotional cult of the Horn, in the unicorn that Hamland and later the Kingdom of the Union of Caputia kept as their national animal, and in the imperial purple still worn at the faith's highest feasts.
See also
References
- ^ Inscription on the sarcophagus of King Osiphus, southern-peninsula excavation. The formula reads: "King Osiphius is blessed by the sacred steed and the 5 who rode upon it. Gydron; God of Diplomacy. Heross; God of Conflict. Furtio; God of Love. Sawra; God of Humor. Uita; God of Wisdom." The variant spelling Osiphius is the inscription's own.
- ^ The Kilbay documents, the principal surviving account of the Aem festival year, recovered near Port Kilbay and only partly deciphered.
- ^ Period survey of the established religions of the Commonwealth of Hamland, which records the Tae Church of Heross "present throughout the Isles and the Pirate Coast" and the Church of Yeren among the Tonarians and Anglians.
