Saint Josaphat
| Veneration | |
|---|---|
| Title | Reformer of the Hammish religion |
| Venerated in |
|
| Feast | St. Josaphat's Day, Tasnember (XIII); kept as a day of penitence |
| Attributes | A torch; a closed book |
| Patronage | Reformers; penitents |
| Canonization | Popular veneration; never formally canonized |
| Life | |
| Born | Unknown; antiquity, the Hammish lands, Keltia |
| Died | Unknown |
| The most contested saint of the Melusinian Faith | |
Saint Josaphat (also rendered St Josaphat or St. Josaphat) was a religious reformer of the ancient Hammish lands, remembered as the leader of the monotheizing purge that destroyed the Old Religion of the Steed. The movement that bears his name, the great reformation of St. Josaphat, burned the books of the old religion, ended its five-fold worship, and remade its five gods as one, preparing the ground on which Yerenism later rose in the east.
He is the most contested figure in the tradition that descends from his work. The Melusinian Faith, which counts the Old Religion among its own deepest roots, venerates Josaphat as a saint while mourning what he destroyed, and keeps his feast as a day of penitence rather than triumph. In Hammish secular memory he fared better: an order of chivalry of the crown and one of old Hamland's great stadiums carried his name into the modern era.
Life
Almost nothing is reliably known of Josaphat's life. No contemporary account survives, in large part because his own reformation destroyed the literary record of the age; the elders of the Steed kept the learning of the old religion, and their books burned with their cult. The traditions that remain describe a preacher of ferocious conviction who taught that the five gods of the Steed were a corruption of one true godhead, and who moved through the Hammish lands gathering followers until the old feasts could no longer be openly kept.
What is certain is the scale of what followed. The reformation purged knowledge of the old ways from the Hammish heartland, closed the five pilgrimage feasts, and broke the priestly caste; excavators of the tomb of King Osiphus record that the names of the five gods it lists had gone unspoken for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. Later tradition softened the man into a saint; the sources permit little more than the purge itself.
The reformation
The great reformation of St. Josaphat was less a single event than a long unmaking. Its central teaching, that the five riders of the Steed were one god wrongly counted, admitted of two settlements. In the west the reformers pursued the harder line, treating the old worship as error to be erased, and the burning of the books belongs to this branch. In the east the same teaching matured into Yerenism, which named the one god Tiron, reread the five gods as his five virtues, and preserved in its commentaries much of the lore the west had burned; among the Tae of Taeland, beyond the reformation's reach, the war-god Heross alone was kept, as Therosism.
Both of the reformation's heirs became vessels of what it purged. Yerenism carried the five gods forward as virtues; the Melusinian Faith later carried them further still as its Five Currents, and gave the virtues back their old gods' names. The books were never recovered; almost everything else survived.
Veneration
Josaphat's sainthood has always been uneasy. Yerenism honored him as the forerunner of its own revelation, the man who cleared the ground for Yeren's preaching, though its gentler settlement with the old gods sat awkwardly beside his fires. The Melusinian Faith, which counts the destruction of the Old Religion as a wound in its own history, holds him in a deliberately mixed regard: a saint, but a saint to be repented with rather than celebrated.
That ambivalence is built into his feast. St. Josaphat's Day falls in Tasnember (XIII) in the Melusinian liturgical year and is kept as a penitential observance: the faithful honor the reformer while mourning the tradition he destroyed, a wound the faith understands itself as partly healing. He is the only figure in the Melusinian calendar whose day is kept in sorrow. In old Hamland his day was kept separately, and less soberly, as the feast of the royal order that bore his name.
Legacy
In Hamland the reformer's name outlived every church that claimed him. The Order of St Josaphat, an order of chivalry of the Hammish crown, was open to all living citizens of the kingdom and to foreign dignitaries, and was conferred in four grades: Knight or Dame Grand Cross, Knight or Dame, Commander, and Officer, the last two carrying the post-nominals CSJ and OSJ.[1] The order's badge was a gold cross bearing a single ruby at its heart, the stone and ribbon varying by grade, and its motto was Non omnis moriar, rendered from the Audente as "Not all of me shall die". Melusinian commentary observes that the motto is truer of the religion he burned than of the man. St Josaphat's Stadium at Porapa, one of the great sporting grounds of old Hamland, carried his name into the football era, and the older Hammish spelling, St Josaphat without the period, survives in both institutions.
The Melusinian Faith teaches that its deepest inheritance, the Five Currents and the veneration of the horned sacred beast, reached it through the reformation Josaphat led, and that the same reformation cost it three thousand years of learning it cannot recover. Its regard for him holds both teachings at once.
See also
References
- ^ Records of the Order of St Josaphat, which give its motto, feast, eligibility, grades, and rolls. Its sovereign was the reigning King, its Grand Prior a Duke of Morfaga; its officers included a King of Craitland and a member of the Ravaillac family, whose name was later carried by Caputia's founding queen.
