Song of Aldin
The Song of Aldin is the second part of the Libro Aquæ, the sacred scriptures of the Melusinian Faith. Where the Tetrad carries the faith's theology, the Song carries its story: a poetic and narrative compilation recounting the life, mission, and teachings of the prophet Aldin, the Pentheros of the Dozan Bovic Church through whom the goddess Melusine was revealed to the world of Micras. Rich in allegory, it gathers songs, poems, and tales around the themes of faith, love, courage, and divine fellowship, and at its center stands the transfiguration of Melusine at Thaleia.
Content
The Song opens with the prophet's vision of a figure he would later call the Siren, and turns on the day he recognized her in a fisherman's daughter of Thaleia named Melusine. With her consent he poured a silver pail of melted holy butter over her, and she was transfigured, her legs fusing into the tail of the Sea Cow.[1] The verses that follow tell of the town that denounced her as a witch, of the prophet who stood between her and the crowd and put Thaleia under the ban until its penance was paid, and of the commission he delivered, the charge of Bous: that she should go through the waters of the world, where she would be feared, hated, and scorned, but also adored, loved, and worshiped.
Around this center the compilation arranges the wider matter of the prophet's life and teaching: songs of his years as shepherd of the Bovic faithful, poems on the fellowship of the divine herd, and tales in which love, courage, and fidelity are tried and proven. The Song is the portion of the Libro Aquæ most often read aloud, and its verses supply the faith's hymnody as the Tetrad supplies its doctrine. The event at its center is kept in the calendar of the faith at the Feast of the Transformation, in the month of Sonnuber.
The prophet
The faith identifies the Aldin of the Song with Zahir al Din Benjamin Rai Ayreon-Kalirion (1630 AN-1716 AN), the Shirerithian prince who served as Pentheros of the Dozan Bovic Church from 1637 AN to 1665 AN and lived out his last half-century as Pentheros Emeritus, dying surrounded by his family; he was buried at Athlon under Bovic rites. His common name is Hurmu for "the old one," read within the faith as "the wise one." In Melusinian teaching he is honored as the instrument of Bous, who sought a counterpart for the sea and worked the transfiguration through his Pentheros; he is commemorated in the diaspora alongside the figures of the faith he made possible, and the Hurmu municipality of Saint Aldin in Amaland bears his name.
Dating
The events of the Song admit of two datings, and the faith holds the question open. The traditional chronology, followed by the Thalassan Revelation, places the transfiguration at Thaleia around 1560 AN. The identification of the prophet with the historical Pentheros, whose life is documented from 1630 AN to 1716 AN, implies instead a date within his pontificate, in the generation before the Vision of Zalae of 1653 AN. Traditionalist readers hold to the received reckoning and note that the prophet's very name, "the old one," reaches past any single lifetime; historicist readers reply that the Song sings of the documented Pentheros and date its events accordingly. The debate is carried on within the faith without division, each school reading the same verses.
Relationship to the Thalassan Revelation
The Thalassan Revelation, the foundational account of the transfiguration and of the journey of the goddess to Keltia that the faith calls the Flight from Thaleia, stands outside the Libro Aquæ as a primary text in its own right. The Song retells the events the Revelation records, but in verse and at the scale of a life: the Revelation fixes the narrative of the goddess, and the Song surrounds it with the story of the man through whom it happened. The goddess's own later saga, her descent into the underworld and her rising, is told in the Revelation and expounded in the Tetrad rather than sung here; the Song keeps to its prophet. The two texts are read together in Melusinian worship, the Revelation for the account and the Song for the devotion.
