Faun (Reformed Stripping Path)
Faun is a deity of the Reformed Stripping Path, representing the moon of the same name.
Faun, the Lady Divine of Natural Balance and Fertility, emerged from the heart of the ancient forests, embodying the harmony of life and growth. As the queen of the satyrs and the revered Morovian Sasquatch, her first followers, Faun symbolizes the primal energy of the natural world. Her presence inspires devotion to the cycles of nature and the cultivation of fertility and abundance across Bassaridia Vaeringheim.
Faun in the Reformed Stripping Path
In the Reformed Stripping Path, Faun is celebrated as the steward of the natural world and the embodiment of its balance. She guides mortals in harmonizing with the cycles of life, growth, and decay, urging them to respect the interconnectedness of all living things. Her teachings emphasize care for the earth, nurturing the land, and embracing the vitality of life.
Faun’s followers regard her as a nurturing and protective deity, whose blessings bring fertility to the land and renewal to the soul. Her influence extends to all who seek harmony within themselves and with the natural world, particularly those who depend on its bounty for their survival.
Faun in the Bassaridian Zodiac
Faun governs the Zodiac of Faunian, the thirteenth sign of the Bassaridian Zodiac and the third zodiac of the month of Opsitheiel. This zodiac is associated with the Host Star Dilëtaz, a celestial emblem of love, protection, and nurturing care, which appears at approximately 36°N latitude.
The zodiac of Faunian encourages followers to cultivate love and harmony, nurturing both their communities and the natural world. Under the light of Dilëtaz, worshipers reflect on their relationships with others and their responsibilities to the earth, seeking Faun’s guidance to foster growth, balance, and sustainability.
The Sylvan Fellowship
The Sylvan Fellowship, based in the forests surrounding Sylvapolis, is the primary sisterhood devoted to Faun, Lady Divine of Natural Balance and Fertility. It is one of the three distinctly Dionysian cults and Mysteries of the Reformed Stripping Path, and the one that most closely resembles the ecstatic cults of the traditional Stripping Path. Its membership consists almost entirely of women; men may serve as musicians, guards, or satyr-actors on the periphery, but are excluded from the core Mysteries. In both ritual style and social role, the Fellowship preserves much of the old Bacchanalian ethos—dance, wine, masks, and the shedding of constraint—while reinterpreting it through Faun’s tutelage and the Reformed theology of natural balance.
The Fellowship’s sacred landscape is defined by mixed woodland, terraced clearings, and hidden caverns along the river valleys around Sylvapolis. Sacred groves, marked by carved standing stones and garlanded trees, function as open-air temples where Sylvanists meet for seasonal rites. Beneath the forested hills lies the Hollow Gate, a complex of tunnels, paths and chambers that serve as the principal entrance to the underworld in Faun’s cult. These mostly subterranean passages—lit by bioluminescent fungi and lined with petroglyphs—form the route of the Rite of Verdant Passage, the Fellowship’s most famous underworld initiation. Altars and way-shrines along the Hollow Gate depict Faun accompanied by satyrs and Morovian Sasquatch, reflecting her status as their queen and first patron, and anchoring the Fellowship’s identity as a bridge between human devotees and the wilder spirits of Bassaridia Vaeringheim.
Internally, the Sylvan Fellowship is structured as a tiered mystery-order with strong continuities to the female-led Mysteries of the original Stripping Path. Novices, called Leaf-Daughters, begin by tending groves, preparing wreaths and wine, and learning the hymns of Faun and the Dionysian liturgy inherited from Bacchanalian tradition. After completing at least one full agricultural cycle in service to the shrines, they may be initiated as full Sylvanists, entitled to participate in the inner dances, oversee minor rites, and guide village women through fertility and mourning ceremonies. Senior priestesses, known as Grove-Mothers, supervise networks of groves and Hollow Gate descents; they decide who is ready for the deeper underworld Mysteries and act as spiritual counselors to rural communities. At the top stands the High Sylvanist of Sylvapolis, who presides over the principal grove-temple, represents the Fellowship in councils with the Temple Bank of the Reformed Stripping Path and the General Port of Lake Morovia, and is widely regarded as Faun’s foremost interpreter in the modern era.
The cult’s theology centers on Faun as steward of natural balance and patron of the forest’s untamed vitality. Sylvanist teaching emphasizes that life, death, growth, and decay are not opposing forces but parts of a single cycle, and that attempts to hoard or over-exploit nature—as dramatized in the Homeric Hymn to Faun—inevitably provoke correction. The Fellowship’s Dionysian character appears in its insistence that joy, intoxication, and erotic play are not shameful if they remain rooted in reverence and mutual care. Drawing on the older Stripping Path tradition of the Mysteries—where “virtually all leaders within the Mysteries, and the majority of members, are women” and men are barred from many ecstatic rites—the Sylvan Fellowship casts itself as a Reformed continuation of women’s Bacchanalian leadership, now aligned explicitly with Faun rather than directly with Bacchus. Within this framework, satyrs and Morovian Sasquatch are treated as elder siblings and guides, embodiments of wildness that must be befriended and appeased rather than conquered.
Ritual life in the Sylvan Fellowship is rich, embodied, and seasonally structured. Daily practice in the groves includes communal songs at dawn, simple libations of wine or herb-infused water poured at tree roots, and short circle-dances that mirror the turning of the year. Two major festivals define the cultic calendar. During the Rite of Verdant Passage, held at the Hollow Gate, initiates crowned in ivy and oak descend along a long, winding path through the underworld, pausing at carved monuments to recite verses from the Hymn to Faun and to undergo symbolic “deaths” and renewals. At the journey’s nadir they stand in darkness before an underground shrine of Faun, then re-emerge to the surface amid bonfires, drums, and ecstatic dancing, celebrating their rebirth as full participants in the goddess’s cycle. On Panagia Therizis (the Holy Day of the Reaper), Sylvanists lead harvest processions in and around Sylvapolis, mixing offerings of grain and fruit with wine, songs, and torchlit revels that honor both the reaping of crops and the eventual reaping of mortal lives.
Many of the Fellowship’s rites are explicitly women-only. Inner-circle Bacchanalia, held in secluded forest clearings or deep within the Hollow Gate, exclude men entirely; only Sylvanists and carefully vetted village women may attend. These events often feature masked dances, shared confessions, and guided intoxication using wine and Noctic-Rabrev–scented incense in carefully controlled amounts. The purpose is not spectacle but catharsis: participants are encouraged to shed social roles, express grief and desire, and reconcile with one another under Faun’s gaze. Men may join outer-ring celebrations—processions, public feasts, and satyr-pageants—but are forbidden to cross the inner boundary marked by ivy cords and carved posts, echoing the older Stripping Path restriction on male participation in many of the Mysteries’ most ecstatic rites.
In civic life, the Sylvan Fellowship serves as a rural support network and a channel for women’s power in forest and farming communities. Grove shrines around Sylvapolis maintain seed banks and herb gardens, organize communal gleaning, and administer informal mutual-aid funds for widows, single mothers, and families struck by crop failure. Sylvanists serve as mediators in disputes over woodcutting, hunting rights, and foraging, stressing the need to protect sacred groves and leave enough for the forest’s non-human inhabitants. They work closely with the Mystery of the Verdant Embrace and Sanctum Vitalis to coordinate planting rites, herbal medicine, and water cleanliness, ensuring that Faun’s ecstatic worship is grounded in concrete care for land and bodies. In urban neighborhoods of Vaeringheim and Delphica, small Sylvan houses provide refuge and counseling for women fleeing domestic violence or spiritual exploitation, framing their protection as a defense of Faun’s groves against profanation.
The Fellowship’s Dionysian heritage has also shaped its role in major campaigns. During the New South Jangsong Campaign, Sylvanist missionaries participated in the Temple Bank and Vaeringheim Division’s religious outreach. In Norsolyra, a city famed for shipbuilding, Sylvan priestesses joined with missionaries from the Mystery of Red Mirth to organize a ship-blessing festival: vessels were draped in greenery and wine-colored banners, dancers in satyr and maenad masks moved along the quays, and each hull received both Dionysian libations and Faun-blessed garlands before launch. Threats from a rival shipbuilding faction prompted the Vaeringheim Division to deploy land and naval forces to guard the event, allowing the festival to proceed without disruption and forging a lasting association between local craftsmen and Faun’s favor. The combination of ecstatic spectacle and visible military protection made the Fellowship a memorable face of the Reformed religion in New South Jangsong, especially among women involved in dockside labor and artisanal guilds.
Missionary activity by the Sylvan Fellowship is formally integrated into the economic and ritual structures of the General Port of Lake Morovia. In the Port’s company tables, “Missionaries of the Sylvan Fellowship” appear as a Temple Bank service category with a valuation comparable to other major cults, indicating that Sylvanist missionary teams are traded and deployed as high-value spiritual assets rather than as informal volunteers. Their assignments typically target forested or agrarian regions—both within Bassaridia Vaeringheim and across diaspora corridors—where ecological stress, depopulation, or social fragmentation threaten the balance Faun demands. In such places, Sylvanist cadres lead reforestation rites, women’s councils, and Vernal- or Harvest-themed festivals that re-knit community bonds around shared land and shared joy.
The Fellowship’s response to the Baratar Scandal of 52 PSSC and the corridor-based policy set out in Bassaridian involvement in Corum reflects its suspicion of hidden rot beneath apparent prosperity. In sermons around Sylvapolis and other forest-edge towns, Grove-Mothers compared clandestine weapons exports to a blight spreading unseen through a grove: the canopy might look healthy for a season, but decay in the roots would eventually topple even the largest trees. By contrast, the Straits Conventions’ White-Lane humanitarian corridors and publicly logged manifests were framed as “cleared paths” through the forest: routes everyone could see, share, and bless together. While Sylvan Fellowship Kleisthenes did not participate directly in the Corum humanitarian mission, their teachings circulated among missionary cadres and diaspora communities as a moral argument for audited transparency, communal oversight, and the rejection of covert violence dressed up as cunning.
Within the broader theology of the Reformed Stripping Path, the Sylvan Fellowship is regarded as the archetypal Faunian “Dionysian Mystery”: an order that keeps the wild, ecstatic heart of the old Stripping Path alive inside a Reformed framework of balance and covenant. Whether leading ivy-crowned women through the Hollow Gate during the Rite of Verdant Passage, presiding over harvest dances around bonfires in Sylvapolis, blessing Norsolyrian ships in partnership with fellow Dionysian cults, or urging diaspora communities to choose open, shared paths over secret, diseased ones, Sylvanists present their work as continuous service to Faun, queen of satyrs and Sasquatch. In their teaching, every dance that reconciles estranged neighbors, every grove protected from greed, and every woman who emerges from the underworld Mystery stronger and unashamed is a small proof that the Lady of Natural Balance still walks Bassaridia’s forests—and that her joy, properly tended, can heal a world scarred by neglect and excess.
Mythology: The Hymn of Faun
The Homeric Hymn to Faun, composed by the Bassaridian playwright Eliyahu al-Bashir, tells the story of Marathos, a woodsman whose greed leads him to exploit the forest sacred to Faun, disrupting its natural balance. Despite warnings from the villagers, Marathos defies Faun, claiming dominion over the land.
In response, Faun curses the forest, rendering it barren and lifeless. Humbled and desperate, Marathos begs for forgiveness, and Faun teaches him the necessity of care and respect for nature’s cycles. Marathos dedicates his life to restoring the forest, and Faun’s blessings return, symbolizing the renewal of harmony between mortals and the natural world.
The hymn is recited during the Rite of Verdant Passage and the Panagia Therizis (Holy Day of the Reaper), reminding worshipers of their responsibility to honor nature’s balance and the dangers of exploiting its gifts without reverence.
Worship and Festivals in Bassaridia Vaeringheim
The Rite of Verdant Passage
The Rite of Verdant Passage, held at the Hollow Gate, is a sacred journey into the underworld that symbolizes transformation and renewal. Initiates, adorned with garlands of ivy and oak leaves, descend into labyrinthine tunnels beneath the earth, encountering luminous fungi, ancient petroglyphs, and trials that test their courage and endurance. At the heart of the underworld, they commune with Faun’s spirit, receiving her blessings of vitality and renewal.
Panagia Therizis (Holy Day of the Reaper)
On the 150th day of the year, the Panagia Therizis, or Holy Day of the Reaper, honors Faun as the guardian of the harvest. The festival features processions, feasts, and offerings of grains and fruits at her altars. Worshipers celebrate the abundance of the earth and express gratitude for Faun’s blessings, reaffirming their commitment to care for the land.
Epithets
Faun is revered through epithets that reflect her nurturing and protective nature. She is known as the Lady of the Grove, symbolizing her stewardship of the sacred forests. As the Mother of Renewal, she represents her role in nurturing life and fostering growth. Faun is also called the Bearer of Blessings, emphasizing her ability to bestow fertility and abundance upon the land.
Iconography and Depictions
Iconography and Depictions Faun is often depicted as a radiant nymph adorned with garlands of flowers and draped in flowing robes of green and gold. She is frequently shown amidst woodland creatures and blooming forests, surrounded by symbols of life and growth.
Symbols associated with Faun include the Horn of Plenty, representing fertility and abundance, and the Wreath of Ivy, signifying the eternal cycle of life. Faun is closely associated with the Morovian Sasquatch, believed to be her earliest followers and protectors of her sacred groves.
Artistic depictions of Faun capture her ethereal beauty and vitality, inspiring worshipers to embrace her blessings and foster harmony with the natural world. Her imagery serves as a reminder of the profound connection between humanity and the earth, encouraging devotion to the Lady Divine of Natural Balance and Fertility.
