Thúrun
Thúrun (Hártal spelling Ðúrun) was the polytheistic religion of much of far western Messenia from approximately 1500 BCE to 1000 CE. Its practice was centred in Transaphrasia, with predominantly Thúrunite societies reaching as east as Alcasia and as north as Tvåriken. It formed the basis of a common culture, which was remarkably consistent in many of its customs, and which in turn came to mark sophistication — if not a distinct 'Thúrunite civilisation' in the region. Although it became a cultural entity and force in its own right, transcending individual groups of western Messenian peoples such as the Sunneni and Vossar, and becoming adopted by later incomers to be passed down to the early Siur, it would ultimately be challenged and displaced by Arlatur from the 7th century CE.
Etymology
The derivation of the name Thúrun is uncertain, but a link has been posited to the Antissan dariya, “call”, possibly a reference to the distinctive chanting that is known to have formed a part of Thúrun ritual; the earliest references to the faith under something resembling that name date from the 9th century BCE.1 It is also referred to in Hártal as Gamlatrú or the “Old Faith”, although this term was not used during the period in which Thúrun was widely practiced; its first recorded use is in Arlaturi Siur histories dating from the 11th century.
History
Precursors
Although the Arlaturi historiographical term of the 'Old Faith period' describes in its loosest application all history prior to the Summoner, Thúrun properly refers to the complex polytheism that emerged under the influence of Antissan Palthachism as Antissan states such as Dammuri and later the Larhine Empire expanded into western Messenia. The original belief systems of this region were animistic, propitiating divinities in nature so as to assure for practitioners a reasonably unhindered existence. A native West Messenian pantheon was already taking shape at the onset of Antissan conquest, with more important principles being named and given personalities as important gods, and a somewhat ordered cosmology forming, constituting 'pre-Thúrun'. In this form, it was the union of land (seen as male) and sea (seen as female) that gave rise to human beings; at one remove, the sun and moon were seen as mostly beneficent grandparents (the rare occasions of solar and lunar eclipses were taken by believers to be transient marks of disfavour), and the night sky as a kind of “heavenly ocean” in which the spirits of the deceased lived and watched over those still living.
Antissan era
Antissan influences introduced many of western Messenian religion's more complex forms over the course of the late second millennium BCE. To a lesser extent, there was also exchange with Senuminism through trade along the Tin Road to Sabamia, but overall Palthachism remained the more dominant influence. With the decline of Antissan civilisation after the collapse of the Larhines, early Thúrun can be held to have supplanted classical Palthachism in the west for all practical purposes.
The more hierarchical pantheon of Palthachism, headed by Nepis and Fenya, was translated and adapted into early Thúrun as counterparts to local deities, and vice versa among the Antissans. The principles of land and sea retained their primacy in the west, with the corresponding Antissan deities Tehnu and Dalasi becoming the main objects of veneration there. Antissan rites also introduced complex priestly organisations and gendered distinctions: previously sexless or mutable spirits were assigned more clearly defined personalities, the priesthood of each deity was required to be of the matching sex, and female deities became regarded as second-order behind male counterparts. Finally, Palthachist ideas about gaining favour with Sebanants in the afterlife introduced a 'high' form of ancestor worship, appealing to humans who lived honourably and attained some measure of divinity on death. Shrines to these ancestor spirits could be extremely elaborate, and a palace in Soeria had a full temple for this purpose.
Post-Antissan developments
Following the fall of the Antissans, western Messenia emerged as an independent cultural sphere dominated by the post-Antissan Sunneni and the Vossar to their northwest. Thúrun took on a life of its own as a set of practices and customs deemed as a mark of sophistication and civilisation in themselves, allowing for cultural exchange that integrated the two peoples to a great degree. Meticulously observing Thúrunite rites in all aspects of life became the preoccupation and even the ultimate end of local societies; it became more feasible to speak of Thúrunite peoples than Sunneni or Vossar as distinct cultural groups. It has been suggested that a part of this was a moralistic reaction to Proto-Siriash, the other descendant of old Palthachism, whose practitioners wreaked havoc on ordinary society as ascetic berserkers in the period. Thúrun certainly became less accommodating of other religions overall, and the spread of Siriash and Cairony through later contacts with Messenian cultural centres further east would be checked by suspicion of those religions' differences with the Thúrunite lifestyle: Cairony for its clergywomen's direct contrast with Thúrun's patriarchal priesthood and culture, and Siriash for its strident antitheism along with other attitudes continuous with Proto-Siriash.
A particular feature of Thúrun belief which arose in the post-Antissan period was that of wirda. The term is usually translated as “predestination”, although it can be argued that this covers only part of the overall sense; wirda held that the fate of an individual was preordained at the moment of his birth and immutable, and there is evidence of the word being used in a literary context as an expression of futility. This last was an idea known to have been discouraged within mainstream Thúrun practice; those whose fate was ultimately to walk with the gods in the afterlife were expected to show their probity in this life by upstanding and moral conduct, and by charitable deeds. The fact that the individual could not know his ultimate fate – merely believe in the truth of his assumption – could be held to make his subsequent behaviour fall into the realm of self-fulfilling prophecy. Some surviving records, however, point to the existence of a counter-philosophy that held that, since the decision as to whether one would be admitted to the afterlife had already been made, no act by the individual in his life could change that, and one was therefore free to act entirely as one wished – probably the most famous early form of antinomianism on Arden, and regarded by mainstream Thúrun in the same heretical light as its counterparts in other faiths in later centuries.
Decline and fall
Siur historians have made an argument that Thúrun was already showing signs of breakdown during the late Digull, around the time that Ragna Hrafnamaður was developing the philosophical framework of Arlatur, although an element of personal and institutional bias may be present in that analysis. Nonetheless, the clash between the two systems of belief was an acute one almost from the point that Arlatur began to gain traction in the Siur country. Arlatur’s insistence that no individual was of greater intrinsic worth than any other ran directly counter to the well-entrenched hierarchical nature of Thúrun; and, at the purely temporal level, the refusal of Arlaturi to accept the validity of existing social hierarchies marked them as a threat in the eyes of local rulers and others with a vested interest in the maintenance of the status quo.
Despite intermittent periods in which Arlaturi were marginalised and at times persecuted in the Thjáning, Siur rulers who continued to practice Thúrun increasingly found themselves ruling over a growing Arlaturi community. Acceptance of Arlatur at the highest levels of society was not, perhaps, the inevitability that modern histories suggest, but the declaration of the commonhold of Æthelin for Arlatur in 774 is justly regarded as the tipping point which led to its supplanting of Thúrun in the Siur country by the beginning of the tenth century. The process was helped along substantially by the esteem in which Jukka af Essingi, first thár of the Siur and another early convert, was held after his successful repulsion of the Secote invasions of the early ninth century.
Increasingly driven to the fringes of society, Thúrun in its then-current form became virtually extinct by the end of the first millennium. The descendant practice of Assandrism, while it bears some similarities to late-period Thúrun, has diverged sufficiently to be regarded by many as a quite distinct creature from its predecessor.
Culture and customs
Names and naming
Thúrun maintained a practice seen in a number of other pre-modern faiths in which names were not fixed at birth. Customarily, a new-born baby was given a “provisional” name by his parents, the ashalatra (probably from ashal, “first” and hatrau, “to assign, name”), by which he was known during childhood, but this was usually discarded as the child reached puberty and underwent the initiation rituals by which he was accepted as an autonomous adult. The new name, or mayastra (from mayast, “man, [adult] male”), was given as part of those rituals; the process by which these names were derived is unclear, but studies of some contemporary cultures – and others closer to modern times whose practices were similar – attest to the new name being one of personal significance to the bearer, based either on a past event or personal quality, or a statement of intent for his future.
However, it is known from funeral inscriptions that adherents of Thúrun had a third name, the kaninyatra (probably from kaniniyau, “to prostrate, bow down”); this was a form of “spirit name” unknown to others, under which the bearer interacted with the gods and, presumably, by which he referred to himself while at prayer. The practice is not unknown elsewhere – many primitive cultures have held that to know the true name of a thing is to hold power over that thing, and the existence of a “true” spirit name renders other public names technical aliases. A number of inscriptions on tombs among the Dammurites and later Larhines follow the general form “X, whom the gods call Y”.
Marriage and divorce
Thúrun's idea of marriage was not necessarily for life. This is not to say that many marriages did not last the lifetimes of the couple concerned; however, it was generally accepted that a marriage need not last longer than the time required to see the youngest child of the marriage reach adulthood. Divorce, by contrast, could not legally be sought during this period; however, after this point it could be obtained merely by making a joint statement to that effect before a priest and three other witnesses.
Marriages customarily took place in the open air, partly as a means of seeking the blessing of the gods on the union; almost invariably, the bride and groom would spill a small amount of wine or mead into each other’s cupped palm at the beginning of the ceremony as a libation to honour the gods. The practice has outlived Thúrun given its absorption into Arlaturi tengja, although the seeking of an external blessing has become an honouring of the internal divinity that Arlatur holds as present in all creatures.
Death and funerary practices
While deserving spirits were allowed into the realm beyond, the other side of that coin was that those who were undeserving or had seriously transgressed were barred from crossing over, and were forced to wander the world of the living in perpetuity. (Thúrun appears to lack a harsher concept of punishment in the afterlife than this, which may have informed the lack of a principle of capital punishment among the early Siur.) Driven towards dementia by this ceaseless wandering, the restless dead were thought to seek out the newly-deceased so as to reanimate their bodies; in order to prevent this happening, the body had to be watched over for at least three days – although in practice, Thúrun funerals took place within this time-frame – in a practice called the hilamma, a term used in other contexts as “gate” or “guard”.
Although the Vítrör and other inhabitants of the later Siur country are known to have practiced ritual burial, this seems to have been almost wholly supplanted within classical Thúrun by the Dammurite practice of cremation (waranti, literally “burning”). The reasons are not clear, but given that smaller objects of value were ritually burned as sacrifices or placatory gifts, cremation of the body may perhaps be seen as a larger-scale variation on the practice. An alternative method, the parkuli (probably from parku, “high”) involved the body being placed on a high wooden platform and left to the elements and passing scavengers; this was practiced in some fringe regions, most notably within present-day Elland, although it may have been a holdover from indigenous practices, given that it was not widely used elsewhere.
Tathyn
The practice of ritualised tattooing was an early feature of Thúrun, sometimes suggested to have been influenced by Protosirian practices. These tattoos are referred to in modern Hártal as tathyn (Hártal taþnar, singular taþyn); the term probably derives from Antissan dassu, “strong”, as an indication of strength and probably virility. Tathyn in the Thúrun tradition were worn almost entirely by men; their wider use by women in modern Siur society is an outgrowth of Arlaturi practice of gender-neutrality. Historically, inscription of tathyn was a function reserved to the priesthood, and the modern term for persons permitted to inscribe tathyn, paðlar (singular paðyl), derives from the Antissan patili, “priest”.
As in the modern age, tathyn were used for a number of purposes, of which indicating one’s particular patron deity was only one. The practice of separating particular types of tathyn by location, commonplace today, was probably formalised by around 1600 BCE.
While most outsiders – and, indeed, many Siur themselves – see tathyn as an ancient practice, it should be noted that tathyn as used in the present day are a comparatively recent phenomenon, dating back to the Endurtendrandi of the middle to late 18th century; along with other aspects of Thúrun, tathyn became discredited following the rise of Arlatur and only returned to common usage as the Endurtendrandi saw the conscious modelling of a “Siur heritage”.
Science
Regard for a controlling animus within natural phenomena and inanimate objects led quite naturally to something approaching veneration for the stars and planets, and an intense interest in their positioning and movement. The Jötunsteinn culture, widespread in the far west in the period 2000-1500 BCE, was particularly active in this area, with the characteristic arrays of large carved stones from which their name is taken being used for astronomical studies at a time when actual writing – in the form of the early Linstafur runic script – was only just becoming widespread.
Gender bias within Thúrun
Particularly by comparison to the strong gender-neutral stance of Arlatur, which arose within a Thúrun environment and, to a fair degree, as a reaction to it, most Thúrun culture is seen as essentially male-dominated. This simplistic position is arguably unfair; as already discussed, the priesthoods of Thúrun’s main deities were divided along gender lines (although those gods perceived as being male generally held precedence), and women did exercise significant influence in several fields.
Secular law, in particular, was seen as very much the domain of women – this being taken as an extension of women’s role as homemakers and custodians of domestic tranquillity. Indeed, Hjördís Birgissor, mother of Ragna Hrafnamaður, the founder of Arlatur, was herself a reikómari or travelling judge, and the Summoner herself was apprenticed to her mother for most of the time in which she was developing the philosophies of Arlatur.
Neither was it expected that women would not take up arms where necessary, as might have been the case in a more purely patriarchal society. Most specifically military forces within the Thúrun sphere were male, but this can be taken as merely a reflection of men’s greater physical strength. Women – again, largely from perceptions of them as guardians of hearth and home – were positively expected to be skilled in arms from a predominantly defensive posture. Outside perceptions of this associated it with the courseraine that had previously been told of Antissan retinues.