the nature of folkish belief

Among the Thederim there is no single word for what Westerners often seek to name as a single thing. The Thederim do not commonly speak of a bounded “faith” that one enters and cannot depart, nor of belief as an exclusive pledge. Rather, their customs and understandings are lived as part of ordinary life: the keeping of days, the tending of shrines, the speaking of names, the avoidance of certain acts, the telling of old tales, the making of offerings, the taking of vows, and the disputing—endlessly and with relish—of what these things might mean.
For this reason, when the learned must speak of the matter in a single phrase, Osing-way is serviceable, though imperfect. The word is encountered most often in its plainest sense: a way-path to a shrine, grave, standing stone, holy hollow, or other place where osings are known to gather. By extension it also denotes the body of rites, observances, and devotions conducted along such ways. It does not necessarily denote a single doctrine, nor does it require assent to a single account of the world. In Thederim speech, the “why” and the “how” are rarely forced into agreement; correctness is more often measured by doing than by saying. Orthopraxy, not orthodoxy.
The Thederim will sometimes speak instead of nature—not merely trees and weather, but the proper shape of living: the pattern by which people, beasts, spirits, and seasons interlock. Much that a stranger might press into “theology” is, for the Thederim, a question of whether a life is lived in keeping with nature, or against it.
During the last fifty years—owing to increased intercourse with Westerners, the needs of diplomats, and the habits of schools—there has arisen a more orderly account of the Osing-way than many householders would ever attempt. This account is useful, but it must be handled with care. The Osing-way is, by temperament, paradoxical: it admits contradiction without shame, prefers the suggestive over the exhaustive, and treats vagueness not as failure but as room for the Werld to remain strange.
What follows, therefore, is a map—not the land.

a note on old orders: cyrl, wyling, eyrl

The Folk-from-across-the-Sea were not one people in their origin, yet they carried with them a familiar ordering that appears—under many names—across the Antipodes:

• Cyrls, free farmers and householders,
• Wylings, priests and custodians of rites,
• Eyrls, warrior nobles and patrons of war-cults.

The ships that made landfall did not carry these estates in equal measure. Most were crowded with cyrls; few bore many wylings or eyrls. In the old lands, priest and noble often propped one another up; in the new, severed from the weight of ancestral property and retinue, such arrangements withered. The formerly enslaved cyrls, being the multitude and the muscle of settlement, quickly established the radically egalitarian moral temper resentful of all bondage that would come to be treated as ancient law: that men and women are born equal in standing, whatever their parentage.
This matter is not merely political. The Osing-way mirrors the society that keeps it. Where class is thin and mobility is real, a religion that insists upon fixed spiritual castes will not be long endured. Over generations the inherited myths were reordered, reinterpreted, and—where needed—re-homed upon Werld soil.
Even so, the old tripartite ghost lingers in the broad division that scholars commonly use when speaking of Thederim tradition: Folklore, the Courts, and the Psealms.

the three strata of the osing-way

I. Folklore: osings, ylmre, wonders, and terrors

Folklore is the low myth of the Thederim: household tales of osings, ylmre, monsters, witches, wizards, and the hidden rules of luck and spite. It is carried chiefly by speech and habit—mother-to-child, neighbor-to-neighbor—and has shown remarkable stability since the Landing. New stories are forever being grafted on, but the oldest cores change little. The greatest alteration, more often than not, is simply this: events once set “elsewhere” are relocated into the Werld, with beasts and plants adjusted to match the country.
Folklore is not “lesser” in its power. Many scholars learn—too late—that a proverb muttered over a threshold may govern more behavior than a hundred sermons.

II. The courts: shrines, orders, and the six queens

The Courts are the organized heart of wyling practice: networks of shrines, vows, calendars, and custodianship. They are commonly understood as a long synthesis: remnants of older war-cults and priestly authority, braided together with practices learned from Wels and Elandie as the Folk assimilated and intermarried.
As the eyrls dwindled in worldly authority, many priests gradually turned away from gods of rulership and conquest—figures too closely resembling the old aristocratic bargain—and toward powers more chthonic, nearer to hearth, grave, childbirth, sickness, weather, oath, and wheel, though the process was gradual and generational. It was the Sesbrean and Vilbraennean Reforms of the IV Wheel which produced the Courts in forms recognizably akin to those kept today.
The Courts are six, each associated with one of the Queens. Because the wylings no longer hold social supremacy, membership and service are open to all who can endure the discipline and the obligations.

III. The psealms: song, city, and the memory of glory

The Psealms are the song-memory of older noble rivalry: tales once composed to praise heroic ancestors, justify old claims, and recall battles against monsters and chaos. In the Antipodes these songs belonged chiefly to eyrl-houses; most cyrls neither knew them well nor needed to.
In the Werld, however, the shape of the thing altered. Even where households did not preserve the old Psealms, they remembered what such songs were for. Within a few generations new cycles were being made—less for bloodline than for clan, band, and above all city. These works spread quickly, often taking a middle ground between practical folklore and the more inward rites of the Courts: entertaining, political, and sticky in the mind. Among the best-known are the Wolfing Cycle and the Eyriad.

of osings and offerings

A common axiom of Thederim thought is that all matter is ensouled: beast, plant, stone, metal, river, and wind. Learnèd disputation may refine the claim—some arguing that “soul” is distinct from matter, others that it is the very same substance seen under a different aspect—but in practice the consequence is plain: the Werld is full of presences.
Osings are presences unbound to a single object. One may think of them as souls made person-like: spirits inhabiting nature, animate and inanimate; or as the “faces” by which the ensouled world can be addressed. They range from petty household osings to mighty Queens. Even when speaking of the Queens, Thederim commonly resist the word “gods,” preferring instead: osings of surpassing power.
Dealings with osings are often transactional, though the wise will add that the osings themselves set the price, and that what they value is not always what a supplicant expects. Offerings, abstinences, and proper speech matter less as “bribes” than as the manners by which one approaches a will that is not human.
Notably, communion with osings is not confined to the Courts. Ritual trance—sometimes aided by mushrooms, smoke, fasting, chanting, or sleeplessness—has long been the province of folk-practitioners: dryce, galdners, and others broadly named witches. In theory anyone may attempt such commerce; in practice, the attempt is perilous, and talent is unevenly distributed, thus the role of tercines, the college of priestesses specially trained to offer the correct sacrifice on behalf of supplicants.

the mother and the six queens

The Thederim all speak of a single Creator as the Mother—unknowable, infinite, and withdrawn from the Werld. The Mother is said to have birthed six daughters, the Queens. Yet even here the Osing-way refuses neatness: most will insist the Queens are not “deities” but osings, and that divinity is a category mortals invented to flatter themselves into comprehension.
The Mother is rarely worshiped directly. She is too great, too far, and too uninterested. The Queens are nearer: not necessarily kinder, but nearer. It was, after all, the White Queen, not the Mother, who created all men and women in Her image.
Though endlessly disputed in detail, all agree the Mother, self-begat, emerged from the Cosmic Egg, which She made. Standing upon the shell, She formed the Werld out of the spilled contents, forming the land, the sea, and the sky. The shell itself became the great baetyl of the Navel of the Werld in the Omphales.
Afterwards She fashioned the Father out of wood and brought him to life by placing an egg within his chest. Mounting him, the Mother then became impregnated with the White Queen. The Mother then sent the Father down from Heaven to gather materials across the Werld to build a crib for their daughter. From this point the traditions diverge in their telling, but most liviers agree that the Father, upon returning to Heaven, beheld the White Queen and desired Her and stole Her away. The Mother struck him down with Her lightning sword, castrating him and casting him from Heaven. Pathetically, he crawled the Werld searching for his severed member, but the wrathful Mother sent down three ravens who gobbled his parts, granting them the spark of intellect, speech, and consciousness.
Thereafter, disgusted by Her creation, the Mother withdrew. In this withdrawal the Thederim find their chief answer to the question of evil: She does not tend the garden. The Werld has been abandoned. In the quasi-livier Apocrypha & Unwanted Things, the Mother, disgusted by the Father’s betrayal and deeming the Werld a failed work, turned Her attention to the making of new and more perfect worlds.

reincarnation and the selfsame soul

Reincarnation is among the central habits of Thederim thought. Upon death, it is commonly held, the Black Queen decides what life follows.
Because reincarnation is not understood to be bound by the order of space or time—one may die in the future and be born again in the past—many philosophers argue toward a startling conclusion: that all lives are, in truth, the lives of one soul lived in innumerable shapes, known by scholars as radical solipsism. From it follows the moral idiom sometimes called selfsameness: to harm another is to harm oneself, because one must one day live that harmed life; to cheat is to be cheated; to kill is, eventually, to kill oneself.
Those who favor this doctrine will sometimes address strangers as selfsame-brother or selfsame-sister, not as sentimental piety but as literal metaphysic.
There is also, among the bolder disputants, a strain of argument that time itself is illusory, and that “before” and “after” are conveniences of the body rather than truths of the Werld, though this belief is by no means universal.

the queens

The unlearnèd pretend the Queens may be arranged in a tidy lineage, with a tidy chronology, and a tidy set of “correct” attributes. This is a comforting fantasy for those who cannot abide the truth: that we live in a Werld in which the divine is neither indexed nor cooperative. The Osing-way has never obliged them.
The order of the Queens varies by court, city, and century; and where a charice insists upon certainty, one may generally assume they defend a local custom rather than the heavens themselves. We shall therefore speak of the Queens as they are commonly encountered in practice: by their powers, their cults, and their reputations.

the white queen

The pantheon is headed—whatever provincial rivalries may say to the contrary—by the White Queen, youngest of the Queens, and (in the most widely received liviers) the only child born of the consummation of the Mother and the Father. Other liviers, especially those cherished far from Eyr, multiply the Father’s paternity with suspicious generosity; a few go so far as to name all but the Yellow Queen as his daughters. This is one of those disputes which is most often a sign of local pride.
The White Queen is the Hermaphrodite Queen, and in Her own person demonstrates the original equality of man and woman. She fashioned for Herself a phallus, and by it impregnated Herself, emulating Her own conception. From Her body came three sons and three daughters—two dark-skinned, two tan, and two pale—whom every Court acknowledges as the progenitors of mankind, however they quarrel over which child first stepped into daylight.
She is, in the plain sense, the Mother-Father of humankind, and behaves as one would expect a proper parent to behave: with fierce favoritism toward none, and sharp impatience for those who bring trouble upon the household.
Folklore is full of Her battles against ettins, guebbelins, and ylmre, for the White Queen has never been content to “reign” in the ornamental manner preferred by lesser spirits. She bears Eyenbite, a sword said to cleave any substance as easily as one cuts woven cloth—save for woven cloth itself, which perversely resists it. She is likewise famed for Corunice, Her drinking horn—also called the Horn of Plenty—which pours wine without end, to the great delight of poets and the considerable expense of tavernkeepers who would rather the public not take such stories too literally.
Her dwelling is Heafneburh, set upon the Big Moon (called also the White Moon), and She governs its comings and goings. It is no surprise that Her sign is the crescent moon.
It is likewise no surprise—though it does irritate certain polities of the Pentarchy—that the White Queen is held to be the especial Queen of Eyr. Being occupied with the defense of the Werld against chaos, She rules Eyr by proxy, having anointed the wode to govern in Her stead.
She is also reckoned the Queen of Magic, standing uncomfortably astride the old division: drit and drycraft (inherent, feminine power) and galderie (learned, masculine craft). It is fashionable in lecture halls to claim this “contradiction” proves the Osing-way incoherent. It proves only that the Werld is not a pamphlet.