Ramastaarn: a fantasy culture with strange gender-role specialisation

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

It's common to coordinate festival calenders so they come when there is a surplus of food. It is also common to dedicate the festival to a Corn King of some kind. In your case the festival would come just after the fish run and would celebrate a fish spirit or a spirit of one aspect of the sea. If they are monotheists which intuition says they are not, but is possible, adjustments can be made. Christians managed to get fat and drunk at harvest and slaughtertime just as well as pagans. In any case the food calender is tied to the festival calender which is tied to the religious one for obvious reasons of convenience.

Intuition is in this case correct. Few if any Ramastaarni are monotheists. I guess you'd say that they are animists, but since on the World of Isles animism is not a matter of faith but blatantly within the empirical magisterium you might not call that "religion". Dealings between the Ramastaarni and assorted geists/daimons/genii might well be considered more a category of diplomacy or commerce than religion. The Ramastaarni certainly encounter enough geists that are avaricious, gluttonous, lustful, slothful, wrathful, envious, arrogant, duplicitous, gullible, blustering, inconsequential, and just plain stupid that spirits are no more convincing as moral preceptors than humans.

On the other hand: the Pathetic Fallacy is in full force on the World of Isles, so if a field is fertile its geist is also fertile. If you want good crops it really does help to get the land laid.

You might also consider the women to be ancestor-worshippers and the men (who have no idea of who their fathers are) to be predecessor-worshippers. Their dreams are certainly haunted by the memories of deceased clanswomen and senior lodge members. In the usual process these, or composite figures of them, become heroes; living, dreaming members become their avatars, producing a well-understood illusion of reincarnation or of possession by ghosts. There are of course also avatars of the universal exemplars: some lodges have programs of training and dreaming intended deliberately to induce recruits to become avatars of favoured exemplars. A member of Red Flower who is not avatar of Jolian at least pretends to be, and is expected to die trying. Likewise for Raven Lodge and avatars of Luciphage.

In relation to this reverence for hero-possessed predecessors, the Ramastaarni have a custom that the Gehennese find even more grotesque than not knowing who their sisters are. Rather than decently cremate all corpses as a precaution against plagues of undead, they truss up the corpses of their most revered elders and put them in the rafters over the fireplace to mummify in the smoke. Then, if they do become undead, they induce or force the resulting lich to become an avatar of a clan or lodge hero, and stash them in the roof for emergencies. Helios (the Geist of the Sun) tolerates these undead no better than any others, but inside the building, or at night, they can be formidable. In the counsels of the group their voices carry great weight; as avatars of the ancestresses and old masters they do a great deal to perpetuate and enforce group norms of behaviour.

This is also a good time for ritual matings, whether marriage, or as you are positing an avuncular culture, more collectivistic in concept. That is often used as sympathetic magic.

Ramastaarni culture isn't really avuncular: men have no authority over their sisters' children. The clans are run and children raised entirely by the women, with no more involvement of their irrelevant brothers than of their unknown fathers or their non-existent husbands.

[jason taylor]

The men have to gain authority over boys at a certain point to teach them male skills and disciplines in any case.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

The men have to gain authority over boys at a certain point to teach them male skills and disciplines.

Indeed. It happens when the boys leave their maternal clans and join the lodge to which they are assigned by the oneiromancers. Those are not in general, except by chance, the lodges of their uncles any more than they are the lodges of their fathers. And the people who have authority over boys in the lodges are not any relatives as such, but the senior members of lodges.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Indeed. It happens when the boys leave their maternal clans and join the lodge to which they are assigned by the oneiromancers. Those are not in general, except by chance, the lodges of their uncles any more than they are the lodges of their fathers. And the people who have authority over boys in the lodges are not any relatives as such, but the senior members of lodges.

Yes. What I meant(which I didn't make clear) was a system where the blood mother is known for obvious reasons, but the paternal function is unknown and applied collectively. In a small tribal group obviously several would be literal uncles, but just as likely to be cousins-removed. "Collective avuncularity" was just the term I used for it, adapted from a periodical whose name I forget.

[Bengt]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Mud and dust wash off, and the human integument is largely immune to damage by seawater.

I was thinking of quarry and forest work where the there are a lot of scratchy things. There are also heat based industries, I guess they don't have foundries or forges, but what about fired pottery, glass and/or charcoal?

[Agemegos]

I didn't mean to imply that the Ramastaarni eschew protective garments in circumstances where their protection is valuable, only that they would rather go naked than spend a day on a boat in a soggy loincloth or get their clobber all muddy in the taro swamps.

I'm sorry that that wasn't clear.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Intuition is in this case correct. Few if any Ramastaarni are monotheists. I guess you'd say that they are animists, but since on the World of Isles animism is not a matter of faith but blatantly within the empirical magisterium you might not call that "religion". Dealings between the Ramastaarni and assorted geists/daimons/genii might well be considered more a category of diplomacy or commerce than religion. The Ramastaarni certainly encounter enough geists that are avaricious, gluttonous, lustful, slothful, wrathful, envious, arrogant, duplicitous, gullible, blustering, inconsequential, and just plain stupid that spirits are no more convincing as moral preceptors than humans.

That sounds entirely normal for a shamanistic religion to me. Shamen are traditionally meant to be pretty pragmatic in their relations with the spirit world - a very powerful spirit might get something like worship, but with lesser power's it's a lot more of an exchange of favours...

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

That sounds entirely normal for a shamanistic religion to me. Shamen are traditionally meant to be pretty pragmatic in their relations with the spirit world - a very powerful spirit might get something like worship, but with lesser power's it's a lot more of an exchange of favours...

The three basic stances appear to be the priest or devotee, who worships the power as a superior; the shaman, who bargains with it as an equal; and the sorceror, who views it as an inferior and binds or enslaves it. Though those all rest on personalizing supernatural power. If you don't personalize it you are something else again.

Bill Stoddard

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by whswhs

The three basic stances appear to be the priest or devotee, who worships the power as a superior; the shaman, who bargains with it as an equal; and the sorceror, who views it as an inferior and binds or enslaves it. Though those all rest on personalizing supernatural power. If you don't personalize it you are something else again.

Bill Stoddard

Runequest, yoyoyo.