The idea of gods with human representations and human concerns is relatively new to the people of Thule, my King. Before the time of Atlantis, no one knew of gods such as Mithra or Asura. Even the old, primal deities—Herum, Set, and perhaps Tiamat—had no priests or houses of worship. In those years, humans worshiped only the unseen spirits of hill and field, beast and tree. The people of the cities may have forgotten their names, but the tribes of the jungles and the plains remember the Forest Gods, and they still pay homage to them. Those who worship the Forest Gods are not priests or clerics. They are druids, shamans, or totem warriors of one kind or another. Their magic is derived from the spirits of nature, not the power of faith or the divine intercession of the gods. In fact, tribal
people are mystified by the rites and doctrines of the city gods; to the typical barbarian, gods don’t want anything from humankind—they just are. Honoring the natural spirits is simply good sense, since angering the spirit of the deer by failing to express gratitude for a successful hunt might lead the spirit to keep game away from the hunter in the future,
while angering the spirit of the mammoth is a good way to get oneself killed.
Civilized travelers are sometimes inclined to treat druids and shamans with skepticism—after all, they have their own explanations for the mysteries of nature and do not look at the world in the same
way more primitive peoples do. But there is no doubt that shamans and other practitioners of nature magic deal with powers every bit as real and capable as the mystic forces harnessed by a wizard’s spells or a cleric’s prayers. It seems that for the wilderness tribes, believing is seeing. They perceive a world where every animal, every tree, every rock, and every stream posesses its own living spirit, and for them, it is so.
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