Hatarant Alapeni

General Introduction

Andaperna people, regardless of ethnicity, believe in ghosts and spirits haunting and vexing them on a regular basis. These entities are blamed for things going wrong, health issues, sometimes also bigger events like bad weather. To deal with these spirits and the adversities they cause, the Andaperna people have developped means of compensation or appeasement. One of these are hatarant alapeni, clay tablets used to bind malevolent ghosts to their grave and hinder them from causing trouble to the people in their vicinity.

Description

Hatarant alapeni are an instrument employed and produced by priests, especially priests of Harashepas, the storm god. But also priests of Shakatassipas use hatarant alapeni, especially in health-related issues.

As ghosts and spirits are believed to be stationary and indestructible, special means are to be used to deal with them. While most clay tablets are not fired, hatarant alapeni must be fired to grant permanent protection from the entity they are aimed at. In worse cases, when the entity can not be appeased or sealed away somehow, the space where they are believed to be up to their mischief gets sealed. In nature cairns are erected around the deposited tablet, in settlements small, mostly brick-made boxes are built an in homes sometimes entire rooms or the basement is sealed of.

The practice of sealing off small areas sometimes takes absurd forms when a family of eight or nine loses one room in the house and is forced to live in the living room. Also in cities sometimes there are brick boxes in the middle of open spaces or even on passageways which makes traversing these places difficult in some instances.

The history of the hatarant alapeni

The origins of the hatarant alapeni lie deep in the mists of history. Despite the long literary history of the peoples of Andaperna, these tablets are only most seldomly brought up in written sources. Countermeasures against ghosts, demons and spirits in general are mentioned quite frequently though, mostly referring to either the problems caused, the entities causing them, their victims and the religious specialists performing the countermeasures.

One hatarant alapeni has been retrieved from an ancient ruin by the slopes of the Hruzk Mountain Range in the very west of Andaperna. The ruins history can be traced back to late in the Era of the Trees and the place seems to have been destroyed by the impact of the divine punishment that started the Era of the Fire. Indeed fire seems to have be the cause of the sites destruction, which led to the thorough sintering of the plate, preserving it for millenia. While the practice may have existed before that time already, no older examples have been found so far. The language on the tablet though seems to be well formulated, indicating some kind of standardization. Besides text, there is also a map of constellations on the place, the meaning of which and its connection to the sealing ritual is unclear.

Item type

Book / Document