Dahan

In the religious tradition of the Eleven Cities, Dahan was the god of water, and therefore of the vegetable kingdom. He was also a god of fertility as more generally interpreted, particularly as it pertained to the human male. Possibly the oldest of the eight major gods, Dahan was worshipped in a wide variety of ways from the prehistory of the Cities until The Wesmodian Reformation  .
Despite the broad reach of Dahan's cult, worship of the god appears to have been a predominantly rural activity, with cult centres being rare in urban areas. His rural priests appear to have liaised and interacted with each other more than those of most other gods, and to have developed a network of cultural leverage that made them increasingly unpopular over time. Objections to the means by which these priests demanded worship of and homage to Dahan were said to be what motivated Wesmod to launch his reformation, during which the cult suffered an especially thorough loss of public support.

Etymology

In Old Zolian. Dayh means green, while Han is man. Dahan therefore most likely means Green Man. One possible nuance to this is that idiomatic Old Zohlian occasionally used the "adjective + man" form to create an agentive construction; "large + man" could mean grower, for example, or "wuthering + man" could mean sailor. The name Dahan could therefore mean Greener, in the sense of Maker of things green. Either interpretation is a clear reference to the deity's links with the vegetable kingdom, though the distinction may be important for thaumatological purposes.

Origins

Dahan appears to be the oldest of the deities of the Eleven Cities. The geographer and thaumatologist Kaydre Ysapryo records encountering evidence of his cult during her travels across the damp alluvial plain to the southwest of the cities. This evidence, she claims, took the form of several effigies of a crouching, hirsute, exaggeratedly ithyphallic man. These, she claims, were carved out of soapstone on a scale (the effigies typically involve roughly two cubic feet of stone) and in a blocky geometrical style consistent with the oldest known objet d'art that her civilisation ever gave rise to, predating the oldest cities by over a millennium. Laying aside their more striking physical attributes these effigies depicted a bearded man with long hair hanging loose down his back, thus evincing a remarkable similarity to later cult images of Dahan. These artefacts, Ysapryo claimed, were mostly been fished up out of rivers, suggesting their manufacture and deposition represents an act of cultic devotion to a river deity or personification of the fertilising potential of the waterways. This would be entirely in keeping with Dahan's subsequent divine portfolio. As such it is generally agreed that Dahan was probably first venerated as a god of rivers and acquired his broader connotations of vegetable and human fertility over the great span of time since.
Another odd archaeological phenomenon of the southwestern plain is the dolmen. These are typically in wooded areas on hilltops; a number of other lithic sites in similar settings are widely supposed to have been dolmens overturned or vandalised during the Wesmodian Reformation, or possibly abandoned at an earlier date. The upper surfaces of these dolmens were worked roughly flat, creating stone tables of uniform waist height with either three or four legs, though the bottoms are rounded smooth as if by water action, leading some to speculate that they are constructed using boulders lifted from rivers and transported uphill, sometimes over considerable distances. Despite the apparent precariousness of balancing one large rock (sometimes weighing as much as a ton) on three or four others, these edifices are conspicuously stable and preternaturally resistant to erosion. To this day these dolmens serve as the geographical focal points for regional festivals surrounding the secular figure of Father Han, which are thought to be directly descended from more recent forms of Dahan-worship, making their connection to rites practiced when the god was actively venerated fairly clear. The ages of these sites are difficult to assess but some of those in the western environs bear toponyms that bear clear influence of pre-Zohlian languages, indicating they must be at least 2,500 years old.
Finally there are a number of ancient stone circles on the plain, some of them surrounding (evidently artificial) hills. Some of these are simply rings of standing stones, while others are composed of trilithons that - like the dolmens - constitute remarkable feats of stable engineering. The largest of these have dolmens in the centre. The exact purpose of these sites is debated by archaeologists but they clearly represent huge investments of time and energy for those involved in their construction and popular lore links them very tightly to secular festivals of Father Han. It is highly likely they were cult centres of Dahan, or regional variations of the god.

The posssibility of such variations gestures to the notion that Dahan constituted a condensation - so to speak - of a variety of regional fertility gods. Proponents of this theory argue that the various different forms of archaeological evidence of fertility-worship represent not regional cults of the same god, but different deities that became equated with each other as improved communication networks on the plain led to the populace being exposed to wider ranges of ideas, eventually merging into a single over-arching cult. The wide variations in the festivals to Father Han in the present day have also been cited as evidence for this. Opponents argue that the apparent organisation and hierarchy of the clerics of Dahan in the pre-Wesmodian era speaks against this, since such a network would not have been maintained as a straightforwardly ecumenical exercise. The proponents in their turn dismiss this reservation, arguing that the regional officers of this organisation were local holy men interacting with their equivalents in other areas. This matter is far from settled.

Divine portfolio

Dahan is in the first instance a god of water. In the cities where he was worshipped - most notably Dypholyos - he was celebrated as a god of the sea, though this appears to be more of an thalassocratic extrapolation of his long-standing connection with rivers than an intrinsic feature of his portfolio. In rural areas, however, where the connection between moisture and fertility was a more prominent feature of life, Dahan was viewed as a paternalistic godhead, associated with rain and rivers, and therefore the vegetable kingdom, including both domesticated crops and wild plants. Given the centrality of cropping to rural communities, this accorded him tremendous importance in such places.

Dahan's association with fertility did not extend to the animal kingdom, a sphere of influence jealously guarded by Pergyad and his clerics. Dahan was, however, thought to govern human fertility and by extension came to be associated in many areas with children. This occasionally brought his clerics into conflict with those of Hayan.

Worship

The worship of Dahan is an interesting matter in that his clerics appear to have formed a unified order, but worship of him appears to have been highly heterogeneous, with different communities observing sometimes radically different rites.
In Dypholyos, for example there existed a small park-like space in which a human-sized stone effigy of Dahan was kept. At low tide on the spring equinox this effigy was lifted from its plinth, paraded to the waterfront, and left on the foreshore until the rising tide submerged it, then returned to its usual place when the tide ebbed again. Something similar appears to have happened in Oluz. Most cities do not seem to have taken Dahan particularly seriously at all, however. Short lyric poems lampooning him as a preoccupation of unsophisticated bumpkins apparently forming a minor literary genre in some cities; perhaps sadly none of these poems have survived to the present day.
In rural areas, however, worship of Dahan was a serious, socially pervasive business presided over by a cadre of male priests. What information exists about this priesthood is recorded mostly post factum by outsiders, many of whom were conspicuously dubious about their activities. One of the most extensive sources of information about them, in fact, is the Wesmodian Invectives the seventh of which depicts the priesthood as a network of avaricious, libidinous criminals running something of a metaphysical protection racket on an intimidated peasantry. Subsequent sources tell horror stories - some of them rather lurid - about the demands these men made on their communities. Such authors of course have an axe to grind and it is difficult to know exactly how the priesthood of Dahan really worked. They clearly had far-reaching social powers, however. It was they, for example, who dictated harvest times, conducted marriages - apparently dictating or forbidding them as the necessity arose - and officiated in disputes over agricultural activity and yields. In return for this they were supported by their community and enjoyed privileges with regard to food and other indulgences, though it is not known if these privileges were abused as frequently or egregiously as critics such as Wesmod claimed. It is clear that they were an organised group, with priests in most substantial communities liaising by means of frequent embassies to each other's territories. New young priests learned their requisite knowledge via oral instruction from superiors in an organised hierarchy, the levels of which appear to have been named after plants; "Willows" were very junior members and "Ivies" and "Chestnuts" evidently more senior. Fragmentary evidence exists as to exactly how this hierarchy worked, and awaits the attention of thaumatologists.
Priests appear to have gathered for mass ceremonies at cult sites - including some of the major stone circles - at the summer and winter solstice. The nature of these ceremonies is difficult to ascertain; they were evidently highly secretive clergy-only events, with interlopers from the laity dealt with harshly or even violently, and no written records are known to exist. Some post-Wesmodian critics argue that human sacrifice took place at these events, claiming that the circles constituted ritual spaces in which young virgin girls were killed to ensure a fruitful spring. Again, it is difficult to know exactly how seriously to take these allegations. Wesmod himself makes references to priests in each community choosing a child each spring to consume a hemlock potion, a concoction that - unless mixed in a very low concentration - would be highly toxic, essentially suggesting that the sacrifice of children was a feature of Dahan-worship. Wesmod certainly sees this as a grave and invidious imposition on a community and uses it as a keystone in his arguments against the cult. Selecting a young "spring princess" and allowing her the first drink from a cauldron of of sweetened fruit tea is an esteemed spring equinox tradition to this day in some communities, and may be a mollified social remnant of a much more demanding social practice from the days Dahan was actively worshipped.
In fact the spring and harvest festivals held dear by many rural communities in the present day appear to be more forgiving remnants of Dahan-worship, and as such are of considerable interest to modern thaumatologists. These festivals vary widely from place to place, and such heterogenousness is thought to reflect the various ways Dahan was worshipped in various communities or, perhaps, the aspects of his worship that retained any symbolic significance to local communities in the wake of the Wesmodian Reformation. Much work therefore remains to be done on the confusion of jostling equinox traditions such as spring poles, well-decorating, fruit pies and teas, garlands of ivy and mistletoe, ritual processions across river fords or to nearby dolmens, games of hugball and stickball, the enthroning of the spring princess and (less commonly) her prince, feasts and dances - many of the latter explicitly associated with marriageable young people in a community - ribald songs and mummeries involving a variety of folkloric figures revolving around the secular but clearly significant persona of Father Han. Scholars generally agree that this figure is a mollified stand-in for Dahan himself, and that the mummeries present clues as to the practice of Dahan-worship and perhaps goings-on at the secret solstice festivals practiced by his priesthood. Others suggest he in fact stands in for the priests themselves, who took an active role in local festivals in the pre-Wesmodian era; the common business of Father Han crowning the spring princess with an ivy wreath and handing her the fruit drink as she sits in his lap, for example, may be a recollection of the priest's former role in the ceremony, whatever that may have been. Some even argue that some of these traditions - such as Father Han leading the children of a village to the local waterway to drink from and dance in its shallows - might be some sort of parody or criticism of a formerly demanding, and now discredited, priesthood. Again, it is hard to suggest that with any certainly, but the seasonal festivals of the southwestern plain represent a potential goldmine of information for contemporary and future thaumatological scholarship.

Wesmodian Reformation

It is generally agreed that the behaviour of the priesthood of Dahan is what launched Wesmod to begin formulating the opinions that led to the Wesmodian Invectives. Dahan is one of only two gods - the other being Maryas - mentioned by name in the first, programmatic invective, in which he is characterised as the justification for a huge assemblage of barbarous superstition and violence, presided over by a cabal of self-serving, greedy men enjoying an easy life at the expense of the peasantry. Detailed discussion of such activity must wait until the seventh invective, an odd rhetorical delay that researchers have been unable to convincingly explain. Wesmod's attack on Dahan is in fact firmly focussed on his priesthood, with the logical deductions he makes with reference to other gods largely missing in favour of a scorching indictment of his earthly agents. He accuses the priesthood of holding the peasantry in their thrall, of exploiting them for their labour, of practicing foul abuses on their daughters and practicing the murder and defilement of children, asking only in passing what horrendous god would demand such actions in return for his protection. Students of Wesmod, reading the invectives for the first time, are often taken aback to find such a demonstrably cool and calculated thinker evidently completely lose his temper when discussing a matter seemingly central to an otherwise solid argument.
Wesmod's brutal attack on the priesthood of Dahan is, as noted earlier, one of the central literary sources we have for the earnest worship of the god. The quality of this information can fairly be questioned. Quite apart from Wesmod having an obvious axe to grind, it is reasonable to query where a bookish courtier to the Archon of Tyros learned anything much about the overwhelmingly rural cult of the river god. No particularly conclusive theory on this count has ever been advanced, leading some to suspect that Wesmod may have been mistaken, perhaps even willingly. It might even be argued that there is a degree of paternalism at play in the seventh invective, and that the author might have been reacting against little more than snobbish rumours about credulous peasants. As noted above, comic verse attacking the worship of Dahan is known to have circulated in some cities around the time that Wesmod would have been writing. The depth of feeling in his attacks on the priesthood may be taken as evidence either for or against this argument. This would of course imply that the entire Wesmodian Reformation owes its existence to a great - and potentially rather naive - misunderstanding, and cast the esteem that Wesmod's society has for him in a very different light. Those who seek to protect his reputation observe that there is very little to suggest why he might suddenly have set aside his inauspicious position in order to become a firebrand social reformer, unless his ideas about the priesthood of Dahan - and those of the other gods - had not be percolating in his mind for some time. Problematic as the seventh invective is, his supporters reason, it is surely not the result of spur-of-the-moment prejudice.
Wesmod is known to have spoken forcefully against the cult of Dahan at a number of events during his itinerant ministry, arriving in villages to decry the cult and its leaders with some of the most fiery oratory of his career. Public reactions to such denunciations were intriguing; Wesmod's invective appears to have been almost entirely successful. There are several recorded instances of the local peasantry turning against the local priests of Dahan on the spot, including some in which the unfortunate cleric was lynched, or at least graphically dethroned. The precise reliability of such accounts is open to question, since they are not from eyewitnesses. Nevertheless the existence of an entire subgenre of folk songs about "sending the man into the river" - all of impeccable rural pedigree - demonstrates that the notion of an immediate loss of public support for the cult in the face of attacks from outside certainly made sense to the provincial imagination; there may well be something to these stories. There is, correspondingly, very little evidence to support any sort of popular resistance to Wesmod's preaching. The image that quickly emerges from the records of his ministry is one of a peasantry being emboldened to throw off a resented spiritual regime.
The priests, however, do appear to have fought back, at least as far as they could. Accounts exist of impassioned shouting matches between Wesmod and local clerics of Dahan, some of them ending with the reformer calling upon his supporters from among the witnesses to silence the priest. Here the story tends to either become comic, with the priest being tipped into a local waterway, or rather grim, as he is stoned, beaten, or even killed. Priests are often described cursing Wesmod, calling down the wraith of their god upon him, typically to no effect, and thus playing directly into his hands. Conversely, there is one detailed account of Wesmod falling ill during his ministry, afflicted with a serious stomach ailment that caused horrendous vomiting and very nearly claimed his life. This sickness took effect immediately after the autumn equinox, when the priests of Dahan would have been holding one of their private ceremonies, and the chronicler holds them directly responsible, describing in ghoulish detail how they murdered a little boy to power a dark curse against Wesmod, only to have him recover, demonstrating the dwindling power of their god. Note that this account attributes the priesthood of Dahan with actual magical power, a point that directly contradicts Wesmod's central argument about the gods in general, if not Dahan in particular. In any case it is clear he survived.
Wesmod of course did not go everywhere, and his oratory did not produce instant effects everywhere he went. The cult of Dahan appears to have endured in many places, but his mission broke the spine of the institution, and priests were evidently treated with less and less reverence. Accounts of subsequent decades describe some priests of the god attempting to take a leaf from the book of the cult of Pergyad, reinventing themselves as some sort of divine visitation, but with little success. The priests took to roaming the roads of rural districts, accepting largesse where they were still taken seriously and often being run out of town where they were not. Many it seems died hard and undignified deaths in winter hedgerows as vagrants and beggars. Within a few decades of Wesmod's own death, the cult was more or less extinct, at least in terms of having any sincere worshippers.

Current status of cult

As noted above the cult of Dahan collapsed fairly suddenly, mostly within Wesmod's lifetime, and no longer exists as such. Also as noted above, however, there is a profusion of essentially secular practices regularly undertaken in rural regions that clearly descend from the worship of this god, and many of these are of great interest to thaumatologists. Dahanian mummery alone is likely to have profound ritual importance; so too do spring dances, seasonal spiced cakes and teas, and much of the folk music of the southwest. Those wishing to explore the sorts of magical powers apocryphally attributed to Dahan and his followers have no shortage of source material to work from, though sifting the wheat from the chaff - a metaphor appropriate to research into an agricultural deity - is an ongoing problem. For one thing it is often unclear whether the innumerable regional variations in these seasonal practices are the result of post-Wesmodian devolution or the result of the cohesion of local variations in worship from the pre-Wesmodian era.