Selph Taldume

Selph Taldume was a member of the Lunar Society of Pholyos famed for her research into the origins and links between the pre-Wesmodian cults of Dahan and Ynglyas. She is also known for her controversial but compelling research into the pseudo-historical alchemist Morogyad, co-authored with her colleague Ryl Rayan Kol.

Biographical details

Selph Taldume was the daughter of Lunar Society founder Holyam Taldume and his wife Qayanan. As such she was brought up in a household steeped in antiquarianism and was raised bilingually, speaking both Old Zolian and the Chogyan dialect with both her parents. She claimed to have played with dolls under her father's desk as he poured over fragmentary components of his evolving collection of Ynglyan literature, and claimed to even remember some of the titles of these, though this may be something of an embellishment as at that stage of scholarship very few such volumes had known or accepted names.
What is unquestionably true is that the younger Taldume was assisting her father in his research from a young age and began making meaningful contributions to the Lunar Society fairly soon thereafter. Perhaps her most productive contribution was extending her father's policy of delegating mundane business matters to employees, which allowed the family more time for its esoteric pursuits. She appears to have been devoted almost full-time to thaumatology by the time she was thirty.
Taldume was, at her mother's insistence, married to a prominent ship captain involved with her family's businesses. It appears to have been a match of convenience, with scant personal attraction on either side, and the husband is rumoured to have started a family with another woman in Ramoros. That may be hearsay, but what is known is that he was killed in a brawl in Loros a decade into the marriage. Taldume never remarried, but she does appear to have had a discreet, long-standing liaison with a family retainer named Hayanan, who enjoyed a meteoric rise through the ranks of the Taldume family estate after the death of Selph's mother.
Taldume was taken ill at a meeting of the Lunar Society in 148 AWR while discussing her research into the seaborne cult of Zargyod. She was bedridden for almost a year, during which Hayanan diligently nursed her, before dying in 149. The precise nature of her malady is not clear. She intriguingly willed her body not to the Pholyan Brotherhood of Rooks but to the Chogyan Bruised Ones, who accepted her into their care and buried her with due ceremony.

Thaumatological significance

Modern thaumatologists consider Selph Taldume to be one of the leading post-Wesmodian contributors to the field, having both built intelligently on her father's work and contributed significantly to fields to which he never turned his attention. The published Letters of the Lunar Society reveal her to be a garrulous, opinionated, often incisive commentator on the pre-Wesmodian religions of the Eleven Cities. Like her father her initial interest in thaumatology related to the (specifically Pholyan) cult of Ynglyas, though her publications also address the worship of Dahan and Zargyod.
Foremost among Taldume's publications are a series of revised, updated editions of most of her father's works, which are generally regarded as meaningfully superior to the originals, sometimes fundamentally so. Taldume in fact worked hard to ensure the gradual, intergenerational accretion of knowledge of thaumatology, noting in her published letters that the length of astrological cycles would require this sort of study and arguing, fairly plausibly, that this sort of scholarship was what the pre-Wesmodian priesthood of Ynglyas was in fact engaged upon. Her inability to attract any sort of apprentice or assistant was something else she addressed frequently in her letters; her several frustrated references to her failure to interest her maidservant Hayanan in the practice are the primary source of speculation that their relationship transcended that of an employer and employee. Taldume the younger is generally seen as a more committed, systematic scholar than Taldume the elder, and two centuries after their publication her books on astrology and weather magic are generally regarded as the state of the art in terms of the study of these pre-Wesmodian practices.
Taldume's interest in systematising the study of thaumatology led her to take an interest in the Stone circles found on the Alluvial plain. Perhaps building on an under-recorded aspect of her father's work, she associated them more with the worship of Ynglyas than that of Dahan, as is now commonly supposed. She published pamphlet essays to this effect before undertaking a series of field trips to visit the sites in the last decade of her life. This was the first systematic study of these sites. Interestingly her conclusions from this work led to her revising her opinions on the matter, proposing instead a kinship between the two cults that predated recorded history. These essays were published as pamphlets in her day and are now collected as the book The Eyes of the Southern Plain, and remains noteworthy work on the subject.
Taldume's other major work, conducted in the last few years of her life, concerned the pseudo-historical thaumaturge and demigod Morogyad. Controversially, she came to the conclusion that Morogyad, rather than being a historical figure, was actually a folklore conflation of a series of different historical figures and the shipboard worship of the god of fortune Zargyod. This opinion is expressed in her book Footsteps of Morogyad, co-authored with fellow Lunar Society member Ryl Rayan Kol and published shortly after her death, and is generally regarded as an audacious but credible assessment of an interesting topic.