Ynglyas

In the religious tradition of the Eleven Cities, Ynglyas was the goddess of the moon, the stars, and female fertility. With the passage of the year being marked primarily by the movements of asterisms, Ynglyas was also a deity of time and calendars and her cult had important - though unclear - links with that of Krezzan
Ynglyas's association with the predictable movements of the natural world made her the patron of diviners and prognosticators. As such she was the deity most closely associated with thaumaturgy in the period when the gods were actively worshipped. Much of the knowledge accumulated by her cult was lost in the The Wesmodian Reformation  and efforts to authoritatively reconstruct it have been a central concern of thaumatologists for some time, though these efforts have been inconsistent and fraught with personal and professional jealousies.

Etymology

Ynglyas's name is a superficially straightforward but has some complex connotations. In Old Zolian, yngel means moon; the -yas suffix is the feminine inflection of the verb to have. As such, via a fractional contraction in the form of the loss of the e the name means She Who Has The Moon.

This is simple enough, but the precise meaning of this name is a matter of debate among linguists. It may imply that Ynglyas controls the moon, or that she merely understands it.

This distinction is potentially highly significant to thaumatologists attempting to reconstruct the liturgy of her cult. Purely linguistic analysis is not helpful here - the Old Zolian morphology simply does not draw a precise distinction - and thus researchers must turn to literary and archaeological evidence to clear up the ambiguity.

Origins

Despite being the subject of a predominantly urban cult like that of Ajqyod, Ynglyas is widely believed to be a goddess of daunting antiquity. Literary sources from the cities describe her as having more in common with ancient rural deities such as Dahan and Pergyad. It is likely that she originally arose as some sort of female counterpart for Dahan. The seasonal rise in the waterways across the southern basin serve as a natural, symbolically male fertilising principle, but this rise must be carefully planned for in order to be properly exploited by agrarian communities. It is, in fact, fairly predictable, so long as the predictor remains observant of other natural phenomena, most obviously the machinations of the moon and stars in the night sky. The female associations of the moon would carry over to the stars, giving rise to the notion of these movements having a female primum mobile to correspond to the male symbolism of the rising waterways.

Proponents of this idea point to the stone circles that exist on the fertile agricultural basin to the south of the cities. General opinion has it that these were sacred sites of significance to the cult of Dahan, locations for the attested (but never adequately described) conclaves of his priests; it was here, the accusation runs, that the priests of Dahan conducted their human sacrifices. The competing notion is that they were in fact sacred to Ynglyas, serving as ancient observatories at which the motions and relationships of asterisms and the moon could be observed, systematised, assessed and, perhaps, influenced by ritual means. Those making such suggestions observe that such sites are often found a long way from the rivers most obviously sacred to Dahan, but are invariably situated in places with broad, uninterrupted horizons where the entire night sky could be observed without obstruction. Such observations, they argue, were the chief ritualistic activity of the pre-Wesmodian cult of Ynglyas, and the stone circles her temples; this theory relegates the worship of Dahan, including the putative sacrifices to him, to the hilltop dolmens also found in the southern lowlands. Indeed the notion could be extended to suggest that Ynglyas was the central celestial deity of the plain and Dahan her terrestrial adjunct.

Such ideas, though difficult to discount, are unattested. Inscriptions of Ynglyas's name and archaeological evidence of her worship as a distinct entity in rural areas are, in fact, hard to come by. Indeed the notion of her ancient origins is somewhat reverse-engineered from the evidence that the movements of the stars and their correlation to weather patterns were seen as numinous matters worthy of clerical attention from the very early histories of the cities themselves. Temples to Ynglyas existed in eight of the Eleven Cities - the exceptions being Ghogyos and the northern outposts of Oluz and Halumay - more than any other god, and all of these edifices were at least 1,800 years old, making them some of the oldest urban structures whose age can be remotely ascertained. It would make sense for predominantly maritime cities to attach considerable importance and resources to the worship of a god involved with matters so germane to sailing and navigation. Maps of the night sky have been found inscribed into rocks on islands in the Sea of Jars, apparently used as references by early navigators charting courses from one island to the next over the sea. These makeshift observatories are often found near shrines to a female deity thought to be Ynglyas. The precise age of these sites is difficult to determine; if they were much older than the cities (ie in excess of 2,000 years old) they may point to a competing theory about the emergence of the goddess, who might in fact have nothing to do with Dahan. Proponents of the more inland origin of Ynglyas cite such structures as shrines to an incipient cult of Hayan, insisting that Ynglyas is at heart a fertility deity like Dahan. This difference of opinion abides.

Divine portfolio

Ynglyas was in the first instance the goddess of the night sky, the moon and the stars, just as Ajqyod was the god of the sun. This primary responsibility gave her a variety of other spheres of influence. The complex but predictable movements of the stars, linked to the seasons, granted her power of some description over weather. Mythology frequently depicts her using this power to harm of inconvenience those who display irreverence or disrespect towards her, a point that adherents to the notion of her originating as a fertility deity use to link her with savage characters such as Pergyad. More straightforwardly her evident capacity to control winds and rains made her a popular goddess among navigators and merchants.
Whether it serves as her central purpose or not, Ynglyas's connection with the moon linked her to female fertility, in which capacity she received homage from couples hoping to conceive and from pregnant women to ensure uncomplicated labour.
Of particular interest to thaumatologists was her capacity for prognostication, which came from her link with the movements of the stars. This linked her to Krezzan, a god associated with matters of time and fate, and thaumaturges both before and after the Wesmodian Reformation are known to have been devotees of her cult or students of the writings of her priests.

Worship

At least in recorded history, the worship of Ynglyas appears to have been a predominantly urban undertaking. It also appears to have been a reserved, scholarly undertaking similar in much of its procedures to the veneration of Krezzan or Maryas, with highly literate clerics collaborating on a series of learned writings cataloguing and analysing the movements of the stars. The priesthood is known to have been gender-integrated, with women conspicuously prominent in some cities; in Ramoros the temple appointed a female mistress of ceremonies as a matter of principle, though exactly how much power this individual had is unclear. Pre-Wesmodian sources attribute the priesthood of Ynglyas with the invention of both the abacus and the astrolobe. In most cities they were the arbiters of calendars and times, pronouncing the changes of months, years and seasons. In Tyros and Pholyos they also arbitrated times, announcing dawn, noon and sunset of each day, every day. The clerics of various temples are known to have travelled to meet each other to compare notes, and collaborate directly on their work, and there are references to temples chartering ships to travel to precise spots in the Sea of Jars in order to observe astral phenomena on specific dates and at precise angles. That clerics had sufficient resources to finance such expeditions bespeaks both a high degree of organisation and a considerable degree of institutional wealth.
The goal of all this research was to investigate specific phenomena, make predictions about specific subjects, and develop prayers and rituals in order to influence the future - in short, a rather specialised form of thaumaturgy. The content of the prayers is not known. It is known that some of the rituals involved lengthy memorised chants and incantations, some lasting from sunset to sunrise and others conducted in rounds by teams of priests or, possibly, volunteers from the community. While this was happening, priests clad in specific raiment - predominantly blue, it seems, and involving a variety of head-dresses, but also adorned in some way with silver stars - walked in specific pathways across or around circular ritual spaces, pausing to adopt ritualistic poses or to speak or sing important solo sections of prayers. Batons or staves of unclear significance were also used in these rituals, being held at certain angles or struck on the ground. Some of the ritual spaces where these activities took place were permanently in place in the temples of Ynglyas, others marked out carefully with some combination of pigments and candles in public spaces. There is reason to suspect that temples in different cities often collaborated on these rituals, either travelling to each other's cities to participate directly or sychronizing their activities to ensure that the same (or complimentary) activities were being performed at different places at precisely the same time. It is known that the temples in some cities - most notably Tyros - received regular stipends from the city to perform particular rituals at specific times. In Tyros and Pholyos, for example, evidently considerable sums of public money were handed to the priests in order to perform a particularly onerous and elaborate ritual on each full moon between the autumn equinox and the winter solstace - that is, three nights a year - to ensure favourable winds for the merchant and naval fleets of the city. It is also known that the priests of Ynglyas accepted payments - often oddly modest - in order to divine auguries for individuals, such as expectant parents wanting to know the gender of their child.
The details of these rituals and divinations is, however, sadly largely lost. The priesthood appears to have been a fairly secretive - or at least toplofty - institution that invested considerable effort in maintaining its own professional and liturgical secrets. For one thing the large majority of their writing was recorded in a complex orthographic code with very few points of contact with any other known language spoken in the Cities. The lines of this code were arranged vertically rather than horizontally, and it supposedly had many more characters than any other Zolian-derived tongue. This code was one of the hallowed secrets of the cult, with priests undertaking a lengthy course of training before they were allowed - or able - to write in it. This course varied from place to place; in Ramoros it was said to take four years, while in Pholyos it took only two, but students were required to engage in a quite punishing regime of ascetic discipline throughout the period. Most puzzlingly of all, this code appears to have also carried through into the oral components of the cult's liturgy, with prayers and incantations as well as ritual and theological texts recited and recorded in it. In short, the cult of Ynglyas developed its own system of magic words and used them frequently in its rituals. Contemporary accounts of their rituals thus belabour the arcane nature of what was being spoken or sung, very little of which was intelligible to non-initiates.
The code, and the jealousy with which it was safeguarded, was used against the cult during the Reformation, with some success, as the priests of Ynglyas were forced to shut up shop fairly quickly. Within a generation, most of their records, and with them the code, was lost. Only a few small fragments of the writing system survive to the present day, and thaumatologists have been working hard to reconstruct it for many years. Attempts to authoritatively revive the tradition necessarily involve a great deal of guesswork, and few of them agree on much, making this potentially decisive clue relating to this cult still very much open to interpretation. Finding fresh data on this code in the form of lost volumes of the writings of the priesthood is a central aspect of research into this god, but the Reformation deposed much of this literature to parts unknown.
Ynglyas was also the stated focus of religious devotion of non-urban cult centres at which prophecies were offered by (predominantly) female clerics. These oracles operated in a variety of ways, being independent, both of each other and any influence from the scholarly network constituted by the urban cult. The most famous of these was the Great Southern Oracle that operated on the shores of Lake Ozrem Kos and whose prophecies took the form of songs sung in glossolalia by a small choir of celibate priestesses under the influence of a magical infusion of lake water. Also of note were the Oracle of Jars located on an island in the northwestern corner of the Sea of Jars, the Indigo Tower in the rugged, infertile hills to the south of Andymalon, and the Nameless Ones a sorority of cloaked, anonymous priestesses who lived on a permanent, itinerant tour of the Eleven cities, each accompanied by trunks of arcane books, from which they would read in public, always by moonlight, and - appropriately encouraged - drop into precognative trances and deliver prophecies. These oracles were taken fairly seriously by both governments and the general public, and occasions on which their prophecies came to pass are matters of historical record, though many of these instances are open to question.

Wesmodian Reformation

Ynglyas and her cult is the subject of the fifth of the Wesmodian Invectives. Wesmod's objections to this cult are cited by those who study the matter as among the weakest in the entire thesis, yet they appear to have been more or less successful. He launches an attack on the moral and intellectual accountability of the cult by examining its mysticism. He observes the closed nature of the cult, their use of their own oral and written languages and the ultimately self-serving nature of their intellectual activities. The goal of prognostication, he argues, is to unfog the future. There seems little point in doing so, he continues, if the result of this insight is going to be recorded in a book that only a tiny handful of savants can read, particularly if there is no independent supervision or prioritisation of what these people are actually learning. For all of their research, Wesmod argues, the cult never seemed to actually improve their capacity to foretell the future, or indeed to perform their basic cultural function. Sunsets and sunrises are, he observes, somewhat self-evident; what is the precise purpose of having them officially arbitrated? The broader question of arbitrating months, seasons and years is rendered moot, he argues, by the fact that the research is only ever shared with other members of the priesthood - again, via use of their arcane code - and not to the peasants, sailors and farmers who might find the information genuinely useful. Such people, meanwhile, get by fairly well with just a few of the key observations about day length and the coming and going of asterisms, raising the question, once again, of what all this research is for. Ultimately Wesmod accuses the priesthood of Ynglyas of being indulged hobbyists whose social status far outpaces the social value of their work.
Wesmod's attack on the cult of Ynglyas has, some commentators observe, an air of make-do, as if the reformer, having set out to attack gods he genuinely had issues with such as Dahan and Krezzan, felt obligated to also attack the other gods, and grudgingly strung something together. Nevertheless the invective seems to have had the desired effecrt. Unlike the priests of Krezzan, the priesthood of Ynglyas do not seem (or seem to have claimed) to have foreseen Wesmod's work. As the dissemination of his essays led to a withdrawal of support for mysticism in general, the degree of public reverence for Yngylas appears to have withered. Public interest in their rituals withered quickly, possibly dropping to nothing within a few years, and their ability to gather resources for research expeditions similarly sharply declined. As such it became increasingly difficult for the professional priesthood to conduct their activities, let alone get paid for their activities, and the temples became increasingly thinly populated. Quite what happened to the individual clerics, and their students, is not clear, but within a generation or so of Wesmod publishing his invectives, the cult of Ynglyas was essentially out of business.
Athough the reformers who supported Wesmod could count this as a great success, this had some unfortunate downstream effects. Some of these were largely comical. Tyros, and some other communities, had relied upon the priests of Ynglyas to keep track of the passage of moons and therefore the movement from one month to the next, and as the priesthood atrophied no alternative arrangements were made for this, creating chaos as nobody could actually agree on which month it was. The neglected library of the temple was consulted, but it was, of course, all written in code and therefore indecipherable, and the large majority of it was ultimately dumped in the city's lagoon. A secular calendar was established, with an arbitrary start date, based on what observations laypeople could make, but imprecision in this system was such that within a decade the city was holding its annual autumn market in the height of spring. Emissaries had to be sent to other cities to find out what the actual date was; the first two to return, from Pholyos and Dypholyos, reported similar problems in those cities.
The more serious consequence of the atrophy of the cult of Ynglyas is hinted at above - the loss of the accumulated research of the cult. It is difficult to know exactly what this consisted of, but it is likely that a priceless body of information on timekeeping, meteorology, prognostication, logic, mathematics, cartography and cryptology disintegrated in the Tyros lagoon before the death of Wesmod himself. The libraries of the other temples met similar fates - that of Ramoros was looted for fuel during a harsh winter a few years after the Reformation; that of Elpaloz evidently destroyed by an accidental fire some years later. Bits and pieces of this literature did survive, though of course its encryption made it difficult for anybody to assess its worth. From such unpromising beginnings, learned minds across the cities gradually began trying to reconstruct what was accidentally cast aside.

Current status of cult

The post-Reformation chaos in Tyros was evidently echoed to a greater or lesser expense in several of the other cities. As years passed the value of a unified calendar for inter-city trade, especially to mercantile cities such as these, became increasingly apparent; shipping and finance suffered as deadlines could not be agreed upon and shipments arrived at times at which the destination markets were saturated with goods, and many cities suffered from serious economic downturns, most obviously Ramoros, which went into a sharp decline from which it has arguably never recovered. The people and leaders of the cities, keen to take the Reformation to its logical conclusion, had essentially thrown the baby out with the bathwater, at great expense to all.
Roughly a century after the Reformation, therefore, a consortium of merchant princes operating in Tyros, Pholyos and Adymalon began financing work by learned men to try to reconstruct something of the knowledge base of the cult of Ynglyas. This particular effort quickly fragmented over methodological disputes over exactly what was being researched. Its indulgent backers, however, did finance the construction of the first telescopes and astralobes built in the cities since the Reformation, and established something of a cultural commonplace; the notion that arcane wisdom is to be sought in the stars. Over the 900 years since research into the movements of the stars has proceeded in fits and starts, by small, disparate collections of individuals. The research they undertake often dies with individual workers, however, or falls victim to personal or professional rivalries, making such work slow, hard to direct, and subject to frustrating false starts, dead ends and setbacks.
One of the more interesting such groups was the Lunar Society of Pholyos, a group that existed in Pholyos for a century or more starting roughly 350 years ago. This loose coalition of writers and courtiers met regularly at the houses of its members and - although there is some debate among contemporary researchers about their precise credibility - appear to have been devoted to reconstructing the institutional memory of the cult of Ynglyas, as well as researching phenomena such as the Navigators and the Shroud Kings. Individual members include notable past thaumatologists as Yran Qobryod, whose work on the Navigators is central to most subsequent work on the topic, and Ryl Rayan Kol, Syaph Zelmuna and Holyam Tadume, who, working as a triumvirate, claim to have collected a considerable assemblage of books belonging to the cult of Ynglyas, including some of those belonging to the Nameless Ones, and by painstakingly correlating them to have made considerable strides in deciphering the magical code of Ynglyas. Their work stalled following the murder of Tadume, however, and it is not clear what happened to their notes. Their claims are therefore open to question. This being said, the likelihood that fragments of the research of the Lunar Society exist have sent contemporary thaumatologists flocking to the libraries and archives of Pholyos in the hopes of finding leads.