Old Faith mythology and history

The Old Faith, by and large, is not concerned with a literal explanation of how human beings and
their sister races of dwarves, halflings, and other mortals came to inhabit the world. It is enough
that the world has always been, and that mortals emerged from its fabric as a natural element of
it. Nevertheless, the Old Faith has spawned a bewildering variety of mythology across the lands
of Drau-Mura. The purpose of these stories is to entertain, offer moral instruction, and confirm
the wisdom of the Old Faith as a druidic religion. Were a scholar to assemble the most common,
appreciated mythology into a coherent whole, snipping out inconvenient contradictions and
aporias, she might end up with something like this:

The natural world has always been: The stars and seas have whirled in their patterns for eons
before the appearance of mortals, and will do so forever. Indeed, the notion of time, like
language, is a product of the mortal imagination: A breeze or blackbird cannot know or speak its
own history, and cares not for it. For this reason, we cannot speak of "how old" the world is.

We can only imagine what the world was like before mortals appeared, crawling from the earth
or being born to beasts. It is said, however, that that world is peopled by numerous spirits of
nature. They are primal and inhuman. When these spirits encounter mortals, they take offense,
possibly because mortals insist on naming them as they named animals, plants, the sun, and
everything else. Most of these spirits simply fade to another realm closed off to mortals. Some of
them destroy mortals in fits of confusion and rage. Some of them remain in this world, secluding
themselves in wild places or disguising themselves as ordinary things, tormenting and deceiving
mortals at their pleasure. We call these spirits fey, though perhaps some of them took to the evil
ways of mortals, and became demons, and they are present among us today, though rarely.

Mortals -- and in particular, humans -- come to know the natural world better than beasts, but
their knowledge also alienates them from it. Primitive mortals eventually grow out of Balance
with nature, coming to fear, loathe, and desire dominion over the moon, the sea, the cycles of life
and death, and so on. Fortunately, a group of wise mortals seeks moral inspiration from nature,
treading the Balanced path between reason and instinct, self and other. They become the
first druids of the world, share their wisdom with their people, and sow the seeds of what will
come to be known today as the Old Faith. One of their first edicts is that no mortal should waste
time on pondering the mysteries of death: Only the dead may know the fate of the dead; let the
living attend to the affairs of the living. (Some druids dismiss the existence of the afterlife
altogether, or suggest reincarnation as the death of the individual self.)

Some stories say that the first druids of the world formed a covenant with the natural world, that
the mortal races might be allowed to prosper from its bounty, but they must honor it too. For this
reason, many druids today rail against the excessive incursion of civilization into the wilderness.
It is not about protecting the wilderness itself, but about honoring this covenant, for should it be
broken, nature will take its terrible revenge on civilization, in the form of earthquakes and
plagues. (Or, some surmise, druidic magic will simply disappear from the world.)

Druidic religion in its infancy is far more animistic and polytheistic than it is today, often
suggesting that elements of nature can be propitiated or cajoled as if they were mortals
themselves. This reaches its logical conclusion in the deification of these elements: There is now
Shoura, the Moon God rather than the moon, or Pa Shal, the Great Hart rather than deer in
general. Or perhaps the gods have always existed alongside nature, and mortals simply gained
knowledge of them. Thus, when we speak of the old gods, we speak of the prominent, glorified
elements of nature, such as the moon, the sea, the earth, and so forth.

The druids of the world increase in knowledge and wisdom, becoming not only priests and
magicians but also philosophers and scientists. In time, the natural world is seen as more and
more abstract: less as inhabited by literal gods or spirits, and more as a sacred process and web
of being. (For example, an oak tree does not have a sacred element or spirit in itself. Rather, the
whole cycle of growth, from acorn to oak to the destruction of the oak, is simultaneously
ordinary and sacred.) Furthermore, many of the gods of Drau-Mura have an altogether un-druidic
quality, from the supposedly supreme Deity of the Ashoumites, to the bloodthirsty God of War,
to rather disturbing deities of dream, night, madness, death, and sexuality. Increasingly, orthodox
druids minimize the importance of literal gods, and emphasize moral and spiritual practice
through rites, meditation, and personal reflection and discipline. Today, orthodox priests favor
an intellectual, nontheistic, spiritual approach to the Old Faith; their faith is intellectually
appealing but has some difficulty appealing to the masses. Primal or conservative priests favor a
version of the Old Faith that emphasizes direct veneration or worship of nature as personfiied (or
entitized) as the old gods. The Old Faith also invites numerous
unusual heresies and heterdoxies, with many of them emphasizing philosophies of self-
perfection or apotheosis, or traffic with fey.