Dwilight University/Humanities/Sallowsian Melting Salad

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The Sallowsian Melting Salad

As the leading (and only) scholar, and the as yet most influential noble in Dwilight pertaining to this region, I have come to a conclusion on one of the qualities of the Sallowsian people. I will claim in this essay that the Sallowsian people possess two traits which have been used to their advantage since the ancient days of the Sallowsitte Cape. These traits are adaptation and reapplication. From these traits, the governing quality I assign commonly to these people is persistent. In no other society I have experienced, and I admit in my travels of Dwilight I lightly examine the societies of the people I come across, have I so obviously witnessed the quality of persistence in any other group. Through adaptation and reapplication, the Sallowsians have been able to successfully maintain their oldest of traditions while simultaneously altering their ways to suit the needs of the time. Hence I humourosly analogize this phenomenon with the label, the “melting salad”.

The Sallowsians are a mix of languages, customs, rituals and foods from every people whom put their fingerprint on the Cape. At the very same time, one can currently see the very same traditions practiced by the ancient tribes of the Cape alive and functioning. Those whom I have mentioned this theory to have called it contradictory, and I at times scratch my head over such a truth, but please visit the region yourself, become acquainted with their stories, their faiths, their history and their present culture and you will leave with the same answer I have found. They are extraordinary in their flexibility while stubborn in their past. The best evidence I can provide for this is in their religious worship. We can trace the evolution of the Sallowsian religion, which should be pluralized to religions, categorically.

The earliest kernel of spirituality and religion in the region is ancestral worship. The tribes performed rituals obsessively to their deceased relatives. There are traces of small daily sacrifices, where an ancestor would be offered produce or specie in exchange for blessings and fortune, and also the major monthly sacrifices where living creatures – livestock and cattle, would be fed to the giant hole nearby the Qubel Channel. That hole has since turned into the well in the centre of Sallowtown used in the ritual known as the Feeding of the Pit. The concept of ancestral worship was the major spiritual expression of the people in the earliest times. It is the spine of the region’s religion in the present day.

One other constant element to the Sallowsian religious heritage is purity of tribe. My experience with the modern form of this concept is in exclusion by xenophobia. The people there do not like foreigners or outsiders and are less likely to accept strangers into their communities. Fortunately, when I revealed to them my purpose, to liberate them from their Dark Age, and when I showed them the mark placed on my chest, signifying I was the incarnate of their Prince, they accepted me without obstacle. This was true until I had relations with one of their young princesses. I believe this quality tends to be expressed more in the society than through their religion, as I have participated and conducted many ritual offerings myself with their encouragement. Supposing they were strict on ethnicity, then I would not have been invited. Contradictorily, while the people exclude strangers, they absorb foreign ideas and knowledge. It is almost remarkable how learned the Sallowsians are of every type of outsider information. I expected them to be well travelled, but have since learned that they are merely very minute when they examine the deposits of what I term the “culturepan.”

As time progressed, through the arrival of new peoples and the creation of the military bred arexi, new concepts entered the Sallowsian spiritual awareness. The arexi redesigned the Sallowsian social hierarchy, and were the first to place an autocrat as the ruler of the entire Cape. The arexi system emphasized the groupings of family units into clans, the stratification of the clans and the solidarity of the clans as a dynasty. There would be one ruler as supreme originating from one clan selected to provide Prince’s. The devotion to the dynast led to the worship of authority. All Princes since the first, Prince Sallow, have been considered deities of the Sallowsitte Cape, including me. This concept was not present in the Sallowsian psyche prior to the Arexi Reign, and was brought in by a group outside of the tribal community. It is evident then that the concept was naturalized by the Sallowsians. While retaining their ancestral worship, they expanded and adopted authority worship.

In addition to authority worship, the arexi entered another facet into the Sallowsian religious awareness. This was territory worship. The tribes had always held the desert to be sacred because of their long relationship with it in their history, but never would they treat it the way the arexi treated their city. The arexi were the constructors of the city of Sallowtown, and since it bore the name of their first dynast, they attributed it supernatural qualities worthy of ritual worship. For the tribes, the hole used in ancestor worship was built over and turned into a well. This overlap inevitably led to the tribes worshiping the whole city along with the arexi. Territory worship can also be termed sacredness. The people designate sacred space then pay it worship. This was originally an arexi concept.

Now to reveal the adaptation and reapplication of these events to prove the truth of my statement, that the Sallowsians are persistent. The Sallowsian people I have befriended use all of these concepts in one worship, and at times separate worships. Ancestor worship has been reapplied to both the prince and the city. As well, the burial grounds of the ancestors are worshipped much like the city. Let me break that down. From what I detailed above, you know that the Sallowsians employ ancestor worship, authority worship and territory worship. Combine these concepts and you have the current state of the Sallowsian religious awareness. They worship their city as an ancestor, a territory, and the greatest authority (since it is the city of their first prince). They worship their ruler as an ancestor, the highest authority and the overlord of the sacred city. They worship their ancestor’s burial grounds as sacred territory and continue to worship long dead Prince’s beneath the dirt as ancestral authorities.

The example of Sallowsian religion provides evidence for the persistence of the people in the Cape in their reapplication of succeeding adapted practices. None of the old ones have been retired, and all of the new ones have been “Sallownized”. Knowingly then, I can conclude at least one general common quality of the Sallowsian people. They are persistent in their development of local culture and the accumulation of foreign culture to which they then adapt and reapply.


Prince Bowie Ironsides.

Spring of 6 YD (or the 14th of June 2009).