Picture credit: Lamington Pav
Working on the new book - 125k words and climbing. Will likely be broken up into 5-6 books and dumped on Amazon, each a week apart.
It’s hard to justify taking time to blog about Hyperborea when I’m trying to finish a (rather big!) book about it, first. However, a bit of luck today. Below is a section where Gerard is talking to the reader about faith on Hyperborea. It works fine as a blog post, so here it is!
of men and gods
The 21st Century world feared no gods.
Faith, as I remember it, was strong as ever there. However, it was not faith as our ancestors would know it. In our time, we looked to God for strength against the crushing might of our own, grim, cyberpunk world. We could only do that because our cyberpunk world had first crushed God.
For most of our species’ existence we’ve had no such gifts to reassure us. No great power over atoms, or to travel between worlds. There weren’t books, read from thin air, filled with the Universe’s secrets! For most humans there weren’t books, at all.
Imagine then how refreshing it is to be around such terrified people. They still know to keep asking that same cosmic question asked around the first Pleistocene fireplaces:
Our universe is much older than us.
It has, therefore, more evolved beings in it.
It follows that such beings would have more power than us.
So WTF do we do?
How do we understand our lives, against the backdrop of such creatures? Is not the universe theirs to shape, not ours? How do we engage them? Do we at all? How do we survive them? These are not philosophical questions for Hyperboreans.
There is a certain wisdom they have that comes from being a culture that has evolved to survive repeated extinction level events. Part of it is deep-rooted lore. It has passed between and across their civilizations and grown. In a priest’s tale to bored acolytes. A barbarian’s recounting around a fire. Glyphs rubbed clean and read from just unearthed ancient tablets. This lore has allowed humanity to survive deep in the cracks of this world. To survive, and then emerge from them, again and again.
Central to that lore is the idea of human triviality. We’re nothing compared with the entities feuding over this world. Do not irk them! Monoliths carved with lost languages now only tell us that their makers were obliterated. This is the absolute price humans may pay for their triviality.
Yet, there are lesser gods. Even beings not even that. Ones who hate us more because they are trivial as well.
Many of these can be resisted - as we did the Mi-Go at Aymund. This does not make these creatures any less terrifying. Not all who stand in their way can do so with an army. Yet, with such beings negotiation is possible. Land can be ceded, as were tundras of Athoph by the Zidon’s ancestors. Sacrifices can be made; Andromedas chained to rocks to feed sea monsters. The Hyperborean does not seem himself as negotiating, and neither would be. Instead, haggling with greater powers is called worship.
Worship is most effective. It does not even require understanding between parties. The Settites worship snakes; villagers leaving them milk and eggs at the night. The serpents learn to visit and when to do so. They bite children to complain if they are forgotten. Mud bricks are built over the spot and declared a shrine. Bricks become stones and the shrine turns to a venerated temple. Priests emerge; secondary parasites yet essential to the negotiation between species. They extract gold and daughters as their price as intermediaries. Inspired, they fund peasants to go forth and tame new land. Snakes appear; they are left milk and eggs. The cycle repeats.
Settite snake worship - all the way up to the Titanoboa monsters - is harmless enough. Worship is an easier way to tame Hyperborea’s monsters than understanding them. Worship becomes too high a price, however, with the advanced races. The Mi-Go cults in Darfur worked as a proxy state and army. The meddling of Yithian envoys is permitted just because they know the future. The Deep Ones, under Caral, had their own voting bloc on Dura’s council!
In the end, the proud Hyperboreans have always knelt for such creatures. Knowing the costs, they will kneel again. It is easy for us to scorn them. Many things are easy for those with power over atoms. They Hyperborean only knows the power of iron blades and whispered words. He witnesses their triviality every day, and with it, his own. The Hyperborean is afraid. He is afraid of the stars. That the sun may not rise. What if the earth opens up and destroys his whole village? Or a fire flashes across the night, banning the sun for a year, causing famines?
This is why he doesn’t pray as a 21st century person might. He is not looking for his gods to aid him in his life.
He is praying, desperately, for his god not to kill him.
This is the nature of faith on this world, where men may point to gods on the horizon.
Credit: Diamond Shark