Here goes... *deep breath*
Tribe: The Serpent Clan
Habitat: About a sixth of a green valley, with a river leading to a freshwater lake at its bottom. The clan moves frequently, but tends to settle about three miles from a forest beyond the valley. The area experiences a wet season during the winter, when temperatures can drop to 14 or 15 C; the summer typically sees a high of 32-35 C.
Phenotype: Hair is universally black, with eyes either brown or grey. Skin tone is similar to northwestern India, without a great deal of variation. The clan tends to identify different gene pools by jaw and cheekbone structure, which has worked pretty well so far.
Occupation: The tribe is split into hunters, foragers, and leaders; the majority of the adults and older (10+) children are foragers, as only the most proficient are allowed to hunt, save for youngsters whose skill is still being gauged. There is no hard and fast rule to enforce this, but merely social convention; a gatherer with a good eye for recognizing obscure plants is held in higher regard than most hunters.
Leadership: The clan has two figures who are never required to work for food: a clan parent figure and a priest(ess). They rule in tandem, and their decisions are incontrovertible only if they both agree. In situations where this is not the case, each individual is free to decide. When one of these two figures dies, the survivor selects the replacement from amongst the clan's members.
The Clan Father or Clan Mother is distinguished by the responsibility of that office: to personally test any new plant or meat, and to declare whether it is fit for consumption. This is symbolic of both the greater wisdom the leader is supposed to hold and the willingness to serve the clan despite danger.
The clan's priest or priestess venerates the clan's entire pantheon, donning handmade masks of hide or leaf if there is need to honor a particular deity – masks that trap some of the raw power of the god in question. The tasks the priest is responsible for are making the rains subside at the end of their season, promoting childbirth (more on this below), and lighting fire.
These two positions represent a sharing of power, and were created as a way of dual rulership by the two original leaders of the clan.
Language: The clan uses its own corruption of the region’s lingual family, and includes two uncommon phonetics. The first of these, which I’ll transcribe as t’d, is a dental click made by placing the tongue against the back of the teeth, as if to pronounce the d sound, but briefly sealing the mouth, adding much more air pressure when the tongue is retracted. The second phonetic is transcribed e’u, and is the open vowel heard in the Canadian French honneur. They are both phonemes, but it makes more sense to me to have apostrophes as an indicator than to have any sort of repurposed symbol/lettering spread about various words.
Religion: The clan believes that, when there was nothing but nothing, a single brief hum rang from the nothing, and this mysterious hum caused the nothing to become the realm Na Su Na. Na Su Na then began to hum, and from its hum came the sky and the ground. The sky and the ground also hummed, and made the above sky and the beneath ground, but when their humming reached Na Sua Na, the two hums together made it become void, leaving void between the sky and the ground. Horrified both by the destruction and the void, the sky and the ground stopped humming, and the world lay silent, content to be dwelt in.
Now, when these places were made, they made their own living things; the sky made birds and the Sun goddess, the ground made people and animals and the Berry goddess, the beneath ground made worms and the Stone god, and the above sky made good and bad demons and the Season gods. Also, after this, came the Lightning god, who came from Na Su Na when it became void, and is allowed to be in both the sky and on the ground at the same time. All women had the power to create from their souls children, and so the world was filled with children and the children of children.
The ground had five fields in it, in which living things dwelled. The place where living people were was called the Wet Place, where green things and animals lived; the Frozen Lake was a faraway place where the most evil of demons were imprisoned in a massive lake turned to stone; the Stone Trees were where the worms lived above ground and waited to find what happens when worms die; First Valley was a place of great beauty, where all good plants grew and the gods themselves foraged; and the Twisted Glade was the primeval forest where terrible monsters roamed, mighty enough to destroy demons. It was only possible for the most skilled of any realm to go from one realm to the other, and even then the traveler would only be given one other realm to roam. The exceptions were the gods, who could go where they pleased, and the worms, who all travelled to the Stone Trees.
The clan offers veneration to a number of deities. The chief among these is their sun goddess, Irat’dok, who reigns from the sky and grants hunting, flowers, and children. She gave birth to five female clouds, who became the five winds, and later gave birth to a son, the rain. She used her magic when her fifth daughter, Taari the Lake Wind, was born to make the child far more powerful than any of her siblings, and to ensure Taari’s place as ruler if Irat’dok were ever to lose the symbol of her superiority, her magic boar tusk, which was seven feet in length. This spell was powerful enough to affect all of existence, and is where the Serpent Clan derives its use of the holy number 5, from which nearly all their major numbers are derived (the five fields, a 5 x 2 counting system, and the five parts of five beasts, to name a few examples). She took her symbol, a massive boar tusk, from an evil boar demon she killed before there were children of children, and with that magical tusk, she came to the Season gods, who honored her good deed and promised to serve her.
The other god with a major role in the pantheon is the Lightning god, the trickster Dare’uket. All the gods had magic, amongst which was the power to create fire. Dare’uket one day was using his magic fire to warm himself during his busy winter, and had to rush off to a storm elsewhere. He forgot the fire, and a woman found it and claimed it. When Dare’uket returned, he saw that the woman had taken his fire. He appeared before her and showed her how it could be used to warm food and take the marrow from bone. Seeing that the woman was a good learner, he gave the fire to her and showed her how to make more, only asking that those who make fire give thanks to each god at least once each year. The other gods’ reactions ranged from the fear the Goddess of berries had, to the surprise of Irat’dok, to the apoplectic rage of the Dry Season god, who thought it his right to give and take fire. Irat’dok calmed him by lying with him and telling him that the woman with fire was honorable, and would every year give him praise, as would all other humans who made fire. The woman with fire became the first proper priestess of the pantheon (which had existed to a lesser degree beforehand), as well as one of the two people who first organized the Serpent Clan. As such, there is a small (15-20 person) cult revering Dare’uket.
The one religious ritual not practiced solely by the clan’s priest is the journey of the dead. When the living die, the dead person’s spirit becomes many worms, who seek to travel to the Stone Trees. The deceased’s family will carry that person into the forest nearby, finding a tree beneath which to set the body. Only then can the family close the corpse’s eyes, allowing the spirit to begin its journey towards the Stone Trees.
Social Customs / Tradition: The clan observes mated pairs; there is no marriage ceremony as such, but it is taboo to be with another once a pairing is made. Children are considered to be solely the offspring of the mother, and are given three choices when they are roughly ten years of age: learn hunting with a side of foraging, firemaking/religious worship with a side of foraging, or heavy foraging with the lightest hint of hunting. This helps ensure a backup plan in case the child isn’t as competent as hoped, as well as helping to emphasize the gatherer nature of the clan. Names are almost entirely the names of various plants and herbs, with occasional corruptions; a few children are named after important animals.
The clan mainly hunts five animals: the snake, the rodent, the boar, the fish, and the wildcat. From these animals, there are five materials mainly used: bones for tools and marrow; skin for clothing, shelter, hauling, and masks; meat for food; organs for bait; and blood for food and ritual paint. While other animals are killed as the opportunity presents itself, at least 95% of the clan’s hunting focuses around these animals, and their hunting is geared primarily towards those animals.
As previously mentioned, the number five is considered holy; the most prominent example is in childbirth. A fifth child, a common occurrence, is held to have its own power plus some of the powers of its four siblings, and the child’s mother is given a small ceremony to celebrate the birth of what will no doubt be an exemplar of a child. When a tenth child occurs, it is even more wonderful, for that child also has some of the powers of its nine siblings. The mother of a tenth child is highly exalted, and is held in high regard for the rest of her life, in addition to any renown her skills might bring her. Children born in this manner can even possess the old powers of children who have died.
Thanks to the region’s warm climate, the need for clothing exists only on the hottest of days; while most wear hides as a personal symbol and sign of prosperity, there is no perceived harm in going about naked, if it’s more convenient. Children especially are often unclothed, to avoid ill-fitting hides. Once a child reaches 10, however, there are typically enough hides of the proper size available from other clan members to have at least moderately-comfortable clothing. Hair on the head, face, and body are left to grow, though fingernails are dulled on wood if they become too long, shorter nails being more conducive to wielding tools near angry boar.
Buildings are temporary structures made by propping up animal hides, and exist primarily for shade and shelter; while a family typically sleeps near one another, and some hides are more worn than others, no family has a permanent home, as these constructions are used on an as-needed basis.
The Serpent Clan has been almost entirely isolated from other tribes, but not by conscious effort; most people would consider making their home in a valley in the rainy season a dubious decision at best.
Knowledge / Technology: The Serpent Clan is well-versed in local herbs, thanks to its societal emphasis on foraging. There are always three or four in the clan who know how to make fire, though the priestess is almost always the only one to do so for practical purposes. Hunting depends largely on hefty sticks and thrown stones; for dangerous game, hunters almost always learn an animal’s path and plan an ambush. Clothing is limited to a few scraps of hide, and buildings are a piece of hide propped up to provide shade and shelter from rain and wind. Neither the nature of human procreation nor the occurrence of seeds are known yet. Due to the population-intensive nature of their diet, the clan has almost no skilled crafts (the closest being the masks and rituals of the priestess). Butchery is performed with bone, taking a great deal of time and wearing down tools quickly. Cooking is available, helping to rid meat of disease, despite not eliminating it completely.
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Topic: TRIBES - a prehistoric tale of prehistoric people doing prehistoric things (Read 14180 times)