Speaker of the Memories
In elvish spiritual practice, it is held that the elves are formed of three parts: Spirit, Memory, and Body. Each of these aspects of being is in a sympathetic relationship with the others and harm to one is believed to cause harm to another, lasting even into the next life. Additionally, everything an elf is at birth is gained through reincarnation, for no wholly new elf can be born who has not lived before.
The Waters of Memory are a collective of the experiences of elvenkind, built up by generations of elves in communion accessing the memories of their people. Some stories say that the dreams of elves began with the first tears for lost Ildathach shed by the ancients. Whatever the beginning, the Waters of Memory have grown in the millennia since. The elves also conceptualize the Waters of Memory as a sort of afterlife, where the memories and personality join with the collective to await the re-embodiment of the spirit.
So then, it is the duty of a Speaker of Memories to safeguard the memory of the elves. The 'memory of the elves' they looked after was many things. It was the personal Memory of individual elves whom the Speakers guided and instructed in communion with the Waters of Memory. It was the cultural hiraeth, a profound sense of missing something or someone deeply important or personal to the spirit and the grief that accompanies such loss, especially in the sense of loss of home. Finally, the Speaker of Memories was also responsible for preserving the living cultural memory of the elves as well as the ancestral memory—which coincided with one another in the Waters of Memory, with each communion, layers being added—so that they could guide young elves to discover more fully their past lives.
The Elvish Hiraeth
The elves have a deep and abiding cultural longing for a place, usually called Ildathach, where their people originated, to which they cannot return, and of which scant fragmented echoes remain. From this place the first ancestors of elves migrated. The gods of this world, new and raw with power after drinking of the Wellspring, struck down the earliest elves with mortality, and wars dwindled these ancient ones until future generations were lesser and lesser in the perfect image of their origination. As a result of this deeply felt loss of self and home--an emotion which they call hiraeth; elves have developed a spirituality that honors their ancestors and by extension their ancestral ties to the birthplace of their kind. Because they cannot return to the primordial other-world of their creation, there is no true renewal of elvish essence; they can only try to preserve themselves in spite of this world and its gods, slowly fading as they succumb a little more each generation.The Waters of Memory
The Waters of Memory are a collective of the experiences of elvenkind, built up by generations of elves in communion accessing the memories of their people. Some stories say that the dreams of elves began with the first tears for lost Ildathach shed by the ancients. Whatever the beginning, the Waters of Memory have grown in the millennia since. The elves also conceptualize the Waters of Memory as a sort of afterlife, where the memories and personality join with the collective to await the re-embodiment of the spirit.
Communion
Universal among the elves is the meditative, half-conscious dreaming state analogous to the state of sleep experienced by humans and the other species descended from the gods. This state, sometimes called a 'trance' or 'communion,' allows an elf to access the Waters of Memory. Early in life, these communions primarily gave an elf impressions of Ildathach, this phenomenon, which some scholars believe to be subconscious on the part of either the young living elf or the Waters of Memory, has the consequence of perpetuating hiraeth with each generation. Later in life, typically after having lived for a century, elves no longer experienced any direct impression of Ildathach, leaving a sense of loss.For most of an elf's life, communion was a meditation on identity, for Memory is considered the identity of the spirit, and it was of utmost spiritual importance to elves to symbolically restore themselves to a perfected form before death. In this perfected state, an elf would have access to the memories of all of their past lives during communion. Whenever an elf entered communion to discover memories from their past lives, they left an imprint or ripple in the Waters, adding to them with newer memories from their present life and situation. Advanced practitioners were even able to access the ripples of elves of other generations, bridging memories between spirits, though this has only ever been documented to manifest as abstractions like emotions or brief recollections rather than full personalities.
Endless Dream
Some elves, particularly those so ancient as to come to be regarded as 'ancestors' who often felt no desire to continue in living, entered into a near-death long-term communion which elves refered to as the Endless Dream. In doing so, the elf underwent special preparations for a journey deep into the Waters of Memory. Some of these dreaming ancestors entered into the Endless Dream to preserve ancient knowledge, perhaps with the purpose of passing this knowledge on to future elves in communion. Others sought to reconnect with Ildathach.Indeed, the purpose of such asceticism could be varied, but invariably involved preparing a chamber for meditation and a great and austere ceremony—which carried similar tone to elvish funerary rites—and the continuous attendance of dedicated servants to the sleeping elf. The funerary tone of such ceremonies, and future homage paid to the ascetic, may be due to a cultural understanding that there is no return for the dreamer. Indeed, no elf is known to have returned from the Endless Dream. Throughout history, wars have resulted in the physical death of dreamers whose servants, being driven off or killed, were unable to maintain their charge. In such cases, it is unclear whether the dreamer remains fully personified within the Waters, or merely joins with it as per death by any other means.
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