Autumnal processions

Autumnal processions are a spottily-attested ritual which appears to have been practiced by the Boles of Dahan on the Alluvial plain south of the Sea of Jars in the pre-Wesmodian era. The exact nature of the ritual is widely and, given the emotive accusations involved, hotly debated. Some thaumatologists dismiss the entire notion as a slander on the pre-Wesmodian cult of Dahan, though others view it as a potentially revealing window into fertility magic praticed in rural areas. A version of the ritual is practiced in some rural communities in contemporary times, though whether these processions constitute any continuation of the pre-Wesmodian practice is not clear.    

Procedure

 

Pre-Wesmodian

  No eyewitness acount of an Autumnal procession in the pre-Wesmodian era is known to survive, and archeological evidence for it is scant at best. The earliest reference to the practice comes in the Seventh Wesmodian Invective. Wesmod describes how the priests of Dahan would tour the community they led, playing a drum to summon the local children from their homes on the evenings of the autumn equinox. The children would follow the priest away from the community and into the surrounding woods; if there was a body of water nearby, the procession would move in that direction. The children would be kept in isolation, watched over by the priest, for the next several days, while their parents brought in the year's autumn harvest. The priest would then return to the community and inspect the bounty collected by each family, then retrieve the children of those who had been appropriately productive. The children of those who fell short were murdered, buried in the woods or thrown in the waterways, and referred to by the priests as sacrifices to the land to ensure a better harvest the following year. The whole business, Wesmod avers, was a method by which the priests used the mystique of the god to hold the children of the village hostage in order to ensure a compliant harvest workforce and claim credit for the bounty it produced.   With the extinction of the Boles of Dahan in the wake of the Wesmodian Reformation, this practice seems to have died out completely.  

Contemporary

  Autumnal processions take place in a small proportion of rural communities on the Alluvial plain today, mostly in localities close to major waterways such as the Chondolos River. Children, dressed in their finest clothes and often bedecked with ribbons, undertake journeys to the water's edge. Many - especially, it has been noted, young girls - will conduct this journey via rhythmic, apparently coordinated skipping. They will carry food with them, and at the water's edge they will eat an outdoor meal, often without any adult supervision. Boys will often conclude this meal by diving, fully clothed, into the river, or engaging in a rough-and-tumble horseplay which ends with one or more of their number being overpowered and thrown into the water. He will be helped out again afterwards, and the children will return to the village. These events take place in late summer or early autumn and often constitute the last day of childlike idleness before the participants must pull their weight in the autumn harvest.  

Commentary

  Many commentators have pointed out difficulties with Wesmod's accont of the pre-Wesmodian practice. Wesmod was an urbanite from the insular city of Tyros who never set foot on the Alluvial plain before he published his Invectives; any information he could provide he learned second-hand, and he neither named or even implied any sources for it. Given that the Seventh Wesmodian Invective is famous as the longest, least disciplined, and most bitter of the eight, and indeed that the entire collection of invectives appers to have begun as a venting of urbanite spleen against what he seems to have believed was the state of affairs in rural communities where the Boles of Dahan enjoyed prominence, it may well be that his entire report is an exercise in demonising the priests of Dahan, either via calculated rhetoric or sincere error.   Thaumatologist Margyas Maray made a great deal of the Autumnal processions in her picturesque reconstruction of the worship of Dahan. Dismissing Wesmod as a propgandist, Maray identified the contemporary processions as grass-roots holdovers from the pre-Wesmodian cult, noting the skipping element as evidence that the children themselves rejected the reduction of the cult and conducted the processions themselves when the adults demurred. Noting they would only have done so if the processions were positive or rewrding experiences, Maray cites the survival of the tradition as evidence of the wholesome nature of the cult of Dahan.   Qroyatan Marys characteristically takes a rather gimmer view of the practice. Noting that farms near rivers are less deendent on spring rains than those in drier areas, he also observes a negative correllation between ommunities who practice these processions and those who crown The Spring Princess; villages rarely do both. He maintains that Wesmod was broadly correct his his descriptions of a pre-Wesmodian tradition in which the local leric of Dahan would ritually drown a child from their villiage at harvest time as an offering to the god who had watered the crops during the summer growing season. Modern processions, he beiieves represent a dilution of this tradition, just as the Spring Princess in other communities constitute a folk survival of speing sacrifices in other communitiies.   Revivalists of the worship of Dahan have shown little interest in the processions, possibly because both the Green Circle and the Ivied Ones are orgnisations of young adults who, to the best of public knowledge, do not have children.