Book of Morogyad

The Book of Morogyad is a book by the Dyqamayan thaumatologist Ezynon Moronyad. The book records insights into the pre-Wesmodian worship of the god Zargyod among the Sailors on the Sea of Jars. Despite its title, the book contains only one chapter dealing with the demigod Morogyad, though it does present audacious and groundbraking - if not universally accepted - research on the cult of his father at sea and his role as an intercessory power therein.

Contents

The book consists of four lengthy polemic essays, the first of which interrogates the notion that Zargyod was ever primarily a god of fortune. Moronyad argues that this association is primarily a post-Wesmodian perception caused by the prominence of the Commercial Guilds in contemporary business and society. He makes the somewhat controversial suggestion that the Guilds have deliberately fostered this perception as a way of investing their commercial agendas with anqique glamour and 'borrowed legitimacy,' a fairly inflammatory thing for an author to say unless they had some particular bone to pick, which Moronyad does not. Rather than being a god of fortune, he argues, Zargyod was predominantly a deity of the sea. He uses literary evidence to support this claim, arguing that pre-Wesmodian literature records Zargyod as born (repeatedly) on islands, fighting battles with sea creatures and interacting with sailors and safeguarding their dignity and traditions, but never really developing any association with metals - almost exclusively the purview of Morogyad - or probability until after he was no longer being actively worshipped.
In the second chapter - the briefest in the book - Moronyad shores up his assertions with discussion of the worship of Zargyod among sailors in the pre-Wesmodian era. Beginning with a survey of dockside shrines to the god, of which he claims to have found three in each of the three Insular cities. These, he asserts, were clearly used to conduct symbolic sacrifices, likely of remaining rations, as thanks for successful voyages. He also claims to have sailed on ships where similar structures, in wood, were part of the superstructure. Moronyad claims to have sailed on numerous very old ships which still had these shrines, and that while all materials of value had long been stripped from them many still exhibited holes spotted with blue-grey rust indicating they once held brass nails or rods. This interpretation dovetails neatly with wrecks he visited on uninhabited islands - he intriguingly gives no further details about this - in which substantially intact altars to Zargyod were present, consisting of sheets of hammered brass featuring bowl-like depressions and daises on which stood brass and gold statuettes. The shipboard worship of Zargyod, he argues, was clearly very widespread in pre-Wesmodian times.
The third and by far longest chapter deals with Moronyad's collection of maritime music and sailor's dances, which he argues contain numerous echoes of the worship of Zargyod as a god of the sea and a patron and protector of sailors. He spends a great deal of time delineating sailor's pipes and discussing why they are so frequently made of copper or brass, arguing that these materials are traditionally chosen not for their tonal properties but because they were seen as sacred to Zargyod. He allows that the two reasons are not mutually exclusive, but argues that both speak to an origin as highly precise ritual instruments, upon which particular tunes could be played to court and direct the god's favour - a possible origin, he suggests, for the eventual evolution of Zargyod's connection to the concept of luck. Moronyad also spends a long stretch of prose extrapolating these ideas onto the lyrics of sea shanties, drawing a number of examples from his own expansive collection of the songs. Although he admits that these songs served the utilitarian purpose of co-ordinating rhythmic activities in collective labour, he insists quite strongly that this need not be considered separately from religious or magical purposes, arguing that the pre-Wesmodian operation of a sailing vessel was itself a quasi-religious activity in which the courting of divine favour and the operation of the physical vessel were inextricably linked activities.
In the fourth chapter Moronyad broaches the topic of Morogyad. He argues that while the land-based cult (and most post-Wesmodian thaumatologists) have seen Morogyad primarily as a thaumatologist or alchemist, the seagoing cult positioned him primarily as an intercessory theurgist, a figure who could approach his father on their behalf, and that a substantial proportion of the sea-borne worship of Zargyod was therefore devoted to courting the attention of the son. Moronyad uses archaeological rather than literary evidence for this point, noting that his reconstructions of shipboard altars to Zargyod are consistent with the presence of copper or brass statuettes, and that the archaeological record does include such statues posed as raising or presenting their left hand. Though earlier archaeologists link these statuettes to the worship of Zargyod, Moronyad specifically identifies them as Morogyad due to their posture (Zargyod is only associated with the left hand in the myth of The Wagering Lords of Elpaloz, whch Moronyad dismisses as propaganda of the cult ashore; Morogyad is widely credited with accomplishing feats of magic with his) and argues that these statuettes were the foci of shipboard veneration. Morogyad was, he argues, an important intercessory power in the seagoing cult, a figure whose favour could precipitate that of the true god.
A brief concluding note asserts - in distinctly choleric terms - the dignity and genuineness of the sea-going cult of Zargyod and Moronyad's intention to continue studying it as both a thaumatological subject and a matter of social history. This, he argues, is a greater service to posterity and magic than the self-interested experiments of the alchemists.

Commentary

The general feeling among readers is that Moronyad makes a convincing circumstantial case for his position, and that Book of Morogyad is a worthwhile contribution to modern thaumatology. The circumstantial nature of some aspects of the thesis is questioned by some scholars. The most notable issue is Moronyad's undocumented reconstructions of altars to Zargyod in unrecorded shipwrecks on uncharted islands. Readers have queried why Moronyad offered this seemingly far-fetched explanation for a fairly important plank in his argument when the first essay in the book explicitly discusses the dockside shrines to the god scattered through most of the Eleven Cities. Moronyad's point, critics observe, would have been equally well-served by suggesting that the shipboard altars are mobile reiterations of that tradition; did Moronyad discuss these shipwrecked alters purely to distance the putative seaborn cult from that which evolved into the Commercial Guilds? Moronyad has responded to this suggestion with his customary bile, making several enemies in the process.
The references to the potential use of Moronyad's archive of sea shanties are productive, however. Several thaumatologists are known to have visited Moronyad's home in Dyqamay to consult and add to this archive, something he is apparently quite willing to allow depending on the politeness of the request. Others, refused for various reasons or simply intimidated by Moronyad's reputation, have begun their own data-gathering expeditions around the docks and sea lanes of the Eleven Cities - enterprises of which Moronyad is said to be intensely dismissive.

Availability

Book of Morogyad is less than a decade old. Most well-stocked scribes in the insular cities can produce a copy in a few days for a reasonable price. It is slightly harder to find further abroad but scribes in Pholyos, Ramoros and Elpaloz are known to stock it and those in other cities are likely to do the same soon.