Maryas

In the religious tradition of the Eleven Cities, Maryas was a goddess of knowledge. Where Hayan was venerated as the goddess of sense and intelligence shared, however, Maryas was regarded as the goddess of secrets, intrigue and malice, and from the earliest records her cult possessed an air of unwholesomeness.
She is also associated with magic and childbirth. Partly as a result of this Maryas retained enough symbolic importance to be actively worshipped throughout the Eleven Cities for much of the pre-Wesmodian period. She did not disappear from the numinous imagination until the The Wesmodian Reformation  , when her cult became a focus of rapidly-escalating popular discontent. When this ill feeling boiled over into violence and her temples were stormed, however, they were found to be deserted, and her clerics fled. Theories as to where they may have gone remain the subject of lurid rumour and hearsay to this day.

Etymology

The name Maryas is a fairly straightforward agentive construction of Old Zolian. In that language mar means wisdom or skill; the suffix -as is a feminine inflection of the verb to have. The goddess is therefore named roughly Wise woman or Skilled woman, a name that some scholars have suggested connoted an ultimately wholesome origin for the cult.

Origins

It is at first glance curious that a society would worship a goddess of secrecy and malice. Thaumaotlogists, however, have developed two - not necessarily contradictory - explanations as to how this may have happened. The first. and perhaps most likely, is that she arose as a result of a demarcation dispute among the devotees of the two other major goddesses, Hayan and Ynglyas. Both are associated with epistemology, Hayan being a goddess of wisdom and ratiocination and Ynglyas one of prophecy and prediction. Both are fundamentally benevolent, and their mythologies frequently depict them sharing their knowledge, via their own idiosyncratic methodologies, for the good of sufficiently ardent and demonstrative devotees. The extension of such benedictions, however, is a demonstration of power; that which is extended or bestowed can be retracted or denied, largely on the whim of the bestower. Such retraction may be for the receiver's own good, but without an explanation this would not be apparent pre factum. To the denied party, therefore, such denials could only possibly appear as demonstrations of malice.
Devotees of Hayan in particular, the theory runs, would have struggled with the notion of their benevolent goddess acting in such a way, yet the possibility she might do so could not be logically excluded from her modus operandi. The notion therefore is that Maryas emerged as a malicious counterpart of Hayan and/or Ynglyas, a sort of anti-Hayan who used her knowledge to the benefit of some but the detriment of society as a whole. Such subdivision of divine portfolios would allow for the presentation of Hayan as a figure of unadulterated goodness, and thus for the presentation of the cult of Hayan as an uncomplicated force for good in society. Ynglyas, and her cult, could similarly be kept free of accusations of malice. Yet the unavoidable by-product of this exercise in religious propaganda is a concession of the existence of a powerful evil force in the cosmos, which would naturally require appeasement. Those who took responsibility for such appeasement could very well, and possibly very quickly, have set themselves up as a clerical establishment on the order of those of Dahan or Krezzan. There is scant literary or archaeological evidence for this theory, but most thaumatologists regard it as at least circumstantially plausible.
A more wholesome possibility - though one that carries disappointing connotations of its own - is supported by Maryas's name, which as noted above means roughly Wise woman. The argument runs that the name initially referred to the discussions of gynaecology, childbirth and fertility that took place between women in general and midwives in particular in the years surrounding the foundation of the cities. Maryas, it is suggested, may have initially received veneration as a patron goddess of who took part in those discussions. Supporting evidence for this contention can be found in Maryas's links to the moon and stars, natural phenomena linked to notions of female fertility, in the attested connections between her cult and that of Ynglyas (a goddess more directly linked with such concerns) and in the peculiar misanthropy running though the mythopoeia associated with her, much of which depicts the abuse and exploitation of patriarchal authority. Despite the evident gender-integration of her clerics, in fact, Maryas is an abiding feminine presence within the pantheon of the Cities.
The unwholesome connotations that came to surround this cult may have emerged as a result of the discomfort the patriarchies of the Cities had with the notion of a female illuminati. The existence of secret female knowledge existing outside the predominantly male power structures of the evolving cities would have given rise to suspicions of conspiracy and thence, via perceptions of deficient causality, to accusations of witchcraft and sorcery, matters that Maryas quickly absorbed into her divine portfolio. Again, the cult's connections with those of Ynglyas, goddess of prognostication, will have contributed to this perception. In fact the argument has been made that, rather than being an evil twin of Hayan, Maryas evolved as an evil counterpart of Ynglyas, embodying the occlusive and conspiratorial aspects of the practices of divination and magic. This theory hinges on the notion of entrenched institutional misogyny in the early histories of the cities, though this is not hard to imagine. The attested gender-integration of Maryas's clerical establishment raises a potential problem - if this cult arose as the result of fears of female conspiracy, why did it have male adherents and, indeed, priests? - though this might be explained by Maryas's connection to Krezzan, another deity with connections to both magic and medicine - and noted for the enclosure and secrecy of his cult.

Divine portfolio

Maryas was in the first instance a goddess of knowledge, and specifically of the discovery and concealment of knowledge. This made her, significantly, the patron deity of thaumaturges in the pre-Wesmodian era, whose activities the cult may have either aided or, perhaps, stymied; sources are ambiguous, and the notion of the goddess possessing control over who did or did not know certain information leads to the likelihood that their approach varied between individual cases. She was also generally characterised as a capricious and conspiratorial deity whose control over information made her the goddess of secrets, malice, and plots, a set of responsibilities that led to widespread suspicion of her cult.
Less emotively Maryas was associated with medicine and childbirth, and was the patron and protectoress of women of marriageable age - typically those aged from early adolescence to the birth of their first children, at which point they traditionally passed to the protection of Ynglyas.

Worship

Nothing is known for certain about the worship of Maryas. Although the cult is known to have produced a substantial body of devotional literature - enough for some researchers to suggest that the composition of this material served some sort of intrinsic devotional purpose itself - none of the resulting material appears to have survived. The large majority of it was lost in the sudden disappearance of the cult in the Wesmodian Reformation. Post-Wesmodian authors do make occasional references to rare books penned by cult members, the key texts of which appear to have been entitled The Book of Shadows and Presentations of Darkness in Darkness. Secondary sources even quote a handful of short passages that suggest these works would have been of great interest to thaumatologists, being disputations on the manipulation of reality and the perception thereof by humanity. While some of these books did evidently survive the reformation, being referred to as recently as 300 years ago, they have since been lost, possibly to simple attrition. Were any copies to turn up, they would be major finds, both in terms of their sheer existence and their contents.
With no sign of these texts on the horizon, however, researchers must rely on accounts of cult activity from outside the cult itself, which, like discussion of the worship of Dahan, is mostly written by those seeking to perpetuate criticisms of the goddess and her devotees. As such it is often considered deeply unusual that Maryas is the only one of the eight gods of the tradition upon whom Wesmod is silent. There are Wesmodian Invectives about all seven other gods, some - such as those against Dahan and Pergyad - quite savage, but he is silent on the cult of Maryas. Possible reasons for this are discussed below.
Fortunately for researchers, subsequent writers are more loquacious, though the resulting information is far from authoritative. No sources on the liturgy of Maryas survives from less than two centuries after the reformation and thus none that does survive is written by anyone with first-hand knowledge of the matter. Much of what is written about the cult therefore probably contains only a small kernel of truth. A substantial proportion of the horror fiction and drama of the Cities, for example, is set in one or another of the temples of Maryas, depicting young people being foully mistreated by evil wizards; much of the pornography written in the region is similarly orientated, some of it being written with evident reference to the mythopoeia surrounding the goddess. From this sort of literature there emerges a suggestion of nocturnal rites in which the activities of acolytes was directed by senior clerics. Ritual chanting is a common feature of these stock scenes, in which flutes and percussion instruments were apparently used to keep time. There is also frequent discussion of censers shedding scented smoke. Sources diverge on whether this smoke smelled sweet or foul, but all agree the smell was strong and the smoke thick; some allege it was of unusual colours, often green or purple. This may be written off as sheer hearsay, though it has some interesting parallels with what is known of the rites devoted to Ajqyod and (better attested) Zargyod, suggesting there may be something to such discussions, even if the rhetorical climate in which it is offered leaves something to be desired.
Archaeology is of limited use in settling any questions. Literary sources make it clear that Maryas's temples, like those of Krezzan, were enclosed stone structured with doors that were kept barred; supposedly very few people ever entered or left the buildings. Such buildings existed in Pholyos, Loros, Tyros, Oluz and Elpaloz, though all were demolished within a few years of the Wesmodian Reformation and the land reclaimed by the cities so quickly and thoroughly that their precise locations is now a matter of debate. In all cases, it is said, the districts that replaced the temples quickly became noted as areas of ill repute, noted as the haunts of bravos, footpads and other desperados, though the reasons for this are never stated. Attempts to investigate the foundations and cellars of the less reputable districts of these cities have occasionally been made, though as yet nothing clearly definable as a temple structure or cultic artefact has been found. It seems unlikely that such structures and institutions could be completely erased, however, and the search is ongoing.
Maryas - either specifically named or heavily implied - is a character in some recorded examples of the mummery that survives today as a social vestige of the worship of Dahan. This demonstrates that the goddess was known, and incorporated into the fertility religion practiced in rural hinterlands. There is little in such scripts to position Maryas as any sort of villain; indeed her typical role in the plot is as a problem-solver, and sometimes even as a protector of the persecuted, often employing herbal potions in her pursuit of her goals. Foul potions, many of them poisons, are a frequent component of the urban invectives against Maryas. As such it is fair to assume that the rural expression of this cult was more reputable than its urban counterpart. Another interesting point about these mummeries is the uniform masks, reputed to be made of wood, coloured pale grey, and to cover the whole face, worn by the mummers playing this goddess. These could be the closest thing yet found to a genuine cultic artefact of Maryas and an examination of an example, or better yet an observation of it in use, is another of the rare actionable objectives of research into this enigmatic figure.

Wesmodian Reformation

The secretive cult of a goddess of deception and malice, associated with an extensive mythology chronicling the hideous mistreatment of vulnerable members of society and a large body of rumours about ritualistic abuse and immorality, would seem to be something of a sitting duck for a reformer attacking the public credibility of a polytheistic religion. This being the case, it is remarkable that Maryas is the one deity on whom Wesmod is almost completely silent. Maryas is mentioned in passing in the first, and programmatic, of the Wesmodian Invectives, in which Wesmod criticises them for exactly the reasons just given. The remaining seven invectives deal with the other major gods - Pergyad, Krezzan, Ajqyod, Ynglyas, Zargyod, Dahan and Hayan - in turn, but there is uniquely, no specific invective dealing with Maryas.
This silence is obviously hugely conspicuous and has given rise to a huge body of speculation and theory as to what may have prompted Wesmod to foreswear comment on the subject. Again, it is hardly as if he could have wanted for material, and his invectives against Krezzan and Dahan in particular demonstrate that he is perfectly willing to resort to emotive arguments when he feels they would further his general rationalist objective. Some argue that Wesmod was himself a secret initiate of the cult of Maryas - a notion hinging on the theory that the cult maintained a secret network of lay adherents whereby they influenced public affairs, something of a conspiracy theory in itself. Others argue that the cult had some sort of leverage against Wesmod and, learning via secret means (supernatural or otherwise) of his plans to publish his Invectives, pressured him somehow to leave their goddess out - which, again, supposes this cult meddled in secular affairs. Rumours to this effect were known to circulate at the time but, again, are all but impossible to corroborate. Another theory is that a ninth invective does exist attacking Maryas, but that it has somehow been supressed and lost, possibly to appear in a library or lost trove somewhere. Proponents of this theory observe that nowhere in the existing document is it explicitly stated that there were only supposed to be eight essays. This is perhaps the least problematic of the popular theories for Wesmod's silence, but again, it is very difficult to advance upon. Forgeries of a ninth invective occasionally circulate and have been known to sidetrack serious but misguided researchers.
The popular image of the Wesmodian Reformation is of angry mobs storming temples and overthrowing evil theocrats at the direction of a righteous reformer. In fact, this is only true in a small number of cases and places, mostly to do with the cult of Maryas - an ironic point given Wesmod's virtual silence on the organisation. In the months following the publication of his invectives public mistrust and dislike of the cult of Maryas began to escalate rapidly as the general public - or at least those who read Wesmod's essays - took his general remarks and applied them to this secretive organisation. Such unrest gave rise to the angry mobs of popular imagination in several cities, with riots in several cities as people vented their spleen at the real or imagined wrongdoing of the cult. Mobs besieged the temples of Maryas in Loros, Tyros, Elpaloz and Oluz, while popular unrest in Pholyos was directed towards secular authorities, from whom the mobs demanded action against the cult. Matters appear to have escalated for a month or more throughout these cities, with unrest in Loros and Pholyos particularly pronounced, until a particular night in which all five of the established temples to the goddess were stormed at once, in Pholyos by order of the city's assembly. It is not clear how or why unruly mobs in five different, disparate locations co-ordinated their actions in this way; it may be that the chroniclers recording that this took place are either mistaken or, perhaps more likely, engaging in a little poetic license. Whatever the case, most of the temples that were in fact stormed were those of Maryas.
All sources agree on the result of this violence, however - the temples to Maryas were uniformily found to be deserted. No treasures were found to be looted, no libraries of the goddesses's devotional literature were apparent, and the handful of identifiable ritual spaces were stripped of anything that might have been seen as evidence of wrongdoing. Most remarkably, the priesthood was gone. Even the temples in Loros and Elpaloz, which had been surrounded by angry mobs continuously for over a month, contained not a single priest or acolyte, or indeed any evidence of their recent presence. The temples, occupied and active until as little as two months previously, were empty shells.
What happened to the priests and priestesses of Maryas has been a matter of debate, rumour, theory and conspiracy ever since. Some suggest that they committed some sort of magical mass suicide, wiping themselves out in a away that somehow erased their bodies, after burning any evidence of their crimes. Others have suggested that a grand ritual, generally held to have involved human sacrifice, allowed the priests to escape with their treasures into some sort of netherworld, from which they may or may not (accounts vary) have ever returned. Others, of a more practical mindset, argue that the temples possessed secret underground passages and the clerics used these to escape with their treasures before they could be apprehended. This theory tends to be more popular, simply because it seems more plausible. Certain titles from Maryas's devotional literature is known to have circulated in secular hands after the disappearance of the cult, which also indicates that some of the libraries of books the cult was rumoured to possess did survive the Reformation. The provenance of those titles, however, is never made clear in historical sources, and the suggestion that they were acquired from surviving priests of Maryas, although plausible, raises the question of why these fugitive clerics would part with their devotional wisdom. Whatever happened, it is fair to say that none of the eight major gods was more thoroughly wiped from the public life of the Eleven Cities by the Wesmodian Reformation than Maryas.

Current status of cult

Main article: Shadow Men
Ever since the Reformation, there has existed within the urban folklore of the cities a body of rumour and hearsay concerning a secret force known as the Shadow Men. Exactly who, or indeed what, the Shadow Men are varies widely from telling to telling. Some argue that they are a gang of thugs and thieves, killing wayfarers and burgling homes for financial gain. Others suggest they possess magical abilities, typically revolving around illusion and obfuscation; they can change their appearances, become invisible, or use secret incantations to control the memories and perceptions of others in pursuit of some far-reaching and mission to manipulate right-thinking society to inscrutable but invariably malevolent ends. Still others perceive them as a race of inhuman monsters in superficially human shape, and accuse them of all manner of murder, violence, abduction, rapine and mischief; missing children are often said to have been taken by the Shadow Men (or Shadow People; in that particular context, a large number of those involved are said to be women). Shadow Men are said to drink blood or tears, or to steal particular pieces of anatomy - fingers, tongues, eyes or wombs - from certain people at certain times, and to wreak terrible retribution on anybody unfortunate enough to stumble across them at their work. These people - if people they are - are held responsible for a variety of social ills, including food shortages, pestilences, storms, the death and incapacitation of public figures and even unsolved murders. Any debate of any unexplained public (or indeed private) misfortune is likely to attract accusations that the problem is the work of the Shadow Men.
Such accusations are seldom taken entirely seriously. Most adults, at least when speaking publically, tend to regard the Shadow Men as an urban myth, and certainly hard evidence of their actions, either individually or as any sort of ongoing effort building to any recognisable objective, is hard to come by. There is, in fact, little to suggest the Shadow Men exist at all. The stories are persistent, however, and almost all pinpoint the cult of Maryas as the origin of the conspiracy. To the extent that anybody credits the stories, these miscreants are believed to be devotees of Maryas, either descendants of the cultists who (evidently) escaped the Wesmodian Reformation or some sort of attempt to revive the cult in later years. At the very least, it is thought that public belief in such a conspiratorial group arose to fill the vacuum created by the evident destruction of the cult of Maryas during the Reformation; the society of the cities, it seems, needs a cloaked, masked scapegoat to blame for problems that seem to have no obvious explanation.
Thaumatologists, perhaps paradoxically, tend to be more receptive to stories of the Shadow Men than most learned people. Most such stories tend to credit the subjects with particular powers, either obviously magical or weirdly preternatural, and following up stories of such powers to determine their viability (and plan experiments to try to reproduce them) is of course the core business of thaumatology. Not all thaumatologists, of course, take this pursuit seriously, and indeed the discourse community contains a goodly proportion of hardcore "Shadow Sceptics." The discovery of conclusive evidence of this group would be an enormous coup for any thaumatologist, however, due to their commonly-supposed link with the cult of Maryas. If the Shadow Men are indeed the descendants of the Maryans, they would presumably be able to locate some or all of the cult's literature on the magic of illusion and misperception.