/lit/ - Literature

Since their earliest times, we learn of struggles, aspirations, mishaps of a people - otherwise elucidating the entirety of their confusing pre-historic course as a tribe- in how they appeal to ancestors; the more victories culminated by the tribe, it follows more spoils are needed to satiate these guardian spirits! For who wards off misfortune, disease, foe, but the mythical founders who were there at the formation of the group, who are not living yet also not dead?

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If this people finds themselves in dire times, or situations with bare sustenance, their ancestors are cursed and the festivities honoring them go unobserved - for not even the bone marrows after a hunt may be spared. Rituals, festivals, myriad customs, traditions, phrases continue to remain forgotten as looming problems faced by the tribe persists. Only with a hundred skirmishes won, with walls raised over settlements, with countless foes in captivity, can the tribe affirm itself as elevated above rivals, and when the dust settles who can credit this fortune but to the prophecies of ancestors, to tribal wisdom originating from ancestors?

As the group finds need for encapsulating their distinctness, their flauntable strengths, the legendary ancestors become venerated as heroes and demi-gods. Now the people with their new found spirit necessarily hold sacrificial rites in temples, and on the temple walls are patterns of notches accounting the culmination of resources by this people, with more notches promised should the ever more elaborate customs continue.