Professor Lessing,
I received your letter. It seems you are still writing A General History of the Old Days, and have reached the final volume.
I once saw the church burning old books in Nashka. The flames lit up an entire street, and the faces of the people were filled with devout joy. In this age, that someone is still willing to write an epitaph for an empire dead for a century, outside the chronicles of the various churches, is an exemplary act of courage, even if it can never be published.
To get to the point, you mentioned in your letter that you had many questions while writing the chapter on the Great Sunset. Allow me, then, to offer some... observations from a layman on the subject.
Let us begin with the empire's last emperor, Julian the "Mad King."
Mad King. Judging by that name, one might think Julian was an incomprehensible lunatic. But his madness was not pathological; it can be analyzed through logic. To understand him, one cannot overlook the two emperors who preceded him.
Julian's grandfather, Mikhail the "Wise King," was a sage among sages. He believed wisdom and virtue should rule the empire, and granted the Council of Sages powers nearly equal to the emperor's. Under him, the system worked quite well, because he was the cleverest man in the empire. The sages respected him, and he was happy to listen to their opinions.
After Mikhail came Julian's father, Valens the "Mediocre King." One wise, the other mediocre-the contrast in their reputations could hardly have been greater.
Valens was a good-natured man, not stupid, merely too gentle. When he ascended the throne, he faced a Council of Sages whose power had grown beyond all precedent. The sages refuted every one of Valens's edicts point by point, and rejected every appointment on the grounds that there was a more suitable candidate. Eventually, all manner of fables even began circulating among the people: "The foolish emperor proposes an absurd scheme, which the wise sages reject in an admirable fashion"...
Although these stories repeated the same theme to excess, they were accessible and humorous. I would rate them highly; they were great treasures of the world of fables. It was only a pity that Valens was saddled with the label of "Mediocre King" before he was even in the ground.
The struggle between the emperor and the Council of Sages is an interesting subject, but clearly not the one we are here to discuss. Let us instead consider how this situation affected Julian: a child watched his father humiliated by a whole court of wise men adopting a humble posture, while the entire populace traded jokes about the emperor, and he himself would one day have to take that seat...
I imagine you can already picture how young Julian's mindset would develop.
Extreme arrogance and extreme inferiority coexisted within Julian. He believed himself a born ruler and longed to prove that he stood above everyone's judgment, yet he also feared every authority that claimed wisdom, afraid that he would ultimately become a second "Mediocre King."
Julian distrusted the Council of Sages, but how could he oppose them? Through edicts? The sages had long since stripped him of any real power. By force? The generals had been recommended by the Council of Sages. Through public opinion? Those fables had long since accustomed the people to the emperor's foolishness.
The young emperor might have spent years matching wits and courage with the old men of the Council of Sages, and that would have been a story of a new ruler's rise. But Julian's conceit made him unwilling to lie low, so he needed a simpler, more forceful, and directly effective measure: for instance... using a voice beyond reason to prove himself, and an authority above the secular world to crush the sages.
He ultimately found "the gods." The Hymn to All Gods was the weapon he forged for himself: a monumental work that did not survive, a pantheon compiled by scouring all the empire's faiths, and a sacred hymn proclaimed by the emperor himself at the millennium festival.
It is no easy matter to see the contents of the Hymn to All Gods today. Its original manuscript was buried in the imperial capital, though copies were sent to the capitals of the various frontier regions to be recited at the same moment in conjunction with the ceremony. But those copies were also destroyed by the church-after all, when a church claims that a particular deity is supreme, only for someone to point out that the deity is merely a minor figure in a document, that document becomes a great eyesore.
Fortunately, I did manage to gather some surviving fragments, enough to show just how "rigorous" the Hymn to All Gods really was. Here are three passages:
"Astaroth, supreme god of creation, beyond whom there is no creator. He parted heaven and earth, shaped the mountains with his left hand, and opened the seas with his right. The order of all things came from his will, and the sun, moon, and stars move unceasingly in obedience to his commandments...
"Listen, to those first footsteps! Tylantia, grandmother of the gods, origin of all creation. Stars rose wherever her toes touched, fertile soil sprang forth wherever her skirts brushed, and rivers gathered wherever her sighs fell...
"Yarn raised his great hammer and struck chaos ten thousand times, each blow corresponding to the birth of a thing..."
Yes, there was no creator besides Astaroth, Tylantia was the origin of all creation, and Yarn created things with his hammer. These and yet more mutually incompatible myths were crammed into the same Hymn to All Gods. Rather than a foundation for the empire's orthodox mythological system, it was more like a hodgepodge of folk beliefs.
Whether he had no time to refine it or simply saw no need, we have no way of knowing what Julian was thinking. If I were to speculate, what mattered to him was being crowned in the name of all the gods, and forcing the sages to kneel and listen to the emperor's dialogue with them. Whether the gods had ever been introduced to one another was of no importance. In any case, Julian probably never considered the consequences, whether those that would follow by normal logic or those that have actually come to pass.
No need for consistency, no room for rebuttal: crushing reason with absurdity and holding the gods hostage with praise. This is why Julian should be called the "Mad King," rather than for the vague "follies of the Mad King" found in books today. From that alone, one could hardly imagine what he did.
In any case, Julian took this Hymn to All Gods into the Pantheon and held the rite celebrating the empire's thousandth year. Calamity followed, and we entered the "Age of Fading Daylight," which continues to this day.
From the clues in your letter, I can see that you too pieced all this together from historical records. I have merely stated it more directly. What comes next is the matter you carefully skirted in your letter.
You mentioned that, among the surviving historical records you had gone to such lengths to find, you noticed some "questions that are difficult to explain." You did not specify what those questions were, but I can state them plainly for you:
There are no records of church organizations in the imperial archives, no clergy among the lists of high-ranking officials, and Julian's actions show no respect for the gods, treating them merely as instruments for displaying his authority... All these signs indicate that faith in the late empire had become highly generalized. The gods existed in tradition, art, and ritual, serving as a spiritual anchor in the lives of the people rather than as dogma that had to be strictly observed.
That the gods can manifest their divinity is common knowledge among the people today, but this common knowledge seems to have a not-so-distant starting point-the beginning of the Age of Fading Daylight. Before then, where were the gods, how did they exist, and why do all the churches claim that their gods were the empire's orthodox faith from ancient times, while fighting one another tooth and nail... These are the questions you dare not write about, and no church is willing to answer them.
Well, I believe I have now done what you hoped I would do. After all, you avoided the conclusions in your letter, but laid out the clues leading to them in neat order, so your intentions were not hard to guess.
There is no need to be ashamed. I have seen too many people like you, lingering at the door of truth, unable to bring themselves to push it open, and needing someone else to give it a kick, whether on the door or on them. In that case, I suppose I shall reluctantly oblige with a kick.
There is no need to reply.
Carlo Schuster
P.S. The A General History of the Old Days series is very well written. Once you finish it, you had better put it away and leave it there. Otherwise, the next time old books are burned, your manuscript might be among the flames, along with you-just a joke. I know you are on good terms with Grand Duke Ogway, but the church's reluctance to hold a public trial does not mean it is powerless, and the grand duke will not openly break with the church for your sake. Caution is necessary; I trust you understand that.