Any account of belief in Dagea has to begin by separating three things that are usually spoken of together: what the churches teach, what people in the country actually do, and what travelers report. A Feldian farmer can hold the Church’s teaching sincerely, leave a bowl at the treeline on the same evening, and see no contradiction in it, because in his experience there is none.
What the churches teach
The Feldian Church holds to a single creator God, and beyond that holds to remarkably little in a form anyone could write down. It has no fixed canon. Its bishops disagree with each other and with their own village priests, frequently and in public, on questions that a stricter faith would have settled centuries ago. The Church teaches that there are angels and that there are demons; it teaches that the former are God’s and the latter are not; it does not teach much about how either occupies itself, and it discourages speculation on the subject in terms which suggest the speculation is common. Its formal position on the older country practices is that they are superstition. Its practical position is discussed below.
The Kretavic faith is older, shares the same ancestry, and is a great deal more certain of itself. It teaches that the world cannot be made right until it is converted, that holy war undertaken to that end is the highest work available to a life, and that those who die in it are promised resurrection when the work is complete. Kretavic doctrine is coded, coherent and consistent across the country, which is precisely the quality Feldians find alarming about it. The two faiths regard each other as cousins who remember sharing blood. See The Crusade.
Country custom
Custom does not follow doctrine and never has.
In Waldheim things are left at the treeline — food most often, sometimes a worked object, always at the edge and never carried in. Nobody local finds this remarkable and nobody local explains it, least of all to outsiders who ask directly. Foresters will say only that the wood is old and that one does not go in empty-handed twice.
In the Erka Fjords oil is poured at cairns, at headlands and at the turns of a hard passage, in small quantity and without ceremony. An Erkish crew will do this in weather that makes stopping expensive, which is the detail that persuades most visitors it is not merely habit.
In Steinmark no new working is opened without an offering left at the face — bread, salt, or a coin driven into the rock. Steinmark miners are the most matter-of-fact people in Feldia on every other subject. On this one they do not negotiate, and a captain who skips it will find the shift will not go down.
In Sahalim the custom is the cistern share: a measured portion of a household’s water is not drawn, and is not counted as loss. Kretavic clergy explain it as an exercise in restraint and the householders explain it as what one does. The three calls, made at the cistern before drawing, are likewise described by the devout as a form of prayer and by everyone else as the thing you do before drawing water.
The Bagii and the Erkish go further than custom. Both name the presences they deal with, track their moods, and speak of them in registers of grievance and obligation rather than reverence. They do not consider this belief. They consider it seamanship.
Hedge doctors and cunning folk
Nearly every rural district in Feldia has a practitioner who is not a priest: a herb woman, a bone-setter, a writer of charms, someone consulted about a sick cow before anyone considers consulting anyone else. They are known collectively as cunning folk, though almost nobody uses the term to their face. Their competence is uneven and their medicine is often real: the herb craft in particular is better than the universities admit.
The Church’s relationship with them has settled, over two centuries, into a tolerance nobody has ever written down. Bishops publish against the practice. Village priests refer parishioners to it. The referring priest is not disciplined, because disciplining him would require the bishop to send a physician instead, and there is no physician. Where a rural priest takes part in a harvest rite himself — which happens, and is not rare — the usual episcopal response is to record it as a local peculiarity and move on.
What travelers report and what scholars say
The reports are consistent, which is their most interesting property. A road that is safe past all reason, on which nothing has been taken in living memory, while the road two valleys over is not. A house that visitors leave changed, always in the same direction and always toward the same vice. A town that came through a bad decade markedly less damaged than its neighbors, without anyone being able to name what it did differently. Add to these the traveler stories out of the Kretavic deep desert, where accounts of time running wrong are old, numerous and mutually corroborating in ways the tellers could not have arranged.
The university at Kirchberg has produced three broad positions and no consensus. The first takes the reports at face value and disputes only their interpretation. The second holds that the reports are what a frightened or credulous mind produces on an empty road, and points out, fairly, that the stories are consistent partly because the tellers have heard each other’s. The third declines to decide, collects the accounts, notes where they cluster, and publishes the clusters without comment; most working scholars arrive at it late in a career rather than early.
Kretavic scholars are engaged in a version of the same argument about their own country, on similar evidence, with the same result. Neither faculty has won. A reader who finishes this article uncertain whether any of it is true has understood the state of the question exactly.