Deepist Lore

Deepist Minotaur

On Deepism

What can you really say is true about Deepism? The most we know comes from those who don't complete their initiations, who give their word and then grow scared in the warrens beneath the earth where they're shepherded, and are able to engineer some kind of escape. Those accounts hold meager weight with me, for who can really credit the words of oathbreakers? Regardless these dubious tales do give us a glimpse at the structure of the Deepist cult.

It is a cult: hierarchical, shrouded in secrets, virulent how it spreads to infect the minds of the disenfranchised and alone. You know those who belong to it by their garb and grunting mouths, slack faces and leeched-looking skin. Mostly they stay out of sight.

Deepism is almost entirely counter intuitive to a philosopher of gods and orders, such as myself. In fact, it's almost too neatly opposed, suggesting to me an ulterior ideology beneath the fabrication we observe, and others participate in. While the holy orders I've studied have emphasized light, ascension, and visibility, Deepism holds sacred the opposites. Darkness is truth to a Deepist. To descend is to grow in circumstance and majesty. The thing most obscured is what a Deepist must count most consequential.

As for the symbolism of the bull, the gravitation towards the monstrous and fungal... It follows that one must ascribe meaning to one's immediates. People anywhere must tell stories about the trees, the birds, the sun, moon, and stars. Such is what they encounter and are fascinated with. It is only logical that the horrors that grow below, grow among the Deepists in their caverns and holes, would figure greatly in their mythologies. From all appearances, they are an ancient, dogged order of devotees, and whatever it is they have given themselves to, they seem to feel rewarded in their service to it.

I will always be curious to ascertain more, though I very much doubt anything of substance will volunteer itself. Thus, I move on to more productive studies.

The Deepists are like the wolves or the Thrixl: they are there, and to wonder why is only the game of spurious soap-loving scholars and other limp-limbed idlers.

A Deepist Poem

"When There Came Our Bull-Headed God"

In dagger-jagged depths, spiral-delved and full of drumbeats,

We banged our braggy drums. Blasted voices in old blessing-songs

Of softbodied gods who supped with us on sweetshrooms

And molds and cavedust, on dropwater and on nothing.

Hoofed and horn-laden he came out of halls buried

In looping heavy notes he laid his challenge-poem across our lakes

And calms and caverns. “Here,” he sang “is cairn and cure for your old

Listlessness: horn your heads and abandon them for glory.

Story your starless cavesky, I say, with the bloods and deeds of

Foes you feared when those old gods flaunted and flustered your faith.

I am unbeatable in darkness I am unquenchable by cool or by wet.

I am your founder

Now. I make, as flamefall feathers new the farmfield,

You my grass, all gathered terror- gripped who witness my greatness

And hope for no gory end, you the wheat into the consuming fire. You

The barkless into the bounteous proud and boast-belting brazens

I call brothers. Be unbound by peacetraders and take bellowing

what is not well-guarded from you: it is yours by law, if by you it is won.”

And his great legs danced on the rock and dashed themselves on dunderheads.

While his song split the stones and unsteadied stabled hearts,

We wild ones heard and wailed our long-locked warliness,

And took from timorous hands the morsels and the troves

And the surpluses we were owed and stamping and clapping and stomping,

Charging, we cantered after him down dauntless into the wells and chambercaves

Of a hundred underpeoples. We ended them. And until then had not been us, thundering and thunderous.