CHAPTER 5
Death Priests
When Our Lady of Pain discovered her sister had left the Land of the Living
and taken refuge in the World of the Dead, her wrath and fury were boundless. She
descended to the Land of No Return, through the caverns and lower regions
known only to the spirits, until she reached the city of Erkalla itself, ruled by
Cyric, the King of the Dead. And Loviatar approached the gate of the city, known
as Ganzir, and pounded her Flail of Tears on the door, demanding to be let in,
but her command was unanswered, and her screams resounded through the streets
of Erkalla:
“Gatekeeper, I am here at Ganzir before the Walls of Erkalla. Open these gates
for me! I am Loviatar, Maiden of Pain, Mistress of Sorrow, and I shall smash
down this door if you do not open it! I shall crack open the bolts with my Flail
of Tears and sunder the iron with my Scourge of Despair. I shall release all
the dead from city of Erkalla, and they shall climb up the stairs of the earth.
I shall raise up the dead, and they shall eat the living: the dead shall
outnumber the living!”
And the Gatekeeper appeared, and he opened the door, but he would not let Our
Lady pass:
“Mighty Loviatar, Maiden of Pain, you cannot enter Erkalla with your symbols
of Power. Leave them with me, and then you may visit the King.”
Our Lady of Pain saw the truth in his words, and at the gate of the city, she
stripped off her talismans. She gave up the Flail of Tears, surrendered the
Scourge of Despair. She unwrapped her Robe of Severed Hands, and coiled up her
Whip of Countless Afflictions. She unwrapped the spiked wire from her hair and
plucked out the needles from her nails.
And at last Loviatar was finished, and the Gatekeeper escorted her into
Cyric’s dismal palace. And the King of the Dead saw Our Lady humbled, and in his
throne room of glory, he heard her complaint. Cyric made his voice heard like a
gavel of thunder, and he spoke loudly his judgment, with the following words:
“I am Cyric, Lord of Erkalla, and I welcome you to my pale domain. You have no
power here in my most ancient city: over the dead only I am King. I have heard
your request and will honor it. When you leave, your sister shall accompany
you. But each winter she will come back and visit me, and I shall return her to
your side in the summer.”
Our Lady of Pain heard his pronouncement, and she left gladly with her sister
beside her. Thus Loviatar ascended from the netherworld, resuming her just
punishment of Man.
—“Loviatar’s Descent into the Netherworld,” recounted in the Nycoptic Manuscripts
Long before magicians learned how to practice the Art, priests were
worshipping Death in its varied forms. In Eastern societies, Death was personified as an
active agent in the world, symbolized by the rise and fall of a river, in the
fury of a raging tempest, or in the jaws of the crocodile. In Hindu, Death was
revered as Kali, the Black Mother, goddess of Murder and Destruction. In Nordic
society, Death and Pestilence were personified by Hel, another feminine deity.
In other cultures, Death was merely an impersonal event, not an active force,
and the important necromantic gods were those that presided over the spirits of
the dead in the Afterlife. Nergal (from Mesopotamia), Yeh-Wang-Yeh (from
China), Arawn (from Celtic Europe), Mictlantecuhtli (from Mesoamerica), Osiris and
Anubis (from Egypt), Hades (from Greece), and Pluto (from Rome) were all gods of
the Dead, charged with ruling the netherworld. In particular, the
Egyptians—whose society was fairly obsessed with death—had an entire pantheon of deities
who were associated with the dead: gods of Embalming, Entombment, and Final
Judgment in the Underworld.
Modern fantasy has further enriched the concept of the death priest. Clark
Ashton Smith, in “The Charnel God,” describes the worship of a ravening Ghoul God
by the name of Mordiggian, a creature who feasts upon the remains of the dead.
Robert Bloch explored this same theme in “The Brood of Bubastis,” in which he
describes the cult of a ghoul queen as a perverted form of Bast, the Egyptian
cat goddess of pleasure. These writers were expanding a fictional religious cult
of incomprehensibly evil extraplanar powers, founded by H. P. Lovecraft in the
1928 story “The Call of Cthulhu.” Since then, countless authors have
contributed to the fictional cult of Cthulhu, creating numerous evil deities of Death and
Madness.
Given the potentially wide range of necromantic worship, the death priest
deserves special attention set apart from the discussion of wizards in previous
chapters. In this chapter, we basically present an addendum for the Complete Priest’s Handbook (CPrH) that includes updated information about necromantic priesthoods.
The information in this chapter can also be used to flesh out the religious
background (if any) of necromancer wizards. Finally, we briefly mention a few
religious secret societies that might include priests as well as necromancers.
These secret societies will be further discussed in Chapter Seven.
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