Lands of Tyranny
Day 17 of The Centaur, Year 416
Festum
Festivia/Luxa
Symbol: Gilded Goblet, Grapevine, the Red Apple.
The Goddess of Abundance, Excess, Waste, Debauchery, Feasts, Jealousy and Envy
Festum, revered as Festivia or Luxa in different cultures, is celebrated as the embodiment of life's richness and the pleasures of existence. She is the Goddess of abundance and festivity, encouraging her followers to experience life to the fullest and appreciate the bounty of the world around them, but also the Goddess who both tempts, rewards, ensnares, and corrupts.
Festum's worship is centered on joy, acquisition, and sharing of prosperity, making her a popular deity among all social classes. Her followers celebrate her through displays of opulence and hedonism, glorifying the joys of earthly pleasures with little care for the uncertainty of the future in a true 'carpe diem' fashion. Her teachings emphasize that true contentment comes from embracing life's pleasures without guilt, promoting an understanding of desire as a vital force driving personal achievement and prosperity.
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In stories and folklore, Festum is depicted as a statuesque, forested-like woman draped in robes of overflowing vine and fruit, often bearing a gilded goblet or a red apple—symbols of unending bounty, abundance, and fulfillment of desires. Her form changes as quickly as vines grow in spring and summer, reflecting her nature as both nurturing and overwhelming. Her followers see her as a generous matron of every joy life has to give and a protector of those who seek to enjoy life's blessings without restraint or being bound by fear or guilt. To others, however, she is a trickster who offers mortals the gifts they most desire, only to bind them to her will through the chains of gluttony and lust, a view of the deity especially prominent outside of the Black Dome, thanks to the faith in the New Gods.
Those people who still to this day attempt to keep their Festum faith generally practice in the outer reaches of the Imperial lands, close to the borders of forests, in an attempt to protect them from unwanted reach. Due to the massive popularity of ancient festivities, especially tied to Festum, Festivals were created to ensure the contented nature of the people, albeit with a completely new rebranding in the New Gods fashion. Even these festivities in more remote places where the Empire has less control, or simply, less interest in exercising strict control, remain disincentivized via high taxation but are still tolerated as long as no explicit reference to any of the 'Old Gods' or their traditions would be made.
Festum's rituals often accompany wild free dance, expressing unrequited desire and abandonment in a mixing of drugs, fat and tasty food, sweet drinks, and any other form of pleasures. To please the goddess, halls should be filled with laughter and joy, but even more so with euphoria and abundance to the point of waste and pointless excess. During veneration, many gather from far and wide in a feast of the ages where plenty of drugs of all kinds are consumed. During such activities, those who are present often would report feeling like having lost track of the passing of time or of having lost themselves entirely due to the abundance of alcohol or other mind-numbing consumables or practices, often swearing to be feeling a miracle of ever-lasting nights and experiences, allowing spirits to fester into life with no tiring.
Among the most specific ways of worship, rituals, and celebrations, we can find the "Ceremonies of Aspiration," where small personal offerings are left in one of Festum's sanctuaries, including tokens of aspirational desires—be it love, success, or personal fulfillment. These rituals are performed with optimism, focusing on potential and personal growth rather than envy or jealousy, and are thought to sometimes make wishes come true. However, the same deity's sanctuaries, often called "Altars of the Unfulfilled," serve as places where the poor, unfortunate, just envious, or even particularly passionate leave offerings in the form of small tokens or written notes expressing their desires and frustrations. These notes are both a plea for relief from their deprivation and an expression of a particular, often apparently unobtainable, goal or a yearning. However, it is not uncommon for these notes and tokens to be very similar to 'love spells,' subtle, envious curses, or requests to Festum for a particular impulse or wish to be satisfied.
Other everyday celebrations are some form of dances and festivals, called by the deity's worshippers "Dances of Desire," vibrant and inclusive dances symbolic of life's diverse pleasures, where participants wear costumes representing their hopes and dreams, celebrating the freedom to express one's inner desires in a supportive environment.
For those who can not access such a level of excess or luxury, Festum often gradually takes a sometimes very different meaning: malicious worship, channeling frustration, envy, or even anger towards those that instead do have or can have something that is otherwise unavailable or unreachable. Be it food due to a famine, water due to a drought, or more mundane things such as power, riches, a happy life, or even the attention of another.
Author: Rashan