The Why and the Wherefore
I've been working with others on various papers and trying to 'reconstruct' working systems from them. It would be nice to publish, but there are various non-disclosure issues and the possibility of causing offence to people in the real settings. We also wanted to investigate the relationships between some characters in the context of developing such a system, in much the same way as experimental archaeologists perform real tasks and then look at the traces, learning how to interpret archaeological remains. In this case, we take the theoretical circumstances; if the interaction between the various characters ceases to be believable, we check whether that's because we're imposing our present-day and fairly middle-class attitudes. If not, then there is probably something wrong with the theory.
So, after some discussion, the idea is to use a fictional set of material, in a fictional setting with fictional characters. The Tuscan/Etruscan hill-town of San Unil was devised as a playground for some shared fiction a number of years ago, so I've dusted it off as the historical setting - note that this setting was always intended to be Etruscan society and religion as envisioned by Leland, not as it's currently perceived. I've fleshed it out with my knowledge of real-world Tuscan geography. The present-day setting is the university district of a large city, some locations having appeared elsewhere on my site, borrowed, along with the characters, from a novel I've been working on for three years.
At the moment, the work is a bit of a tease; although the next four or five months of the characters' lives is pretty much mapped out, I've stopped posting just before the start of the first present-day ritual, because the experiment has worked. As with my fictional Crotona time-line, the characters have developed personalities of their own, and the interactions have thrown up some problems with handling the later part of the system - 'no, they wouldn?t do that' - which are tricky to resolve. So, we're taking a breather and I?m going to finish the core of the Madeleine material.
To set the scene, here's the opening text, setting the ground rules, seven years ago (ye Ghods is it that long?)
When the invaders came from the sea to San Unil, they pulled the roofs off the old temples to Our Lady, and carted Her statues away to their new official shrines. In the new shrines can, and do, worship the Lady in the new shrines (where She has a name) in the new manner, with the rites intoned for us in the language of the new rulers. Naturally She accepts such worship, but in the caves below the town She is still simply The Lady and it is a great comfort to us to meet Her in the old way, face to face, without an intercessor-priest.
Perhaps this is an open secret, but it does not seem wise to talk too freely of it.