Throughout Lilitic culture there is poetic imagery of pens and breezes. These images go back to Sarthía, the first significant writer of the early Lilitasa, who spent a great many years synthesizing a belief system for her fellow nomads through a mixture of her own passion for life, and many long years of experience observing the politic processes of the Ksreskézai. She never devoted a monograph to the topic of fate, but most likely gave several speeches on the matter. Both images are mentioned extensively throughout Stilla-lumela and Zelchútina-la, her best-known works as Censor.
The Ksreskézai had always been creatures of extremely powerful emotion, and as a result they believed that emotions were spirits that possessed people and fed off the energy of the feeling. Species less prone to emotional outbursts were less compatible with the spirits, and hence of less value. As a result of cultural diffusion, the Lilitai also became emotionally very expressive. When the Ksreskézai became extinct, the misery among the Lilitai and the loss of the formerly-omnipresent Ksreskézai made the Lilitai, as a whole, experience much more muted emotions, leading to the unfortunate belief that they had been abandoned by the spirits.
Sarthía was not happy with this state of affairs, and knew that a better life for her people was possible. With her extensive experience over a wide array of social contexts and in dealing with other species, she was able to determine that emotions were most likely entirely part of an individual, and not provoked by any external force. This led her to the assertion that an individual shaped and chose her own route through life. Even if there were supernatural components to the individual's soul that were both beyond her control and in commune with the universe, the individual had some say in how she acted and how her life progressed. (This was philosophically very convenient for the Lilitai, as they had just been abandoned by their masters' deaths, and desperately needed self-determination if they were going to escape the encroaching Hogedep.)
She identified two major categories of processes that guided an individual's life.
The first were the controlled, orderly processions of inevitability, of planning, of self-determination, and of meeting expectations. To each of these ideas she assigned an author (sarthía), and emphasized that the authors are not necessarily all good or bad—depression, success, fame, destitution, love, failure, and many other things all follow set paths, trajectories, or states. Anything that can be predicted is considered to fall under this heading.
The second were the uncontrolled, disorderly interruptions: coincidence, compulsion, luck, accidents, falling ill, and so on. Each of these phenomena are considered gusts or breezes brought forth by a wind (shúthíma), and they tend to affect individuals unexpectedly, and without easily-foreseeable outcomes. They may also be good or bad.
Some critics of Sarthía, especially Finanía and her students, considered the idea of the Winds (or at least the breadth of the category) to be essentially defeatist, seeing it as an excuse to accept problems rather than addressing them. This debate over soft positivism remained one of the dividing issues among the Lilitai until their partial assimilation into Lyrisclensian culture.
Sarthía herself considered the categorization moot, as she felt it was much more important for an individual to decide when she would let different forces control her life. She pointed out that unpleasant and pleasant authors may be easy or hard to follow depending on how familiar they were, and that the fundamental difference between the two forces was whether they forced one to react to them, or whether they were states of mind that the individual could accept or reject.
The Ksreskézai had always been creatures of extremely powerful emotion, and as a result they believed that emotions were spirits that possessed people and fed off the energy of the feeling. Species less prone to emotional outbursts were less compatible with the spirits, and hence of less value. As a result of cultural diffusion, the Lilitai also became emotionally very expressive. When the Ksreskézai became extinct, the misery among the Lilitai and the loss of the formerly-omnipresent Ksreskézai made the Lilitai, as a whole, experience much more muted emotions, leading to the unfortunate belief that they had been abandoned by the spirits.
Sarthía was not happy with this state of affairs, and knew that a better life for her people was possible. With her extensive experience over a wide array of social contexts and in dealing with other species, she was able to determine that emotions were most likely entirely part of an individual, and not provoked by any external force. This led her to the assertion that an individual shaped and chose her own route through life. Even if there were supernatural components to the individual's soul that were both beyond her control and in commune with the universe, the individual had some say in how she acted and how her life progressed. (This was philosophically very convenient for the Lilitai, as they had just been abandoned by their masters' deaths, and desperately needed self-determination if they were going to escape the encroaching Hogedep.)
She identified two major categories of processes that guided an individual's life.
The first were the controlled, orderly processions of inevitability, of planning, of self-determination, and of meeting expectations. To each of these ideas she assigned an author (sarthía), and emphasized that the authors are not necessarily all good or bad—depression, success, fame, destitution, love, failure, and many other things all follow set paths, trajectories, or states. Anything that can be predicted is considered to fall under this heading.
The second were the uncontrolled, disorderly interruptions: coincidence, compulsion, luck, accidents, falling ill, and so on. Each of these phenomena are considered gusts or breezes brought forth by a wind (shúthíma), and they tend to affect individuals unexpectedly, and without easily-foreseeable outcomes. They may also be good or bad.
Some critics of Sarthía, especially Finanía and her students, considered the idea of the Winds (or at least the breadth of the category) to be essentially defeatist, seeing it as an excuse to accept problems rather than addressing them. This debate over soft positivism remained one of the dividing issues among the Lilitai until their partial assimilation into Lyrisclensian culture.
Sarthía herself considered the categorization moot, as she felt it was much more important for an individual to decide when she would let different forces control her life. She pointed out that unpleasant and pleasant authors may be easy or hard to follow depending on how familiar they were, and that the fundamental difference between the two forces was whether they forced one to react to them, or whether they were states of mind that the individual could accept or reject.
