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04052025 CHUKCHI PEOPLE AND ULLE SHAMANISM -- RELIGION

This is mostly to explain the reason Vinevyt is such a pariah within her community.

If you consume -if you even TAKE- anything from the wandering black shamans, you forfeit your soul to them and their temple.

People who have taken their cursed medicines with be accosted by beasts. They’ll attack the communities herds, they’ll take children, they’ll take any lone person. Eventually, the person who took whatever medicine from the shamans will eat their family.

So, especially harmful for small arctic communities that rely on their herds and the lawfulness of members. Threats to families are very reasonably terrifying, but without a herd it is impossible to survive northern inland Siberia. You will not have food, and you will not have transport, and you will die.

Shamans don’t tend to go so far north as it is dangerous and generally fruitless, but they do occasionally when they catch wind of a epidemic they’ll go try to help out to limited success.

Other groups have varying opinions to Ulle shamans, from adapting some of their practices and artifacts, to fully relying on them, to shunning them, to overt violence. Bands within ethnic groups also vary in opinion, creating a large gradient of acceptance/usage.

I should probably explain the (real world) concept of black/white shamanism and how Ulle shamanism fits into that. Oh well.

04042025 TEMPLE INTERIOR -- LIVING-SPACES

Designing the interior spaces is honestly more important to me than designing the exterior, mostly because it is monumental in influencing the actual structure of the building. As fun as it is to design this grand structure, I need to make sure that it is at the very least semi-habitable.

For this, I tackled the living-quarters of the temple. I wanted to incorporate traditional Yakut designs of Urassas as I feel like the general design of the temple really trends towards my Russian and Mongolian architecture considerations.

The curved design of the Urassas that the rooms adopt help them feel more homely and comfortable, moving away from an uncomfortably tall box, tapering it to avoid harsh and dark corners.

The one concern I have surrounding the design considerations of these rooms is the large circular hole in the center of the room that traditionally housed some form of fire pit. Warming techniques like that are not important within the temple, as heating comes from the beast below. This causes a weird hole in the center that is useless. One idea is more nest-like bedding, another is filling it and allowing more ground space for work, but that may depend on a person-to-person basis.

Another issue with the rooms is… well they're mostly just for sleeping. Having these large individual rooms is pretty antithetical to traditional living; it's very isolating. Thus they probably spend very much time actually in them, leaving them for storage and maybe the occasional sleeping. Most work is thus done in separate rooms, probably in the wing past the library.

04042025 LANTERNS -- DESIGN

One odd little issue about designing this building I have consistently ran into it: how do I light this damn place? It is massive, and cavernous, and dark… but I don't want people to be running into pillars and walls left and right. Typically, you'll see large open rooms and windows within temples, but you can't really do that where the average temperature drops below -40 in the winter.

Of course to solve that you would have guy running around constantly lighting candles and shit… horrible. So I've been constantly thinking about designing a lantern that stays pretty constantly lit, and also made of meat. Someone may have to run around and relight things every coupla days… or weeks, long enough that it doesn't matter if I don't mention/cover it ever. Cool.

The meat art is just to fit the general aesthetic of the… the whole meat temple. The fuel it burns is some fat from the Beast, and it casts a disgusting pink-red light from the skin-shade.