Coronation time

After the death of a Tsolyani Kolumel (= Emperor), all his or her heirs who have not "renounced the Gold" are summoned to the city of Bey Sü to take place in a ceremony called the kolumejalim, subjecting them to "a roster of tests which cover every facet of character thought by the Tsolyani to be needful for a ruler: bravery, endurance, cunning, physical prowess, judgement, knowledge of history and the arts, and a dozen other fields."

Candidates can name champions to stand in for them in three of the trials, but must compete personally in the others. We are told that each event is carefully judged, and the strongest contenders are taken into the temple of Hnalla where the adepts of all the gods and the High Princeps of the Omnipotent Azure Legion make the final selection "according to ancient and secret ritual methods". The winner is taken to the palace at Avanthar and enters seclusion as the new Emperor. All the others are sacrificed at the temple of Karakan.

That bit about "ancient and secret" methods has the whiff of how the House Cup gets awarded at Hogwarts, where you might earn the top score throughout the year only to have the headmaster arbitrarily award enough points to make his favourite the winner. And I've never seen the kolumejalim handled well in any Tekumel game, including the ones I've run. It should be a secret ritual, impenetrable and inscrutable, not a big, brash, crowd-pleasing, last-man-standing arena fight like you'd get in a Netflix or Amazon TV show*.

Supporters of the losing princes have to accept the outcome, not least because their candidate will have been sent to the gods by the time they get to hear about it. That's how it should work in modern elections, mind you, (minus the human sacrifice at the end) but not everybody has it in them to be a good loser.

In one of my Tekumel campaigns I staged a kolumejalim and allowed a few rumours about how it went to reach the ears of the player-characters. The candidates were Prince Eselne, Princess Ma'in (pictured), Prince Mirusiya, Prince Rereshqala, and Prince Taksuru. 

In the test of bravery, they were given a shield and had to touch an archer who was shooting at them from ten metres away. Eselne walked straight up to the archer, fending off arrows as he went. Ma'in was hit in the leg and faltered. Mirusiya threw his shield, hitting the archer. Rereshqala ran forwards, took an injury to his arm, but still touched the archer. Taksuru closed in by walking rapidly around the archer in a spiral so that he couldn't get a shot off.

Ma'in lost that one, but it's not obvious who came out best. Eselne and Rereshqala showed the most obvious kind of bravery, but the other two were cleverer. It wasn't supposed to be a test of cunning, but the watching dignitaries want a smart Emperor, not a dummy, so that might sway them.

The test of endurance involved picking up a red-hot metal bar and plunging it into a tub of water ten metres away. Eselne showed some cunning this time; he threw the bar into the tub. Ma'in and Mirusiya both managed to carry it to the tub, showing their endurance for sure. Rereshqala appointed a champion for this contest, and the champion failed. Taksuru dragged the tub over to the bar, and only then picked it up and dropped it in.

I don't recall who won the kolumejalim in that campaign. In another campaign, Eselne won but Mirusiya escaped and began a civil war that split the player-characters and the empire. The argument about whether he was behaving honorably in doing so was a complex and interesting one, and took place in a spectacularly dramatic location. But I'll tell that story another time, hopefully before the next coronation in our world.

*Unfortunately in Professor Barker's ur-campaign the kolumejalim played out exactly like a crap TV show. Read about it here if you really must, but don't say I didn't warn you. Though we may never know Barker's true political opinions, there is absolutely no doubt that his instinct for storytelling was banal and pulpish. Better to imagine the Tekumel he described in his source materials rather than in his dreadful novels.

Going to the gods

If you believe in gods and in life after death, it's not inconceivable that you might consider it an honour to be sacrificed in order to carry a message to the world beyond. Some real-life cultures seem to have taken that view. Frazer gives several examples in The Golden Bough and talks about the sacred king whose reign might well end with a trip to the afterlife. Describing the 16th century customs of the Chichimecas, the friar Marcos de Niza said: "They cast lots to decide who will have the honour of being sacrificed, and with joy they crown him with flowers upon a bed on piles of wood which they set on fire, and so he dies. The victim takes great pleasure in this rite."

"Great pleasure"? Anthropologist Kathryn M Koziol isn't so sure about that. In this paper about another Pre-Columbian culture she says, "Among the Natchez, the mortuary rituals of the elite Suns [chiefs] included the killing of retainers. These retainers were members of the Natchez population and gained prestige for their kin by willingly dying, or at least by performing their willingness to die, to accompany their leaders." My emphasis there.

Professor Nicholas Humphrey gets outraged at the suggestion that the Inca "Ice Maiden" might even have been an enthusiastic participant in her own ritual killing (40 minutes in to this video)...

But Humphrey is a psychologist, not a historian or anthropologist, and the simple fact is we don't know. The sacrifice of the Ice Maiden might have been a crime inflicted on an unwilling victim; it might have been a signal honour jealously coveted among the Inca. Even framing it in those terms only makes sense in the context of our own culture.

Players of my gamebook Necklace of Skulls may have been on the receiving end of such an honour. On your visit to Chichen Itza ("Yashuna" in the book) the priests of Chaac invite you to jump into the sacred cenote with a message for the gods. Of course, in the gamebook the cenote undeniably is a gateway into the mythic world. In real life (see photo above; that's me on honeymoon) it's just a dirty great pond in which you'd soon go down for the third time. Pleading hydrophobia was no get-out, as there was always the option of getting sacrificed as an esteemed ball player, which is what the spouting snake-heads represent in this carving:

It's not just in Native American cultures that we encounter the willing (and even apparently eager) sacrifice. Ahmad ibn Fadlan, writing in the 10th century, gives a vivid account of a Viking ship burial in which a female thrall has sex with each of the mourners in turn and is then ritually killed. Wikipedia wonders at the attitude of the thrall herself (a volunteer, according to ibn Fadlan) and says, "While the scholarly consensus assumes that the slave girl would have felt happy and privileged about having sex with many people before being killed, recent work has suggested that we should instead see this as an account of rape and brutal strangulation."

What "recent work" could that possibly be? Time travel? A séance? Because otherwise they just mean "somebody's recent opinion", which is utterly useless. It only tells us about the attitudes of the West in 2021, not of the Rus in 921. We cannot know how people from those far-off cultures regarded a sacrificial victim without knowing what the world looked like through their eyes. Even the word victim implies a modern viewpoint. To them the afterlife was probably as real as sunlight and rain, whereas we know perfectly well they were not off to see Chaac or Odin with a message from the mortal world but were simply being snuffed out. Would they have been frightened or honoured? Both, probably. As Professor Koziol says at the start of that paper I cited, human societies are capable of acts that are simultaneously great and terrible. Our rituals aren't unambiguous, so why should our reactions to them be?

No matter how sure you are that you're about to enter the afterlife, there's got to be a natural fear of death too. A kamikaze pilot crashing into a warship no doubt had feelings of both fear and pride. The September 11 attackers presumably felt exalted, terrified, uncertain and excited all at once. They were told their martyrdom would earn them immediate entry into a heavenly paradise, but did they completely believe that? Would Wikipedia describe them as feeling "happy and privileged" or as having been manipulated and psychologically abused? If we can't even exactly pin down the mentality of modern jihadists, how are we going to judge the cultural mores of five or ten centuries past?

Yet thinking our way into other cultures and other mind-sets is part of roleplaying. On Tekumel, prisoners of war who aren't of glorious enough status to be worth ransoming back to their clans will usually get sacrificed to the gods. In Tetsubo, a character performing seppuku believes he is undertaking an act of courage and dignity. Spock in Wrath of Khan knowingly took a lethal dose of radiation as an act of logical altruism -- it wasn't his fault he was then doomed to an eternal afterlife of sequels, and we can only hope that any player-character attempting the same thing in an SF campaign would be granted the dignity of a true death.

We don't know what it's actually like to be a person raised in another era or culture, but we are all human and we have universal emotions and our imaginations. We can conceive of a credible mindset for a kamikaze pilot or a 10th century slave girl on a pyre or a Maya citizen jumping into a sinkhole. That's as good as it's going to get.