"What's this?"
Dominic took the book, the old cracked leather and lime dust dyed the cover light yellow like dry bones, but it felt strange and unspeakable to buy it.
It is like picking up a hermit crab hiding snail shell, the living creature's cervical limb rubs against the inner wall, and the silent vibration is transmitted to the skin.
It seems that the tanned velvet paper is injected with some kind of life again, and the fresh things flow slowly in it.
The muscles of the palm and fingers were slightly spasmed, and he almost threw the thing out like he was throwing away a cold and smooth living thing. He tried to restrain his instinctive impulse and moved it to the table as quickly as possible.
Despite this, the rough movements made a bad sound when the book contacted the table, as if the internal page friction and the binding wires were broken.
"Keep it!" Field's heart trembled and quickly slipped down from the ladder to check the situation. Fortunately, there was no visible damage in the appearance.
"This thing is probably older than both of us. It's still a separate book. If you want to spend a few years, you can consider putting it in the antique shop."
He gently blew away the dust on the surface, placed the book on the V-shaped pillow, and spread it slowly and evenly.
The stiff spine made a moan like a breaking moment in the next second, like an old clam pried open, hiding something formed by some foreign objects.
"I just knew it was this note." Field didn't notice his companion's hesitation, but he regarded that as a concern for damaging the book. "Look, I seem to see the content of collecting stones for the church, it's really old."
When the church was so old that it was a new wasteland at its foot, the missionary who had only had pitiful luggage and a sacred book set foot here for the first time, writing these words on a stone pillow, leaving scratches on the cover on a rough surface.
The reason for the legacy here is probably because the narrator is ordinary and has no value to send to the collection of the monastery as a special meaning document.
But this is exactly what they need, something that is more personal.
Judging from the simpler or more difficult conditions, this was an independent missionary and did not have a good educational background. He was only given the arrival of the trend of expanding to the marginal areas. He registered the name at the religious office and obtained a formal license.
The newly sealed lords of the local area gave limited support, providing a wooden house, several bags of grain seeds and uncultivated land, and then ignored it - in fact, this was a mid-to-high level start.
He needs to learn local dialects by himself, work to obtain daily necessities, and on the basis of being able to survive, communicate with residents with strangers, share food with spare parts, and help with labor.
Then came the last decade of hard life. Compared with the long period of time, there were very few written records during this period.
At first, he often mentioned the letters he asked to take away to the church and the lord, but after finding that there was no reply, he stopped sending them.
The hand holding the farm tools takes time to write down one or two of your experiences on life skills during hard work.
Thanks to a little medical education he received, he used simple herbs to help deal with some diseases with relatively high self-healing rates, successfully gained a certain social status, and then became a link of information transmission between the lord and the residents with his clerical ability.
At this point, coupled with a long-standing reputation for being kind to others, the prestige of missionaries has been unshakable, and the residents regard it as part of the settlement, a person worthy of respect.
There was almost nothing he could not know, including some very subtle local "customs".
Just as the fisherman on the beach would pray for peace and catch from the imagined existence dancing in the wind and waves, the mountain people would also have similar behaviors. Strangely, he spent a lot of time and didn't fully figure out what was going on.
There are usually several types of paganisms encountered by the church in the past: polytheism, natural or ancestor worship, shamanism, etc.
First, the situation obviously did not develop to the point of being as high as polytheistic or single god worship, because it did not develop to the emergence of clear gods and corresponding fields, nor did it exist.
Therefore, the author once believed that some primitive natural worship was circulating locally, which could simply explain natural phenomena as rules set by the Father for the world.
However, as the exchange deepened, the speculation of natural worship began to become untenable.
The indigenous people do not worship specific natural phenomena or things at all. People have awe of mountains and clouds and think they have special meanings, but they do not seem to think that they have any spirituality, nor do they pray for shelter or benefits.
After reading the classics, he felt that he should correct his ideas and treat them as shamanism, because some individuals in the village have higher interpretation rights and are considered to be able to come into contact with something extremely mysterious and ethereal than the spirit.
In terms of form, they have a certain similarity with shamans, and they even show the results of their contact perception by making something.
But in terms of these things, it is different from the Shamanism.
There are no feathers, furs, horns used to show the spiritual power of animals, nor instruments that imitate the sounds of nature.
The only thing that is above is probably the common shape similar to a totem, extremely complex and repetitive and monotonous, and is expressed over and over again in what they make.
He described it as a spiral shape with a strong sense of layering and dynamic feeling.
Dominic and Field looked at each other, as if they had dug something they shouldn't have dug.
Although it is normal for some local customs to be left behind after the conversion in marginal areas and is a tacit fact that everyone has tacitly interpreted, pagan totems are still widely spread - even if the meaning has been forgotten, it is scary enough.
This is obviously not a secret that is too deep. The parish should have been informed of this and deliberately downplayed the influence, which eventually formed the current result. It is similar to the fact that two shovels of soil were piled up when landfilling garbage, as long as it is not openly enough.
At that time, no missionary would be happy to see this situation. After he thought he had a preliminary understanding of the other party's belief form, he wrote a draft in advance and found an opportunity to come to communicate and test it.
This chapter is not over, please click on the next page to continue reading! If the pagan claims that he can communicate with the spirits and communicate with his ancestors, he emphasized that the soul will inevitably enter heaven and hell for judgment after death, and there is no intermediate state.
If the pagan believes that all things have spirits, he will preach that the Lord is the creator of all things and that when he creates, he will not leave spirituality to natural creatures.
All known pagan worship and response methods are recorded in the "Collection of Pagans", and the preaching process is also smooth.
The other party listened carefully to the mission from beginning to end, without refuting or interrupting, without the offensive anger of faith, and even expressed varying degrees of approval of the doctrine. He raised only a little objection - what you said makes sense, but that was indeed not what you described.
As for what it is, the statements of several respondents are vague.
In the end, he was unable to argue with the pagans. After all, people could not punch the invisible wind, and doctrine could not attack something that did not exist.
The transformation of faith was going well, and the residents accepted more systematic and beneficial teachings in a good manner.
But the spiral, curly pattern, vortex, and shapes that do not even have a name still appear in unexpected places from time to time when they are about to be forgotten.
It was like a small thorn piercing under his skin, which made him care more and more, and frequently visited the last followers of the primitive beliefs that had been marginalized.
They are not well-educated people. Although they have a desire to express themselves when referring to "that thing", they are not helpful in improving poor language logic and communication barriers caused by some dialect production vocabulary. Missionaries are never able to build a specific impression from it.
The fragmented records only brought confusion. Perhaps on a day when he was very humid, he used severely stained strokes on the damp paper to try to summarize his long-term thinking.
The pen tip stays in one place for a long time, and the diffuse thoughts and ink form dark patches.
Immediately, the uncontrollable disorder was projected on the paper and turned into a messy line that burst into explosively. There was no direction or consciousness, like a lost person shrouded in thick fog, crashing and running wildly, cutting off the "clouds" and smearing the "sky" and "missing".
But it seems that there is some force that pulls the pen tip, causing the lines to entangle and loop around each other, forming a dense cluster of lines.
In the deepest black gap, Dominic read a word that was out of place:
"Scale?"
Consciousness automatically took a step towards a direction that did not exist at all.
Chapter completed!