das said:
Masada, what's Fish-Speech for Emperor? You never know when you need to bastardise a foreign title.
Emperor is
the closest English approximation I could manage without resorting to another language. Aside, from the obvious connotations i.e. above a King, and yet not a King, there are other slightly more sacral understandings inherent in its use.
First and foremost would be the understanding on the part of Aitah (
and her eventual successors) that a person honored the Ancestors in an appropriate fashion, however non-standard that might be. A subset of that requirement would look at the Seshweay equivalent of the
mana tangata (authority by blood) of the individual to the Ancestors, although that isn't as important as it once was.
This consideration for proximity to the Ancestors also extends into more metaphorical territory, which is the second consideration and far outweighs the utility of 'literal' blood-links now. It instead looks at how that person conforms to one of the
Ratu Adil'(Just Ruler) arch-types of Seshweay society which more or less conform to the traditional Ancestors with the slightly more recent additions of Pa, Aya'se, the Matah and now most importantly Aitah herself.
Since the first real Emperor in the modern sense is seen to be Aya'se and because he marked with his death a thousand years later(?) the end of that particular era his name has now attracted all those connotations. Even though his relative importance in the divinity stakes has now been somewhat degraded by the huge importance now attached to his daughter Aitah he is still seen as the paragon of all non-God (in the singular sense) rulers.
I would suggest that some diplomatic misunderstands allowed this. Those would include:
(1) mistaking your ancestors for the Ancestors, since the latter tend to be pretty generic really;
(2) this led to some interesting shenanigans involving the recital of your ancestors which because of linguistic links in some age past tended to have names which bore slightly more than superficial resemblance to the Ancestors; and
(3) the whole religious reformer, fighting the good fight against the barbarians trope is seemingly a recurring theme in Seshweay history, the envoys happened to think that your Aya'se was more or less modeling himself (albeit somewhat badly) on the ancient incarnation of Aya'se.
Which more or less allowed them to inaccurately concluded that Iralliam is just a rather deviant form of Aitahism alongside just about every other relatively well known religion (and obviously only semi-known religions). So the short answer is Aya'se.
