Without law there is only chaos. Without time there is only confusion. Arameas holds both, and in holding both, holds civilization itself together.
Attributed to the first Aramean High Judge - Armeas Mercleis
Arameas is not worshiped with the passion of Kymara's followers or the devotion of Zodo's faithful. He is, instead, respected - acknowledged by those who understand that civilization requires something other than faith and power to hold itself together. He is the god of law and time, created by El Anon to be the steward of order in a universe that would, without him, tend inevitably toward chaos. This is a less dramatic role than that of his fellow gods, and Arameas is the first to acknowledge it. He does not seek worship for its own sake. He seeks compliance.
Characteristics
There is an order to which all things unfold. Nothing comes by chance, all things - all aspects of being and existance - follows the Law. The ending of the Law is what brings The End.
Paper 1, The Apocalypse Papers
Arameas is lawful and utterly neutral in his approach to morality. He does not distinguish between good law and bad law - only between law and its absence. A judge who sentences an innocent man according to proper legal procedure is, in Arameas's view, doing his job correctly. Whether the outcome is just by any other standard is not Arameas's concern. This makes him a deeply uncomfortable deity for those who hope that law and justice are the same thing.1
The Order of the Universe cares not of morality, only of law. Only harbingers of chaos seek to tip the scales of justice to one spectrum or the other.
Paper 2, The Apocalypse Papers
He is patient in the extreme - a quality that makes sense for the god of time. He does not act quickly. He does not need to. He is, as his followers say, always on time.2
All things happen in the time that they are meant to happen. Nothing in a just world is late or early, and the world itself is nothing but just. It moves, it quakes, it rains, it snows, all in the right time. Arameas keeps the law of time as he keeps all laws, and he keeps them, always on time.
Paper 3, The Apocalypse Papers
Personification
Arameas is described consistently as a figure of middle age - neither young nor old - in plain robes, carrying scales in one hand and an hourglass in the other. He has no remarkable physical characteristics. He is not radiant with power like El Anon, not fractured like Zodo, not reborn like Kymara. He is simply present, measured, and exact.
Arameas, the keeper of the law and time, sits in the middle of time - neither is he too old or too young, neither is he radiant nor is he dim. Arameas is as plain as the law he keeps. The scales he carries shimmer not, nor does the sword glow or blast in flame. They are as they are meant to be, just.
Paper 5, The Apocalypse Papers
He communicates with his followers through what they describe as a sense of absolute clarity - a sudden, complete understanding of what is correct in a given situation. His followers do not speak of visions or voices. They speak of certainty.3
Powers
Upon his scales does Arameas weigh all - law and time. For time is a measurement of law, and law is the guidance of time.
Paper 1, The Apocalypse Papers
Arameas holds dominion over law and time. His power over law manifests in his followers - judges, guards, lawmakers, and those who enforce order all find their abilities sharpened by his influence. His power over time is more mysterious and less frequently discussed by his own followers, perhaps because its implications are uncomfortable. A god who governs time knows what has happened and what will happen. Arameas says very little about this.4
Followers
Keepers of the law, holders of peace - these Arameas has anointed as the shields of righteousness. To the judges he's made clerics - priests of the rule of law. The historians are the prophets, for what better avatar of Arameas can there be?
Paper 3, The Apocalypse Papers
Arameas's followers are found wherever law is taken seriously - courthouses, guard posts, government buildings, and military academies. Judges are his most devoted adherents. Guards, soldiers, lawyers, and administrators make up the bulk of his congregation. He has few followers among the general population who are not in some official capacity, which gives his faith a distinctly institutional character.5
In the Kingdom of Auphera, the mandatory five-year guard service required of all men upon reaching adulthood has roots in Arameas worship - the idea that service to law and order is a sacred duty owed by every citizen, regardless of personal inclination. Whether the current government maintains this requirement for theological or practical reasons is debated.6
The Temple of Arameas
The principal organized body of Arameas worship is the Temple of Arameas which is more of a judicial institution than a church in the conventional sense. Its priests function as judges, arbiters, and legal scholars. They are called upon to settle disputes, interpret laws, and in some jurisdictions serve as the final court of appeal. Their rulings are considered binding by those who have agreed to submit to Temple arbitration, which in some communities is a considerable proportion of the population.
The Temple maintains strict neutrality in political matters. It will not take a side in a war, will not declare a government legitimate or illegitimate, and will not refuse to apply the law as written regardless of who benefits. This neutrality is both its greatest strength and the source of its most pointed criticism.7
Clerics of Arameas
Priests of Arameas carry the weight of law with them literally - they may add their Arcana trait to any check involving the enforcement or application of law, the detection of guilt or innocence, or the formal pronouncement of judgment. They also have an uncanny ability to determine when they are being lied to in formal proceedings, though this ability does not extend to casual conversation.8 Their presence in a courtroom or at a formal arbitration is considered by most jurisdictions to lend the proceedings additional gravity and legitimacy.
Theological Notes
Arameas occupies an interesting position in Nor'Ovan theology because he is the one major deity whose existence is least contested. He does not claim to be the creator. He does not claim to be the most powerful. He does not promise salvation, eternal life, or cosmic justice. He offers only order, and order is something that even the most skeptical observer can see operating in the world without any divine explanation required.
This makes him, paradoxically, both the easiest and the hardest deity to believe in. Easiest, because no extraordinary claims are made on his behalf. Hardest, because his worship offers the least comfort - no promise of resurrection, no personal relationship with a god who loves you, no hope that the wicked will ultimately face justice beyond what the law provides. What Arameas offers is process. For some people, that is enough. For many, it is not.9
- 1. They frequently are not. Arameas's followers tend to be very clear about this distinction, which does not always make them popular.
- 2. This phrase is used both as a theological statement and as something approaching a greeting among devoted Arameans. Outsiders find it mildly unsettling.
- 3. Critics of Arameas worship note that "a feeling of certainty" is a remarkably convenient form of divine communication, since it is indistinguishable from personal conviction. Arameans reply that this is the point - Arameas does not override human judgment, he refines it.
- 4. What little he has said, according to his followers, amounts to "what will happen will happen, and the law applies equally to the future as to the past." This has not resolved the philosophical debates it prompted.
- 5. This is sometimes described as a weakness - a god whose followers are mostly officials is a god whose worship rises and falls with the stability of governments. The collapse of the Ascian Empire, for instance, was devastating for organized Arameas worship in ways it was not for the more personally-held faiths.
- 6. Both, probably. The two are not always easy to separate in Auphera's complex relationship between the Church of Mana, the Church of Sol Anon, and the residual influence of older faiths like Arameas worship.
- 7. "The Temple of Arameas will faithfully arbitrate your dispute with a murderer" is a real criticism that the Temple addresses by noting that its jurisdiction is consensual - no one is compelled to submit to its arbitration, and those who do so agree in advance to accept the outcome.
- 8. Priests of Arameas in casual conversation are, by all accounts, entirely normal in their ability to be deceived. Several have noted this is humbling.
- 9. The Church of Sol Anon and the Church of the Holy Body both view Arameas worship as incomplete - a faith that addresses the mechanics of life but not its meaning. Aramean scholars tend to view this criticism as a category error. Law, they say, was never meant to provide meaning. That is someone else's job.
