A/N: One reason this has taken so long – aside from my hiatus and work – is that piecing together a coherent salarian culture is not easy.
The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space
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Smiling Jack, grumpy Richard, and long-suffering Rachel,
Your last response to my updates on salarian physiology was … colorful. I was not fully aware of the wide range of curses and invectives known to humankind, and some of them, if I understand human anatomy well enough, do not appear to be possible. I did warn you that your understanding of the salarian people was flawed, due to your own biases.
These biases are likely to also cripple your ability to grasp salarian culture. As I said when I first started my report, salarian culture is heavily influenced by ancient traditions and religion, but is also influenced by math, logic, and the ever-shifting perspective which is a watchword among the salarian mindset. Cerberus tries to operate by utilizing the cultural failings of other races – the turian tendency to follow procedure and dependance on tradition and organization, or batarian arrogance and lack of anger management. You cannot rely on such easy handles on salarian culture.
Their culture is not like 'human culture', defined more by piddling differences, language variants, and socioeconomic brackets. Nor is it akin to the unified culture of asari, where language and nuance has been leveled through the years and the only thing that remains are the traditions and influences from long ago. Salarian culture is a polyglot assemblage of many moving parts, all of them more calculated to confuse and obfuscate the truth from observers.
The chilling part, of course, is that the observers it tries to cloak itself from are other salarians.
Cerberus Thought for the Day: There is no such thing as surrender in the lexicon of the brave. To return with your shield is victory, but to return on it is loyalty.
Salarian Cultural Basics – the Family (on a large level)
Dr. Minsta made an excellent summation of human culture in his asari report, winnowing the basics down to "location, language, ethnic groups and customs". Such trite summaries of entire peoples, tossing off eons of history with short, frail words of little hard meaning, cannot be used to describe something as semi-rigid as 'salarian culture'.
At its very core, the salarian culture is built around four pillars – religion, family, intellect, and access. These probably seem very alien and nonsensical to you as ascribations of culture, yet that is exactly how best to describe the salarian daily life.
Salarian societal structure is dominated by family first, of course. By family, I do not mean a traditional nuclear family as humans have, or even the extended family that asari have. Salarian 'families' as you would know them are called clans. Most clans are small, with less than a hundred members, and as they get bigger they fission off younger daughters to start new ones. But clan relationships remain fixed.
Every salarian clan traces linage through the dalatrasses, with most of the more powerful families able to claim as relatives one of the founding dalatrasses from the Shego Era. An unbroken linage six millennia long not very impressive to krogan or asari – but it is much, much longer than any other race has been able to keep a single ruling set of families in power. The Windsors are but a thousand years old, the House of Manswell can be traced back, I believe, to the Hohenzollern dynasties, but again, that is but fifteen hundred years ago.
The salarian stability in ruling families speaks to the chilling strength and endurance of salarian family structures. While there are certainly 'nations' involved, most nationalism faded long ago for salarians, and it was always more about the families backing the nations than the ideal of nation-states themselves that attracted the salarian mind.
When we speak of 'families', then, we are talking of the highest, oldest clans in existence, which have split off thousands of times to form the clans of today. These families are like archetypes of salarian culture, thought, and outlook, and a clan will trace back their own heritage (and way of looking at life) to one of these families.
The four most powerful families are Shuel, Manno, Ergii, and Daaso, with the off-world families of Yaan and Solus not far behind. Culturally speaking, literally every salarian alive is related, as least distantly, to one of these six families. And the families, although powerful in salarian government, science, and law, are more than merely institutions of power – each one has a fundamental way of looking at the universe that is completely different from the rest.
Without going into unnecessary detail, since I have my doubts about Richard's level of interest, or patience, it is important to know how the families differ. The "old blood" – Manno and Ergii – are those salarians mostly from the old Reach cultures and the brood of Shego herself. They prize logic and cool thinking, reacting to situations after analysis, the physical sides of the arts, and the application of minimal force for maximum effort. The old blood is hardly ever seen out of the core salarians systems, even the poor among them disliking alien influence. Stiltedly polite and yet cautious to even speak, the best example humans would be familiar with is the former salarian Citadel Council, Ythan. This segment of their culture is religiously devout to the old ways, believes in science, progress, and gradual improvement, and isn't so much anti-alien as aloof. They form the core of the political structure of the homeworld, the backbone of the artistic and creative classes, and have strong representation in certain diplomatic ventures.
The "new blood" – Shuel and Daaso – were the remains of families shattered by the wars and the Collapse, rebuilding in a more militant, more prepared frame. Rejecting the cool logic of the old blood, the new blood is superstitious, suspicious, self-sustaining, and above all else mercurial. They believe to not change is to stagnate, to leave one's self open to assault. Very few of these families are heavily into the Wheel Religion, most have moved into other religious venues. Scarred even today by the memories of the Collapse, these hyperactive sorts are the movers and shakers of salarian society. Common off-world, they are known to be shifty, unpredictable, and stubborn in many ways. Never abrupt but always sharp-toned, many of the new blood seem perpetually annoyed, angry, or dismissive. These types form the core of the STG and many of the clans descended from these two are merchants (although not anyone from the families themselves).
Finally, the "outer ways" – the Yaan and Solus families – are the most reckless and dangerous of the various arch-families. Dismissive of risks, daring, hyper-theoretical and dismissing ethics as a creation of flawed minds, these two cutthroat groups are what usually is projected into alien view when they think of salarians. Twitchy and fast-talking, many of them refuse to utilize proper speech patterns for linguistic best-fits in a chopped, almost staccato stream of thoughts, ideas, musings, or worries. Dismissive of manners and often seen as either rude or air-headed, the two families were the first to see the value of alien beings and how to capitalize on that fact. The new blood also forms the bulk, such as it is, of the salarian military.
I realize that the tendency to shoehorn intelligent beings into boxy categories is a tendency I have recommended you abstain from pursuing – but in this case, perhaps, it has some merit. Despite the other ever-rapid changes in salarian society, the family allegiance remains the one constant touchstone.
I will discuss names and their importance a bit later, but knowing a salarians core allegiance is the best way of figuring out how he (or rarely, she) thinks. In all my years, I have seen salarians do many random, unexpected things. I have seen vast shifts in their outlook and perceptions, and the focus of their efforts. But a Daaso-clan salarian is always going to be a religious fanatic with a leery streak a mile wide and a tendency to assume the worst, while a Solus is going to be a frenetic, word-stammering freak with six thousand ideas and brutal military skills.
The family structure is arcane, at best. Below the six top families are literally dozens and dozens of thim-than, literally 'breeders of skill'. These intermediate families have histories of producing large, stable egg clutches, and often act as intermediaries between the high families and those below them. Then there are the thim-shaair, the 'breeders of purpose', which I'll touch on later, but appear to be genetically modified breeding clans to produce soldiers or thinkers.
The high families don't get involved in intergalactic politics OR business – which probably seems odd. They all have vast levels of wealth, but almost all of it is in the form of real estate, stocks, and bonds in the government. No member of the high families would sully their hands with mere 'work', unless it was in the sciences. Instead, these families (through the mediation of the thim-than) engage in reproductive trades with the thal-thanish, the large mercantile families who run salarian corporations, or the thal-skithar, the very large breeding families that form the salarian craft guilds.
All of these trades and interactions are governed by religion, which brings me neatly to my next point.
Salarian Cultural Basics – Wheel Rites
Unsurprisingly, the mostly logical salarian mind rejects out of hand any form of religious concepts that you humans would understand as such. They do not, in any way, shape or form, believe in 'gods' or in supreme, unknowable intelligences. They also categorically reject most of the metaphysical elements that are so key to siari.
Salarians believe in a concept they call the Wheel. I have thought long on this and the best human concepts that fit the idea are the Christian Book of Ecclesiastes and certain atheistic interpretations of samsara.
The Wheel, as I understand it, is the binding concept that all life is created to in turn create more life, that all things that can occur have an explanation, a time, and a place of execution, and that free will is an illusion imposed on living beings by the flow of time. There is nothing 'new' – all things exist at all points in time – life is merely a process of experiencing a gradual revelation of this knowledge. To explore and discover 'new things' is merely accelerating the process, and by doing so introduces the possibility of perceiving events outside of the flow of time.
All of this, of course, is both somewhat para-physical and very highly philosophical. The masters of the Wheel in salarian society are both mystics and rigid logicians. They have put forward what seem to be outrageous claims, and yet historically speaking, have managed to back them up.
To wit, the Wheel says that since all things already have come to pass, manipulating our perceptions is the equivalent to being able to see the future. Wheel mystics have demonstrated the terrifying ability – repeatedly – to model future behavior with only the tiniest bits of pertinent data as long as they can ascribe certain fixed values to what they see. Wheel mystics predicted the Collapse, meeting the asari, and the importance of the krogan to galactic survival. They don't know what they see or what the exact importance is, but they can find what they call 'points of perspective' and from these mental points, engage in some kind of hyper-advanced hunches.
The Wheel is a sort of visualization of these beliefs. Salarians think that everything that happens now has probably occurred before, and will again. Life begets life, struggle in turn leads to improvement, instincts and emotions lead to conflict and death, driving innovation and planning to triumph. Individuals in the Wheel are like bit-streams in the data network of the Galaxy – impossible to predict individually, but capable of being modeled in the abstract in large numbers. The Wheel, then, suggests that all life is ultimately the same – we are all born, we all bear offspring, we all love and hate, we all desire a better future for our children, we all fear the dark, and eventually, we all die.
And because the Wheel lays out that all things are already existing, that nothing is really 'new', and that the future can be modeled if one can find enough points of perspective and accelerate one's ability to perceive, that the future is in essence, like reading a book. To the characters in a book, things happen as they happen, but the reader can flip to the end of the book and find out how the story ends.
The Wheel mystics claim to be able to do this.
I know that this probably sounds patiently ridiculous, but it has been confirmed, at least to salarians, which explains much of their overall mindset. To a human, free will is everything – your God having martyred himself to give you the chance to, as it were, decide on whether to turn away from sin or not. Asari religion rejects sin and links all things together but offers no answers as to the why of existence. Salarian wheel rites offer a cold, blank explanation of what is coming, where 'why' becomes 'because it is so' with no variants.
This is why salarians dispense with morals and ethics. An act that is to happen is inevitable in their eyes. Whether it is 'right' or 'wrong' is completely pointless to think about, as it will happen, thus a salarian might as well take advantage of it. At the same time, they believe random perceptions of an event, and deeper understandings, should allow them to perceive and forecast what is coming in the future, and thus embrace that aspect of life as well.
I don't know very many humans (or asari) who can take up such a bizarre way of looking at the universe. It is not something that is easily explained, except by the cool distance of time and seeing their mystics able to perform with a high level of accuracy.
Wheel rites are heavily ceremonial, with a 'morning service' every morning that lasts about a half hour, usually given over to personal meditation and introspection, to analyze what has been seen and to draw conclusions from it. Mystics are not priests, they do not lead congregations and rarely, if ever, interact with most other salarians. Instead, they have followers and apostles, who take their words and thoughts and spread them through society as they see fit.
A follower of a mystic who foresees great calamity may end up warning people...or building several businesses to take advantage of the hardships likely to come with such calamity.
Other than rites of communion with the mystics, most salarians practice Wheel rites individually in private. This mostly consists of meditation, focused analysis of a days events, and memory exercises to extract and focus on what the subconscious mind has picked up on. Salarians can draw staggeringly accurate inferences from such activities, and it also appears to provide them a level of emotional and psychological stability during traumatic events.
It also explains why salarians are so capable of dealing with loss, death, and other unpleasant influences – the Wheel maintains these things were always going to happen anyway, and to the logical salarian mind, acceptance is better than railing away at unalterable fate.
It often confuses outsiders that salarians say, on the one hand, that everything is fixed and has already occurred, and on the other hand, that knowing what comes allows them to prepare. A Wheel mystic once explained it to me as such: a solar storm is coming, and nothing can stop it. But it takes fifteen light minutes for the storm to reach the planet you are on. You can't stop the storm, and you can't save everyone it will kill – but you can get those you can reach and get to listen into cover. You can't change the larger outlines of what will happen, but you can shift the small, individual aspects of it.
I fear, in this context, that salarian foresight and planning has lead them to see events coming that they are preparing for in ways that fill me with trepidation. The breeding experiments and pushes for trans-mortal abilities imply whatever is coming may be very, very bad.
Aside from this, Wheel rites and beliefs play a huge role in how salarian clans deal with each other and with events. The Wheel lays down a rigid set of 'customs' in dealing with certain aspects of how salarians interact with the world around them. A mystic, for example, has no possessions, does not involve himself in business, and would die of shame before using his abilities for profit. Most businesses, however, will consult a mystic before embarking on a new product line or investment, to see if there is anything beyond the business side to be aware of.
Wheel rites also form the core of why salarians are so erratic – by deliberately moving off of the script that life has laid out for them, they attempt to generate points of perspective to see what is coming. This leads salarians to gamble outrageously at times with investments, in politics, and in espionage.
Their view on finding perspective illuminates their fascination with spying and intelligence gathering, as they see it as yet another point of perspective to utilize. Indeed, to them, such is hardly an aggressive or unwanted act at all – no one wants their secrets revealed, but if it leads to an insight that allows greater predictions and security, the salarians don't see it as a violation in the same way that other alien races do.
Salarian Cultural Basics – Names
As I touched on earlier, salarian families are a good method to determine the biases and outlook of salarians from clans related to them. This is why it is crucial to evaluate the core family when dealing with such. The arch-families are often incorporated into district or city names.
For example, all salarian names can be broken down into the short form (Personal agonomen and clan name) or the longer, more elaborate form. The long form starts with the name of the planet of birth, national allegiance OR high-clan allegiance, city of birth, district of their clan's affiliation (which may or may not be on the planet or in the city they were born in!), their own clan's name and their agonomen.
A salarian from the homeworld might thus be named Sur'Kesh Ergohai Thanish Shuelan Gimos Thran. Born on Sur'kesh in the city of Thanish with ties to clan Shuel, but affiliated to the nation of Ergohai (Thanish is a city in Maithan, while the Shuel clan is strongest in the nation of Soluthus) indicating that he may have drifted from his original allegiances. His short name would be simply Thran Gimos.
Name analysis is an art, not a science. One must ascertain the message invoked by differences in place of birth and current allegiance, and the clan – family relationships as well.
Salarian Social Structure
Attempting to codify the polymorphic mess that is salarian society is akin to cataloging the movements of a pack of vorcha that are on fire. There is a structure there, but it is riddled with hops from the lowest to the highest, with loops that call upon Wheel Mystics, and with cultural baggage that hasn't been shed in thousands of years.
That being said, the rough layout is as follows. The Six Families are atop the salarian structure, although none of them 'rule'. Their dalatrasses, instead, meet regularly to put forth names for the position of High Dalatrass (in peacetime) and Daltriana (in wartime).
The High Dalatrass is roughly equivalent to the turian Primarch or the human President in terms of political power on a military-political level, but only the Daltriana can command the military. The High Dalatrass is usually picked from one of about twenty clans that are direct descendents and subordinates of the High Families. Known as the Leading Clans, these clans specialize in politics and alien relations. The High Dalatrass heads the salarian civilian government.
Below the Leading Clans are the War Clans, another set of about twenty clans that provide the bulk of salarian military officers. The Daltriana, the old title of Shego, is given to a member chosen from these clans to lead the military in wartime. It is significant to note that salarians do not see a point in having civilian control of the military – in peacetime, the military answers directly to whatever leading clan is in charge of a region of space, and in wartime they answer to the Daltriana, but they never answer to the government. A curious separation of powers, designed to prevent any tyranny from occurring.
Collectively, the High Families, the Leading Clans, and the War Clans are known as the Conclave. These are the nobles of salarian society. Below them are the Service Guilds, the Craft Guilds, the Home Clans, the Offworld Clans, the Free Clans, and at the bottom, the Lythari.
About 2% of salarians are in the Conclave. 35% are in the Service Guilds, 25% in the Craft Guilds, and 20% in the Home Clans. 15% are in the Offworld Clans, and the final three percent are in the Free Clans. The Lythari, outcasts, are so rare as to be a non-entity – while there are several hundred thousand of them, there aren't even enough to form a full percentage point compared to salarian population in toto.
The Service Guilds are clans involved primarily in industrial labors. These are the big business, the corporations, and the bulk of salarians are in clans that answer to the guilds. There are a number of guilds within the Service Guild (mining, pharmacology, etc) but they all meet every five years to elect fifty representatives to serve in the salarian version of a parliament. Aside from this, salarians in the service guilds are what you would term 'upper middle class'. They have stable jobs guaranteed almost from hatching, and interact mostly with each other. The Service Guilds are all about clan profits and clan power, not really 'salarians' as a gestalt ideal.
Their bitter enemies are the Craft Guilds – salarian specialists. Once merely members of the Free Clans, the Craft Guilds arose out of feelings that the Free Clans were being manipulated for the betterment of the Service Guilds and not salarian society as a whole. Each one of the four craft guilds specializes in a task – doctors, lawyers, shipbuilders, and zero-g miners. These four tasks were critical at all parts of post-spaceflight salarian culture, and they remain so today. Many of the clans in the Craft Guilds are very rich, but many are very poor. They operate a few corporate entities, but for the most part the Craft Guilds are almost asari in their outlook – they work for the betterment of all salarians, whether on the homeworld or off it. The guilds assemble once every five years to put forth candidates to the parliament, as well as selecting a Chief Operations Officer to lead the Guilds as a whole.
The Home Clans and the Offworld Clans are groupings of individual clans descended from the Service Guilds, and most are involved in non-specialist enterprises. Office workers, technicians, repair personnel, cooks – just normal people. The lower middle class, if you will. They vote on a bloc of representatives put forth in toto by the Clan leaders.
The Free Clans are a broken remnant of earlier histories, when clans answered directly to the High Dalatrass and the Six Families. Over time, the Home and Offworld Clans drifted away from them, and the Craft Guilds took most of their clans with them, leaving the remains to linger at the bottom of society. They are make-work salarians, operating the restaurants, chain stores, remote HE3 fueling stations and the jobs no one else wants. Clans too poor or small to get good breeding contracts, outcasts, and rebels all end up in the Free Clans. There are a great many yindos among the Free Clans, especially in the more distant colonies, and they are becoming more prevalent as time goes on since most clans want nothing to do in terms of breeding contracts with Free Clan members.
Salarian Social Structure – the Lythari
Salarians rejected by their clans, utterly alone, are called the Lythari. These are rebels against everything it is to be a salarian, who have turned their back on their own families to strike out on their own. Lythari are outcasts in every sense of the word – few, if any upright salarians would deal with such on any level. Most of the Lythari can be found in the Terminus systems, and occasionally entire Lythari yindos can be found there.
A few lythari serve as advisers or scientists for disreputable krogan or batarian groups. The largest organization of Lythari, the Broken Wheel, can be found operating in krogan territory, as these are lythari who voluntarily and forcefully fled from salarian space and jurisdiction as rejection of the use of the genophage, which they found repulsive. Even centuries later, their descendants would rather wander brokenly than submit to a government that would condone such acts. The Lythari, then, would be a natural vector for any infiltration of salarian society you might wish to pursue, but their effective ability to actually enter salarian society is likely to be low – they are very moral by nature, which is why they are outcast.