thoughts on the divine beast
forgive any inaccuracies of any accepted info, i don’t know of much deep lore so these are just some ideas based on what i know and think of.
in czech/polish folklore and holiday tradition, there is a creature called turoń. during festivities, someone dresses in a draped sheepskin cloak covering their head and body while holding up the costumes wooden head, a shaggy horned bovine creature with a slack jaw. the wearer claps the loose jaw to music and chases people around, biting them playfully. turon also pokes people with his horns, symbolizing passing on fertility to the family.
at some point in the song turoń faints and everyone gathers to bring him back to life by blowing wind up the tail and lighting hay as incense. turoń comes back alive and continues to dance.
the practices involving turoń vary per region, with one region in poland waving a star for the holiday of the epiphany on the 6th of january. in this region, if anyone stares too long at the star or its bearers, turoń tackles them.
when the holiday time ends, families ‘banish’ turoń with a song:
Idź, turoniu, do domu
nie zawadzaj nikomu
nie tuś się wychował
nie tu będziesz nocował
Go now, Turoń, go home
Don't you bother any more souls
Here's not the place you live
This not the place you shall sleep
it makes me think that based off the customs of turoń, the isolated location of the stagefront, and the way the lion is sleeping upon entrance, that this lion’s spirit was banished from people’s homes after the holiday, and the puppeteers with it. he sleeps dormant once banished.
something worth noting in my opinion is the dialogue in dancing lions cutscene, “cleanse away the strumpet’s vile progeny”. “strumpet”, of course, meaning “wh*re”. i could be wrong since i don’t know too much deep lore but this feels like a reference to daedicar, who is described in the daedicar’s woe item description as having “indulged in every form of adultery and wicked pleasure imaginable, giving birth to a myriad of grotesque children.”
just like turoń can be banished with a song or chant, perhaps the dancing lion spirit can be summoned with that as well. it feels like this lion represents something corrupt or inverse about the ideas of turoń spreading fertility, since he is instructed to cleanse the lineage of ‘the strumpet’. it makes me wonder if it’s implying that we, the tarnished, are one of daedicar’s descendants. or perhaps this is simply just the hornsent wanting to purify the region of peoples who are not them, maybe referring to marika or the erdtree or something as the strumpet. this could make sense given the description of hornsents mask: “Used to ward off thoughts of impurity, doubt, temptation, and other wickednesses one is vulnerable to while absorbed in divine ritual”
as a side note i do think that since daedicar’s woe is dropped by rya and there’s some stuff about rykard as a human reproducing with serpents to create the man serpents that the talisman isn’t specifically about the man serpents. the language about the man serpents birth is about a terrible ritual and daedicar partook in pleasure specifically instead of ritual, so it feels potentially different to me. that might not be the agreed upon interpretation but that’s my opinion. i think the purpose of rya dropping the item is more about the grotesque essence of the inhabitants of volcano manor through mentioning this other story. so i think it is possible that daedicar could be the subject of the hornsent’s dialogue in dancing lion’s cutscene.
attached is an image i found on pinterest that i just thought looked cool, which led me down the turoń rabbit hole. i reverse image searched it to find it’s from a czech book about folklore, and when i was reading about the tradition it reminded me so much of dancing lion. i haven’t seen this comparison made before, and i love the concept of the dancing lion so much, so i thought i could share my thoughts on the parallels.