Covenant Beliefs¶

Covenant Beliefs are the doctrines and rites of the Covenant, the religious community led by Elijah Ray in the Georgia ghost town of Auraria: a holy meteor, Auraria as the Garden of Eden, a coming apocalypse, visions from a peach drink, and baptism in red clay.


Type	Lore (religion)
Aliases	meteor clay; Garden of Eden; red-clay river baptism; clay god
Followers	The Covenant
Leader	Elijah Ray
First appearance	Appalachia 02

Overview¶

In Appalachia 04 Andre summarizes the faith for the table. The Covenant holds that the community has returned to the original site of the Garden of Eden, the only place that will be preserved "when the earth turns up and consumes everyone in the biblical apocalypse". They are, he says, technically Protestants, in that direct communion with God is possible, but they also believe their leader has a special relationship with God and is a prophet, "not, like, Jesus 2.0". Auraria is a real Georgia gold-rush ghost town, and a local tells the team in Appalachia 01 that religious folks took it over about ten years earlier (Appalachia 01, Appalachia 04).

Origin¶

According to Primenthol "Prim" Greengrass, who left the church, Elijah Ray had a prophetic dream and then heard on TV about a shooting star over the area. A few days later he moved the congregation out to cheap land and started trying to grow potatoes. The Covenant believes a holy meteor struck nearby and infused the local clay with divine energy. Prim says much of the doctrine fails the "sniff test" (Andre (as Prim Greengrass), Appalachia 02).

Teachings¶

Auraria as Eden¶

Mother Dahlia Riversand and the member River describe Auraria as "the promised land, the Garden of Eden". River says Elijah Ray called the people pressing the community to leave "agents of Satan, come to take this away from us" (Andre (as River), Appalachia 04). See The Land Dispute.

Daily practice¶

Members do not eat meat. Dahlia runs a one-room schoolhouse teaching Latin and times tables, and Elijah Ray teaches a comparative religion course there and is said to have taught at Harvard. The camp has no electricity (Appalachia 04). Members live in white tents, plus the old church and a community building, in robes or sack dresses (Appalachia 02). Prim and Willow were renamed in the group's style at age three, and Elijah Ray has several wives; Prim calls him "a pretty nice guy. For a bigamist" (Appalachia 02). River says Elijah Ray encourages members not to spend too much time with family and to focus on "our new family and God" (Appalachia 04).

The peach drink and visions¶

The ritual drink is a jar of dark liquid with peaches floating in it. Prim says peaches alone would not give visions, but "they are if you grow the right funguses", and warns "if they offer you a vision quest, don't take it" (Andre (as Prim Greengrass), Appalachia 02). Frotter Comstock tells the team he had been helping the community with a methanol problem in the drink, caused by their insistence on fermenting with natural yeast (Appalachia 02). See Covenant Peach Preserves for the related product the community sells.

Red-clay baptism¶

The cold open of Appalachia 04 shows the rite. At night a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman (Jeremy) changes into a thin white robe and follows a candlelit path to a river red with clay. Four women in white dresses kneel in the mud. An older man with high cheekbones kisses his forehead and hands him the peach drink, which he drinks deeply. The man chants in Latin, wades in holding a candle and plunges the salesman into the mud, and he vanishes beneath the surface (Appalachia 04).

In the daytime scene Dahlia offers the team a place at "the baptism this evening" for a salesman they talked into joining. He is waiting in a preparation tent for his "rebirth and renaming", and Andrew speaks to him through the tent wall. The team does not intervene and moves on to other leads (Appalachia 04).

What remains unknown¶

Whether the red clay is truly special. The players' guesses range from the "clay god" to contamination: River says the community bathes in the river despite a lot of runoff from the Spud Hut plant, and the women suffer frequent yeast infections (Appalachia 04).
Whether the older man in the cold open is Elijah Ray, and what happened to Jeremy.
Whether the peach drink played any part in Willow's disappearance.