Aldryami see nature as personified. Aldrya is the ultimate in this. She is the personification of the Forest. Aldryami are on good terms with anything that personifies nature: earth spirits and daimones, for example. They see things as people and relate to them. Animism and theism view the world as being personified by spirits and gods. So those views are fairly natural to Aldryami. Sorcery, on the other hand, tends toward the impersonal. Sorcery is described as "energy" and "nodes". Trying to understand Aldrya as a node in the energy of the Song would be (pardon the pun) fruitless. A sorcerous tree would hear the Song rather as a classical musician would: a near science. It would try to find the underlying order of the composition of the Song. It would completely miss out on the meaning of the Song: Aldrya's loving embrace of her children. A sorcerous tree can Sing, but it can't Dance.
I think mystic trees are also a wrong path. I actually suggested this to Greg in a long list of possibilities that he summarily dismissed out of hand. Aldrya herself is certainly transcendent in some ways, but maybe not in a way that is meaningfully mystic. She belongs to a strange class of things that are connected to the Underworld, which is so strange that Greg professes not to understand it fully. For me, that is sufficient to explain why both daimones and spirits can be within her animist tradition.
Chris Lemens
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