Tinerans

In Poul Anderson's The Day Of Their Return, Ivar Frederiksen spends time among "tinerans" who are like a combination of Gypsies and a traveling circus so we know what to expect from them:

an itinerant life-style;
painted wagons;
draught animals;
colorful clothing;
tricks of the trade;
peculiar customs and linguistic usages;
a particular attitude to outsiders.

Because the novel is set on another planet, the draught animals include stathas and the other domesticated animals include neomoas. Because the planet in question is the dehydrated Aeneas, the tinerans' dogs are skeletal with huge rib cages and water-storing humps. Each wagon has neither a cat nor a caged parrot but a "luck," a small imported organism with a leathery mantle over gray fur, curved pointed ears, needle fangs, three red eyes in a triangle and, it turns out, a parasitic telepathic relationship with its owners.

The tinerans provide yet another parallel with my recent experience of religious traditions. A Traveler woman, addressing a local moot (social gathering of Pagans), told us that she had been brought up in a then living polytheist tradition where men worshiped Herne the Hunter while women worshiped the Moon. I have also been told that, when Carina saw pictures of the Virgin Mary at primary school, she thought that this was just another manifestation of the Goddess. People, including neo-Pagans, with a scholarly knowledge of European Paganism have good reason to believe that no such tradition survived into modern times. So was Carina's childhood religion a rare or even unique case of an unknown unbroken tradition or had it started in modern times, then passed itself off as something older?

In any case, although Aenean city dwellers attend churches, the tinerans have a shrine in a small wagon. The king of a tineran band is its high priest presiding over public religious ceremonies and conducting secret rituals, including fertility rites, with fellow initiates. Anderson, as always, imagines religious divergences in future societies.