Last modified: 2024-01-28 by olivier touzeau
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![[Fomoire flag]](../images/f/fr}fomo.gif)
Flag of Fomoire Institute - Image by Ivan Sache, 23 July 2010
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Fomoire Institute (Institut Fomoire, website) was created in October 1991 in
Gentilly - a southern suburb of Paris - by a journalist and two
engineers "fond of fantasy literature, mind games and insane
projects". These guys had founded beforehand Janus, an association
of "dilettante demiurges" - with God as a member of honour -, and had
settled in 1986 the record of the longest role-playing game ever (212
h, never officially homologated)).
The Fomoire Institute was registered as an non-profit association in
1992; its seat was transfered to Montpellier in August 2000.
The Fomoire culture was invented from scratch, based mostly on Jorge
Luis Borges' works and Celtic myths. By inventing this, the leaders of
the Fomoire Project claim to defend the fundamental right to everyone
to live his own identity. They also want to rectify the long-lasting
injustice made to the Fomoire people, who disappeared before the set
up of history and was transformed into a bunch of mythic monsters by
the descendants of its winners.
The invention of the Fomoire Myth is therefore based on several
serious references, listed on the Institute website. The authors
insist that they reject any supremacist or xenophobic interpretation
of the Celtic and Nordic myths.
Ivan Sache, 23 July 2010
The institute seems to take its name from a legendary Irish race, the Fomorians or Fomorii (Wikipedia) - one of several waves of semi-deities and "other folk" who inhabited Ireland in prehistoric times according to legend - the Fomorians, the Tuatha De Danaan, and the Fir Bolg. The Fir Bolg were quite possibly the proto-Celtic Belgae people, after whom Belgium is named, overrun by a later wave of Celts to arrive in Ireland.
James Dignan, 26 July 2010
The Fomoire Institute designed a flag, which has been proudly showed by Fomoires in several places of the world (including Iceland, Greenland, The Netherlands, France, Viet Nam, Italy, Luxembourg, Russia, Cyprus, Spain and Malta) (photo gallery).
The flag is green with the rune pédauque, therefore its nickname of drapeau pédauque.
According to the Fomoire Institute (website), pédauque (from Occitan, pé d'auca; in French, pied d'oie, means "goose's foot-shaped". In several myths and legends, as well as in old traditions from south-western France, the goose's foot (in French, patte d'oie) is a symbol of otherness. The Basque myths include Laminak, magic humanoids with goose's feet (equivalent to the Celtic "little people"). The old Occitan legend of Queen pédauque relates that the queen was forced to jump over water to prove she had no palmate feet. From the Middle Ages to the French Revolution, the cagots, kinds of Gascon parias, were forced to bear a goose' foot-shaped insignia for differenciation from the "normal" population. Therefore, the pédauque rune was particularily suitable to highlight the Autrelin (an invented word based on autre, "other") character of the Fomoires.
Palmate foot was a main character of "otherness" and social exclusion in the Middle Ages. Some historians made a link with leprosis, still a cause of "otherness" and social exclusion, which has sometimes palmate foot as a symptom; other believe that the cagots might have been, originally, lepers.
Ivan Sache & James Dignan, 25 July 2010
The rune on the flag, if it is the same as in the Nordic countries a thousand years ago, represents the letter M in the futhark alphabet (image).
Elias Grandqvist, 25 July 2010