Forty Purities

The Forty Purities are a collection of poetic dissertations written pseudonymously in High Secote in the 1740s and 50s by many leading Scholars and Adepts of the Early Radiance in Vaestdom. They constituted a deliberate effort to reform the Vaestic orthodoxy established under Great Neritsia, which had ceased to exist as the Empire of the Vesnites with the Terophatic Restoration of 1702, to conform with emergent Radiance principles. This included the establishment of the novel methods of externalism within Vaestic hierology, and an aesthetic focus on the great possibilities of the authority of Knowledge. Some of the Purities concern political thought, offering, for example, critiques of the generally discredited Neritsovid doctrine of ultragnosis, introducing the concept of personation to describe the corporate characters shared by whole societies—originally in part derived from the Tondakan concept of mechanicism—as well as furnishing some of the earliest reflections on what would become systematised as the Banner-empire or Banner-State. The Purities also appealed, more or less implicitly, to an ideal of Scholarly and intellectual, as opposed to noble, autonomy and authority that they ascribed to early Vaestism.

The background to the Purities lies in the increasingly formalised collaborative associations of intellectuals known as Pechet Boards that had emerged beginning in the latter half of the 17th century with a view to promoting collaboration on scientific, hierological, and broader philosophical issues. These networks, later identified as the primary vehicles for the spread of externalism and the Eastern scientific method, served to establish, for the first time since the consolidation of Neritsovid power, a Scholarly identity that was more or less independent of any individual imperial state. The origin of the Purities themselves lies in one particularly influential Pechet Board centred on the city of Kozrat, not yet the Lacrean capital but certainly that burgeoning country's cultural and intellectual centre, whose correspondent network reached as far as Anabbah, northern Laukuna, and the Prysostaia itself. Led by the Lacrean Rasheem externalist Zafuvniprourkah, the Purities were conceived as a response to a perceived need to reform the rapidly decaying structures that had been left behind by Neritsovid rule. The authors of the Purities adopted names from Vaestic history, and indeed they included among their number several female Acolytes writing under male pen-names—Zafuvniprourkah himself, for his part, wrote under the name of Dana, the great female hierologian of the earliest years of Vaestism. Gradually, the project expanded in scope to encompass members of other Pechet Boards, becoming something of a pan-Vaestic institution.

The Purities were published in sequence, and many of them provoked firestorms of controversy. It was in this era that a broader, politically engaged Vesnite 'public' had first begun to emerge—the earliest shoots of the later activity of the High Radiance Scholarchate—and the debates over the Purities proved catalytic for political reform across Outer Joriscia. At the time of their publication, the authors of the Purities were not generally known, still less Zafuvniprourkah's identity as the leader of the group. His election as Universal Prophet in 1756 by a political contingency in the aftermath of the Third Crown War was thus a great stroke of luck for the Pechet Boards. If Vaestic leaders could initially ignore Zafuvniprourkah's requests for great Scholars to be released to the Prophetic Banner to staff his new Prysostaic Council, they could not prevent the Pechet Boards from expanding to encompass the Prysostaia firmly within their networks. The Purities came under sustained and specific criticism during the Great Doubt later in the century, but received support from successive Universal Prophets as authoritative expositions of the faith, beginning with Zafuvniprourkah himself and culminating in Prophet Tarmo's description of them in 1881 as 'successors to the Commentaries', so that today they form part of the canon of foundational Vaestic texts known in the West as the Bibliography.