Pechet Board

From around the 1660s until the end of the 19th century, a Pechet Board (Lacrean: ⰒⰅⰝⰤⰕⰀⰔⰕⰀⰎ, Pečētastal) was an originally semi-secret society of Vaestic Scholars and Adepts devoted to collaboration on scientific and philosophical issues. Pechet Boards began in the 17th century as loose networks of independently-minded correspondents conducting intellectual inquiry amongst themselves: their name derives from the Lacrean pečēt meaning 'stamp' or 'seal', originally referring to the sealed letters exchanged by their members, and astal, a 'board' as in a Board of Secrets. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, these networks gradually developed more formal institutional structures, sponsoring public events such as academic congresses and jointly funding the establishment of educational facilities and laboratories at mokyklos, as well as the conduct of natural-scientific experiments in general. At the time of the fall of Great Neritsia and the Terophatic Restoration the Pechet Boards thus created a space for independent intellectual inquiry outside the crumbling Neritsovid order, and were highly influential in the formulation and dissemination of incipient externalism and the Eastern scientific method. They also contributed to the emergence for the first time of an autonomous Outer Joriscian political public.

The Pechet Boards reached the height of their influence during the Lacrean Ascendancy of the 18th century, frequently receiving various forms of official recognition and patronage. A Pechet Board centred at Kozrat was responsible for organising the Forty Purities, a series of reformist contributions to hierology that rapidly developed into a pan-Vaestic endeavour; the leader of this project, the Lacrean Zafuvniprourkah, was elected the first post-imperial Universal Prophet in 1756. Despite the turbulence of the Great Doubt later in the century, the Pechet Boards survived into the High Radiance in an increasingly institutionalised form, serving as centres for the co-ordination of the political reformism of the period. Their end, at least in name, came only as a result of the ever more strident disputes over Strong Externalism that wracked Vaestdom towards the end of the century, as they were formally dissolved by Prophet Yorsephor in 1898 following his reprobation of Strong Externalism and the opening of his Tempering of the Prophecy. In practice the change was rather less significant than it may seem, as most Pechet Boards had by this point developed public and official structures, and Yorsephor's utterances applied only to activities conducted in secret without the oversight of the Prysostaia and the various Banners. Nevertheless, the name accordingly fell out of favour at the turn of the 20th century, and existing academic societies, both within particular Banners and at a pan-Vaestic level, have generally adopted alternative titles such as the Knowledgeable Fellowships and the post–Long War Modality Combines.