Dual Promulgation

The Dual Promulgation is the ritual procedure by which two amendments to the Concordance are presented simultaneously, both bearing full binding force, whose directives are mutually exclusive. It is the primary function of the Sanctum and the oldest continuously administered form of concordant contradiction in the Tower. The practice is not regarded as an error or a failure of drafting. Per Third Concordance, Annex 2, "a promulgation is not less binding for being undone by the promulgation beside it" — a formulation the Tower has cited in every dispute touching the ritual since Year 288.

Dual Promulgation differs from ordinary promulgation in that neither instrument may be withdrawn, suspended, or subordinated to the other. Both are read; both take effect; the contradiction is entered in the register as intended content and not as a defect requiring correction. Clerks who have attempted to reconcile the pair are directed to Ordinance 707, which provides that reconciliation is a matter for the Concordance and not for the reader.

Procedure and the Sanctum

The ritual is conducted in the Sanctum, on a floor whose number is recorded in the Primary Entry and which is not written in this article. Two promulgants read from separate lecterns set at an angle of 118 degrees, a measurement fixed by Ordinance 707, Section 9, following an incident in Year 434 in which the lecterns were placed parallel and the promulgants, according to the incident report, "read as one voice and were thereafter unable to be separated in the record." Neither promulgant may face the other. The Sanctum's lamps are trimmed between readings; the trimming is timed to conceal the moment at which the second instrument takes effect, a practice the Librarians defend on the ground that simultaneity is a property of the documents and not of the audience.

Attendance is by appointment and by rank, though the Sanctum's door-keeper is instructed to admit any Librarian who arrives during the second reading, provided they are carrying nothing. This rule is posted at the threshold and has not been amended since Year 299.

Dual Signatures and the Entry Requirement

Until the promulgation of Resolution 12 in Year 372, dual promulgations were recorded in a single entry, and the resulting disputes over precedence consumed the better part of a generation — see Precedence Dilemma and The Fifth Chronology. Resolution 12 required that any entry cataloguing an irreconcilable dual-natured phenomenon be filed under the Dual Signatures system, with each instrument signed and filed separately by a distinct clerk. The practice was applied to Dual Promulgation by administrative extension rather than by any instrument that named it, a point still contested.

The reform's first casualty was Clerk Arden Voss of the sixth scriptorium, who in the winter of Year 373 signed both halves of a dual promulgation concerning grain tithes because the second clerk had been reassigned to the Compromise of the Dual Designation. Voss's entry was struck, refiled, struck again, and eventually retained as a teaching example. Voss petitioned for relief in Year 376 and was granted a formal acknowledgment that the fault lay with the roster. The roster was not amended.

The Question of Reading

Scholarly disagreement persists over whether the reading of a dual promulgation constitutes its promulgation. Third Concordance holds that reading constitutes promulgation, and separately forbade the practice of dual-floor promulgations — a prohibition that, read strictly, would render the Sanctum's own procedure invalid, since its lecterns stand on a landing between two floors and the second reading is customarily taken from the upper.

"The landing is a floor for the purposes of the rite and not a floor for the purposes of the prohibition."

— Ordinance 707, Annex 4, clause (iii)

The Curatorial Board has declined to settle the matter, noting in its Year 409 minute that the ritual has proceeded without interruption under both readings and that "a question which changes nothing is not a question the Board is obliged to answer." A minority position, associated with the College of Applied Chronology after the Promulgation of Harmonized Chronology granted it standing, holds that the two instruments are promulgated in different moments under the Promulgation Phase and merely presented together, which would make the entire ritual a matter of staging. The College has not pressed the point.

Re-ratification and the Hourly Cycle

Since the Edict of Perpetual Promulgation bound promulgations to their own repetition, dual promulgations have been re-ratified hourly. The two instruments are re-ratified in alternation, beginning with the instrument whose lectern stands nearer the door, and the order is not reversed between hours. This means that at no point in any given day are both instruments simultaneously in force, although both are simultaneously binding. The distinction is maintained in the register by a column of small marks and has never been challenged successfully.

Inventory of the Sanctum

The following articles are held in the Sanctum and are counted at each re-ratification by the door-keeper. The count is entered in the Primary Entry and any discrepancy is reported to the Curatorial Board before the third hour.

• Two lecterns, fixed, unaligned.
• One register, bound, in use since Year 288.
• Twelve seals, of which nine are current.
• One lamp-trimmer's stool, replaced Year 431.
• One copy of Ordinance 707, annotated, not authoritative.

A thirteenth seal was recorded in the inventory for Years 390 through 394 and then ceased to appear. No instrument records its removal, and the inventory clause requiring an explanation of losses was suspended in Year 395 for reasons the Board described as administrative.