Sernic diarchy

The Sernic diarchy was a political system in eastern Ausarea originating in Serony which divided affairs into that of two spheres, the 'official' or 'formal' and the 'statal' or 'substantial'. The exact nature of the divide and the characteristics of each half have varied by period, but generally the official represented rituals, leadership, and administration, while the statal was associated with the social orders, forces, and traditions underlying and constituting the polity itself.

The original form of the diarchy from the 1st to 6th centuries CE is usually held to be introduced by the Sernic empire of Zlil, which divided the emerging urban priest-nobility of the djihs into the official 'krang' and statal 'klong' classes. The klong inherited their status with respect to their relationship with ge spirits that allowed them participation in the djih, while the krang were qualified by their ability in djih rituals and statecraft itself (though still typically produced from inherited nobility serving to provide krang). Krang roles were often assumed by the nomadic warriors from the Kataran as stranger-kings, due to the turbulent politics of late Sernic cities.

This reached a logical culmination after the conquest of Serony by a Sarapean elite in the Cremation Wars, whose imposition of darskus as the new confederations of eastern Ausarea was regarded to be an undertaking of responsibilities in the official sphere. The taimi military aristocracy lived as a separate society and did not seek to impose Arpalism on their subjects, and the representation of distinct statal groups was generally guaranteed under their rule. Such an acknowledgement was unilateral on part of statal subjects, since Arpalism and Sarapean rulers more generally had a disdain for the elaborate social divisions of what they regarded as rustic Sernic culture. Even so, they lent to evolutions of the theory itself, which now assigned fundamental metaphysical attributes to each sphere, and took its conflicted but nonetheless evident actualization under Sarapean rule to be proof of its natural validity.

During the Octarchy the high culture of tsunking and the regulations of kengli attempted to homogenize the conceptual foundations of eastern Ausarean society, but instead the outcome of long-term political struggles was a new diarchy between the Plenipotentiaries and sadan compacts. The post-Octarchic states founded by the Plenipotentiaries adopted new frameworks, but all operated upon the consent and cooperation of the compact, which was generally able to hold official rulers to account. The compact directly became the form of the state in the 14th century, and the diarchy thereon became a functional division of the types of authority exercised in each component and process of the eastern Ausarean state.

There was no shortage of theories questioning if the diarchy was necessary altogether, and as early as the 14th century many proposals were made for 'official-less' systems of government and law. Their influence greatly benefited from centralization and rationalization based on the Vasarean Edifice in the 15th century, which caused considerable anxieties about overreach. A combination of theories only recognizing practical interests and rights of a universal type of social actor, and power changing hands in the 16th-century crisis, would then produce normal law and an era usually boasted as one of thorough conceptual statelessness.