Kasikan

Kasikan (from sik, 'to splash') was a system of ritual exchange that structured many aspects of Daunic society ranging from hierarchy to economics to religion. It was based on a concept of reciprocal exchange with offerings metaphysically different according to Daunic beliefs, the balances of which would never be perfectly settled in each encounter; a small credit or debit, held to be present due to man's inability to know the exact worth of everything, grew through interest into the basis for a future exchange. A variety of goods, property, basic favours, social relationships, and a magically potent sexual orgasm were all traded as distinct categories, with a variable hierarchy of these groups determining who was creditor and debtor following the exchange.

Sex eventually became seen as the most useful currency in kasikan, and the basis for complex Daunic polities and diplomacy in the form of the Magal, which employed access to pangagom priestesses to co-opt both Daun and Hangan figures into its political system. Tribute in the form of exports to the Daunic coast granted Hangan leaders the privilege of consorting pangagoms, and the symbolic consummation of these ritual marriages entitled them to goods and favors from the Dauns. In the long run, however, the balance of trade shifted towards the Hangans, for whom the pangagoms became a token of a mere procedure, and who began to pressure the commercially embattled cities after the 9th-century BCE crisis. Within the Dauns, revolts against pangagom authority led to the promotion of promiscuity as the vehicle for social movements, and city-states more localist in outlook seeking to divorce from the Magal used orgies among the citizenry to instill a sense of internal equality, while denying in ritual terms the need to trade with Hangans. This was ended by their collapse from further internal moral breakdowns, and their conquest and destruction at the hands of Hangan invasions.

Kasikan probably inspired the djih ritual exchange system of Serony, and stripped of the peculiar Daunic cultural beliefs that dictated its choice of economic categories it influenced ritual barter and general systems of favors in yol societies of western Ausarea.