Spheres

of the Arts and Works of Humankind

Three Spheres broadly encompass the collective works of humankind, each pertaining to a different realm of masteries over nature, mind, and technology.

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• First and oldest is the Biosphere, the totality of all biological life and natural systems, shaping organisms and the worlds they live upon.

• Second is the Cognisphere, of all sapience and human spirit upon which culture and society are built.

• Third is the emergent Technosphere, encompassing all that is made and advanced as tools, machines and instruments, on which humanity depends.

The Arts

Every civilization touches all three spheres to some degree. But mastery of certain Arts within each realm of disciplines within them remains firmly divided.

The Arts, those are the advanced, commanding disciplines harnessing aspects of each Sphere. Through them and only them, humankind’s greater wonders are achieved.

Mastery over any Art demands certain conditions in a civilization. Those conditions are immovable and in parts mutually exclusive. No single civilization can attain mastery over all. It is for this reason that the Twin Civilizations are divided as they are, and for this reason that certain Arts are monopolized by the Mechanist Union and Terran Empire. 

Civilizations and the Spheres

The Terran Empire cultivates Psionic Arts of the Cognisphere through the dedicated church of the Celestial Illumina. Psionics are the rarest gift of the Egregor, echoes of a distant future. They can only be heard and made manifest in the spirits of humanity thriving, endlessly manifold and yet united in one imperial culture, safeguarded against the lingering decay of entropy. Maintaining this unity is the Celestial’s highest cause and rewarded by the wonders unlocked in Psionic Providence.

The Mechanist Union pursues revelations of the Demiurge through the Arts of Technomancy. Control over the nanomachines, foundations of the Technosphere, is an ever-evolving discipline and can only be achieved by a civilization dedicated to its understanding. This is the goal of every Clade, their societies locked in one perpetual contest of growing control and understanding of astronomical machinery, their struggle an engine of progress toiling against technological stagnation.

Both Twin Civilizations have mastered certain Arts of the Biosphere, albeit of different kinds. Biological life and its studies have proven compatible with both models of their societies. In contrast, no stable power has emerged from attempts to combine and master arts of the Techno- and Cognisphere. Exceptional examples do exist, but never reached such scale so as to enter onto the galactic stage.

Interdependence

Crucially, the Terran Empire and Mechanist Union wholly depend on one another.

Humankind’s twin civilization could not persist at its present scale without the psionically bound culture following the Egregor. The Mechanist Union relies on its universal language and direction even without practicing its display and tradition in unison. Likewise, human civilization could not maintain ist current expansion without Technologies derived from revelations of the Demiurge, such as gravitics and witchspace travel. The Terran Empire relies on them, even though it does not form clades to interface with the Technosphere.

Noosphere

The Noosphere is the theoretical culmination of all human works and knowledge, a sphere transcending all known bounds of the universe, inevitable in the distant future. To the Twin Civilization, it is the domain of both Gods of Humankind: The Egregor setting all law for the cosmos, and the Demiurge harnessing all matter and energy therein.

The utmost arts known to humankind are Greater Psionics and High Technomancy, both tapping into echoes of that Noosphere in the distant future to attain unprecedented power. Ultimately both draw from the same source, but through a lense of their respective discipline, coloring what affect on the universe they achieve.