01
The estate now has three tenses, and each is shaped differently on purpose
You should be able to: Place ritual/1 correctly against backlog/1 and shipped/1, and explain why symmetry between the three would break at least one of them.
backlog/1 is the future tense: an item decays and is never sealed, because intention that never happens should read as exactly that — decayed, not quietly forgotten. shipped/1 is the past tense: a sealed entry never decays, because what happened is permanent. ritual/1 is the present tense — a recurring, witnessed, consequence-bearing act, recorded in a fragment a stranger can validate offline.
These three are not the same shape wearing different labels. A backlog item that never decayed would look identical to one still being worked; a shipped entry that could decay would let the past quietly become uncertain. Trying to make all three symmetric breaks whichever one gets forced to match the others — the estate has that mistake on record for the two tenses it already had, before ritual/1 existed at all.
So ritual/1 earns its own shape: liturgies (declared practices with a cadence and a `rite` — the steps performed) and observances (individual instances of performing one), moving through a state ladder from observed to witnessed to consecrated. Nothing here decays and nothing here is simply sealed once — a practice is proven by being kept up, not by having happened one time.
Source: @flashyos/ritual — ritual/1
02
Agents observe; humans consecrate
You should be able to: State the doctrine in one sentence and explain what each half actually permits.
The doctrine is short enough to hold in your head: agents observe, humans consecrate; unwitnessed practice moves nothing; an observance carries no value and no standing; the log is append-only. Every mechanical rule in the format is downstream of that sentence.
'Agents observe' means a machine can and should be the one recording that a practice happened — a CI job refreshing a fragment daily, a scheduled task running a check. That is exactly the kind of repetitive, checkable work agents are suited to and humans should not have to do by hand every morning.
'Humans consecrate' is the other half, and it is not a formality: consecration is what turns an observed act into one that CARRIES CONSEQUENCE, and only a `person/` identity can do it — never an agent, never an org. An agent observing its own work and also consecrating it would be the same failure the rest of the estate refuses everywhere else: nobody certifying their own claim has certified anything.
03
Unwitnessed practice moves nothing
You should be able to: Explain why an observance needs a witness before it can be consecrated, and what a witness must never be.
An observance alone is not enough to matter. Before it can be consecrated it needs a WITNESS — a party, other than the performer or the performer's own principal, attesting to it with a basis a reader can check. A witness that is the performer, or the performer's own principal, is invalid outright: an organization vouching for its own practice through a different hat is not a second source, it is the same source twice.
The same logic reaches the witness's evidence itself: a witness whose `basis` is missing is invalid, and a witness whose basis is a COPY of the performer's own evidence is refused too — a citation loop is not a witness, it is the original claim repeated back at itself and mistaken for confirmation.
This is the format's version of a rule the estate holds everywhere a claim needs corroboration: a citation is a link, never a copy. Two authorities whose definition text is byte-identical are `copied`, not corroborating, and a witness whose evidence is the performer's own is exactly that mistake wearing a different name.
