The Fifth Department of Ravenna

The Fifth Department & Back-whispering

This online encyclopaedic entry is adapted from interpolated fragments from the entries ‘Back-whispering’, ‘Five Departments’, from the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia of SPQR2Gang (2019).

And thus, let it be decreed that the Last of the Five Departments shall be endowed with the task of greatest difficulty, that of ensuring that the Gang’s Divine Tongue does not perish and yet does not develop into corrupted babble, as all mortal tongues ancient have and modern shall; let this noble duty be conferred onto them...
– Uuzilafurz of Ravenna

The Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in Classe in Ravenna

In 1556, the Grand Oteks of seventeen districts across Western and Central Europe, together with several other faith leaders, convened in the city of Ravenna to tackle some of the greatest difficulties the Gang was facing. Thirty years before the Rebellion of Rotterdam, and a century after the Schism of Strasbourg, the Gang finally managed to resolve some of its differences in order to settle the theological and logistical issues of the time through passionate contestation.

Ultimately, the leaders signed the Declaration of Ravenna (the original now preserved in the Underground Library), the main culmination of these agreements being the formation of the Five Departments (or Councils) of Ravenna. These institutions, which still exist to this day, now incorporated into SPQR2Gang, were each entrusted with a task relating to the preservation of an important rite of the Gang.

The Councils

The First Council was given the task of maintaining peace and diplomatic relations between the various members of the Gang across nations. The Second Council, also known as the Gang of the Gang, was entrusted with the military defense of the gang from without, training those who had been made spiritual warriors in combat of the material plane. The Third Council was bestowed the honour of maintaining a standard of weights across the Gang, and is today still solely focused on their noble mission. The Fourth Council was known to locals as the Meticulous Medics, eradicators of eczema and erectile dysfunction, mighty in their maintainment of salubrity, and dispatchment of malaria, mumps and meningitis. We finally come to the Fifth Council, given, in the words of the Grand Otek Uuzilafurz of Ravenna, the hardest task, that being the maintainment of the ancient Tongue of the Gang, the divine language of the Chaan.

The Fifth Council was formed out of the already existing order of the Monks of Ee, who had returned to Europe after setting off to the Himalayas. While meeting with the Chaan, they were granted by him the ability to perfectly speak and understand the Tongue of the Gang, as opposed to the corrupted forms that were being spoken in Europe. With this knowledge, it was agreed upon and established by the Declaration of Ravenna that the Monks of Ee would now become the Fifth Council, and were entrusted with maintaining their knowledge of the language.

In order to achieve this task, the Fifth Council established a detailed lexicon and grammar of the Tongue, published in the first textbook of its kind, entitled, in bald language, The Tongue. As well as communicating the standards for the Tongue to the Gang, the Fifth Council is also renowned for its innovation in the arts. In the literary arts, the Council itself has produced several beautiful works both in vernacular languages and in the Tongue itself, and is credited with inventing the poetic technique now called ‘lyrical topology’.

Back-whispering

The practice of the art of ‘back-whispering’ is credited to the Fifth Department. The story begins in 1592, when the Prince of the Gang of Tuscany, Niccolò Frangipane, made a special request to the monks of the Fifth Department to produce a performative art which would give praise to the Chaan, and furthermore rival the arts of the musicians, jesters and storytellers. The Fifth Department, after only a single day of meditation, agreed to send over two monks, Arn-Urn and Qudaz, to give an exhibition of the divinely inspired art form they had created.

The Prince decreed that the two monks would be let in on different evenings to give each of their performances, Arn-Urn being let in first. He was brought to the bedchambers of the Prince, and began to perform. Arn-Urn, bringing his voice to a whisper, began to narrate one of the tales of the Chaan, yet not in the usual third-person manner, but rather, imitating, as if he were the Chaan himself speaking to his followers. After several minutes, as the Prince’s attention was fully fixed on the words of Arn-Urn, the monk began shifting his utterances into pure noises, descending from speech into sound. This continued for about twenty minutes. After the experience, the Prince remarked that he experienced a great prickling sensation, which he identified as his coming to be in the presence of a sacred spirit.

Arn-Urn was eventually left to go in peace; a few days later, Qudaz was summoned to the Prince’s bedchambers. His performance was of a different style: still whispered, and still a first-person account of the Chaan, however his tale was purely spoken, and did not descend into the imitation of noises. Nevertheless, Qudaz’s back-whispering still managed to summon that same sacred spirit present with Arn-Urn. The Prince, incredibly satisfied, declared that not only did their work praise the Chaan, as well as rival the other performative arts, but that the summation of those arts was less than the spiritual gift that was bestowed upon him during those evenings.

Back-whispering quickly became popular among the elites of the Gang. However, by non-Gang locals, it was not taken lightly due to its explicit contradiction of Christianity, and at times it was even seen as witchcraft. During Arn-Urn’s visit to the Prince of the Gang of Prague (his native city), a local recognized Arn-Urn, having heard of his practices, which lead to his being taken away by a mob, tried, and eventually executed for witchcraft. Before death, Arn-Urn denied being a witch, and confessed his loyalty to God, the Chaan and the Gang, which of course was the final straw for him. The differences in style between Arn-Urn and Qudaz gave rise to the two schools of back-whispering, and there is still an active debate on which style is to be preferred and when.

Traditionally, back-whispering was performed only by males, with feminine roles, particularly in the Arn-Urn style, involving cross-dressing. This was established by Arn-Urn during the middle of his practice; due to his wide vocal range and ‘natural affinity for the feminine nature’, Arn-Urn was said to be excellent at portraying women, which was likely one of the contributing factors for his eventual prosecution as a witch. In recent years some women have begun to pick up back-whispering, although the practice remains heavily male-dominated.

It is important to note that an art similar to the Arn-Urn style of back-whispering might have been practiced for larger crowds during the time of Plato, Socrates deriding the practice in the Republic:

But there is another sort of character who will narrate anything, and, the worse he is, the more unscrupulous he will be; nothing will be too bad for him: and he will be ready to imitate anything, not as a joke, but in right good earnest, and before a large company. As I was just now saying, he will attempt to represent the roll of thunder, the noise of wind and hail, or the creaking of wheels, and pulleys, and the various sounds of flutes, pipes, trumpets, and all sorts of instruments: he will bark like a dog, bleat like a sheep, or crow like a cock; his entire art will consist in imitation of voice and gesture, and there will be very little narration.

Other innovations

Other inventions of the Fifth Council include the Encyclopaedia of Unknowns, a text published in 1753, documenting the apparently geometric pattern of unknowns that had been discovered up to that point in time (those being the 81 unknowns, the 27 unknown knowns and the 9 unknown unknowns). In 2017, they installed a bike path in cooperation with the local government of Ravenna.