The Communion by Category
The offices and orders, gathered.
The gathering by kind is the register’s quietest teaching: the dead are not all alike; and the temple refuseth to make them alike. Offices and orders, healers, scribes, martyrs, virgins, doctors of the church, are kept distinct because the Party's lists made persons interchangeable, and the interchange was the insult. Here every dead one abideth the manner of witness they were, and the kinds are not sanded into one category called persons, for that category is the filing-cabinet's, and the register is not a filing-cabinet.
The marks upon the gatherings are the register's own grammar, and they are given here that no finder be turned away by a cipher. Each gathering is named by the manner of witness its members bear, in the letters of the confidence ledger: a for the witness of history, b for the witness of record, c for the witness of tradition, d for the witness of hagiography, e for the witness of legend, l for the witness of the liturgy; and beside them, h1 nameth an holiness witnessed of the heavenly register, r1 an holiness witnessed by revelation, f1 an holiness witnessed of the founding register. A saint gathered under a/b/c/l is therefore one witnessed by history, record, tradition, and the liturgy together; and the more letters, the more manners of witness keep the name, and never the more worth — for the letters confess how the record standeth, not how the dead deserve.
A/b · A/b/c · A/b/c/d/e/l · A/b/c/d/l · A/b/c/l · A/b/c/h1/l · A/b/c/h1/r1 · A/b/c/l/e · A/b/c/l/f1 · A/b/c/l/h1 · A/b/d/l · A/b/f1/l · A/b/l · A/b/l/c · B/c/d/e/l · B/c/l · B/d/e/l · B/d/l · B/l · A/b/hag-d/l · A/b/hag-d/leg-e/l · B/c/hag-d/l