Order of Oculists
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The Order of Oculists is an odd society to many of the people who know about it. Its origin lies in England.
Once upon a time a few friends decided to test the curiosity of the human race by establishing a brotherhood in order to find out how many out of pure inquisitiveness would join a society, the purpose of which was concealed to them, by pretending that there was a big secret. To that end they decided to meet and agree upon randomly chosen signs. And indeed the guild of freemasons was established. However, one of the friends
did miss out to meet the others and found later that "these masons" weren't able to recognize him although he had been a founding member. Moreover, "he was particularly unpleased by the fact that the female sex had been entirely excluded" and that the selection of brethren had been so lax. Therefore, he decided to establish the Order of Oculists and to entrust the design of freemasonry to this order. The goal was an exposure of masonic secrecy without exposing the Order of Oculists, to disperse the masonic secrets and preserve their own. A master was also instructed in the careful selection of new members and the art of reading and writing the Oculist cipher. Towards apprentices and fellow members of the Order the master was not allowed to mention the secret attention directed toward freemasonry.
As years became decades and decades became centuries, that secret attention began to wane until no one knew why it existed to begin with. Over that time, the Order of Oculists had gone from something of a watchdog against freemasonry, gathering and preserving information that
might be useful, to gathering and preserving information for its own sake. The Order grew; with its attitude toward women nearly revolutionary given the eras, women soon became proud members occupying all the ranks and stations as their male counterparts. Too, it gave them access to even more information; too many men were fools who thought women incapable of deceit, or simply incapable of understanding the intricacies of finance, or any other such nonsense. As such, women were often in positions to obtain information no one else could. Women thus rose through the ranks quite quickly for the risks they took, for the information they brought.
Information is a valuable tool; according to the Order, it's the scarcest resource and the most sought-after commodity. Yet they don't try to use their information for wealth or power. Information is gathered for its own sake, and freely given to those who know how to ask. Books written centuries previous, e-books published on Audible yesterday, and everything in the middle. The closest stereotype they've come to is of the grizzled old man surrounded by books who knows every word in them. They aren't magicians; they could no more pry secrets from those who refuse to give them up than anyone else. Still--someone who understood how pieces fit together, with a keen enough eye, sometimes could find the patterns that highlight secrets.
This is one of the worlds Abbas walks through.
DisclaimerThe Order of Oculists as detailed here is very, very loosely based on a real fraternity, one that really did form as something of a "response" to Freemasonry. They hoarded information of all kinds that was relevant to their exposing of Freemasonry. After that is where I fictionalize them, heavily altering and changing details. I do this not to mock them or their role in history, but to explore such things through the framework of story.
