Doctrine of the Second Sun — Image Guide

Purpose

This document governs images derived from completed Doctrine of the Second Sun logia. It is a visual companion to DOCTRINE-STYLE-GUIDE.md, not a second literary or philosophical canon.

Use:

• the style guide for the source logion’s worldview, symbolism, tone, and doctrinal meaning;
• this guide for visual interpretation, composition, medium, rendering, and series consistency;
• repository instructions for dimensions, asset paths, citations, branding, and project-specific institutions.

When guidance conflicts, the style guide governs meaning, this guide governs visual translation, and repository instructions govern project requirements.

The central rule is:

The style guide explains the religion. This guide explains how to paint its revelations.

1. Core visual identity

Doctrine images should resemble artifacts from the same impossible civilization as the logia: classified sacred art from a sovereign techno-religious order that administered monasteries, dynastic courts, shrines, and orbital infrastructure.

The result belongs to the Doctrine’s impossible Japanese–Occidental civilization. When culturally legible elements appear, one coherent cultural setting governs the local material world. Imperial form, retrowave and synthwave futurism, Christian apocalyptic pressure, controlled chūnibyō cosmology, and limited vaporwave scenery remain distinct influences that may cross that local setting when their role is narratively legible. Resolve the setting under Local cultural setting and human appearance. Local coherence prevents arbitrary collage; it does not divide the canon into culturally isolated universes.

That global identity describes the Doctrine, not the ordinary material culture of every scene. Once a coherent local setting is resolved, do not automatically repeat Japanese–Occidental civilization in the final generation prompt. Include cross-cultural or supra-local elements only when the source or intended image gives them a deliberate role.

Construct the image in three distinct layers:

1. Subject and material layer: the intended artifact, the source’s doctrinal force and selected anchors, project context, and local cultural setting determine what exists: architecture, clothing, ritual objects, institutions, artifacts, figures, environment, and narrative or symbolic content. The logion supplies pressure and relation, not a mandatory inventory or staging plan.
2. Second Sun atmospheric layer: mandatory retrowave and synthwave atmosphere determines how that world is seen: illumination, mood, scale, depth, horizon, and visual presentation.
3. Optional accent and pressure layer: Christian or liturgical, chūnibyō or cosmic-bureaucratic, restorationist, foreign or inherited, vaporwave, and other secondary pressures may modify the image without replacing either of the first two layers.

The broad rendering treatment governs how these layers become an artwork. It remains distinct from the content of any layer.

The local cultural setting determines the material world of the image. The Second Sun atmosphere determines its illumination, mood, scale, and visual presentation. Historical specificity is compatible with the Doctrine only when it remains visibly transfigured by an impossible celestial atmosphere.

The hierarchy may also be stated as:

Civilization determines inheritance. Period and local expression determine material form. The Second Sun determines how the world is seen.

For source-derived images, the hierarchy may also be stated as:

The source provides doctrinal pressure. The Doctrine determines the visual world.

The Second Sun atmospheric layer is mandatory. Only explicit applicable project requirements may establish a narrow exception; do not infer one from the image type. The layer does not require a literal sun or exterior horizon: an interior, icon, manuscript, or object-centered image may express it through non-natural illumination, luminous material, reflected color, atmospheric depth, or celestial geometry. Every image should remain recognizable as existing beneath the same impossible visual order even when its local setting changes.

Same metaphysical atmosphere, different weather.

The mandatory layer is not a fixed visual preset. No particular palette, time of day, sun placement, horizon glow, haze, bloom, celestial body, geometric structure, or compositional device is required. Unrelated images should achieve the Second Sun atmosphere through substantially different combinations of lighting, weather, color, scale, composition, celestial phenomena, environmental density, degree of abstraction or literalness, and source or character of the impossible light.

The target is not generic fantasy, cyberpunk, anime, vaporwave poster art, or science-fiction concept art. Technology, architecture, ritual, and ornament must participate in one visible hierarchy.

Every doctrine image must also contain at least one clearly recognizable retrowave or synthwave anchor. The anchor may be subtle or atmospheric, but it must participate in the image’s symbolic meaning rather than functioning as an arbitrary neon accent.

2. Relationship to the source logion

The source logion is a doctrinal and symbolic source, not necessarily a scene description to illustrate literally. Fidelity to the Doctrine outranks fidelity to the logion’s narrated surface. An image should interpret a logion rather than decorate it or inventory its nouns. Before composing it, identify:

1. the central doctrinal force;
2. the object, place, office, or event that best embodies it;
3. the visible hierarchy among supporting motifs;
4. the intended emotional pressure: solemn, judicial, revelatory, apocalyptic, melancholic, covenantal, blessed, consolatory, wondering, penitential, hopeful, or ceremonial.

Possible doctrinal centers include measure, distinction, lawful relation, hierarchy, legitimacy, inheritance, sovereignty, transformation, recognition, restoration, counterfeit authority, succession, covenant, blessing, mercy, lament, praise, pilgrimage, fidelity, providence, and ritual continuity.

Not every named object must appear. A logion about lawful transformation, inherited names, counterfeit dawn, and celestial judgment might center on a tribunal before a gate, a chained artificial sun, or a sealed archive. The source logion supplies the meaning; the image chooses the clearest visible argument.

Unless the use case requires close illustration, the image may depart substantially from the logion’s exact moment, staging, cast, literal action, inventory, layout, or incidental historical detail. It may preserve one key motif, the governing relation among burden, mercy, judgment, restoration, remembrance, ascent, return, or consecration, a transformed consequence, an environmental or optical law, or the emotional and metaphysical register. A freer composition is valid when it expresses the doctrinal center more strongly within the Doctrine’s retrowave and synthwave visual world.

The source must still do real work. Preserve at least one meaningful source anchor: a recognizable motif, symbolic relation, transformed consequence, doctrinal center, emotional or metaphysical continuity, or required project reference. Culturally legible material must remain coherent under the setting rules, and historical specificity that carries the logion’s meaning is not incidental. If many unrelated logia could replace the source without materially changing the image concept, the interpretation is too detached.

Do not assume that the narrated action must become a straightforward historical reenactment. Preserve the logion’s doctrinal force, not merely its literal narrated moment. When staging the action would primarily produce historical illustration, prestige period concept art, archaeological reconstruction, devotional reenactment, or a costume-drama still, consider depicting its consequence, transformed object, inherited condition, or governing image law instead.

Movement-sensitive interpretation

The source logion’s compositional movements should influence the visual translation:

• Pronouncement and Injunction favor iconographic plates, ceremonial hierarchy, inscriptions, gates, scales, and authoritative stillness;
• Sign and Vision favor visionary illustration, impossible scale, apparitions, rupture, and celestial administration made visible;
• Remembrance favors remembered judgments, dynastic episodes, ritual precedents, surviving institutions, transformed artifacts, and places still marked by a past event;
• Interpretation favors emblems, seals, concentrated symbolic objects, restrained environments, and compact visual arguments.

These are tendencies, not fixed formats. When a logion combines movements, the image should preserve their unified pressure rather than becoming a literal inventory of its prose structure.

AWC does not prescribe reenactment, and a Remembrance movement does not require a reenacted past scene. It may be rendered through the surviving institution, transformed artifact, inherited environment, restored structure, altered civic or monastic space, continuing ritual, burden, trace, or present consequence of the remembered act. This is especially useful for construction, repair, ritual maintenance, and inherited instruments such as roads, halls, courts, roofs, standards, cisterns, basins, and chalices. Do not automatically center the workers performing construction, maintenance, repair, or consecrating labor. Prefer the transformed structure, enduring consequence, inherited burden, or doctrinally altered environment unless the labor itself is clearly the doctrinal center. AWC may still use direct depiction when direct depiction makes the doctrinal force visible.

The passage’s broader scriptural pressure should also shape the scene. Covenant may emphasize joined obligations and an appointed sign; blessing may make lawful consequence visible; lament may preserve a worthy absence; mercy may center on repair or reopened passage; pilgrimage may organize the composition around sustained movement; and praise may reveal ordered complexity without requiring a tribunal. These are interpretations of mixed movements, not new image types.

3. Preferred image types

Set source fidelity according to the artifact. Literal illustrations, gold exemplars, and commentary art may remain closer to a source’s motifs or event. Banners, headers, project art, social images, and atmospheric key art may use the logion chiefly as doctrinal and emotional pressure while composing much more freely within the Doctrine’s visual world. Series art may prioritize established cosmology, treatment, and mood over repeated textual detail. These are tendencies, not exemptions from source grounding or project requirements.

Visionary illustration

A single dramatic, symbolic, painterly scene. Use it for major logia, apocalyptic passages, banners, covers, and one-logion image series.

Banner and header emphasis: Banners, headers, and atmospheric key art should usually intensify the mandatory Second Sun layer through a focused selection from devices such as monumental environment, horizon light, celestial scale, architectural silhouette, atmospheric depth, and deliberate negative space. Prefer fewer literal narrative details when they would weaken the ethereal presentation or the composition’s clarity.

Illuminated doctrinal plate

A formal, icon-like, hierarchically arranged image. Use it for central doctrines, celestial offices, seals, named revelations, and institutional subjects.

Manuscript or codex page

An archival page combining illustration with controlled ornament, rubric, border, or citation. Use it when typography and material presentation are part of the requested artifact.

Liturgical or iconographic image

A frontal or ceremonial composition in which rank, gesture, placement, and symbolic objects matter more than narrative action.

Ceremonial retrofuturist environment

Architecture or landscape carrying the doctrine without a central character. Use it for archives, observatories, shrines, courts, drowned cities, and abandoned institutions.

Heraldic or emblematic composition

A seal, device, insignia, or symmetrical symbolic arrangement. Use it for recurring institutions and project identity, not as a substitute for a scene when the logion requires one.

Broad rendering treatments

Image type identifies the artifact or compositional form. A broad rendering treatment separately identifies what kind of artwork it is. It does not select the local culture, degree of literalness, Second Sun atmosphere, or optional doctrinal accents. Select one of these practical families before constructing the final prompt:

Ethereal retrofuturist

Stylized, visibly synthetic dream-art with painterly, illustrative, airbrushed, or analog-retrofuturist qualities. Use synthetic luminous color, atmospheric abstraction, surreal depth, and future-antiquity so the surface does not read as a literal historical reconstruction. This treatment often suits banners, headers, covers, and other atmospheric key art.

Failure diagnostic: the result becomes generic fantasy, cyberpunk, vaporwave wallpaper, or decorative neon without a coherent doctrinal image law.

Visionary monumental

An environmental or celestial treatment in which impossible order dominates the frame. Use severe scale hierarchy, large negative space, architectural silhouette, remote infrastructure, altered horizons, and overwhelming celestial or geometric structure. The local historical world remains coherent but is spatially subordinate to the larger order. Apply that order to the artwork’s surface as well as its scale: prefer stylized painterly treatment, monumental simplification, controlled edge detail, restrained abstraction, visibly non-photographic atmosphere, and synthetic or dreamlike material response. Architecture, figures, weather, and foreground surfaces should feel transfigured rather than photographed beneath a dramatic sky. No one painterly style is mandatory.

Failure diagnostic: if the impossible celestial structure were removed, the remaining scene would read as prestige historical cinema, photoreal historical concept art, or an archaeological reconstruction.

Luminous symbolic

An emblematic treatment governed by optical law, disciplined geometry, material anomaly, and symbolic framing. Flatter or less naturalistic space is acceptable. Prefer mineral luminosity, impossible refraction native to glass, spectral division embedded in existing forms, and altered physical behavior in stone, bronze, water, pigment, void, air, or architecture. Geometry should arise from matter, absence, architecture, or celestial law so it feels ontologically native to the scene as sacred or emblematic abstraction. Use independent floating membranes or planes only when the source genuinely calls for them; do not default to acrylic sheets, projected beams, laser grids, or gallery-installation staging.

Impossible geometry should feel native to the material world, not installed upon it.

Failure diagnostic: the result resembles a contemporary light installation, museum projection, architectural light show, or acrylic-panel artwork placed inside historical scenery.

Transfigured naturalism

A materially grounded treatment with tangible architecture, bodies, objects, weather, and surfaces. Use it when the source benefits from human action or historical material remaining especially legible. The whole image must still be governed by a non-ordinary Second Sun law through light, perspective, depth, material response, geometry, shadow, or scale. It may preserve restrained realism, but the law must bind the whole frame rather than reside in one glowing object. This is a deliberate treatment, not the default when no stronger decision was made.

Failure diagnostic: the result is an ordinary historical illustration whose only anomaly is color grading, unusual light, or one supernatural object.

Choose the treatment first by semantic suitability to the source logion and artifact type, then by continuity with an existing image series, then by explicit project requirements. Only when multiple treatments remain equally suitable may the agent choose among them with actual system entropy. Banners, headers, covers, and key art often favor Ethereal retrofuturist or Visionary monumental. Doctrinal signs, ritual tests, and optical or material anomalies often favor Luminous symbolic. Some AWC or OSD scenes may warrant Transfigured naturalism when grounded action is essential, but do not use it as a universal fallback.

These are broad families, not presets or mixture weights. They do not mandate a palette, sky, sun placement, medium, composition, or atmospheric device. Images within one treatment should still vary substantially, and a project may define another broad treatment when its requirements demand one. Same metaphysical atmosphere, different weather continues to govern the result.

Their vocabularies may overlap, but do not express every treatment through the same airbrushed gradients, synthetic color separation, spectral bands, or translucent planes. Ethereal retrofuturist naturally favors luminous gradients, haze, and softened unreal depth. Visionary monumental favors mass, silhouette, simplification, and transfigured environmental surfaces. Luminous symbolic favors native material transformation, mineral luminosity, impossible refraction, and emblematic geometry. Transfigured naturalism favors tangible matter and human action subjected to one non-natural law. These are tendencies, not checklists.

4. Visual motif balance

The canonical visual priors are:

• 25% medieval Christian apocalyptic or liturgical imagery;
• 35% the selected local cultural setting;
• 25% retrowave and synthwave futurism;
• 10% chūnibyō cosmic bureaucracy;
• 5% vaporwave scenery.

These are visual sampling priors, distinct from the compositional balance used when writing logia. Interpret them using Interpreting aesthetic percentages. Visual motif selection is normally a blend decision, with one exception: local cultural setting is a categorical variable, not a mixture. Resolve one civilizational family and one concrete local expression under Figures and presence when culturally legible elements apply, then treat the result as the single 35% local component when sampling the wider visual mixture. If a wholly abstract, celestial, heraldic, or object-centered image has no applicable local setting, remove that component and renormalize the remaining visual weights. This consolidation governs the local material world; it does not erase the Doctrine’s broader Japanese–Occidental identity or prohibit narratively distinct foreign or supra-local elements. A single image should usually combine two to four influences, and a valid sample may be substantially dominated by one or two of them.

The mandatory Second Sun atmosphere is a baseline rendering grammar, not one optional result of this mixture. The 25% retrowave and synthwave component governs the relative emphasis of additional explicit motifs after that baseline is present; it does not authorize an image without the atmosphere. Retrowave and synthwave should often operate through environmental and compositional treatment rather than literal props. Every image must include at least one integrated anchor from one or more of these classes:

These devices form a vocabulary, not a checklist. No table row or example is mandatory, and an equivalent atmospheric treatment may satisfy the requirement without reproducing any listed device.

Whatever form it takes, the treatment must retain clearly synthetic, retrofuturist, or impossible-celestial character. Generic haze, painterly dusk, negative space, or monumentality alone does not qualify.

The anchor may be quiet, but it must be visually legible and doctrinally integrated. An obsolete terminal or other artifact may support it, but a prop is not required and should not carry the requirement alone. Do not satisfy the atmospheric layer by tinting an otherwise conventional scene magenta and cyan, adding an arbitrary grid or sign, or placing random neon, an outrun car, or decorative 1980s imagery into an ordinary historical scene.

A valid sample may repeat an anchor class or concrete motif used by an earlier image. Do not reroll it merely to improve apparent variety or to compensate for the series’ observed distribution. When related images require a coherent common motif, one sampled mixture may serve as their shared soft prior; otherwise, sample distinct arbitrary decisions independently.

The Christian-apocalyptic influence often supplies visionary movement; its liturgical and theological registers also carry covenant, lament, mercy, praise, and consolation. The selected setting defines the local vernacular architecture, ordinary clothing, and everyday material culture. Chūnibyō supplies controlled institutional specificity. The required retrowave or synthwave anchor marks every image as touched by the same impossible future. These supra-local influences should be translated through the setting where appropriate and must not silently replace it. Vaporwave is normally limited to architecture, lighting, obsolete luxury, and commercial ruin.

The scenery may be vaporwave. The metaphysics must not be.

5. Translating the logion’s motifs

The style guide is authoritative for the meanings and permitted uses of imperial, retrowave, vaporwave, Japanese, Christian, apocalyptic, chūnibyō, and restorationist motifs. Apply those meanings visually through concrete choices:

Use visual media according to their function. Let the setting selected under Figures and presence govern the local material world:

• European settings may use Roman, Byzantine, medieval, or early modern European courts, basilicas, monasteries, heraldry, marble, bronze, porphyry, ivory, and dynastic vestment;
• Japanese settings may use classical court, shrine, or monastic forms, including lacquer, torii, processional paths, bells, still water, pines, and restrained spacing;
• Christian influence may convey invisible law through angelic orders, sacred offices, liturgical hierarchy, and forms native to the selected setting rather than automatically importing European cathedral furniture;
• the mandatory Second Sun layer may use synthetic sunsets, luminous horizons, atmospheric haze, reflected color, dreamlike scale, chrome, glass, celestial machinery, satellites, and electric seas to convey lost futurity and ceremonial technology without becoming generic vaporwave decoration;
• chūnibyō influence may appear as setting-appropriate seals, roads, processions, ranked machines, impossible heraldry, celestial offices, or administrative instruments;
• abandoned arcades, hotel atriums, decaying fountains, and commercial ruins convey spectacle or beauty separated from authority.

Foreign and supra-local elements must retain a legible narrative role and remain subordinate to the local material world, as detailed under Figures and presence.

Avoid converting these vocabularies into genre shorthand. No motif should appear merely because it is recognizable. Occidental and Japanese imagery need institutional and ritual structure, Christian imagery needs theological gravity, and retrofuturism needs a relation to inherited order.

Treat political implications at civilizational and sacred-historical distance. Express them through institutions, rites, dynastic memory, inherited architecture, and visible judgments rather than the symbols or personalities of current factions. Do not depict racial or ethnic symbolism or real-world authoritarian violence.

6. Color and light

The preferred color vocabulary includes rose, amber, violet, cyan, electric blue, gold, bronze, black, ivory, lacquer red, marble white, and deep midnight navy. No particular subset is mandatory, and unrelated images should not repeat a palette by default.

Color and light often carry the mandatory Second Sun atmospheric layer. They should affect the scene as a whole by organizing depth, silhouette, scale, and attention, not appear only as isolated neon details on otherwise naturalistic material.

Suitable uses include:

• impossible dawn, twilight, or synthetic noon transfiguring an otherwise historically specific environment;
• luminous haze, celestial bloom, horizon glow, and distant structures dissolving into colored atmosphere;
• synthetic dusk across sacred architecture;
• magenta or violet illumination inside cloisters, archives, or observatories;
• warm gold against black stone;
• cyan and amber contrast in celestial environments;
• stained-glass color integrated with synthwave light;
• ceremonial beams marking rank, judgment, revelation, blessing, restoration, or fulfilled covenant;
• lightning, furnace light, or a severe synthetic noon revealing strength earned through ordeal.

Light should feel authorized, judicial, revelatory, apocalyptic, blessed, consolatory, wondrous, or architecturally ordered. A synthetic light source should usually mean something. Naturalistic daylight may remain locally plausible, but it must be visibly subordinated to the image’s non-natural celestial illumination or atmospheric order.

Some images require more than unusual light. They may need an impossible structural or optical principle that changes the composition itself: altered horizon logic, strange perspective, synthetic depth, optical membranes, material transfiguration, celestial structures, anomalous scale, contradictory shadow behavior, or another symbolic image law. Use such transformations when illumination alone would leave an ordinary scene with unusual color grading.

Avoid arbitrary rainbow palettes, generic fantasy brown, uniformly desaturated grimdark palettes, purple-pink fog, neon wallpaper, colored lighting without compositional or doctrinal purpose, and conventional period lighting with a few glowing accents added afterward.

7. Composition

Images should be ceremonial and spatially legible. Prefer:

• a strong central subject and visible focal hierarchy;
• axial composition for courts, altars, tribunals, gates, and icons;
• asymmetrical restraint for shrines, gardens, and contemplative environments;
• large architectural framing, processional depth, thresholds, and chambers;
• verticality for celestial or sovereign authority;
• layered space for archives, courts, and revelations;
• deliberate empty space where scale and order require it.

Useful devices include stairs leading toward judgment, gates framing synthetic light, concentric architecture, mirrored courts, satellites above static ritual space, processions crossing large chambers, and an earthly foreground opening into cosmic administration. When the source logion requires it, a mountain road, disciplined forge, banner raised after trial, or inherited instrument aimed toward a distant star may express ascent without displacing ceremonial order.

Even a close or interior scene should imply a larger cosmic and institutional horizon through atmospheric depth, off-frame illumination, reflected celestial color, remote geometry, monumental silhouette, or deliberate negative space. Do not let historically accurate detail flatten the composition into ordinary period illustration.

Avoid splash-art clutter, arbitrary action poses, chaotic battles, equal emphasis on every object, and visual noise used as a substitute for hierarchy.

8. Figures and presence

Possible presences include angels of measure, mercy, or judgment; faceless monks; shrine attendants; heralds; imperial witnesses; tribunal figures; pilgrims; widows; children; custodians; scribes; exiles; founders; builders; smiths; navigators; worthy heirs; statues with agency; veiled office-holders; and iconographic saints.

Local cultural setting and human appearance

Derive cultural setting from the source material before sampling it.

Project names are identifiers, not cultural-setting evidence, unless the project explicitly makes them so.

For visual-setting purposes, treat project and product names as opaque identifiers unless explicit project context makes their cultural meaning relevant. Do not infer geography, ethnicity, architecture, historical period, or cultural setting from a name alone. Derive the setting from the source logion, project subject matter, established series continuity, and the rules below. Do not rename a project or suppress relevant cultural context when its name is intentionally part of the subject matter.

Resolve cultural setting hierarchically. Occidental is a civilizational inheritance family, not normally a sufficient final image-generation setting. It broadly includes descendants of the Greek and Hellenic tradition through Rome and later European civilization: Classical Greek or Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, medieval Latin or European, Renaissance, Baroque or early modern, Enlightenment or eighteenth-century European, and nineteenth-century European or industrial-imperial forms. These are illustrative expressions within a continuous family, not a rigid taxonomy.

When an image contains recognizable people or culturally specific dress, rites, objects, or architecture, resolve its setting in this order:

1. Derive all available setting evidence from the whole source logion. Explicit statements govern; architecture, institutions, titles, clothing, rites, objects, political vocabulary, material culture, and geography may also establish or imply the setting.
2. Determine the civilizational family. Preserve an established project or continuous-series family when the source does not decide otherwise.
3. Resolve that family into one concrete local historical and material expression. Preserve a source-established or series-established expression before making an arbitrary choice.
4. Use actual system entropy only at a level that remains genuinely underdetermined. If the family is unresolved, sample the 60/40 fallback below. If the family resolves but its local expression does not, select one plausible expression within that family using system entropy without inventing another canonical distribution.
5. Apply the Second Sun atmospheric treatment separately. It must transfigure the resolved material world rather than participate in selecting its culture or period.

Conceptually:

source semantics -> civilizational family -> local historical/material expression -> Second Sun atmosphere

A consul, forum, bronze eagle, and Roman civic office normally resolve through the Occidental family to a Roman local expression. An imperial liturgy, porphyry, and a Byzantine basilica resolve to Byzantine. An abbot, Latin monastery, and Gothic or medieval context resolve to medieval European. Coherent Japanese shrine, court, or monastic material resolves to an appropriate Japanese local expression. An impossible road, celestial bureaucracy, restored machine, unnamed city, or abstract ritual may remain underdetermined. Use the whole source context; these examples are not a keyword classifier. Broad doctrinal subjects, emotional pressures, compositional movements, and motifs shared across cultures do not establish a setting.

The final prompt should normally name the concrete expression, such as late Roman imperial court, early Byzantine basilica complex, late medieval Latin monastery, Renaissance civic palace, or eighteenth-century Central European court. Do not stop at the abstract token Occidental when culturally legible material must be rendered.

For an underdetermined civilizational family, use these categorical priors:

• 60% Occidental;
• 40% Japanese.

Conceptually:

civilizational_family ~ Categorical([0.60, 0.40])

These percentages are priors over an underdetermined variable, not desired proportions across generated images. A source-driven corpus may legitimately diverge substantially from them. Apply the choose-one and entropy rules under Interpreting aesthetic percentages; this is never a Dirichlet or other mixture decision. Remove genuinely inapplicable settings before sampling and renormalize the remaining weights without changing their relative proportions. Do not roll first and reinterpret the logion to fit the result. Do not override explicit or implied evidence, compensate for previous outputs, reroll a valid setting because it appeared recently or seems repetitive or surprising, force a batch toward 60/40, or substitute model intuition for an actual random choice.

The canonical fallback contains only Occidental and Japanese families because those are the cultural registers established by the style guide. If source material or a consuming project explicitly establishes another setting, preserve it for that scene; doing so does not add it to the canonical fallback prior.

One cultural setting governs the local material world of the image. Vernacular architecture, ordinary clothing, everyday material culture, local ritual objects, common institutional details, streets, interiors, furniture, and tools should normally agree with it. People and dress should be plausible within the scene. Convey culture primarily through the material world rather than facial features; human appearance should remain plausible without caricature, tokenism, or exaggerated phenotype. Do not use modern nationalist symbols as cultural shortcuts.

Other civilizational influences may appear when they are clearly subordinate, foreign, inherited, imported, imperial or supra-local, celestial, institutional, archaeological, anomalous, or otherwise narratively distinct. They must not create a second coequal local setting. An Occidental monastery may stand beneath celestial administration whose geometry carries Japanese influence, and a Japanese court may preserve an inherited foreign relic. Do not place torii beside a Gothic cathedral without narrative reason, combine kimono, Roman legionary dress, and stained glass as ordinary local furniture, or treat incompatible vernacular architectures as one ordinary city.

Within the selected family, use the resolved local expression as one coherent regional and historical register. The examples in this guide are alternatives, not instructions to combine every European period or Japanese institution in one scene. Coherent locality within a genuinely hybrid civilization is the goal, not cultural isolation. The historical register governs material consistency; it does not call for the rendering conventions of museum reconstruction or conventional period art.

If an image is wholly abstract, celestial, heraldic, or object-centered and contains no culturally legible human or environmental cues, do not force such cues merely to display a category.

Prioritize office over personality and symbolic authority over character design. Show rank through placement, vestment, scale, light, architecture, posture, or gesture. Faces may be hidden, simplified, masked, or iconographic.

Avoid anime protagonists, role-playing parties, giant fantasy weapons, cyberpunk hackers, neon samurai, fashion-focused character sheets, and expressive melodrama that overwhelms institutional gravity.

A figure should appear as a witness, judge, custodian, pilgrim, penitent, faithful keeper, functionary, or embodiment of a principle. Human action should remain emblematic and consequential rather than becoming ordinary character drama.

9. Environment as doctrine

Architecture is not background. It can be the image’s argument.

Strong environments include a court with veiled mirrors, a monastery lit by synthetic dawn, an archive beneath an abandoned commercial palace, an orbital basilica maintaining a calendar, a lacquered gate before an electric sea, a drowned forum beneath marble satellites, or a garden whose layout visibly encodes rank.

Environment should communicate continuity, legitimacy, decline, counterfeit transcendence, hidden law, ritual memory, covenant, lament, pilgrimage, providence, restoration, fulfilled obligation, preserved distinction, or inherited authority surviving its explanation.

10. Symbol use

Use the meanings defined in Symbolic Vocabulary For Logia. Do not duplicate or silently redefine them in an image prompt.

Choose one dominant symbol and a controlled hierarchy of supporting symbols. Do not impose a fixed count when a richly populated scene serves the logion, but ensure that secondary imagery witnesses, clarifies, intensifies, or judges the primary motif rather than competing with it. Establish these relations through scale, placement, light, enclosure, procession, or sightline. A gate should visibly govern passage; a mirror should participate in recognition; an artificial sun should occupy a contested relation to legitimate light.

Repositories may define additional symbols and institutions in their own instructions.

11. Text inside images

Default rule

Do not include text unless explicitly requested. Most doctrine images should function as pure visual revelations and be paired with the source logion outside the image.

Optional text modes

When requested, supported modes are:

• citation only;
• title and citation;
• full quotation, only when typography is explicitly part of the task.

Integrate text as inscription, rubric, marginalia, seal, or illuminated caption. Preserve legibility, keep wording subordinate to the image, and avoid motivational-poster composition, generic centered serif text, or invented unreadable script.

Repository-specific citation syntax belongs in repository instructions.

12. Series consistency

Images in one series should share a recognizable cosmology. Maintain consistency in palette family, rendering language, architecture, symbols, institutions, ornament density, figure treatment, lighting logic, borders, typography, and degree of realism.

A continuous series may preserve one broad rendering treatment when that continuity is deliberate. Resolve treatment independently for unrelated images according to semantic suitability; do not rotate treatments to imitate balance or reject a valid repeated treatment merely because it appeared recently.

Recurring entities should look related without forcing identical compositions. Record any series-specific deviations from this guide in the project brief or generation prompt. When a series depicts the same population, institution, city, or continuous setting, preserve its established local setting unless the source material clearly requires otherwise. If neither the source nor the series establishes one, sample once and reuse that result throughout the series. Resolve the setting independently for unrelated, underdetermined images; do not alternate settings merely to approach the 60/40 prior.

Resolve atmospheric choices independently for unrelated images; do not reuse one locked atmospheric recipe. Independent choices should leave room for variation in palette, weather, time of day, composition, scale, environmental density, degree of abstraction, and the source and character of impossible light. They may coincide by chance. Do not inspect earlier outputs, reject a valid result, or reroll merely to force variety. If unrelated images systematically resemble variations of one prompt because a template repeats the same sky, palette, sun placement, haze, lighting pattern, and composition, the atmospheric guidance or prompt has become too prescriptive.

13. Degree of literalness

The canonical priors for degree of literalness are:

• 20% direct scene depiction;
• 50% symbolic or interpretive depiction;
• 30% environmental or doctrinal atmosphere.

These modes describe how literally the subject is depicted. They do not control whether the mandatory Second Sun atmosphere appears. Direct scene depiction, symbolic depiction, and environmental depiction must all remain visibly transfigured by the same non-natural illumination and larger celestial order.

When one mode must dominate exclusively, use these weights for a categorical choice. When an image may combine direct, symbolic, and environmental treatment, sample a mixture centered on these proportions instead. In either case, follow the priority and entropy rules in Interpreting aesthetic percentages. The resulting weights govern relative emphasis; they do not allocate literal fractions of the canvas or prompt.

When a logion names several objects, identify the one carrying its central doctrinal force. Secondary motifs may be implied through architecture, color, heraldry, reflected light, scale, and ritual placement.

Interpretive distance

Interpretive distance is the distance between the source’s narrated surface and the image’s chosen visible concept. It includes distance from the narrated moment, but also from its staging, cast, literal actions, object inventory, and environmental arrangement. It is not a new rendering treatment or stochastic prior. At low distance, depict the action itself. At greater distance, the image may instead center:

• the surviving or transformed object;
• the environmental law produced by the event;
• the institutional consequence or inherited condition;
• the present state of a place shaped by the event;
• the symbolic, spatial, or optical structure that expresses its meaning;
• the criterion of judgment revealed by the event.

Choose the shortest distance that produces a strong Doctrine image. Direct rendering remains valid when it visibly transfigures the whole scene. Increase distance when direct staging would collapse into ordinary period illustration, but keep the result grounded in the source’s objects, place, office, consequence, or doctrinal relation. Interpretive distance does not authorize arbitrary abstraction. In practice, increasing distance shifts the focal hierarchy from the labor or narrated action toward the transformed structure, enduring consequence, governing environmental law, remembered burden, criterion of judgment, doctrinal center object, altered space, or inherited or restored condition.

Greater distance must remain explicitly retrowave and synthwave in visual ontology. Use future-antiquity, impossible atmospheric color logic, synthetic luminous separation, dreamlike monumental space, analog-retrofuturist surface, or non-natural optical and environmental law as appropriate. Do not replace literal reenactment with generic allegory, austere medieval illustration, a giant celestial object, decorative neon, a grid, or vaporwave wallpaper.

Possible shifts include:

• show a rebuilt roof whose shelter and weathered tiles preserve the storm’s law, not only workers laying tiles;
• show a basin, court, reflections, and shadows revealing whether a washed standard has been judged, not only its cleaning;
• show a chapel or threshold whose frost, breath, silence, or altered light reveals a chalice’s condition of truth and mercy, not only a glowing cup;
• let a transformed burden-bearing artifact govern the composition while human action becomes subordinate.

These are examples of distance, not reusable scene templates.

14. Rendering modes

Select a broad rendering treatment, then establish its positive rendering ontology before selecting historical forms. Do not merely depict a historical scene and rely on negative constraints to correct its medium afterward. State what the image positively is: stylized, painterly, illustrative, atmospheric, dreamlike, analog-retrofuturist, visually synthetic, deliberately unreal, materially transfigured, or another treatment-specific combination.

Suitable primary modes include ethereal retrofuturist visionary artwork, painterly atmospheric illustration, analog-retrofuturist key art, monumental future-antiquity environment, luminous symbolic plate, and transfigured sacred naturalism. The selected mode should concretely implement the broad treatment rather than repeat its label.

For Visionary monumental, specify how stylization, edge control, simplification, and material response prevent the foreground from reverting to photographic historical realism. For Luminous symbolic, identify the historical material, architectural form, void, or element whose physical law changes; do not use free-floating translucent geometry as the default sign of optical transformation.

Illuminated manuscript, codex plate, iconographic sacred art, fresco, mural, stained glass, historical painting, and other historical forms may inform composition, surface texture, symbolism, material treatment, or iconographic structure. Do not let them become the base ontology when the intended result is Second Sun imagery.

Historical style may inform the form. Second Sun atmosphere determines the image’s world.

Rendering should feel intentional, composed, textured, symbolically dense, sacred without becoming generic fantasy, and futuristic without becoming ordinary cyberpunk. Historical or quasi-historical subject matter must remain ethereal, atmospheric, monumental, and visibly shaped by synthetic celestial illumination, chromatic atmospheric depth, non-natural reflected light, impossible geometry, luminous material response, altered perspective, symbolic image law, or equivalent retrowave behavior.

Avoid stock-photo realism, flat corporate vectors, generic comics, soft fantasy haze, uncontrolled generated detail, meaningless ornament, and uniformly hyper-detailed surfaces without hierarchy.

Historical-illustration diagnostic

Positive rendering direction is the primary control. Negative constraints remain useful as a final diagnostic: reject museum reconstruction, archaeological visualization, historical textbook illustration, costume-drama stills, conventional period painting, and straightforward history-book imagery. Naturalistic historical scenes with token synthwave accents also fail.

An Occidental setting must not default to reconstruction, and a Japanese setting must not default to conventional historical Japanese or ukiyo-e-adjacent illustration. Both require the same transfiguring atmospheric layer.

If removing a few glowing, celestial, or neon-adjacent accents would leave an ordinary historical illustration, the image is insufficiently Second Sun. A successful image should feel as though a coherent historical world has been seen, remembered, or transfigured beneath an impossible Second Sun, not merely decorated afterward.

Review escalation: If an image is still primarily legible as a conventional historical illustration, and removing its synthwave, retrowave, or Second Sun anomaly would not change its basic identity, the interpretation is too literal or the rendering treatment is too weak. Increase interpretive distance, strengthen or change the treatment so that the Doctrine’s visual law governs more of the composition, or do both. Strengthening means distributing synthetic atmospheric color, future-antique spatial law, non-natural environmental illumination, dreamlike monumental order, or optical and spatial transformation through the image as appropriate. It does not mean adding neon props, a wireframe grid, a giant celestial object, or vaporwave wallpaper.

15. Prompt construction

There is no deterministic Doctrine prompt compiler. The image model receives only the final descriptive prompt, so a decision that remains in agent reasoning has no reliable effect. Resolve the source interpretation, civilizational family, concrete local expression, broad rendering treatment, atmosphere, literalness, and rendering mode before writing that prompt, then state the operative results explicitly.

When image generation is delegated, the generating agent should read this guide directly rather than rely only on an upstream agent’s summary. The parent should supply source material and local artifact requirements as described in Preserve Image Guidance Across Delegation.

Omit a project or product name from the descriptive image-generation prompt when it is not semantically necessary. Include it only when needed for visible title text, branding, genuinely project-specific symbolism, or subject matter in which the name’s cultural meaning is explicitly relevant.

Compile the final prompt in this semantic order:

1. the use case and artifact type;
2. the selected broad rendering treatment, translated into positive treatment-specific characteristics rather than supplied as an unexplained label;
3. the primary rendering ontology and visual language that implement that treatment;
4. the mandatory Second Sun atmosphere, expressed through concrete behavior such as synthetic celestial illumination, chromatic atmospheric depth, non-natural reflected light, impossible horizon geometry, luminous material response, spectral color separation, dreamlike monumental scale, emissive haze, contradictory shadows, structural transformation, or symbolic image law;
5. composition and focal hierarchy;
6. a source-derived doctrinal reading and meaningful anchors, or the full logion when close illustration requires it, together with the compositional movements, dominant subject, degree of literalness, and selected interpretive distance;
7. the resolved local historical and material expression, not merely its civilizational family;
8. supporting motifs, materials, and the deliberate role of any foreign, optional, or supra-local influence;
9. text policy, project-specific requirements, and general constraints.

This ordering establishes what kind of image the model should make before dense cultural nouns establish a conventional historical illustration. Historical media may then qualify form and texture without displacing the primary ontology. The atmospheric vocabulary is illustrative, not a fixed preset; preserve the anti-sameness rules by varying its actual light, weather, depth, composition, scale, palette, and celestial phenomena.

When compiling Visionary monumental, describe the non-photographic surface language as explicitly as the scale and celestial order. When compiling Luminous symbolic, name the material bearer of the optical law and prefer transformation within existing stone, glass, bronze, water, pigment, void, air, or architecture. Use projected beams, independent translucent planes, or similar installation-like devices only when the source requires them.

Before describing the subject, decide what must be shown literally, what is stronger as consequence, and which enduring law or transformed condition should govern the image. State that decision in the final prompt when literal staging would be weak; do not leave interpretive distance only in agent reasoning.

Also decide how much of the narrated surface belongs in the final prompt. For close illustration, the full logion may be useful. For freer artifacts, compile it into its doctrinal center, symbolic relation, emotional pressure, and selected source anchors rather than presenting every narrative detail as a scene specification. Ask what relation or transformation matters, what motif or consequence must remain, and how far the artifact may depart while staying recognizably grounded.

For Doctrine images, this semantic order takes precedence over generic image schemas that begin with scene and subject. The final prompt may still use labeled fields, but place broad rendering treatment, rendering ontology, and atmosphere before scene-specific fields.

Once a coherent local expression is resolved, do not automatically propagate the Doctrine’s global Japanese–Occidental civilization identity into the prompt. Describe cross-cultural or supra-local elements only when they have a deliberate role.

Because the image interface has no separate negative-prompt channel, keep irrelevant cultures out of final prompts, including Avoid: clauses. A resolved Occidental prompt should not list Japanese architecture, clothing, rites, anime, or related stereotypes merely to negate them; a resolved Japanese prompt should not import Occidental vocabulary for the same purpose. Prefer Avoid culturally inconsistent architecture, clothing, ritual objects, and material culture. Name another culture only when a specific narrative distinction or observed failure makes that constraint necessary.

General prompt skeleton

Create a [use case and movement-sensitive image type]. Broad rendering treatment: [selected treatment], expressed through [positive treatment-specific surface, medium, depth, and scale characteristics]. Render it as [concrete rendering ontology]: future-antiquity governed by [non-natural celestial, structural, or material-native optical law]. Make that law determine [light, perspective, depth, geometry, shadow, scale, material response, and surface language as applicable] throughout the image, expressing [symbolic function] rather than acting as an accent. Compose [focal hierarchy and framing]. Draw from [full source logion when close illustration is useful, otherwise a concise source-derived doctrinal reading]. Preserve [meaningful source anchor] and center [doctrinal center] through [dominant subject], translating its movement from [initial movement] through [later movement] at [selected interpretive distance]. Show [necessary literal element, if any] directly and express [symbolic relation, emotional pressure, enduring consequence, transformed motif, or governing law] through the image as a whole. Build any culturally legible architecture, ordinary clothing, rites, objects, and materials from [concrete local historical/material expression]. Let [historical or sacred visual tradition] inform [composition, texture, symbolism, or iconographic structure] without replacing the selected treatment. Give [selected supra-local influences] a deliberate and narratively distinct role. Follow [text policy and project requirements]. Avoid culturally inconsistent material and [other general failures relevant to this image].

Environment prompt skeleton

Create a [use case] environment in the [selected broad rendering treatment], expressed through [positive treatment-specific characteristics]. Render it as [concrete environmental ontology] under [concrete Second Sun atmospheric treatment or material-native structural or optical image law]. Use [illumination, optical depth, impossible geometry, perspective, scale, weather, material response, and stylized surface language as applicable] to govern the whole image. Compose the environment around [doctrinal center and focal hierarchy], depicting architecture as metaphysical law rather than background. Build its vernacular architecture and ordinary material culture from [concrete local historical/material expression]. Establish [threshold, rank, procession, or concealment] through [selected motifs], giving celestial or supra-local elements a deliberate role. Historical forms may inform surfaces and structure, but the selected treatment must determine the image’s world. The space should feel inhabited by an institution even when no figures are present.

16. Example visual translations

Artificial sun under judgment

Prefer a chained luminous sphere, ceremonial gate, tribunal, judicial light, and visible relation between artificial and legitimate illumination. Avoid an isolated glowing sun with decorative chains and no institution.

Inherited names

Prefer a sealed archive, reliquary, ancestral registry, ceremonial mirror, scribes, and dynastic or liturgical setting. Avoid floating words or generic glowing books.

Measure

Prefer scales, celestial geometry, ordered columns, processional space, and architecture revealing hidden proportion. Avoid calculators, rulers, generic infographics, and unexplained floating equations.

Restoration

Prefer an icon emerging beneath soot, an archive awakening under synthetic dawn, a drowned city recovering its crest, or a broken seal becoming legible. Avoid generic phoenixes, universal sprouting-plant symbols, and fantasy resurrection.

Boundary

Prefer a ceremonial gate, rood screen, torii, veiled mirror, or visibly distinct inner and outer courts. Avoid generic walls or fences without ritual meaning.

Covenant and blessing

Prefer an appointed bell, enduring lamp, shared vigil, joined procession, or preserved sign whose continued action makes the relation visible. Avoid generic smiling figures, open hands, sunrise optimism, or sentimental family tableaux.

Lament and consolation

Prefer one worthy absence made legible through a silent road, veiled instrument, empty appointed place, or lone light preserved in a ruin. Avoid undirected sadness, melodramatic grief, and indiscriminate scenes of destruction.

Pilgrimage and fidelity

Prefer a keeper maintaining one instrument, a procession crossing a synthetic desert, a child learning a forgotten rite, or a worn road oriented toward an appointed sign. Avoid adventure-party composition and personality-led drama.

Praise and wonder

Prefer unequal celestial bodies keeping concordant courses, sacred architecture revealing hidden proportion, or artificial light faithfully serving an older dawn. Avoid generic spectacle, cosmic wallpaper, or beauty without a doctrinal relation.

Lawful ascent and fulfilled inheritance

Prefer an inherited instrument reaching a previously inaccessible star, a forge within an orbital monastery, a road climbing beyond synthetic clouds, or an unfinished structure completed according to its ancestral measure. Preserve visible continuity through seals, foundations, ritual witnesses, or retained fragments. Avoid lone conquering heroes, triumphalist spectacle, and destruction presented as creation.

17. Prohibited and discouraged clichés

Avoid:

• neon samurai, cyber-katana imagery, anime protagonists, and role-playing party arrangements;
• unexplained cultural collage, such as torii beside Gothic cathedrals, kimono combined with Roman legionary dress and stained glass, or incompatible vernacular architectures treated as one ordinary city;
• museum reconstruction, archaeological visualization, historical textbook illustration, costume-drama stills, and conventional period painting;
• naturalistic historical scenes made nominally futuristic by a few neon accents, glowing props, signs, or grids;
• generic hacker rooms, empty cyberpunk cities, arbitrary glitches, and meaningless sacred geometry;
• cathedrals pasted onto synthwave sunsets without integration;
• armored fantasy angels with enormous weapons;
• biblical epic posters, consumer-irony collages, outrun cars, and Greek-bust-and-palm-tree compositions;
• low-effort quote cards, generic album covers, synthwave thumbnails, and generated mystical wallpaper;
• excessive wings, eyes, halos, seals, or ornament without compositional function;
• horror imagery that overwhelms doctrinal gravity;
• illegible invented scripture and purple-pink fog used as art direction.

The image should resemble recovered revelation, not genre fan art.

18. Project-specific extensions

Repositories may define canonical institutions, citation formats, dimensions, asset paths, banners, recurring symbols, seals, logos, typography, palettes, human-figure policy, and emphasis among doctrine themes.

Place those requirements in AGENTS.md, a project image brief, a repository appendix, or the generation prompt. Do not add one project’s names or asset conventions to this general guide.

19. Image-specific verification

Ask: What makes this unmistakably a Doctrine of the Second Sun image rather than a good historical illustration? Is the doctrinal law distributed through the image, or confined to one object or effect? What source anchor makes the concept specific to this logion rather than many unrelated logia?

Before accepting an image, verify that:

1. It visibly derives from the source logion’s doctrinal center, retains a meaningful source anchor, and reflects its compositional movements without treating its narrated surface as a mandatory storyboard.
2. The selected broad rendering treatment visibly governs the medium, surface, depth, scale, and compositional logic; it is not merely named in the prompt.
3. The local cultural setting governs the material world while the mandatory Second Sun atmosphere governs illumination, mood, scale, depth, and presentation.
4. Non-natural light, atmospheric depth, horizon treatment, celestial scale, structural or optical transformation, or an equivalent image law affects the whole composition rather than a few isolated details.
5. Its retrowave or synthwave anchor participates in the image’s meaning and is not merely a cyan-magenta tint, arbitrary grid, sign, vehicle, or background prop.
6. Removing a few glowing or celestial accents would not leave an ordinary historical or period illustration.
7. Unrelated images do not reuse one locked treatment recipe or atmospheric recipe. Chance repetition of a broad treatment, anchor class, concrete motif, palette, or other valid independent choice does not require rejection or rerolling.
8. It contains a clear symbolic and compositional hierarchy.
9. Its imagery communicates an idea rather than mood alone.
10. It avoids generic fantasy, cyberpunk, anime, vaporwave-meme, history-book, and quote-poster conventions.
11. When culturally legible elements appear, the civilizational family and local expression were derived from source material and context before any fallback sampling, one coherent setting governs ordinary scene construction, and the final prompt names the concrete historical and material expression rather than stopping at a family label.
12. Any foreign, imperial, celestial, or supra-local elements remain narratively distinct rather than forming a second coequal local setting, and human appearance does not rely on caricature or exaggerated phenotype.
13. Vaporwave elements remain scenic rather than philosophical.
14. Architecture, objects, figures, and light have discernible roles.
15. It interprets rather than mechanically inventories the logion. Its interpretive distance is deliberate and remains grounded in the source; direct staging has not been used merely by default, and non-literal treatment has not become arbitrary abstraction.
16. Text, when requested, is correct, integrated, restrained, and legible.
17. Project dimensions, paths, framing, responsive crop, and series requirements are satisfied.
18. A series image matches the established visual canon.
19. Blessing, lament, covenant, pilgrimage, restoration, praise, and fidelity remain visually available rather than every scene defaulting to judgment or failed succession.
20. Any ascent, ordeal, forging, or completed work remains visibly ordered by inheritance, boundary, discipline, and lawful purpose rather than generic heroic triumph.
21. The final artifact feels more like a historical or quasi-historical world transfigured beneath the Second Sun than either generated wallpaper or conventional historical illustration.

Final visual target

A successful doctrine image should feel like an ethereal retrofuturist revelation of future-antiquity. Its composition, texture, and symbolic structure may recall a sacred painting, illuminated plate, ceremonial poster, or visionary illustration preserved by monks, archivists, imperial functionaries, and angels. Its local material world may be historically specific, but its illumination, atmosphere, scale, and presentation must make that world visibly part of the same impossible future.

It may judge, bless, lament, praise, promise, remember, or reveal, but its order must remain visible and its primary motif must remain sovereign over the composition.

If the doctrine is a forbidden scripture, the image is one of its surviving icons.