Decline of Literacy in Luminarium (Lorica)

Decline of Literacy in Luminarium
While at first literacy of High Lorican was taught so that commoners may read their holy text, after a series of attempted reformations and the crushing of various denominations of the religion, the mage-priests were able to convince the luminarates of each of their luminances, that common literacy was an evil that threatened the luminarates' rule. And so from 950 AL to 980 AL all the luminances proclaimed reading, and learning to read, illegal for anyone not of the priesthood or of the rulers' lineage. Within a few generations, none but these latter could read at all, and by then the technologies of the golden era had been mostly lost to the commoners, who lived paltry, meager lives thereafter.