I have thought about these questions a lot. And I’ve been handling most of these problems by fudging. For instance, I don’t create any original aberrants with detailed mechanics so I don’t need to have an accurate representation of their effects. I’m avoiding making a character that’s too much in the know about it - they’ve studied it a little, but they aren’t experts. That may, or may not, help you.
But, some of these questions have an answer:
The University is clearly the only institution in Lenore that can give a license. Azalea answered that question here:
The literacy rate in Lenore is bad:
The man crossed his arms. “Potentially useful, if you can find someone who can read.”
“Gilbratha’s literacy rate is the highest in the country.”
“It’s one in five.”
Percy opened his mouth only to close it again, unable to argue with that.
Percy and the coppers are literate, as are the crown families, but, like early America, all schooling is private. Either your parents teach you to read, or you don’t learn it.
Obviously, if a thaumaturge is present for the break, they know it happened. Siobhan’s experience:
She felt all the things at once, tasted emotions, heard the ripples of space, and felt time shudder through her skin.
Thaumaturges experience the break more severely than the nonmagical. In that chapter describing Newton’s break, it was Tonya and Siobhan who ended up on the floor. I read something to this effect somewhere else in the books, but I can’t recall where. But! The Red Guard acts more like a spy organization, relying in word of mouth and alerts. This is apparent in Codename Moonsable:
“Fike kept going, looking to Thaddeus with the kind of determined, hopeful expression people often got when they needed him to fix a problem for them. “The alarms were set off in the morning, once the crowd of sycophants struggling to fit inside her house became noticeable and strange enough for one of the neighbors to call in the coppers. This form isn’t responsive to communication, but becomes frustrated and even violent if its wiles are resisted.”
I suspect they could easily have a divination, but it’s probably only something like watching for a large number of sudden deaths. You don’t know what the effect is going to be, so you can’t watch for it. There’s two kinds of divination, and the second kind resulted in the Haze War, but you seem to need to know what you’re looking for. Oliver described it this way:
A divination spell sends out many little tendrils—strings, if you will—and those strings come into contact with relevant pieces of information and return them to the caster, filtered through whatever translation and analyses method the spell is set up with. The initial number of strings stays basically the same, even if they must reach farther, and so at greater distances they take either more time or more power to gather all the data, and are less likely to be one hundred percent accurate.
Or as Liza explains the divination rays:
A divination spell that returns information about you to the caster shares one thing with any actively cast, long distance curse, compulsion, or even messaging spell. Both must find you to work.
My ward shunts aside, reflects, captures, discourages, and devours any non-mundane possibility of information leaking to magical observation.
Liza and Oliver seem reliable.
Finally, what does promulgate their effect really mean?
That’s a fascinating and open-ended question in the books so far. People keep trying to decide if the Raven Queen is an Aberrant. Lacer explains why she’s not:
Aberrants cannot cast spells. Like a magical beast, they propagate only their own inherent effect, simple or complex as it might be.
So, they speculated what the effect would be:
What would her concept be? ‘Dark miracles?’
I’ve got a theory on how Azalea writes it. She takes an idea of an effect that a spell is trying to create, and then makes it into a horror monster. Adoration? Moonsable. Calm? Newton. Fat sacrificed into a beauty glamour? Severin Whilkes
And for those Aberrants we don’t understand, the effects are not well understood by the unreliable narrators. This is an exploitable trick: Aberrants have rules, but it would probably do just as well to think in that pattern and go from there. The simpler it is, the more convinced the reader will be that you understand the rules.
A horror monster’s complex effect just becomes a lack of the narrator’s understanding. If Alien (from the movie) showed up, what would the effect be? Boundless growth? In fact, it doesn’t matter that much; you still have a monster to deal with.