 Within the sequestered papers of Alanna Celyus, renowned scholar of the imiterium during the era of the Great Crusade, there exists a rather damning tract in light of all that would follow her eventual incarceration. Within it, the scholar expounds in, it must be said, rapidly decaying coherence, that the similarities of the religions and cults encountered by the forces of the Imperium across the span of the galaxy cannot either be denied or ignored. They are, she asserted, at the conclusion of a page marked with what appears to be human viscera, proof of a unified spiritual constant within the universe. The system of belief underpinning the great span of all human civilization, possibly all civilizations, from the dawn of time, and proof yet further that there exists within the depths of the imiterium concepts to whom this power flows. The text stops short of calling these things what Celyus is clearly building to. Gods. The implication is there, plain for all who have the clearance to see such a work, as are the marginalia. Hypothesizing further that the desire to encounter such beings was the fundamental driver for all human exploration and space flight. A pilgrimage, to use the scholar's term, where the seeker, or species, would eventually unite with its patrons and achieve some form of ultimate apotheosis. This was Celyus' final work, and while her earlier magenta-level intelligence treaties had informed many of the foundational tenets of the more esoteric branches of the early imperial regime, this latest would see her condemned to remaining within a sanitarium within the depths of the imperial palace for what little remained of her much shortened life. What records remain of such facilities paint a picture grimmer than I wish to elaborate upon here, but we can presume that her life, such as it was, was at that point one of isolation and screaming. The fate is one familiar to any who have been even remotely aware of the records kept by the Holy Ordo Hereticus, or have indeed plumbed a little bit further into the past. Throughout human history, those who have delved too greedily and too deeply into the deep dark of the metaphysical world have ended their time on this terraqueous plain in all too similar a state to poor lost Mamcell Celyus. Those who have drawn back the veil in an attempt to discern the hidden clockwork of the universe were all too easily labelled deranged lunatics once their labours had borne terrible fruit and were locked away within the loneliest of asylums lest their rantings and ravings inflict similar fates upon others. It is a fate I fear I once came close to. One's last record upon that which is most arcane, even with the sterling preparations one took to ensure the containment of memetically corrosive elements, was apparently inadequate. Most of you have no doubt been curious as to the lack of production pertaining to any subsequent material in this area. Quite simply, a mind needs time to recover. No rational one can ever hope to contain even a glimpse of the true scope of unreality. Many have tried and many, so many, have utterly failed. Their essences dissolving into the churning seas of insanity as that which simply cannot be unfolds its impossible truths inside them and their very selves are sundered into a billion broken shards. The warp and the powers within are anathema in ways we cannot comprehend for they are supernatural in the truest sense of the word. They may form a universal system in that they are, it is abundantly clear, inextricably linked to our own material plane, that they are a dark mirror to it is the only definable thing we can be certain of. One, however, must endeavor to try. Provisions have been enacted to ensure a repeat of the previous incident shall not occur again and one has taken steps to ensure no form of esoteric conceptual alignment has occurred within the macro structure of ideas presented herein. What follows comes with a simple warning. The path is the same as the one troddened by countless others and has reaped a tithe of human sanity beyond anything we could possibly imagine. Now then, that this is a record of the theology damnatus, an exploration of the fundamental underpinnings of the universe, a case study of the demonic within each and every one of us. It is now understood that there exists a soul. The theological, scientific and philosophical debates about the nature of the soul are as old as our species. We have yawed violently between one polarity and another in contemplating its existence from puritanical religious fires to the cold clinical denial of atheistic beliefs. But it is known in this day and age that with our human sentience comes a quantifiably unquantifiable something that is the kernel of us. Be it energy, be it spirit, such concerns are to be frank fundamentally moot. The fact that the soul is and it's part within the fabric of creation is undeniable. Knowledge that has been bought with blood and earned with pain. Souls of humanity are reflected in the warp. Again it has been said to lights in the deep darkness of an unfathomable ocean. To draw the metaphor further, these lights attract the attentions of the predators of that ocean. The oldest and most powerful bargains of humanity have been bartered with souls. That these were debased is absolutely correct. That they were heretical, doubly so. This is but one example of a statement that you must gird yourself to be prepared to hear. That this record will be forced to acknowledge certain truths we can but wish were not the case. The trade of souls was one indulged in since our earliest days. We typically take the form of a sacrifice to draw the favor of a particular god. The sacrifices were often in the form of animals. These primitives best believed were embodying their deity or some form of their earthly aspect. But it is undeniable that humans were also the victims of these grisly devotionals. The multiferous savages believed that their divinities would reward them for such acts. That the soul, the essence of the sacrificed, would be a worthy gift or perhaps sustenance in some of the darker and more sinister cultures. It is now understood, if such a word can be used for a concept or a cane, that it was not precisely the souls of the enamelia nor the humans where the power lay. But in the worship itself. The soul was currency, the ultimate form of coinage. Belief, veneration, faith, devotion, conviction, call it what you will. That supreme expression of ideas has a profound impact upon the universe. It is, as may well be expected, ill-understood and likely impossible to understand. But faith has moved the tides of history. The things in the warp they feed upon belief. It is their foodstuff, their total nourishment. That from which they swell with grotesque power in their hideous realms. To the greater intelligences, the only true power is the sum total of souls they hold sway over. Those mortals who have pledged themselves to the darkest pantheon through pacts both cognizant and ignorant. They have, across the span of all sentient species in this galaxy, attempted to greater and lesser degrees of success to inveigle their way into systems of belief. Usurping the religious fervor of those oblivious uncountables for their own gain, honey-ing the pot with promises of boons and power to draw yet more souls under their dread patronages. These greater intelligences, the so-called gods, they are not the only entities within the imiterium, merely the greatest amongst them, the loci for essential universal aspects. Death and bloodshed, sensation and pleasure, change and evolution, decay and disease. Below, around, a part of these entities are the choirs of the lesser, but no less malevolent. Those atherotropic beings we have come to term, for the sake of the bluntest of all names, demons. The demons of the greater intelligences are sentient in the most basic sense, assessing intelligence, perception, reasoning and creativity. Some are not even beholden necessarily to one deity or another, being things of no special alignment, avatars perhaps for the base concept of the primordial annihilation. Just as the greater intelligences are fulcrums around which the clockwork of unreality turns, the lesser demons are too apart of this danse macabre, caught in the abstract whirlpools of their masters in material eddies. Alanna Acellius posited that the greater intelligences, in much the same manner as your humble servant did previously, are self-aware storms of pure psychic energy, manifesting demons from their masses as atmospheric storms do clouds and rain and lightning bolts, expressions of the greater whole, yes, but unique, all the same. A demon will act with as much agency as it is granted or able to invoke. In doing so, it acts both for its own agenda and that of its greater patron. His goals will often align, although it has been documented that such alignment is as often as not entirely beyond the ken of mortals that would choose to interact with it. Like the greater entities, they are concerned simply with souls and with worship. It is the subject of much debate amongst scholars of the arcane as to whether the aims of these entities are fundamentally malignant. Acellius did not believe so, equating their behavior to nothing more than the whims of nature and one that we could not possibly fathom, asking whether one can debate the malevolence of an earthquake. Acellius did not, of course, live to see what came after her internment. She did not, in her cell in the dungeons of Terra, witness the heresy, nor the siege, nor the scouring, nor the ten thousand years of unspeakable horror. The demonic have perpetrated with undeniable glee upon our species. If one can even begin to claim that such acts are done without a specifically wicked intent, then one is stating that the laws of the materium and immaterium itself, which these creatures are permanently bound to, is a structure so unspeakably evil by human definition as to render this debate utterly pointless. Demons, as they were in the tales of old, are by nature evil, depraved in terrible things of blackest nightmare. They are our most horrifying terrors rendered self-aware, parasitic, malignant. Some have compared the demon to a sentient idea, one's mind that forms as good a basis as any in attempting to grasp their nature. The greater intelligences are clusters of macro concepts, psychic disaster pieces inflicted upon a universe they are also a part of. The lesser entities are as much fragments of these concepts as they are shards of their ultimate power. They are the tendrils by which the dark pantheon are expressed through the veil, manifested in the materium like fingers piercing a cloth, impossible for us to see the force that directs them, but all too terribly motivated by some dreadful intent. At the dawn of the Imperium, these emanations were classified as hyper-predatory Xenos entities of unknown immaterial provenance. They are considered beyond the scientific ability of mankind to explain and quantify, but understood, broadly speaking, as one that simply awaited science to catch up. The immaterium and its dangers, as well as the threat these Xenos represented, was well known, both in terms of actual imperial policy and the deep trauma of the Age of Strife, but they were not by any means granted any semblance of the supernatural. The Imperial Truth, the emperor's atheistic philosophy designed by the master of mankind to lift humanity out of the degradation of religiosity, brooked no such thing. These warp creatures were Xenos, nothing more. The truth was a lie. The necessity of it, at least, or the intent, has been discussed elsewhere within my records to greater detail, but it can be generally assumed that the driving desire behind its implementation was to starve the denizens of the Imperium of the worship that granted them power. There's not simply enough in denying their nature specifically. The Pantheon has been clearly adept in corrupting the belief systems of sentient life were to sup upon the emotions of the material plane. No, better all belief in the supernatural be excised at its root, preventing the warp from growing fat off the ignorant prayers and beseechments of the masses that they so eagerly cultivated. Starve them, in effect, let them wither and rot within the tides of the immaterium, bleeding away their power until they are but pale reflections of the bloated corpulent psychic parasites they once were. Would that it were so simple? Anyway, I have elaborated at length upon this topic. How this pertains specifically to the demon, for the sake of clarity here, I will hear after refer to the lesser entities as emanations. As in a lot of ways they do resemble hyper-predatory Xenos creatures, but differing in crucial ways, as much of an understatement as that is. The form a minor emanation will take is subject to many factors. Lesser emanations, aligned to one of the greater intelligences, tend to follow certain baseline forms, representing what appear to be cardinal aspects redolent of the concepts their patrons embody. Those of the Lord of Blood and Battle are typically the colour of spilled vitae, clad in primitive brazen armour, for instance, while those of they who are of rot are bloated corpse things barely containing the pestilences that ravage their knot-flesh. However, even emanations beholden to the greater are not hidebound by such things. They can and will take any form that they believe, or know, will cause the most severe of horror within any mortals who behold them. One treatise speaks of an encounter with such an emanation, believed to be an aspect of the changer of the ways that took the form, the unfortunate author recounted, of a colour that was beyond description, laterally shifting to a hue that defied all comprehension entirely. Commonly, however, forms adhered to by minor emanations will be bestial in nature, or present an aspect of a cardinal, primal fear, stimulating the biological ancestral instincts within the human hindbrain to fear the horror predator. Substantial part of the fear they seek to cultivate, however, is less due to their appearance and more to the utter sense of revulsion their sheer wrongness inspires within the sentient mind. Survivors will often recount less the visual aspects of these emanations and more the descriptions of other phenomena associated with them that affect different senses, such as the stench of putrefying meat and human effluvia, the pervasive auras of threat and malice and movement that does not track well within the human visual spectrum, seemingly jarringly unnatural and jittery. The circumstances into which they emerge from the immaterium will also affect their appearance as it has been documented that they will attempt to absorb matter from around themselves in order to fashion crude weapons or further enhance their statue and menace. Their size is seemingly also dependent on the circumstance of their arrival in the materium, likely in large part related to the quantities of warp energy in their immediate vicinity at the time of their incarnation. During major incursions, emanations have been recorded as being the size of whole hab blocks swollen on a gluttonous feast of immaterial forces. Cursed discourses upon this have suggested that through means esoteric it is possible even to manipulate the form of an emanation before its incarnation although such rights are of both dubious provenance and highly suspect efficacy. It is likely that the first encounters between humanity and these entities was entirely accidental. It has only been in recent millennia that substantial numbers of human psychers have begun to emerge, leading in accordance to a significant rise in esoteric phenomena surrounding potential or actualized demonic incursions. But the psychic gene has been present within humanity since their evolutionary process began. In time's long past, it is now considered quite likely by scholars of our present age that legends and myths pertaining to arcane powers, sorcery, magical beasts are all, if not actual, accounts, at least derivatives of incidences involving psychic powers and these emanations. For example, the ancient cathartic hysteria surrounding possession and exorcism, once thought allegorical, must now be examined through the lens of a genuine effort to combat the other. Albeit just as much as the worship driven by that self-same religion's wanton historical violence and abuse must to be seen as feeding the same entities they believed they were denying. The victims of said possessions, or at least those that may have been horribly real, were likely nascent human psychers, coming into their power and in doing so attracting the attentions of predators within the warp. The more unrestrained the psycher, the more of them they are, the more turbulent the imiterium grows and the more delicious the pull of their blazing ethereal presences grow to the entities they're in. Regarding, however, those who seek a deliberate means of incarnating an emanation, the most common practice in achieving said has been through some form of ritualized communion with the entity, designed to first communicate through the skin separating reality and unreality, and laterally to pierce it, allowing the emanation its transubstantiation into the mortal plane. The image of these relics is commonly known to imperial citizens. A propaganda bans abound with pics of hooded figures dogged in viscera, chanting prayers in some dark tongue as a sacrifice, usually a fair maiden or staunch servant of his imperial majesty, is prepared. But these gaudy reels are not far from the truth of the matter, will come as a surprise maybe to some of you. The demonic are attracted to the horrific as we have established. They are terror forms, the sensation of a murderous thought made all too real, an allegory of blades and pierced flesh and wicked determination. They are stories, and in order to incarnate them, other stories must be told through vile acts and corrupt resolution. The chanted dispel, for instance, so commonly attributed as an invocation to bring forth a being from the aether. The power does not lie in the words. The slapping meat sounds of human throats do not possess some form of macro-cosmic force behind them. No, no, it is the intent. The words, spilled blood, the torn flesh, the virginal offering, the defilement of the sacred, these are the trappings of an act that focuses the intent, the belief, the emotion to summon forth something that literally feeds on all three. The ritual is the tool, it is the key. A murder does not birth a demon. A murder with a story. Humanity has ever been obsessed with the attainment of power. This, the lesser emanations know, and they are very, very adept in exploiting it. Weaving their way into the lives of humans in pleasing fictional roles that they may gain power over the soul that is the focus of their temptation. Many throughout history have sought to harness this power for their own ends. That is why traditions of ritual communion and summoning have persisted throughout time immemorial. Suppressed, prescribed, put to the flame, hunted and annihilated, though such works may have been, sooner or later a mind intent upon the acquisition of power beyond can will seek hidden truths and occluded answers. And it is to these minds the lesser entities are gleefully drawn, seeking ready prey to help them force their way into reality. Knowledge of the esoteric persisted because there are always, somewhere, people willing to sell their soul for the sake of power. Though these seekers may be successful in their communions, and even if their desire is incarnated through immaterial charges, these stories invariably end in disaster, with the emanation in question ultimately turning upon or betraying their master in highly creative fashions. Typically a deal of some sort is struck, often to the human's great boon until at a crucial moment the demon will reveal a hidden claws and trap its now hapless prey. The emanations are wicked things, and there is little more pleasing to them than the grand arc of such a tale. Just as these Faustian pacts have become commonplace in human allegory, so too have they become the bedrock around how lesser emanations reap a harvest of souls, for they love nothing more than supping upon the delicious terror of a mortal falling in that one instant helplessly under their control. One must always see these acts along a trail as part of a grand narrative that the emanation specifically desires to both create and fulfill. What can be deemed from the sequestered texts is that despite the inevitability of their downfalls, many diabolists succeeded in achieving some degree of mastery over emanations they had summoned. Such entities incarnated in this fashion were invariably weaker than those who emerged from the immaterium under their own devices. The commonality throughout the ages is that such beings are only as powerful as the amount of souls bartered to them, and herein we must loop back to our initial discussion on the currency of the soul. Such units of worth are not in simple numerical quantities. Remember, the warp predator would take a single soul over one hundred if it deems the story behind the sacrifice of the former worthier. But that being said, sacrifice through essences of such creatures. If there's enough of it, the sheer quantity becomes a greater story, such is a rotten way of things. Weaker than their self-wrought kin. Summoned emanations are typically focused on some arcane relic or item. The proverbial magic ring, for example, serving to ground them within the materium that they are so profoundly anathema to. They may, as we all too terribly know, also be implanted within a mortal host, either devouring the soul that once dwelt there as part of a sacrifice or rite, even merging with it, as we have seen with the blessed sons of the 17th Legion word-bearers and all their sundry heretical descendants. Possession has been, generally speaking, deemed a safer option for the incarnation of emanations, as it provides an easily destroyed host should the summoner desire to banish a potentially unruly charge back to the warp. Before the events of the ruined storm during the Horus heresy, it was believed that emanations had agency but were ultimately directed by their masters or some ineffable will, the higher intelligences, perhaps. The actions of the traitor legions put paid to that, and in doing so cast a span of allegorical tales from across human history into question. The Neverborn had, until the darkest hours of the heresy, been paltry things compared to what came subsequently. Even the supposed incursions wrought by untrained human psychers during the ages strife that saw entire planets dragged into the howling vortexes of the warp, they were not compared to the metaphysical conflagration unleashed by Lorgar, Aurelion. The slaughter at Couth to the butchery of the Shadow Crusade piling atop the terror of the warmaster's advance. The veil between realities wore so thin as to be rendered irreparably scant. Since those years, the ever-increasing amounts of human psychers, the constant warfare of this galaxy of ours, the resurgent tides of the dark pantheon's mortal subjects, the Kikatrix melodictum, the Noctis Eterna, all have combined so that we now exist upon a damnable precipice, perched atop an abyss of howling madness pico seconds away from devouring every soul that ever is was and will be. The demon, the lesser emanations they are now fundamentally different creatures to those spoken of in the dusty, doomed texts I have had to parse. They are the untrammeled malice of the Empyrean Maid, real. They are that is born of dealing with creatures that are not creatures. We can only think of them as such because we must frame them as something real in order to stave off their tendrils, but they are not real and yet are. Immateriality is and is not simultaneously, that which is and is not colliding in a cosmic catastrophe to give birth to sentiences of blackest malevolence. They are colors on a spectrum, ideas in your mind, thoughts suspended on the corners of your lips. They are stories and they are stories that hate us. Why even now do the Astartes go to war with blades on their hips? Because the emanations of the greater, lesser shards of a monstrous whole cannot be killed by us, metastasized clumps of self-aware meat. We can be split and torn and rent. No, no, no, no, these emanations must, they cannot be pained. They must be wounded upon a level conceptual, fought with ideas intense, even as they seek to corrupt and usurp and bleed us of our faith, our beliefs, our very selves. Why does the sword and the flame hurt them so terribly when the macro lens and the plasma annihilator barely scratch their aether stuff? They are an indelible part of a hateful universe and they claw, they claw at the fabric scratching, scratching, scratching at the veil, the tentacles questing and probing for the cracks that they may sonder forth and delude this terraqueous existence at a tide of blood and knives and fear and terror and loss and pain and feverish whispers coated in kaleidoscopic catatlysm draw in nigh the hateful divinities clad in all agony, all of it. Resist, resist the wards. The wards resist to the wards. They must hold the emperor, protect the emperor. Head on over to patreon.com slash Oculus Imperial. 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