Imperial Cult

We are the Gods of the new World Order!

We are the Soldiers, the Legion of Light!

We are the Center, the Death of the Sun!

Fire and flame, We are One!

- One of many possible hymns of the Imperial Cult, reeking of Humanity Fuck Yeah and awesome.

In a broad sense an Imperial Cult is any religion in which a head of state is a god. Examples of civilizations with an Imperial Cult include Ancient Egypt and the Japanese Empire. On /tg/, it almost always refers specifically to the official religion of Warhammer 40,000's Imperium of Man, and basically Catholic Juche in Space.

History

It got its start from the Lectitio Divinatus, a religion spread by Lorgar, Primarch of the Word Bearers, on the worlds conquered by his Legion during the Great Crusade and further perpetuated by believers amongst the crusade fleets. The Emperor, an advocate of atheism, did not approve, and chewed Lorgar out for it, which pushed his son into the worship of Chaos instead, and setting the Horus Heresy into motion. Afterwards the Imperium still worshipped the atheist anyway. Just as planned.

After the Heresy, the Emperor was entombed in the Golden Throne and was not exactly in a condition to stop people from worshipping him, and it was soon discovered that humanity could be united by using this religion to control them.

The Imperial Creed

Though the substance of the Imperial Creed can vary from world to world as the Imperium is extremely vast, the Creed itself is deceptively simple. This makes life easier for missionaries who are attempting to bring new planets into the fold as the original superstitions of each planet might be fundamentally incompatible with a convoluted religion with too many doctrines.

Regardless of any other deviations in belief, the basic tenets are as follows:

1. Worship the God-Emperor of Mankind as the One-True-God, your Lord and Savior.
2. Humanity is perfect and are the dominant form of life in the galaxy, everything else needs to be crushed or subjugated.

So at its simplest, a world can believe whatever it likes, so long as the Emperor is God, so on some worlds he might be a god of thunder and lightning, on others he might be the judge of the dead, on others he might just be an almighty paymaster, whilst on others he might be seen as a god of destruction who must be appeased with death... essentially each planet can have it's own view of the Emperor. This makes the Imperial Cult an extremely tolerant religion when it comes to expressions of faith, which is ironically at odds with most observers opinions on what the Imperial Creed is actually about.

The Imperial Cult and the Imperium

Where people get confused is with the distinction between the Imperial Cult and the Ecclesiarchy, which are distinct from one another; just as Christianity is to to Catholicism.

The "Imperial Cult" is just a blanket term which overs a multitude of belief systems compatible with the Imperial Creed and are tolerated by the Imperium, such as the Cult of the Redemption, Cult of Pure Form, a large variety of Death Cults as well as Feral or Death world belief systems.

The Ecclesiarchy is just the "state" church where the organisation attempts to bring a level standardisation to how people worship the Emperor and make relations between worlds relatively seamless. Unfortunately even this is a difficult task as because the Imperium is so large, various sectors can still have their own variations on how the creed is interpreted, and may have different doctrines or venerate different canonised Saints.

Because of this, the issue of Heresy can occasionally come about where different factions disagree with each other on what constitutes "acceptable" worship of the Emperor, though as per the original tenets of the Creed it takes some level of deviation to truly count as abominable.

However, it can and does go a bit further than this in day to day life... as the State religion it does its best to cement itself as only acceptable way to behave. So where the Emperor is the one-true-god: His High Lords of Terra are His living agents, and His priests are the speakers of His word. Which basically translates as "Do as you are told by your superiors, or else. This generally involves: Working in horrible conditions until you die. But what if I don't want to? HERESY. *BLAM*