Editing Degenesis (section)

==Cults==
===Spitalians===
The Spital was a crisis center set up in the Ruhr region of Germany before the Eshaton. Fortified enough to survive the apocalypse, it was originally intended to treat victims of the HIV-E disease that had swept through Europe, up from Africa. Doctors treated patients and UEO (basically renamed EU) soldiers prevented riots from breaking out. When the meteorites fell, both groups barricaded the Spital and held out against the tide of refugees. Since they opened their doors a decade after Eshaton, they refused to ever again turn their backs on humanity.

Part paramilitary and part public health service, they became the Spitalians. Their methods aren't necessarily humane; they herd the sick like cattle into quarantine districts, they hid themselves behind impersonal gas masks and thick black and white membranes that protected them from contamination and they put down the unruly and the combative without mercy. They provide healthcare to any that require it but only in the most pragmatic, insensitive way possible.

It wasn't long before they discovered the Primer, Sepsis and the Psychonauts. They studied the phenomena, categorized it, devised plans against it and saw it as a disease that threatened all humanity. And so, they took action against it and became the greatest defender against the Primer that exists in the known world. They came up with methods of detecting those infected with Sepsis, methods of disinfecting and burning out its spore fields, methods of restraining and studying Psychonauts in relative safety.

They make up the third portion of the triumvirate that runs the Protectorate. The Chroniclers provide the technology and the wealth, the Judges provide the law and the enforcement of it and the Spitalians provide the healthcare and the Psychonaut expertise, while the Clans that they rule over feed the cults in exchange for the service that they provide.

===Judges===
The Judges started with a single man called, as you might expect, the Judge. Before his arrival, Europe was a mess, filled with criminals that did what they want and took what they want. The Judge changed that. He was first seen when he caught a Clanner that was responsible for raiding a village and took him back to his victims. In front of them, he recited the raider's crimes, borrowed a sledgehammer because the village had no axe to offer him and smashed the raider's head wide open.

He offered to return the sledgehammer but for some reason, the villagers didn't want it back.

He went from village to village, enforcing law and order where there was previously none. He drew enemies but he also drew those that sought to emulate him, wielding sledgehammers and donning his signature cowhide coat and broad-rimmed hat. It quickly became a cult of personality, with so many Judges dotting the land that the passing of the very first Judge went unnoticed.

After being given the travel log of the founder by a Chronicler, the Judges gathered and made senses of his writings together, piecing together some basic system of justice and law that would come to be known as the Codex, creating a code for all Judges to operate according to. The Chroniclers even offered the Judges a home to call their own, in the ruins that surrounded their Central Cluster, as an effort to ward away gangs and raiders.

The Judges took this idea and ran away with it. These ruins quickly became a town, which became a city, which became the hub of all civilization in Europe: Justitian, the heart of the Protectorate. In less than a century and with the aid of the Chroniclers, the Judges had successfully created the first nation-state in Europe since the apocalypse.

In short, a man in a funny coat and a silly hat who used a sledgehammer to execute a man because he had nothing else at hand was accidentally responsible for building the first post-apocalyptic nation-state in Europe.

===Chroniclers===
Before the Eshaton, all media had unified into a single entity known as the Stream. Imagine that the internet had successfully swallowed up television, cinema, books, gaming and every other form of media and that's exactly what the Stream is, a global network of information that has merged with every aspect of civilized life. The hardcore nerds of the day who lived and breathed the Stream, who couldn't stand the idea of a world without it, were the Streamers. They innovated, collaborated and developed increasingly exciting ways of exploring the Stream.

Then the Eshaton came and the Stream crashed.

Many of the Streamers that survived across the world remained attached to the Stream despite the apocalypse. They had no stronger desire than to return to the days of the Stream, to reactivate it and have access to the sum of human knowledge once more. To begin with, their efforts were primitive. They hoarded all sorts of data storage devices, the sort of things that were useless without a real infrastructure. Many of them died alone among their piles of useless scrap, having never realized their dream of a reborn Stream. In Borca however, there were enough surviving Streamers that they were able to gather, pool their resources and construct a server hub and the infrastructure to power it. This became known as the Central Cluster, the place where the Stream was reborn.

But this rebooted Stream is a stunted, stillborn thing. Information that wasn't corrupted was locked away behind impassable security measures. The new goal of the Streamers was to acquire the means to unlock the full potential of this static Stream. One of their greatest finds in the pursuit of this goal was a computer museum near Cologne Cathedral, where they found a treasure trove, another extension of the Stream. They spent years sifting through the data, compiling it and learning from it.

Then the Anabaptists came. They saw Cologne Cathedral as a holy place, a fount from which one of the four rivers must surely spring. So they sent in their orgiastics, butchered the strange technology-worshiping heretics and smashed their evil machines, foul relics of the Bygone world responsible for corruption of man. The Streamers scurried back to the Central Cluster, easily defeated. After all, they were just a collection of tech-obsessed looters, they weren't fighters. To survive in the post-Eshaton world, they would need to find a way to defend themselves.

In the end, they decided that the best defense and offense was intimidation, not force. The Streamers donned inhuman masks with voice modulators that made them look and sound like strange machine-gods. When intimidation fails, these voice modulators even function as nonlethal weaponry, capable of magnifying the Streamer's voice and transforming it into a thunderous blast. In addition to this, the Streamers also developed a currency known as drafts, the first that had been seen in Europe since the Eshaton. The Streamers, who had re-imagined themselves as 'Chroniclers,' gradually manipulated cults and clans alike into becoming dependent on drafts, even in regions where the Chroniclers have no presence. They engineered Europe's economy and they had total control over it, up until this very day.

So that's what the Chroniclers are today. Mysterious masked men clothed in drab robes, with voices like thunder and a lust for technology that will allow them to rekindle the glory of the Bygone world, armed with their voice modulators and a steely grip on Europe's economy. If you deliver functional Stream technology to the Central Cluster, you will be made rich beyond your wildest dreams, but they still pay good drafts for even the simplest things, such as scrap metal and plastic.

===Scrappers===
The Chroniclers can be thought of as the first salvage collectors, but they were driven by their ideology and their love of the Stream. When the Chroniclers turned their back on the idea of doing dirty work and rewarded anyone that brought them the remnants of the old world with handfuls of drafts, they invented a whole new profession; the scrapper. The scrapper's dream is that they will find an intact piece of rare Bygone technology that will make them richer than their wildest dreams. The reality is that they usually just end up with sleighs filled with copper wiring, waste plastic and corrugated iron.

Still, the hope of a big find is enough to keep most scrappers digging through the rubble of ruined cities. These scavengers live lonely, solitary lives, as the acquisition of salvage is a rather competitive business. Still, they communicate with one another and help each other in their own way. They communicate with each other through basic symbols carved into walls of dilapidated buildings, to declare they've already been looted and that there's nothing left to be found. They have other symbols as well, for different sorts of danger, for the locations of watering holes and good foraging sites and other such things. Almost always, these runes are accompanied by the signature of the scrapper that carved them. Most of these looters never encounter each other but through this system of runes, they look out for each other and engage in competition with each other. Conversations, rivalries and even friendships can be formed this way.

The closest thing to a unified group of European scrappers is the Cartel, a 'union' led by a rather shrewd dwarf called Bosch in Western Borca. Part thugs and part appraisers, they 'offer' to negotiate the sales of finds on the behalf of scrappers, in exchange for a cut of the find's value. If a scrapper refuses, they often end up with broken ribs and worse, have their finds confiscated.

On the other hand, African scrappers do not associated with the Chroniclers, do not lead isolated lives and do not have to worry about the Cartel's influence. Instead, they work for the Neolibyans and venture into Europe in bands. They work in unison, dismantling ruins and collecting salvage far faster than any European loner could hope to. More importantly, they keep each other sane and productive; it's easy for an African to lose sight of their purpose so far away from their home and their culture, in the heart of a foreign land.

While the Chroniclers use scrappers to gather technology that will help them rebuild the Stream, the Neolibyans are much less ambitious and far more pragmatic when it comes to their intentions. Even before the Eshaton, Africa's infrastructure was woeful, even on the Northern coast. After it, it was abysmal. Yet they possessed a sense of unity that the Europeans lacked and so they streamed across the Mediterranean, looting the ruins of Franka, Purgare and Hybrispania before the Europeans were ever able to really get their claws in them. Through Bygone technology stolen from Europe, they have created an empire for themselves that spans the Northern coast of Africa, complete with an impressive infrastructure to support it. By looting more still from the corpse of Europe, they are able to expand even further.

Consider the European and African scrappers polar opposites. One does it for wealth, the other does it for the prosperity for their nature. One operates alone, the other goes in packs. The only thing that unites the two groups is that they're after the same thing, the Bygone tech hidden in ruins that were abandoned after the Eshaton. Each scrapper has their own technique. Some just haul back mountains of scrap, others use a little ingenuity to bash it all together into something that their employers might find more valuable. In the end, they're all in it for the big find.

===Jehammedans===
Jehammed was a man that lived in the Bygone Era, the years before the end of the world. He declared himself a prophet and preached that there was an apocalypse coming, that the land would be purged of the faithless and left to be reclaimed by the faithful, to be prepared for the return and the forgiveness of God. This prophet had close connections with one Gerome Getrell, the founder of the Recombination Group, a pharmaceutical corporation that had (among other things) weaponized memetics. This fact may or may not be linked to Jehammed's success as a preacher.

Then the apocalypse came and went. The surviving Jehammedans flourished thanks to the teachings of their prophet. They operated like one gigantic, extended family with strict roles for each family member, living simple lives as shepherds and fighting off outsiders, who are referred to as the 'fisherman' in Jehammed's parables.

They expanded until they met the Anabaptists. Although both cults shared similar faiths and idolize simple living, they immediate foes and clashed, turning rivers red with each others' blood as they fought over the Adriatic basin. The Anabaptists were winning, before a mysterious figure showed up, a man that wore a goat's skull who called himself Aries. Now the Anabaptists occupy the West, while the Jehammedans occupy the East, each waiting for the chance to restart the war.

But Jehammedans people have started to worship Aries rather than God. Those that devote themselves from his depart from their clans to join Aries on the isle of Crete, where they declare themselves Arianoi, the savage servants of their goat god. The cult is split between these two factions, humble and traditional Jehammedans and these goat-worshiping Arianoi heretics.

The family system of Jehammedans is what defines them and it is quite Convoluted.

This system revolves around the Ismaeli. Most men are born as Ismaeli and act as the thralls of the Jehammedans, doing all of the cult's back-breaking labor. It is the price they pay for a simple and safe life. They may sacrifice this at any point to become a Sword of Jehammed and risk their life for their clan. Should they excel as Swords of Jehammed, they are allowed to become Abrami, the shepherds and leaders of the clan, and they are allowed to marry two wives, one Hagari and one Saraeli.

Most women are born as Hagari. They live simple lives, making and mending clothes, cooking meals, milking goats and give birth to their Abrami's children.

The Saraeli are chosen from birth by the clan's spiritual leaders, the Iconides, for their virginity, in the spiritual sense. They are pampered and prepared throughout their lives for their marriage to an Abrami, who they are expected to give a single son, an Isaaki.

These sacred sons, the Isaaki, are expected to be the perfect men and are raised to be such, given the finest physical and intellectual training and the best equipment the clan can provide. When they come of age, they live to fight for the Jehammedans and give their lives for the Jehammedans. They exist as sacrifices offered to God in combat, so that the clan might be spared his wrath. Should an Isaaki defy expectations and survive until the age of thirty, he is declared divine by his clan and made an Iconide, the religious leaders of the clan where the Abrami are the worldly leaders.

===Anabaptists===
The core principle of the Anabaptists is Neognosis. God is good, reality is not, with humanity being the unholy fusion of divinity and sin, mind and matter. Death releases the psyche from the body, although it easily becomes bound in matter again. Only through the teachings of Rebus, the founder of the Anabaptists, could a man learn how to forsake the flesh and rejoin God in Paradise upon death.

Rebus taught his followers how to farm and work the land, a much needed skill after the apocalypse, for this honest and simple life was a part of the path to enlightenment in his eyes. The fields of wheat that they produced drew the attention of bandits, who they had to learn to ward off. This led to the duality of the Anabaptists, the two castes of farmers and fighters.

Another belief that Rebus had was that four rivers ran through Paradise, rivers that he believed to be metaphors for various aspects of a man's psyche. So he studied herbs and seeds and experimented with them, observing how they caused these rivers to swell and how they brought both euphoria and enlightenment. This knowledge was passed down to the caste of farmers, which became known as Ascetics, the mind of the Anabaptists, who were defended by the Orgiastics, the body of the Anabaptists. Yeah, they kind of have a thing for dualism.

With the passing of Rebus, the teachings of the Anabaptists became a little muddled. The four rivers are not just metaphors for a euphoric state of being, but they're actually real rivers that the Cult must seek. Paradise isn't just beyond death, it's also something that the Anabaptists are meant to turn Earth into.

Combine all of these traits and you've got an expansionist death cult that fetishizes living honest, simple living, with one half that farms wheat and psychotropic flora to feed the bodies and minds of the other half, the barbarian-paladins that seek to both reach paradise after death and conquer it in life.

===Apocalyptics===
Gerome Getrell had his fingers in a whole bunch of pies. Not only was he the co-founder of the Recombination Group and its biggest investor, he was also something of a televangelist, a profession which may or may not have exploited the same memes that the Recombination Group would later weaponize and equip its employs with. He preached in favor of freedom over information and passion over intelligence, of liberty in ignorance and paradise in violence. The result was something of a world-wide fatalistic gang-cult that only gained popularity after his disappearing shortly before the Eshaton.

Of course, the Apocalyptics have long since forgotten their origins but the memes have still stuck fast. They deny adherence to any order except that of Gerome Getrell's tarot and the archetypes that he designed. They infest any civilization that is formed and see it as their duty to leech wealth and prosperity out of it like a colony of demented parasites. There's no history to them, nothing like that. They're found in every corner of the world; Getrell's memes reached Africa as well as Europe, causing Apocalyptics to be common in societies in both continents. They whore, they steal, they snatch children, they smuggle the addictive spore cusps of Sepsis, they blackmail, they assassinate. They do whatever they want, for their own personal gain and benefit.

There's no much more to them than that. They're a criminal cult that puts its faith in strange, memetic mysticism, that promotes self-destructive pursuit of passion and crime, that infests every corner of the civilized world. They're not organized, with different Apocalyptic gangs remaining insular and frequently in direct competition with each other, although their slavish devotion to the Tarot unites them.

===Hellvetics===
Before the Eshaton, some nations prepared for the possibility of the Silver Horde of Paladin satellites failing to stop the asteroids' descent. One of these nations was Switzerland. Thousands of men and women were herded into a megacomplex of bunkers in the Swiss Alps. They were the nation's leadership, military personnel and civilian experts, everything that was needed to restore Switzerland after a potential apocalypse. The military herded the successful applicants into the alpine fortress, reluctantly fought off angry friends and family that were denied access, and sealed the complex.

The Silver Horde failed to activate, the asteroids smashed into Europe and the Eshaton happened. Tectonic activity caused Yellowstone to erupt and choke the American supercontinent under meters of ash, and it also caused Europe to split in two, creating a gigantic volcanic gorge known as the Reaper's Blow. It even cut through the Alps, causing immense amounts of damage to the alpine fortress of the Swiss. The megacomplex had been carved up into a hellscape of dizzying falls and magma flows. The surviving military's purpose remained intact however, it existed to serve its government and its people. They had already lost their loved ones, they weren't about to abandon their leaders and their greatest minds. Donning asbestos suits, they proceeded to build bridges and excavate bunkers, gradually unearthing and repairing the alpine fortress. They went through hell every day and ended up giving themselves the name 'Hellvetics,' a dark joke that stuck.

The government and civilian population of the megacomplex was nowhere to be found. The remnants of the Swiss military were on their own, leaderless and without purpose. They were a body without a heart or a brain.

Leonhard Gboy is the one credited with the creation of a rationing plan and a system of leadership in the days that followed, creating bureaucracy, rules and goals to occupy the minds of the Hellvetics and give them new purpose. They even made their own chain of command, independent of any government or outside organization. All that mattered to them was the Doctrine, something close to a chivalric code of the knights of old. It replaced their need for a country or corporation to serve. Without it, they were nothing.

When they emerged from their alpine fortress, they did what they saw as their duty and adhered to their Doctrine. They purged the Swiss Alps of bandits and looters that took advantage of the native population. They tamed the shattered alpine landscape, transforming it into a network of bridges and tunnels, cementing the reputation of Hellvetics not only as great combatants but as excellent builders. Yet their chivalrous ways led to them being taken advantage of, with the settlements established in their shadow mocking the Hellvetics and exploiting them, while they lived under their protection. Similarly, routes through Hellvetic territory were used to wage war on other clans and villages.

So, the Hellvetics eventually decided to withdraw, hole up in their fortress and lock the doors. Lawlessness and violence gradually returned to the region and before long, the people had to beg for the Hellvetics to re-emerge. And so they did but while the Hellvetics still stick to their Doctrine, they are no longer a charity. If you wish to travel through the tunnels and across the bridges of Hellvetica, you need to pay the toll. If you wish to have the protection of the Hellvetics, your fields need to feed their soldiers.

So that's what the Hellvetics are at this point. A military for its own sake, an army of warrior-builders armed with sophisticated Bygone technology that are part knight, part mercenary, disciplined to a fault.

===Clanners===
Clanners are unique in that they are not a part of any single organization, they belong to one of any number of clans. A clan is effectively anything that is too small and not influential to be a cult and you could argue that each of the cults started off as a clan, before it became large enough to be considered an influential faction.

One clan is the Enemoi, a rumbling convoy of Bygone military vehicles that travels the corpse of Europe. Devoted to a system of democratic values that was meant to have died with the old world, they defend other clans against any threat that they consider to be tyrannical and oppressive, whether it takes the form of bandits trying to steal food or Judges trying to impose their laws.

Another clan is the Garganti, a tribe of stern figures cloaked in heavy animal furs that tame and ride great mammoths. They are rarely seen in civilized land and are known as one of the few organizations capable of traveling across the Ice Barrier, sometimes for weeks at a time. They are quiet, somber folk that take their symbiosis with their mammoths that they ride a little too serious, shrouding themselves in mysticism.

The Romanos are another clan, that occupy what was once Italy and is now known as Purgare. Their existence is devoted to looting the ruins of Bygone cities, specifically targeting the cultural heritage of their land. Whenever they get their hands on a cultural artifact, they either sell it on to the Neolibyans who take immense interesting in foreign curiosities and ancient baubles, or they keep it for themselves and use it to feed their illusions of grandeur. It isn't rare to find a Romano that styles himself a doge and wears a dusty velvet curtain as a cloak, who spends his days trying to sell fragments of Renaissance statues to rich African men.

Clans can be just about anything you want them to be. You can even have a clanner be someone that isn't a part of a clan at all, but is simply unaffiliated with any organization.

===Palers===
As the Eshaton came closer, Recombination Group stepped up their survival plan a notch. In the months before the asteroids' arrival, RG's middle-class wageslave caste, imbued with memetics, was sent into the cryogenics facilities where HIV-E victims were stored and they went about emptying them. Back then, they were called 'Guardians.' They just scraped out the frozen bodies, threw them into carts without caring if they shattered or not, and sealed them away in storage units to rot. The facilities were then converted into 'dispensers,' to hold the higher caste of Sleepers who would wait out the Eshaton. The Sleepers came, climbed into their stasis chambers and were frozen.

By the time the media found out, it was too late. Sure enough, the asteroids fell, just in time for the Guardians to seal themselves away with the Sleepers.

The Guardians watched over the Sleepers, maintained the backup systems and the reactors and analyzed the information on the screens that streamed from the cryogenics pods. At least, that was where it was meant to come from. In truth, most of the information that they monitored was laced with memetics, with suggestions that the Sleepers were nothing other than divine.

Not all of them surrendered to the brainwashing. Some Guardians blew open their dispensers before their Sleepers awoke and became Clanners. Others waited and were subjected to the memes, again and again. Gradually, non-essential systems shut down once the memes were sufficiently reinforced, with light being one of these. The dispensers became pitch black except for the blinking lights of machinery. They adapted. Intercoms also died. Again, they adapted, communication by smacking on tubes that reverberated throughout the bunker. As conditions became more primitive, their faith in the divinity of the Sleepers only grew.

When the Sleepers did awaken, the Guardians blindly followed their lead, no matter how addled the minds of the Sleepers were thanks to the 2^16 virus that had infected the dispensers. Other dispensers suffered worse fates and never had their Sleepers awaken at all when they were intended to. In these bunkers, the algae became poisonous, mold grew over every surface and the dispenser became uninhabitable, forcing the Guardians to break out of their vaults and enter the surface world. The name that the surfacers gave them has stuck with them: Palers.

They still retreat to their homes, to look over their sacred charges, the divine Sleepers. However, they also send out spies to infiltrate surface society, raiders to pilfer food from surface settlements and scouts to locate other dispensers and unite with the Palers within, if they haven't broken out already. They are pallid, inbred little monsters wielding strange technology that even they treat like magic.

===Neolibyans===
Much like the Judges, the Neolibyans begin their story with a single founding figure, known as the Libyan. A shrewd merchant, he was responsible for bringing great wealth and prosperity to the city of Tripoli, which was enjoying a more temperate climate thanks to the shift in temperature after Eshaton. He had gathered a horde of followers, not drawn to him by a cult of personality by the Judge but who had worked to him, who had personally selected for their love of venture and profit. Eventually he passed away and his followers swore to replicate his prosperity for themselves by following his virtues of exploration, diplomacy and trade. They became the Neolibyans.

They established the Bank of Commerce in Tripoli and united the continent through trade and they sent raiding parties into Europe to gather both old Bygone technology from its ruins and slaves from the clans that had survived. This human chattel works in the oil fields, households and mines of Africa. Thanks to its now temperate Northern region and its relative lack of threats and widespread destruction in comparison to Europe, Africa was allowed to thrive and become a single, unified people in the way that the Europeans had failed to, brought together by the wealth of the Neolibyans.

Once they have become qualified as merchants and have risen from the ranks of apprentices and scribes, Neolibyans are free to squander the immense wealth granted to them by the auctioneers of the Bank of Commerce in any fashion that they please, typically by pursuing one of the three virtues of the Libyan. Some travel the world, hunting down exotic beasts (including Psychonauts) whose carcasses would sell for fortunes or mapping out the furthest, wildest reaches of Europe. Others take pride in negotiating peace between the barbaric Europeans and the enlightened Africans that have raided them for hundreds of years, if only so they might be exploited in less violent ways. Finally, there are those who stop at nothing in their pursuit of profit, making commodities out of the most unlikely things and seeking to make fortunes for themselves through any means necessary, whether it's leading the Scourgers on a massive slaving campaign through Europe in the crawling fortresses known as surge tanks, or through manipulating their fellow Neolibyans and playing them against each other.

Take all of the money-grubbing stereotypes about Jews, put them in an African body and put fancy-looking hats on them and to complete the image, shove a fancy-looking, expensive rifle in their hands and plop them on top of a giant tank. This pompous, pampered merchant-slash-big-game-hunter-slash-diplomat is a Neolibyan.

===Anubians===
The Anubians come across to everyone, including the lower half of their own ranks, as mystical and supernatural, their abilities founded in their bizarre religion. They believe in the Ka, the wave of life that ebbs and flows in all living things, a gift and a curse given by Anubis himself.

They poison their initiates with rotten meat and toxins, then send them to wander the catacombs of the Anubians until they see visions of Anubis himself. These initiates are brought back from the brink of death, embalmed with oils and bandages that draw out the water. After four days, the initiate returns to life, with seven white circles painted on his body.

As the new Anubian comes closer to Anubis, he will be invited to drink from canopic jars by the cult's highest ranks. The poisons contained within will kill him and grant him new visions once again, and when he awakens, the outermost circle painted on his skin will be gone. The number of missing circles represents the number of aspects of his own wave that the Anubian has overcome, and his rank in the cult.

This mastery over life and death is something that the Anubians can offer to others as well. They can seal people that are close to death in cocoons of dog skin that they fill with foul substances and after seven days, that person will claw free from the cocoon with their wave renewed, all skin and bone but living, with their wounds healed. They eat the Duat fruit, the fruit of the poisonous, alien Psychovore jungles of Africa and fall into comas, only to awake days later. Then they drain their own blood and mix it with earth and herbs to form strange medicines that they use to tend to others. Some among their ranks are even attuned to the noosphere of the Psychonauts and are able to detect the webs of Chakra that they weave, and sever them with their sickles.

With all of their mysticism and strange abilities, Anubians have cemented themselves as the spiritual heart of African culture.

Except the deeper an Anubian delves into the secrets of their cult, the more they shed this mysticism as they realize the true meanings behind the words they utter and the acts that they perform.

Oils that were once sacred tinctures blessed by Anubis become little more than catalysts. Every time the Anubian comes closer to death after ingesting something new and strange isn't a spiritual journey, it's just the bioreactor that their body has been turned into catalyzing the substances within it. The disappearing of the circles on their flesh when they drink from the canopic jars and ascend the ranks is not a spiritual journey, it is a chemical reaction. And what do all of these jars contain, what are these mysterious substances that the Anubians imbibe? Bygone technology created by a cabal of scientists that took a stand against the Recombination Group, known as the Anubis Syndicate, who sought mastery over life and death. The Anubians simply continue their work.

They still use words like 'Ka' and 'wave.' They still cast the bones, they still perform the silly displays of mysticism and fulfill their religious obligations for the African community. But the truth is that behind all of the dog skin cocoons and canopic jars, the Anubians are a cult of empirical scientists that have transformed their bodies into laboratories, that have become something other than human through endless experimentation.

So Anubians are two things. To their lower ranks and to uneducated outsiders, they are strange shaman to be respected and feared, with bizarre rituals that grant them some limited control over life and death. To those with the right knowledge and to their inner circle, the Anubians are devout scientists that have turned themselves into walking bioreactors, flipping-flopping between life and death whenever it's convenient, possessing knowledge and abilities that are quite possibly the key (or at least a part of the key) to defeating the Primer.

===Scourgers===
The Scourgers are a rather controversial cult and out of Africa's three factions, they are the one that is to blame for the reputation of Degenesis as a 'social justice' game.

Simply put, the Scourgers idolize Africa. Rather, they idolize everything that they perceive that Africa was. They see it as the land of the black man, who conquered and tamed the wildest continent through strength and might alone. They see the white man as fat and feeble, as the bringer of wealth and weakness that allowed the white man to subjugate the black man, enthralling them through promises of riches. When the Eshaton came, wealth suddenly meant nothing and all that the white man had was weakness. So the time for vengeance came and the black man used his strength to storm Europe, to kill and enslave as vengeance for everything that the white man had done. At least, this is how the Scourgers view Africa's relationship with Europe.

Yet there is more complexity to them than that. They are seen as descendants of eight ancestors, eight spirits that watch over and guide the Scourgers more than any other African. There might be some truth in this legend, as there are moments in a Scourger's life that cannot be explained. Spontaneous hysteria, sudden bursts of clarity or fey, creative moods, an unmistakable gut feeling about something that the African shouldn't know about. It's almost as though the Scourger is possessed when in this state, inhabited by the spirit of one of the eight ancestors. Perhaps this phenomena is linked to the eight scientists of the Anubis Syndicate, who inhabited Cairo before the Eshaton?

Just as strange as the Eight is the phenomena that the Scourgers call the Warui. Before the Eshaton, there were thousands of languages in Africa but now there is only one. Whenever the Psychovore encroached, it had a unique impact on the Africans, stripping away their mother tongue and replacing it with an odd, primal language that everyone in Africa has come to share.

The Scourgers call this language the Warui and consider it a gift from the ancestors, the Eight. It is responsible for the unity of the Africans. The Scourgers feel it more strongly than any other African, with their souls supposedly bound together by their common ancestry and their ties to the Eight. This is what ties together in packs and is why they operate so well as military units. However, the Warui has its limits. When they venture too far North away from the Psychovore and Africa, the Scourgers lose this intimate understanding of each other. They can no longer communicate through a few short phonemes and a little body language, they must resort to actual conversation. In order to strengthen their pack-bond while they're away from Africa, they eat Psychovore seeds in order to rekindle their connection to the Eight.

Communication and community is everything to the Scourgers. They are not just warriors, but they are hearts of community. Should they catch one of their own engaging in vice by whoring and gambling, they bind and torture him until he remembers his place in the world. Any information they share is done entirely through mouth; they are an oral cult that does not dare engage in any sort of writing outside of the wood carving that they perform as a hobby. When they are not fighting the enemy away from Africa, they pursue escaped slaves, hunt wild animals and guard caravans during the day. During the night, they tell stories and share history with African communities that love and adore them. Even the acceptance of a new Scourger requires some interaction with the African community; any new Scourger must be given to the cult by his own mother. The cult doesn't accept anyone else.

So that's what the Scourgers are. A primal cult fixated on imitating the primitive history of Africa, who are fundamentally tied to the Psychovore and eight ancestor spirits, who are adored by and bound to the African community. Your mileage may vary.