Editing Maria Vespa (section)

==Views on the nature of Maria Vespa==

The scanty evidence and tremendous significance of this figure has led to lengthy and often deadly debate, especially within the Inquisition and the Ecumenes.  While Inquisitors have usually settled their disputes by appeal to the most likely explanation, matters of faith are less yielding to reason.  The purpose of this overview is not to explain the correct understanding to the reader, but simply to survey the field.

===Inquisitorial theories===

During M31, the prevailing trend among Inquisitors was to view Maria Vespa as one of the most powerful human psykers to ever live.  Adherents to this theory generally believed that Vespa had been instructed by the Emperor and Malcador the Sigilite.  They held that her actions during the Scouring were only her most famous deeds, and that her apparent death and resurrection was little more than a ruse at the expense of Augustin Carron.  The major problem for adherents to this theory, the so-called '''Realists''', was that Maria Vespa's recorded actions in the Scouring, and particularly after, cover such a wide range of space that she would have to be travelling faster than Imperial Warp technology would allow.  The sub-school of '''Multiple Realists''' attempted to patch up their theory by claiming that Maria Vespa was not a single woman, but instead a conspiracy.  By contrast, '''Evolutionists''' took the starting point of Realism and propose that Maria Vespa began life as a powerful psyker but that after her death (and most of these thinkers suggest that she died during the Heresy) her spirit acted as a point of attraction for other human souls in the Warp, gathering their power into herself and creating a metabeing far more powerful than any purely human psyker.

Others are less sanguine about Maria Vespa.  The '''Augustinians''' believe that she is a demon of Chaos and generally suppose that she serves Tzeentch in some scheme beyond mortal ken but undoubtedly to the detriment of the Imperium.