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, which in turn ended up setting the Horus Heresy into motion. Afterwards, the Imperium worshiped the atheist even more than ever before. 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 portraying him as a god, and it was soon discovered that humanity could be united by using this religion to control them far more effectively than the old Imperial Truth ever could. It's anyone's guess as to what he thinks about the whole mess now.

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 its 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 the worship of the pagan Roman Emperor was to the specific rites carried out in Rome. Comparisons are often drawn to the Roman Catholic Church, but the Church does not have the same willingness to tolerate major differences in theology between itself and the various other Christian sects that the Ecclesiarchy has regarding the differences among the various local strains of the Imperial Creed (or that pagan Rome had regarding the various beliefs of its subject peoples, so long as they included the Emperor in their respective pantheons).

The "Imperial Cult" is just a blanket term which covers a multitude of belief systems which are 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 a wide variety Feral or Death world belief systems.

The Ecclesiarchy is just the state church, which attempts to bring a level of standardization to how people worship the Emperor and to make relations between worlds relatively frictionless. Unfortunately even this is a difficult task as 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. Needless to say, this translates into a lot of people calling each other heretics even when their interpretations of the Imperial Cult are equally valid as far as the Ecclesiarchy is concerne.

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. Typically, this is determined either by the adoption of tolerance towards xenos or the outright worship of other deities that are obviously not the Emperor, especially the Chaos Gods.

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, and are to be obeyed without question. 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*