Adeptus Mechanicus
"All that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science."
-Sir Winston Churchill
"War is the science of destruction."
-John Abbott
"Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences."
-Freeman Dyson
The Adeptus Mechanicus; Often shortened as Admech, is an organization in the Imperium of Man responsible for technology, engineering and most of the Imperium's Industrial production, as well as the operation of the Titan Legions. The Adeptus Mechanicus, whose individual members are known as Techpriests, control thousands of forge worlds (think about any techno/cyberpunk/industrial trash metal band CD illustration obsessed with heavily polluted industrialized landscapes and you will get a bit close to the idea). Forge worlds are covered in massive manufactoria or, as they are known to speakers of Low Gothic, 'work'. The largest forge world of the Adeptus Mechanicus is Mars, homeworld of the Adeptus Mechanicus, on which the most badass weapons ever known to man are made.
They also tend to hog all the really cool shit for themselves—like Titans and other wonderful stuff—only letting the Imperials have it when really, really necessary (or if they're threatened personally). They have two armies of their own, which are not anything like the Imperial Guard, as they are mostly composed of badass angry cyborgs and boxy technogrunge robots that are more violent than ED209, and giant, tank-crushing, lobotomized minions.
They typically look like a cross between Jawas and Doctor Octopus, as well as wearing the sort of rebreather masks that you'll typically see on riot police.
They are also avid music lovers.
This is their theme done by HMKids.
And one for the Machine Cult.
New Releases!
The Mechanicus received an entire army's worth of new plastic models and rulebook! Praise the Omnissiah! Currently, the Skitarii and the Cult Mechanicus army have been fully released. There are also whispers of a THIRD Adeptus Mechanicus codex, but nobody really knows what to make of it. (But why not split hairs and make more money in the process?).
The current releases include Skitarii, who are like if the Guard were badass technogrunge medievalpunk super-soldiers with access to all the good shit, spider-tanks, scout walkers that are basically the Sentinel if it was good, Servitors on tank treads that will wreck your shit, giant crazy-tough robots that will wreck your shit harder, and a plastic Magos HQ unit! Truly, venerate the Omnissiah, and He will provide.
History of the Adeptus Mechanicus
The Mechanicus was established in the distant past, when a bunch of machine worshiping technophiles normal people terraformed Mars during mankind's dominating of the Solar System and colonizing of the galaxy. Thus Mars became an extremely technologically advanced society of astronauts, scientists, engineers, manufacturers, and miners wherein they could pursue advances in technology and power the Dark Age of Technology. After a while, during the Age of Strife, their precious atmosphere was punctured, and solar radiation beat down on their filthy heads burned the land, boiled the seas, and took the sky from them, nuking all life. Everybody either did one of three things: die, hide underground, or turn feral. After hundreds of years of living from half-working mechanical bunker to partially-pressurized archaic hab spire; people began to look upon technology as a saviour and way to return to the former heights of glory. Thus, did a new cult spread amongst the people of Mars, wherein they paid reverence to the Machine God. Just as planned.
And then they joined the EMPRAH because they saw him as an aspect of the Machine God called the 'Omnissiah'. As if the parallels aren't already tremendously clear at this point.
Except it's giant load of bullshit. Tech-priesthood were FORCED to acknowledge the Big E as an incarnate of Machine God quite literally at gunpoint. This happened after they sent pretty much their entire fleet and army to Terra to prevent the Unification of meatbags, so they can continue to raid ancient Terran tombs and libraries once or twice a century. Emperor's fleet fucked them so hard only one in ten returned to Mars to tell the tale. Needless to say, Fabricator-General was very cooperative when Emprah's armada arrived on Mars orbit.
Hilariously, the "Machine God" may actually be the Void Dragon, one of the ancient C'tan Star Gods. The Void Dragon is actually one of the most powerful of the C'tan, and gains control over machines. All those techpriests are going to have serious problems when it wakes up... Oh yeah. It's on Mars because the EMPRAH roofied it and turned it into an angry cave on Mars...yeah. It's now guarded by the Mechanicus in their Noctys Labyrinth. This point of view is not certain, so the Machine God may be anything like the collective mass of all machines or the sum of all knowledge, neither would all Mechanicus accept a C'Tan as their lord. But it's a more fun version, isn't it?
The Machine Spirits
The "Machine Spirit" is the Imperium's version of Artificial Intelligence, mainly because after the reunification of Terra; the Emperor forbade the use of AI in machinery (partly because of the ancient rebellion of the Men of Iron, but mostly to prevent the Void Dragon from skullfucking them, Skynet style).
For all the importance of Machine Spirits to the Mechanicus, it's not entirely clear what they actually are. One theory holds that there is actually a semi-sentient AI fragment in pretty much everything electronic, a leftover from the Age of Strife. These "ghosts in the machine" quite literally must be appeased, or else they'll fuck with the targeting systems in your Bolter at the worst possible moment, start doing doughnuts with your Land Raider, and generally act like dicks. All the ritual and apparent silliness of the Cult Mechanicus, then, is actually necessary to keep the machines operating.
The prevailing theory within the Mechanicus itself would seem to hold that a Machine Spirit is a fragment of the Machine God itself. Whether this is simply rhetoric (you need to keep your gun oiled, or it'll backfire, and the cogboys are just really picky about how you oil it) or the actual truth (the Void Dragon extends its awareness to literally every machine in the universe, which is disturbingly more possible than one might think), the fact remains that Machine Spirits are real enough to severely ruin your day (or your continent, in the case of an itinerant Land Raider), and the ritual and mysticism surrounding the Cult Mechanicum's everyday activities is far more important to them than even the Imperial Creed.
The Techpriests of Mars got around the restrictions against "Abominable Intelligence" in true WH40K grimdark fashion: cut out the "Artificial" part and make it organic, and vice versa. Nearly every piece of sophisticated machinery in the Imperium operates via a cogitator, analogous to a modern-day microchip, which is basically the cloned or recycled brain of a human converted to function like a horrific cyborg version of a CPU. This interpretation of the "Machine Spirit" is particularly disturbing, to be sure, but is a necessity because the Iron Men incident and Age of Strife in general made the Imperium fear the "Silica Animus". The only true difference between a semi-organic cogitator and a true AI is that their machine spirits have no ability to learn or improve on their own, and therefore must be manually programmed by their operators if they need to learn or do anything that is outside their current programming. Thus, it is now nearly (but not entirely) impossible for machines to rebel on their own, quelling the fears of the Imperium.
In any of these cases, it can be easily understood why machines are revered by the Mechanicus and why they are treated like sentient beings. Although, the AdMech is a bit fuzzy just how sentient machines are; are they somehow capable of thought like organics or no more sentient than your bread toaster at home?
The Commandments of the Mechanicus
The Mechanicus have some ideas that they abide by:
The Mysteries:
01. Life is directed motion.
02. The spirit is the spark of life.
03. Sentience is the ability to learn the value of knowledge.
04. Intellect is the understanding of knowledge.
05. Sentience is the basest form of Intellect.
06. Understanding is the True Path to Comprehension.
07. Comprehension is the key to all things.
08. The Omnissiah knows all, comprehends all.
The Warnings:
09. The alien mechanism is a perversion of the true path.
10. The soul is the conscience of sentience.
11. A soul can be bestowed only by the Omnissiah.
12. The Soulless sentience is the enemy of all.
13. The knowledge of the ancients stands beyond question.
14. The machine spirit guards the knowledge of the ancients.
15. Flesh is fallible, but ritual honors the machine spirit.
16. To break with ritual is to break with faith.
What the Mechanicus does
-Fabricator General Kane.
The main role of the Adeptus Mechanicus is to maintain the advanced equipment of the Imperium; which despite stereotypes, they are actually very good at. Most of their rituals to appease machinery are pretty much the same methods we would use to repair our machinery with a whole bunch of religious iconography mixed in. The terms used by the Mechanicus are actually quite similar to our engineers if you swap some of the words (replace machine spirit with A.I, sacred oils with lubricant etc.) Because of its religious nature some of the components of the rituals are unnecessary but almost all Tech-Priests skip the unnecessary stuff in dire situations while some abandon the unnecessary parts altogether. It's also implied that the so-called holy chants are really them repeating instructions to themselves, which would be useful for remembering what you're doing. The cases where chanting is actually necessary is where they are working with something like a Land Raider or Titan - both of which have a temperamental machine spirit - that you don't want to piss off.
They spend a lot of time traveling across the galaxy looking for some old laptops called "Standard Template Constructs" that have all the info necessary for the first human colonist do their job well (mostly a mix of Ikea and "high-tech for dummies" manuals). This is the reason why you will end selling grox hamburgers if you study to be an engineer (unless you have balls or are a spess mehreen artificer who might make something really good) in the Imperium: everything was already done by the ancients in the Dark Age of William Gibson and recorded in these STCs. Thanks to glitches and borderline developers and programmers, all the STCs found by the Mechanicus are more fucked up than Windows Vista. While often the recovered STCs are useless or incomplete, there are instances where they are actually functional, for example the STC data of the Land Raider and the Land Speeder as well as Centurion armour are well known, another nice example is the one found in the novel Skitarius by Rob Sanders, where the badass protagonist helps the Adeptus Mechanicus priests to find a sort of "Empyrean Bomb", capable to dissipate warp phenomena.
More often than not STC data comes from print-outs from fragmented STCs, or copies of these print-outs. These printouts, when discovered, are studied, translated and argued over scattered among their colossal stacks of Tau pornography for centuries before any useful products are made from them. If they ever find an undamaged complete STC, this would likely cause a schism within the Mechanicus, which will tear the Imperium asunder. The Adeptus Mechanicus also attempt sometimes to loot Necron tombs and will gladly put an entire world at risk for this, and act like it's blasphemy of the most serious kind when people wall it off because of the goddamn killer robot skeletons! The idiots. The Priests of Mars also will not mind getting their hands on Xenos artifacts to see how such "blasphemies" can work, and maybe give a hint of how a "pure" design should have been.
Very rarely the Adeptus will actually invent something. While they do adapt designs occasionally the only things they actually invented from scratch is the Lascannon, the Dunestrider perpetual motion machine (who's creator was promptly executed and all designs lost upon creation), as well all the Titans, except for the Reaver Class and the Apocalypse Class, which were invented during the Age of Strife and the Dark Age of Technology respectively. Which is pretty odd, until you realize that they invented them pre-heresy. Even things like Land Raiders and Land Speeders, which were said to have been given critically important parts by the famous Mr. Land himself, were actually just made from really old bits Land found in the galaxy's third biggest library/archive/warehouse (the one on Terra). Well, they also invented the Infernus pattern Predator. Sure they built it on the Rhino chassis, but they created a pattern without killing everyone involved. Of course, they aren't actually "inventing" it. They are, supposedly, using divinely inspired reason to create something that has always existed, implicit in the logical structure of the universe. This is, interestingly, not a new idea, it can be traced back to philosophers like Plato, ultimately the Mechanicus will play to no end with the meaning of the word "invent" to get the job done, as too often and despite /tg/'s cartoonish flanderization your average techpriest will have enough common sense to "feel divinely inspired" whenever his/her neck is on the line, you know, desperation is the mother of all inven... Ahem, I mean, "divinely inspired reason".
Also important to mention is what they do not do. The Mechanicus by and large are the greediest gits in the galaxy. They hoard technology like it is going out of style, which would be fine, if they didn't hoard and defend it, but that isn't the point. The point is that they're basically a mega-corporation that will try to own, buy, sell and take by force any existing technology. Getting a part, gun, computer, vehicle, schematic, program, eyepatch, cookie recipe, or even a tiny plastic model that wasn't specifically mass-produced and shipped to the Departmento Munitorum so they can give it to you, is nearly impossible. Anything with any kind of passing significance or interest to the Mechanicus is guarded by 7-foot cyborg death machines. Anything in the private possession of a Mechanicus operative that might be harder to make than a bolt or nut is treated like the holy grail. I dare you to try and take a 8,000 year-old flash drive from a techpriest who just found it. It's worse than taking little plastic models from fat men with beards.
The Void Dragon
A lot of their tech stuffs come from the Void Dragon that the Emperor bested and imprisoned on Mars ages ago as so humanity could gain mastery over machines. While it might have worked pretty well back when the Imperium wasn't the festering porta-potty of a grimdark shitpit that it is today, it's pretty much a matter of time now. The Necrons already attempted to raid Mars - and succeeded, well, sort of. They got vaporized before they could really even do anything, but the fact that they managed to even land proved a point the High Lords of Terra had been turning a blind eye towards for ages.
If the T-800s get what they want and party on Mars long enough to wake the Void Dragon up, you can bet it's going to be a pretty goddamned bad day for just about any human not wearing loincloths and still bashing rocks together. The few Mechanicus agents who have figured this out have either gone rogue, blammed or gone totally bonkers, ripping all the implants from their flesh. And when you're a member of the Mechanicus, that's about 80% of your body.
Of course, the even worse possibility is that the void dragon enjoys this situation, as every time the tech-priests remove their flesh and place more machine into it, they could be feeding him a fraction of their soul. As there are quite a few tech-priests out there, and humanity being the rabbits they are, this would give him a lifetime of souls to be eating, and a personal army that is very much willing.
By the way, the "Void" Dragon is actually only called "The Dragon" in the official fluff, probably as a reference to Metropolis. But for God knows what unreasonable reason, /tg/ insists on calling him the "Void Dragon", thus confusing him with an Eldar aircraft, or with an Eldar pirate warband. Unless it's an obscure vidya reference. Whatever, maybe it just sounds cooler. The Eldar refer to it as the "Void Dragon", and the aircraft and pirate warband take their names from it.
UPDATE: The new Codex: Necrons written by our Spiritual Liege reveals the necrons are no longer enslaved by the C'tan, instead they are their sworn enemies for tricking them into giving up flesh, thus they were probably going to Mars to capture the Imperial held C'tan shard of the Void Dragon as they won't see humans reliable, or perhaps they were under control of another shard, and wanted to liberate it, oh whatever, for what we know it may have been Trollzyn trying to loot Mars. Or, maybe they simply realize that having a C'tan that can control technology on a planet-sized machine-scape is a bad idea.
The only thing that changes as a result of that is once the Void Dragon (shard or whole, who knows?) wakes up, it will be the only C'tan with ready access to an army, and a pretty damn huge one at that- so it's not only going to be a real bad day for the Imperium, but the Necrons as well.
UPDATE 2: And now it seems the World Engine of Astral Knights fame was supposed to be in route to Mars in order to allow his usurper Phaeron to get himself a new Void Dragon Pokémon, good thing he got sabotaged.
The Religion of the Adeptus Mechanicus
(Forgive OP's bellicose statement, but the fluff and novels pertaining to the AdMech are rather obscure to whether or not they truly understand what they talk about.)
Begin Rant/file exc.//>>
Children, I'm fucking fed up with your shit. Cult Mechanicus IS NOT a replacement of rational thought with religion for the sake of operating machines.It's a (in-universe) developed philosophy of collective rationalism. AdMechs don't throw their critical thinking out of the window. They just already took this thinking, put it on a pedestal, brought it to it's apex (Dark Age), suffered for it, suffered for it again (HorusHeresy, Schism of Mars), then looked at it and asked : "What do we do now?" Every Mechanicum is a rationalist, in a meaning that when he goes through all the critical thinking to the basic reason of his existence, he takes on the dogma of Quest for Knowledge. That he exists to Rationalize the Universe, move towards learning and understanding the Universe and it's laws. It's also a collective quest - adept doesn't seek knowledge just for himself, he sees all the Adeptus Mechanicus as one single huge Gnostical Engine, a Machine of Comprehension designed to learn. He's just a single little gear in the heart of enormous Over-Intellect gathering and producing knowledge.
For what sake? AdMechs thought a lot about this question, and took one answer.
For the sake of Mankind.
Now THIS is where shit gets religious.
As of it now, humanity utilizes science for egoistical purposes of survival (scientists need something to eat) and/or domination, which can be understood by every human through his instincts. Society of Mars, however, got devoid of this motivators, as they dropped their human instincts, so they had to find new goals. This is where the Schism takes roots, as well as the "Cult" part. Every rational human can tell you that objectively life has no meaning. Accepting that fact is what brought the galaxy Necrons and Iron Men. AdMechs knew that this is what they wish to avoid. And the most effective way to avoid that is to walk the irrational way and put a sense for your existence through Faith.
This is what they did.
They are the fanatics in the sense that they BELIEVE that Universe CAN be comprehended, while they have 0 proof of that. They BELIEVE that critical thinking works, while living in a Galaxy that laughs at any attempts of rationalization. They BELIEVE that Quest for Knowledge can be completed. And it this faith, they are being paradoxical and irrational. And they know it. Lets have a look at Universal Laws, that Mechanicum use as the foundation of their philosophy.
The Mysteries
01. Life is directed motion.
This gives a definition to "life", as existence of individual. A definition that basically says "Only that thing which irrationally takes a (faith) direction for it's way can be called a Living Thing".
02. The spirit is the spark of life.
Here they recognize the illogical existence of Souls and Warp, and their defining roles in being representation of one's beliefs.
03. Sentience is the ability to learn the value of knowledge.
04. Intellect is the understanding of knowledge.
05. Sentience is the basest form of Intellect.
Here they define ability for rational thinking.
06. Understanding is the True Path to Comprehension.
07. Comprehension is the key to all things.
And HERE they put this thinking as their Way to exist.
08. The Omnissiah knows all, comprehends all.
And establish an ideal, to which they are heading. --Anon
End Rant/file//>>
Another Magos adds:
There's definitely variation in the creed between forgeworlds and different cults-- even post Heresy, Mars is not unified-- but a lot of them operate on this sort of platonic/hermeticist logic.
Regardless of whether they believe all knowledge already exists or that the disciplined mind can create new things, the religion is trying for union with some perfect being. Whether that's taken to mean "become a robot because the flesh is weak", "find salvation in logic", or even "cultivate the Omnissiah within you" (which would lead to radical differences in practice, from penitent cyberization cults to contemplative engineering orders, which we see in the many faces of the Mechanicum, Koriel Zeth, Forgeworld Mezoa, the Myrmidon Orders, etc), it all leads back to a cautious quest to be the best you can be with logic as your guide.
Gallery
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D'awwww.
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D'awwww, by the way this is canon.
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PRAISE THE OMNISSIAH!
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Someone got Chaos on my Mechanicus, now with theme music!
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We're not sure if that's tech-heresy or an actual activation ritual. Ask your local Magos for clarification.
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showin' a little augmented leg
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Science in the 41th Millenium.
See Also
- Mechanicus Tactics. - Yes, they have rules now.
- Skitarii Tactics. - For the Tech-Guard soldiers of the Mechanicus
- Heresy Era Mechanicum Tactics. - 6th/early 7th edition rules. Very different from either of the 40k versions.
- Mechanicum: Taghmata (30k) - Current 7th edition rules. Still very different to the 40k versions.
