Imperial Truth - Upholding the Imperial Truth: While the very nature of the Warp is unreal, the threat posed by the Daemon extends beyond the metaphysical to tear at the very foundations of reality. Many would choose to deny that this threat was real, and for them the armour of ignorance would be shattered alongside their fragile sanities during the Horus Heresy.For those who sought to hold the darkness at bay -- the organisations established through the years of the Great Crusade -- the threat which they girded themselves against was a very practical concern. These dauntless protectors would struggle to endure in the tumult of unreality unleashed by Horus and his allies, though they would clad themselves in the armour of knowledge, and wield powerful weapons in the forms of archeotech and psyarkana -- the arts of psychic technology.These weapons of esoteric provenance were both as real and as unreal as the sinister denizens of the Warp, and were used to turn the arcane against the Empyreal. However, such potent weapons hold edges which cut both ways, and the Imperium would suffer under the attentions of its own protectors.During the terrible period of history known as Old Night on Terra, the Age of Strife, evil rose to its zenith in the galaxy. For thousands of Terran years, unabated horrors assailed the isolated worlds of Humanity, bringing it to the very brink of annihilation and reducing Mankind to a pitiable species, a shadow of the glories of its past.This era of horrors, perpetuated by vivisector-warlords and techno-barbarian tyrants, was marked by plagues of insanity, the scourge of famine and the tragedy of unending war. Worst of all of the terrors faced by Humanity in this era was the incursion of the Warp, brought about by the emergence of ever more psykers and the machinations of sorcerer-kings.Human worlds were swallowed whole by the Warp or else subjugated to become the slaves of Daemons. On such worlds, the Human body became inconstant, rife mutation twisting the shape of men and women beyond recognition into something entirely alien.Cruelty, brutality and suffering were the only constants of this age -- this is the galactic anarchy which the Emperor opposed and the horror of the darkness which the Imperial Truth was employed to hold at bay. If upholding the Imperial Truth was a necessary evil of the galactic dominion the Emperor sought to achieve, it also served many purposes in the growth of the Imperium of Man, from the breaking up of communities which shared common beliefs that might oppose Him, to creating an equality of opportunity such that any citizen of merit might rise to prominence of their own accord.Furthermore, by breaking the tribalism and in-fighting different cultural groups had held for Terran millennia through the creation of a single Imperial cultural doctrine, and by freeing the Imperial populace of the cosmic dread which mortals feel when contemplating the vastness of the galaxy, the Emperor enabled all of Mankind to set their focus towards the single goal of the Imperial dream.These are all noble and rational causes, though they are shadowed in significance by what appears to have been the greater advantage, as observed by those who were aware of the Great Lie. Every religion, ancient and esoteric, encountered by the Great Crusade in two standard centuries shared one common factor: that worship draws the attention of the Ruinous Powers within the Warp.Organised religions, cults of personality, the worship of god-kings and of xenos, all of these, through some ethereal means, empower beings madmen describe as the "True Gods."It would not be beyond reason to posit that one of the secret motivations of the Emperor in promulgating the Imperial Truth was to weaken the psychic threads which bind Humanity to those foul sentiences in the Empyrean, and break the grasp of the Ruinous Powers. Given the vital importance given to the notion that the Imperial Truth became a universal galactic doctrine, the means taken by the Emperor and Malcador the Sigillite to ensure that it was enforced were many, and in some cases, extreme.However, their consistent purpose points to some justified ends being served which may be unfathomable to lesser, merely Human intellects. This purpose was to suppress at all cost wider knowledge of the supernatural nature of the Warp. To this end, specific and covert Imperial bodies were created, and for the duration of the Great Crusade they largely succeeded.Foremost and most well-known of these bodies acting in support of the Imperial Truth were the tools of the vast Imperial propaganda machine. The Iterators, that order of rhetoricians, philosophers and educators, were primed with the express purpose of propagating the message of the Imperial Truth throughout the Great Crusade. They would ply their trade on every Compliant world newly entering the Imperium, as well as reinforce the secularity and rationality of the tenets of the Imperial Truth on worlds already part of the Imperium for solar decades or standard centuries.The Iterators were recruited from the most erudite, sharp-witted and silver-tongued teachers of Terra, men and women trained at the direction of Malcador the Sigillite to have such a firm belief in the Imperial Truth and keen grasp of rhetoric, debate and diplomacy that when making their orations they could smother any arguments, however sensible, to the contrary of their specific dogma.While considered an overwhelming success from the perspective of the great and good of the Great Crusade, on many worlds the speech of Iterators was seen as bombast and unconvincing, for deep-seated strictures and beliefs cannot be easily changed with the introduction of new and often inflammatory concepts like atheism.The master of Jungmagr is recorded to have said of the army of Iterators which spread among his populace after that bloody Imperial Compliance action, "Better fangs chew'd us through, than left these serpents' honeyed tongues to turn us, for snake is root of our evils and woes befall us now forth."Though many Imperial Compliance actions may have seemed peaceful thanks to the work of the Iterators, more often than not it was the threat of the bolters of the Legiones Astartes standing at the Iterators' sides which cowed worlds into Compliance, rather than eloquence and logic.As the pre-Imperial adage goes, "a mind changed against its will is of the same opinion still" and as such should have been more closely heeded, for in the haste to move on to greater conquests, the Great Crusade left behind a string of worlds ready to reject the Iterators' platitudes, ripe for the influence of the demagogue and the powers of the Warp to fester and ferment rebellion.