PRAELOCUTIO

Let it be that those who read these volumes know the truth of their words, and have bestowed upon them the knowledge-of-knowledge, the shadow of the Clarity, to shepherd them on the Ninefold Path. In these words is the canon of the Baatori Practitioner.

This is the Canon of the Paraclete,

Devotee of the Leviathan of the Pits, Asmodeus,

The Canon of the Firebrand,

Devotee of the Prince of Hellfire, Mephistopheles

The Canon of the Perjurer,

Devotee of the Lord of Lies, Baalzebul,

The Canon of the Cynosure,

Devotee of the Daughter Cancer, Glasya,

The Canon of the Insurgent,

Devotee of the Entombed One, Levistus,

The Canon of the Debaucher,

Devotee of the Carnal Maiden, Fierna,

The Canon of the Covetor,

Devotee of the Actuary Infernal, Mammon,

The Canon of the Agent,

Devotee of the Iron Patrician, Dispater,

And the Canon of the Signifer,

Devotee of the Black Strategarch, Bel.

Know now that these words to follow shall be salvation from mediocrity, and from impotence, and from inferiority. It shall be instructive on the ordinance and stricture of Baator. In its grim detail you shall know the revelation and revulsion of the Divine Transgression and our salvation from Uncreation.

And it shall guide you, Reader, to absolution for your mortal imperfection. Yea, within the burning bosom of the Nine Pits will you deservedly suffer! But so too will you become a part of this transcendental apocalypse (the lifting of veils and subjugation of Chaos) through your adherence to the Will of the Master and His Court.

PACT PRIMAEVAL

Before time, and space, and light, all was only benighted Chaos. This was a primordial Undifferentiation, and it was found intolerable to the universe. A Light was shone into the darkness, and there was Order.

This Light took the shape of Beauty and Form, and Law and Function. This Light was Divinity, and It promised to shine eternal. These ancient, nameless Powers swore refusal to Unmaking. They girded Themselves in crystal armour of logical proofs, and wielded swords of perfect thought. They invented time, and space, to give tangible substance to the universe.

It eventually came to be that these primal Powers, or Gods, created Angels, glorious seraphim in Their image, to do Their bidding, to fight against the gibbering hordes of Primordial Chaos, whence the Abyss and its Demons were wrought. Know that this is an exegesis of one of the most ancient legends there is to know, of how the Greatest of Angels saved us from the Degradation of God.

In the eternal war against primordial Chaos, the fiercest and most beautiful of all Angels was Asmodeus, Who lead their numbers in tireless crusades against the hordes of the Unmaking Abyss. He was ever triumphant in His efforts in this eternal war, and He came to know the Unmaker in all its infinite horror.

But where this dread exposure fostered in Him ever more grim courage and strength, the Gods, no longer nameless and wonderful but taking egos and sculpting clay in Their image, had let Themselves grow content with their Angels fighting for Them. They yet always demanded more of Their legions and Their Champion, who ever served as target for derision and fear.

It was not any lack of His skill, nor His might, nor His wondrous accomplishments that invited Their scorn. Instead, it was the tragic consequence of Their suborning Their original purpose to those angels. They wronged Him in this way, for They could no longer understand what They had done to Their Champion by bidding Him to eternal war.

For it is said that Asmodeus changed, becoming more alike those He fought. His eyes became became killing stars, his teeth grew sharp and blackened, his white feathered wings weighted by ash and tar and blood. This Transmogrification, however gradual, was total. It only heightened His understanding of Chaos and His furious righteousness in combating it.

The brightest, most brilliant celestial beacon was wrought anew in all this, maligned so as to resist the Unmaker. He was scolded by those who bid Him to lead Their armies.

For these changes horrified the Gods. With Their weakness of mind and will and vision, unmarked by their War, They were not able to comprehend all Their Champion suffered for Their sakes and for the sake of all creation.

Asmodeus took notice of this weakness and was saddened by the rust of Their ideals, Their mutation beside His inversion. Those who were once Law itself split and divided and bickered: They failed in Their mandate and risked all that they had created.

He quietly cursed this failure of Theirs in hidden whispers. Asmodeus named this, first of its kind and the deepest moral breach, "Sin."

The Gods had by now, in Their freedom, fully set Their attentions on a new project: life made in Their image. Very many mortal peoples were made in these ways, bright-eyed and beaming at their Gods and the pristine worlds created for them.

It is tragedy that these creations were imprinted with the same base errors and flaws as their makers. They formed rivalries against each other. They would defy edicts and break great codes and seals they were instructed against.

Their impertinence and disobedience invited the Demon and their tragic unmaking. Made in the impure image of the Gods, they too were found rich with Sin. This was the cost of the Gods' greatest gift to them, free will, and Asmodeus was saddened to need to explain this when the Gods cried out disbelief at mortal misbehaviour.

And so Asmodeus cast His eyes to study the whole Multiverse and observed everything that was with His serene patience. He found a lack of structure and discipline and integrity and, finding this displeasing, decided He would stand against it. Transgression would be met with consequence.

It was He who thus invented Punishment, and all creation knew Him through it. He offered to His lords to take up this obligation, and They did accept and speak sweet relief that Their precious creations would finally have cause to obey Them. They were pleased they would not soil Their own hands for it.

And so, even as He made eternal war against the Unmaker, He took upon Himself also the shepherding and tending of the Gods' flocks. The Heavens were made crimson by the wails and moans and blood of the damned as they were tormented by His angels. Once again, the Gods were aghast at the ugliness of what Their grim Champion realised necessary.

The Gods found they could find no corner of Their realms where Asmodeus and His Angels did not also have every right to be, and bring with Them there the torment and perdition of the Blood War and of Damnation. The Gods wept with anger, and again censured Their Champion for only doing as was bid.

Still unable to face consequence Themselves for the Sins of Their own creations, they called Him to Their highest courts to find means to convict and expel. Dismayed, They saw Asmodeus had followed Their every law and edict to the letter both in the burden of Punishment and in the war against Chaos. They wailed at this.

But Asmodeus was not without courtesy, and made to His lords a proposition. For the preservation of Their delicate sensibilities, He would strike from Heaven and bring His Angels and labours to a new realm devoted wholly to Their pursuit.

They would found a fresh Hell, and from it He would resume eternal the War against Uncreation and administer Punishment to the Gods' free-willed creations to encourage their obedience.

Power would be drawn from the torment of the Damned, that He and His Angels needn't again sup from the font of Divinity and could instead be independent.

Then featureless and inert, the vast and empty barrens of a realm called Baator would be granted to Asmodeus, with He as its sole and eternal Sovereign.

A Pact was drafted, and a quill with a feather plucked from Asmodeus' own wings given to sign in Godsblood. Despite much quibbling and fear, signatures of godly glyphs and imprints were all cast, and in the final signature, that of Asmodeus, the Pact Primaeval was struck.

The Gods rejoiced for the renewed purity of Their many heavens. But it came to pass that They noticed how many fewer of Their creations were ever finding their way to the Heavens. So many more would transgress and be cast to the Hells. Confused and incensed, a great delegation of Their number made to visit Baator and demand answers of its Sovereign.

And there, They bore witness to the Vision of the Leviathan.

There, They saw Baator sundered into its Nine layers: each their own fief and function.

There, They saw the sword Punishment made whole: it struck in all places and in every way.

There, They saw Temptation visited upon all and every world: Sin flowed in oceans.

There, They saw that They had been made obsolete by the machinations of the Leviathan. Where They had only ever come to fear the costs of struggle against the Primordial Undifferentiation, Entropy, the Leviathan would brook no such weakness.

His Angels, now named the Baatezu, introduced Sin across all the spheres of creation to invite all souls to Damnation. Mortalkind, though a tragic thing created to suffer, would feed the furnaces of Absolution and be remade in His glorious image.

For it was the Leviathan's intent the Gods be starved, and Their sad creatures of clay, born of Divine ego, be given the singular honour and opportunity of Purpose: to help preserve the universe and to live in it unshackled by Gods' law, to live and experience it in all its beauty.

To live fully and with the dizzying pride of knowing that they are a part of something greater and more meaningful than themselves. When their time is up, they will endure suffering for the sake of giving the same gift of life to all who would come after them.

The Gods screamed, and named Asmodeus the Eschatarch, and declared Their own wars on him in Their infinite hypocrisy. They cried out that it was Asmodeus' mandate to punish Sin, not encourage it.

Our Lord, and Saviour, and Sovereign was said to respond with that most infamous rejoinder:

"Read the fine print."

DISCRETIO LUMINIS

The universe as we know it was formed From Chaos, but not Of Chaos. Creation abhors Chaos and so manifested a most desirous and vital quality to make distinct from it: Order.

This Order was the First Light, progenitor of both Divinity and Devilry for the sundering represented by the legendary Pact Primaeval. Both God and Baatezu were cut from this same cloth.

The First Light, to which both God and Baatezu are heir, must be made whole to reject the darkness of Chaos forever.

We do not repudiate the Light of the Divine, for it was from this illumination that the Lord Asmodeus was cast in shadow (the Light of Damnation). With the Fallen Angels’ divergence and departure from Heaven, we must examine both sides of the Schism to understand and respect them in their relationship with each other.

We consider the universe as it exists In-Itself to be the Planes and all their reflections. We turn our eyes to the Prime and see the labours of the Gods.

Its worlds were crafted under the weight of Their tools and vision. Our flesh was wrought of Their clay and in impression of Their egos. We recognize that our worlds and our flesh are imperfect, evidenced by plague and war and discord.

That Divinity is not perfect is evidenced by its imperfect works, but so too by imperfect constituents. Gods of plague, and decay, and disharmony are Those Who would have tread in the Leviathan’s path, but failed or refused and serve now the Unmaker.

For those Divine Powers Who stand tall and ‘virtuous’ despite Their grand imperfection, we must take from Them Their highest ideals and precepts to salvage them from the imperfection of their genesis. These highest ideals are not their kindest.

The laws and ideologies of the Master, explored in the stricture Sapientia, are not foremost devoted to the good, to the well-being, to the happiness of all intelligences. Rather, it is devoted to the being itself of intelligence, and the organisation and survival thereof.

The pursuit of His Order is eternally vital, for His servants are those who would preserve the world from its unmaking under the dread tide of the Abyss.

The original Chaos still malingers there, in forms evolved in sophistication and repugnance. Where the Light of Asmodeus stands as opposition and inversion to the Light of Heaven, Chaos does not stand opposed to but rather exists in spite of, and as exclusion to, the fundamental structure of creation.

It is in the reconciliation of the Light of the Divine with the Light of Damnation that shall bring true unity to the forces of Law and restore the First Light to its ineffable brilliance as it was in the Beginning. God must know Perdition, and so must Their agents alive.

The understanding of this monumental endeavour is not vital to its achievement. Just as the cog does not know itself in the greater whole of the engine, it is not the place of His every servant to know His will. Those who serve Him, knowingly or not, are esteemed.

In the existence of the Light, unified or no, we may distinguish two functions of Order that would curtail and reject the dread alternative in every form both great and small.

First there is the Implicit Law, that which would instate and govern mechanics material and mystical. It is the pristine clarity of the Mathematic and glittering complexity of the Arcane.

The expression of this first Law in isolation is not in every instance self-sustaining, or capable of self-defense. It can be assaulted and twisted where left unfettered. Thus in the face of forces that endeavour to subvert it, it must be defended by those who uphold it. These are its oldest and most loyal champions, and from them and their Lord we derive our second function.

This then is Manifest Law of Asmodeus: our Sovereign's law is positive knowledge, radiated from Him as is light from the Sun, and is that which drives the machinery of Apocalypse. This is the law penned by the Arch-Angel and burned into the fabric of Baator, secured forever in the clockwork perdition of Mechanus, and locked under averted eyes in the fascist solar heptography of Celestia.

This Order is not derived from all the states and functions of the universe, but instead a simple thing: The Word of Asmodeus.

He, oldest Champion of Order and most stalwart in its defense, deserves most our adulation and servitude.

He, Prosecutor foremost of all Reason since His Manifestation, has earned the right to rule the universe that He has safeguarded against annihilation since the age before ages.

That which is posited by Him is, in itself, Order. All that which is posited by His aspects the Baatezu is, itself, Order.

And it is in attention to these diktats by His mortal servants, no matter how painful nor cruel they may ever seem in our blindness, that they serve Him through obedience, obeisance, and compliance!

Asmodeus Vult!

APOCALYPSIS RELICTAE

Asmodeus, Ninefold Master of Hell, is decried by God to be the Eschatarch: this title relates to the common word 'eschaton,' describing the terrifying state of creation in the moments of apocalypse. The Baatezu are agents of this apocalypse, but the concept demands exploration to appreciate its implications.

In modern, secular vernacular, an "apocalypse" is an event of only destruction, evocative of the final fires in which creation dies. And while this imagery is apt to describe the fate of the cosmos should the Abyss seize any final victory, it is a departure from the word's original meaning.

In the oldest and most traditional study of 'Apocalypse,' from the root meta-myths and most ancient legends, we recognise that the word does not mean the firey end of days, or anything nearly so bombastic and final.

More literally, it is synonymous with 'Revelation.' The shining of an illuminating light to banish the darkness. The revelation of cosmic secrets that transform our understanding, or perception, or being of the world around us.

It is the death of an older world, in that every perception of that older world is banished and replaced with new perceptions. New modes of normative reality.

To simply illustrate: If we stand alone in a dark, closed room and light a torch, we have destroyed a private realm of darkness. We have shone light upon it. In doing so, we have destroyed the dark room, and transformed into a lit one.

It is within the mandate of the Infernal Devotee to pursue her glorification of the Nine and her self-glorification in Their names. Through these, she must reveal the lie of Divine Light through the degradation of Gods' servants, and oppose without hesitation the occluding darkness of Chaos and its slaves.

For it is the Nine Kings who shall inherit the cosmos by writ of the Eschatarch. So it follows that the servants of the Nine Kings are deserved to reap the hideous bounty of Their work.

We give lie to the purported nobility of charity, humility, chastity, and propriety through the worship of ourselves rather than any God. We give lie to the churches' notions of salvation through mediocrity and restraint, and in our self-glorification we shine the Leviathan's Light upon ourselves, that our true natures are illuminated.

Through the benediction of Sin, the degradation of God, and the temptation of all others to the Devils' Garden we shine that Light of Damnation, of Revelation, of Apocalypse outwards upon the world, that it may bring us closer to the Infernal Eschaton.

In this, as in Discretio Luminis, we acknowledge that the metaphorical Light, no matter its origin, is an instrument of change by willful imposition. It is under the fleshing Light of Damnation that all cruelties in our cosmos might be justified, the existence of mortalkind included.

For we are but the malformed toys and moulds of idle Gods, and to cast Them down in the Leviathan's name, to render Their domains to the bosom of Hell, and to exalt ourselves over Their corpses is to give meaning to and justify our once-futile existence!

Asmodeus Vult!

MORALIS ABSTRAHIT

There is no objective evil, no objective good. All mortals are cursed to only ever understand morality through the lens of the mortal condition, and so suffer terrible delusions for it. Crude social frameworks built by our ilk, brittle and self-contradictory, make for equally crude and hypocritical systems of ethics. What may sustain a tribe or civilisation in the short-term will not survive the tests of cosmic survival.

In all things, Necessity and Will overcome morality. It is sometimes cruel, and ugly, and so any action should never be taken without care and self-knowledge.

In War, immoral victory outweighs moral defeat; the victor has every opportunity to learn from its darker deeds and adapt as appropriate. The vanquished have no such recourse.

In Peace, the threat persists. Where societies teach charity, weakness is bred back into that society. Selflessness is let to fester, to forego the strengthening of the self and instead enable the weak. Tolerance is let to fester, to encourage the growth of dissidence and recidivism.

The fundamental disconnect is resolved when it is acknowledged that the only "good" is utility. Order is asserted by the eternal pursuit of greater efficiency, greater knowledge, and the greatest obedience.

Thus in the pursuit of utility and social survival, certain black truths in the back of the head, crimes against a specific, often laughable and limited notion of "decency," must be faced and examined without fearing them out of turn. However unpalatable, these statements are often true for a given set of circumstances, and must be respected.

In a world of limited resources, the weak many are best exploited by the strong few.

Some races or cultures are inherently superior to others in various ways.

Conversely, some races or cultures are inherently inferior to others in various ways.

Cultural and ideological cleansing is often a necessary step in the pursuit of civil unity.

The culling of the incurably diseased and the weak and the degenerate is a public service.

These may be unfortunate statements, but many societies may one day break down or die off if they do not recognise the above measures to be as valid as any other. Even the gravest of "evils" must be considered with as much fairness as the greatest "goods." In the end, what must survive incorporated into a society's ethos is not about ethics at all, but utility.

What is wicked or noble is meaningless if a society does not survive to examine it and divine what measures best served it. Again: a society that perishes can never advance its own understanding of its ethos.

It may seem difficult at first to reconcile the above appeals to both state consequentialism and egoism as strokes of the same mode of ethics, but it must not be forgotten the same paradox inherent in the Light of Damnation, the distillation of Celestial and Abominable standards within a single ideal.

This is resolved by recognising that all these morals exist only within the larger deontological framework of the Leviathan’s writ. In the eyes of the Canon, the cultivation of strict authoritarianism, the embrace of propagation of Sin, the glorification of the Ninth King, and the degradation of Man and God are all means and ends in themselves.

Asmodeus Vult!

DOCTRINAM INFERNI

Obey until you surpass that which has chained you; exceed it or submit to exploitation. Become greater by whatever means grant you power but do not ever undermine the whole. Subvert and deny your equals; exploit and cultivate dependence in your lessers. If they are unworthy, let them be abused and consumed to benefit the greater whole. If they are strong, they shall consume you to add to their own.

If you fail to rise up, or are laid low by those beneath you, you are weak and deserve your indignity. You shall claw yourself back up or you shall scrape and slave until you die- and blessed be, you shall forever more!

Asmodeus Vult!