The Adeptus Mechanicus do not follow the Imperial Cult but a wholly different religion, known as the Cult Mechanicus or the Cult of the Machine.
Via our good friends at Lexicanum
Although the Emperor is venerated by the Adeptus Mechanicus for his ancient knowledge and comprehension, the tech-priests do not follow the Imperial Cult, but a wholly different religion, known as the Cult Mechanicus or the Cult of the Machine. The Cult Mechanicus originated during the Age of Strife. According to its teachings, knowledge is the supreme manifestation of divinity, and all creatures and artifacts that embody knowledge are holy because of it. Machines that preserve knowledge from ancient times are also holy, and machine intelligences are no less divine than those of flesh and blood. A man’s worth is only the sum of his knowledge – his body is simply an organic machine capable of preserving intellect. In the Cult’s tenets, life itself is of no intrinsic value. One of the most obvious examples of this belief is the techpriests’ use of humans as raw material in the creation of the machine-slaves known as servitors.
To the Cult Mechanicus, machines represent a higher form of life than that created through biological evolution. The ultimate object of the cult’s veneration is known as the Machine God (or the Deus Mechanicus), which is believed to have given rise to all technologies and made them manifest through his chosen Illuminati among mankind. The Machine God may be the C’tan Void Dragon, who has been entombed on Mars for millennia and was worshiped by the Cult Mechanicus before the rise of the Emperor. The Cult Mechanicus await the arrival of the Omnissiah, a prophesied physical avatar of the Machine God. During the Great Crusade the forces of the Emperor liberated many of the forge worlds founded as colonies of Mars in ancient times. On his arrival at many of the worlds, the Cult Mechanicus recognized the Emperor as the long awaited Omnissiah.
Lingua-technis or Techna-Lingua is the official language of the Adeptus Mechanicus and part of the collective Cant Mechanicus. It is a binary language, optimized for quick communication of technical data, which consists of a burst of static emitted through the bionic implants of members of the Mechanicum which cannot be understood by unaugmented humans. The Cant Mechanicus is the term for the collective languages of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Few outside the Adeptus Mechanicus can comprehend these tongues, let alone reproduce them. Many Tech-Priests have their jaws and throats altered, the better to speak languages that were designed only for cogitators to use. Furthermore, each language is replete with internal self-references and allusions to knowledge that remains unknown to those outside the order. Their use is forbidden by any not of the Cult Mechanicus. A lot of these languages have words and even entire grammatical structures missing, eroded by the entropy of millennia or corrupted by scrapcode.
The Quest for Knowledge is the driving mission of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The quest consists of research and exploration, but ultimately the focus of the quest is on the recovery of a working Standard Template Construct (“STC”) system. The purpose of the many exploratory missions is the recovery of STC knowledge. For thousands of years the Tech-priests have pursued all information about the STC. To the Mechanicus, it is their lost bible. Any information on the STC including the scraps of knowledge recorded on hard copy designs are sought out and kept as holy texts. No functional STC systems have ever been recovered. The STC survives only as print-outs, some of which are many thousands of years old. Although considered the most reliable, there are very few first generation print-outs, and these are regarded as the most sacred of texts. Through the Tech-priests’ efforts much has been recovered or reconstructed through comparison of copies, although preserved knowledge of the most advanced technology eludes the Adeptus Mechanicus. Most of the early colonists’ needs were simple and very few would have bothered to preserve the more theoretical and advanced technological information the STC contained.
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