On worshipping the ancients and the

On worshipping the ancients and the

**of Note**

rise of Noddism Our union has always venerated the lineages and the past. While we have kept the most cult-like aspects to our private gatherings, we, especially the Ventrue, have openly recited our lineages in court, used rhetorics that recall the great speeches and deeds of our forebears, and we do make celebrations to mark the great moments of our past. When an elder enters court, observe the reverence and the awe as a demigod walks among us. It is the aspiration of many Princes to become the objects of such reverence, but it is a gift we reserve for the truly noble of our blood.

I personally know of a dozen methuselah cults, all of them populated by pillars of their clans and staunch defenders of our hierarchy, more than half of them worshipping ancients of lesser blood than my own.

This is good and proper, and in recent years these cults to our dark saints have risen to prominence and open acceptance. So also for cults celebrating the creatures we call Antediluvians, the oldest creatures of our kind we have any indication of existing.

I believe this is partially in direct response to a less fortunate development that reached its peak at the turn of the millennium — the rise of the Noddist Gehenna cults. The less they are spoken of, the better, but I am glad to say they are on the decline, as no bloodthirsty ancients rise from their tombs and no divine judgement rains fire from above. If these were indeed the Antediluvians, they did not show the destructive appetites attributed to them. Instead their existence makes our claim to power stronger, for we have (forgive my blasphemy) veritable gods on our side.

The Church of Caine With the Sabbat throwing themselves headfirst into their mad crusade, the insidious Cainite Heresy has returned to our cities here at home. Are they a front for the Sabbat, preparing our childer for the return of their secret masters? Tempting our neonates into remorseless sin and base monstrosity? Or is this our chance to forge our own church of Blood, reclaim Caine as a symbol of our kind, and celebrate our role in the world without the paralysing self-criticism of ever-present humanity?

The Sabbat, hard as they are to understand, seem to proclaim Caine as the god and saviour of our kind.

But they also name the Antediluvians as His enemies.

Not so the Cainite Church. Their Gnostic interpretation of Christianity casts us all as angels of the True Divine, put on earth to shepherd Humankind and to oppose the false creator worshipped as God the Father.

In Cainite dogma Caine and Christ are both heaven-sent rebels against a malevolent creature they call the demiurge or Ialdabaoth, Lord of the Prison of the World. All of us, from the theoretical Antediluvians to the weakest of the thin-blooded, share the blood of the True Divine. This tempting faith, while it is obviously nothing but another Kindred distortion of Gnosticism, a human idea, does reenforce the core function of the Camarilla, especially in a time when we have stepped away from idealistic claims of universality to protect our interests against the rabble. Perhaps a new faith is exactly what we need in this time of division?

One that extols our virtues as secret masters of the world. A dogma that fuels our blood with fire as we again go to war against the Church of Peter and this Second Inquisition. I fear that if we do not commit to destroying this church of Blood and refuse to accept its clergy into court, it will destroy us. What is even worse, the Heresy openly spits in the face of the Abrahamic faiths, and that will not sit well with our new allies in the East. I foresee the Ashirra will make demands that we deal with the Heresy in whatever cities we shall share. Because share them we will. 2 2 The Pillars Just like the crusades of the past exposed the primitive warrior-kings of the West to the wonders of the Muslim world, the Gehenna War has made the Kindred world considerably smaller and brought us much closer to the Ashirra. This is the name for our union in the Middle East. Some argue that the Ashirra is another sect entirely, but I disagree. They were the Camarilla long before we were, founded on principles of hiding among their mortal kin and remaining true to the pillars of Islam, even as they are tempted by the impulses of death. Our cooperation is no less close than the bonds between Chicago and St Petersburg.

Both Camarilla, but worlds apart. So while many see the impending marriage between the hidden masters of the West and those of the East as a monumental shift, I see it as the correction of a misconception. If you see in this some great idealism, some inclusive victory against divisive cultural prejudices, I ask you to think again. We are not on the side of the people, of the millions who are turned away from refuge in our cities, and nor are our friends in the Ashirra, their professed piety notwithstanding. We are in this to rule and to survive. We are diplomats, kings, businessmen, elite soldiers, cult leaders, and generals. We are the elite. We are vampires. Thinking the Ashirra is a single thing, a single culture, is a prejudiced idea that will get you killed in the courts of the future. Consider this: among our new allies we find Saudi Princes dining on the blood of women stoned to death for infidelity, a liberal IT-millionnaire from Jordan, Turkish nationalists dreaming of the Ottoman empire, Kurdish freedom fighters and Persian nobles longing for the glorious days of disco in 1970’s Teheran. They are all Ashirra. They all believe in Allah’s pillars. Yet none of them think and act in the same way.

We have a choice. God or Caine. Faith or Isolation.

Either we, as a sect, strive to return to our moral foundation as believers in the God of Abraham, or we risk our new allies and take our chances with the Church of Caine. As I have argued in the essay above, our moral compass is our faith. Staying human is adhering to the beliefs of our breathing days. No one knows this better than the Ashirra. Instead of Traditions, they use the five pillars of Islam as their code of conduct and as a bulwark against the Beast. To awake during day to pray to Mecca requires astounding self discipline, yet they all do it. Do we want to present ourselves as faithless atheists, or do we accept that we are still People of the Book and share a common story and a common morality with the Ashirra? These questions will be answered differently in every domain of the future. One will play host to a court ruled by a Cainite preacher and avoided like the plague by faithful Ashirra. Another will be run like a company by an Ashirra judge maintaining a strict front of impartiality while picking off the unjust one by one. A third will uphold a paranoid Prince trying to fan the rising flames of nationalism in his city to keep the future at bay.

The Gehenna Crusade and the Beckoning have brought us close to our origins, to our venerable ancestors, and to the Ashirra. Now we must choose how this will change us and what we believe in. 2 3 O U R F A I T H the church of blood I attach these transcripts as further proof you have a heresy problem. It’s getting popular and claims to have abandoned the Noddist eschatology, yes, but the Church of Caine is never harmless. Ideas like these are the first steps towards radicalizing our neonates and softening them up for the inevitable return of our enemies. No matter how much these thoughts stroke your ego, we must stamp them out or risk everything. I know it’s painful to kill a childe, but I fear I must insist you act decisively.

By the oaths of Blood we made on the September 14, 1856, in the domain ruled by my sire Lawrence Westfield, under his princely witness, Sanguines et Animi,