Cult of the Last Icon

"Can a tree uproot itself? It cannot. And yet it must."

- Common proverb associated with the Cult of the Last Icon, attributed to Chastaldt Muir

The Cult of the Last Icon was a revolutionist and philosophical ideology that was once established on Zrachken March.

Origin
The Cult of the Last Icon can trace its ideas back to thinkers who have been dead for centuries, many of whom criticized the Covenant’s structure and proposed solutions that would bring about democracy and radical egalitarianism. These ideas were finally codified in the writings and leadership of the San'Shyuum poet-scholar Chastaldt Muir (2209-2347). Muir wrote nine books criticising the hegemony and the ‘totality-stratification’ of the Covenant, three of which were published before his banishment in 2196.

One might think that he was banished for his sedition, but his first three books were dense, abstract collections of poetry and commentary, accessible only to his fellow scholars. The same could be said of his detractors. Muir’s radical theories were confined to the academic world, and scarcely noticed by the clergy or the secular powers. His banishment came about after he instigated and lost a series of vicious power plays against the administration of the academy that he worked for.

Muir and his students set about building a new base of power in the Zrachken March (Runar’s Mire Primary Domain) by brokering peace agreements with the local nation-planets and the Harvest Lords. The Harvest Lords were a heretical revolutionary group that used peasant rebellions and piracy to advance their cause. Many of Muir’s actions should have alarmed High Charity, but the Hierarchs were otherwise busy during the 37th Age of Conflict, and the clergy were satisfied with Muir’s claims that he was doing everything in his power to turn the Harvest Lords away from their heresy.

The revolutionary movements spread, receiving aid from Muir and his students and using his two pseudonymously-published books as their guide stars. Three primary colonies, already weakened by decades of conflict and corruption, fell by 2324. Several satellite colonies likewise were taken. The surviving Harvest Lords joined with the revolutionary leaders to create a new radically egalitarian government, of which Muir was the first among equals due to his influence.

Due to the interdiction of the Harvest Lords and the communication controls implemented by the previous governments, word of the Cult would not spread outside of Runar’s Mire for three years, at which point Muir’s teachings were in full bloom, and obviously heretical to anyone who took the time to read his latest book. A fleet was dispatched to recover the lost worlds, but the Harvest Lords destroyed many fuel stations on the slipspace routes leading into their territory, and kept up hit-and-run attacks that sapped the Covenant strength. It would take twenty years, three fleets of 150 warships, and five million troops to reclaim the lost worlds.

Furrowed Crest, the colony that was the seat of Muir’s Cult and formerly the most populous in the region, lost fifty percent of its population to famine and forced relocation schemes. His disastrous agricultural reforms and ‘living-way’ edicts resulted in crop failures and infrastructure collapse, and the ever-shifting ideological leanings spawned one witch hunt after another until the entire populace lived in perpetual terror and suspicion. An inquisition was organized to study Muir’s influence with the surviving population, and at the conclusion of the investigation, the lead inquisitor ordered that the whole planet be glassed. In spite of the Covenant’s best efforts, Muir’s books would escape Runar’s Mire and eventually be published in secret throughout the Holy Ecumene. Echoes of his revolution would rise wherever there were enough dissidents who believed in the dream of Chastaldt Muir, rather than the brutal reality he brought about.

The Icon
The Cult of the Last Icon gets its name from a prominent icon. This is an image of a hovering tree, often floating above a landscape or a hole in the ground. Offshoot-cults may adopt icons of burning trees, or trees struck by lightning, but the idea they represent is the same, and so is their source. The Last Icon was inspired by a refrain in Muir’s poetry, asking whether a tree can uproot itself as a metaphor for the impossibility of reform coming from within a system. The tree imagery is a direct reference to the Covenant theological concept of the Branching Tree, which symbolizes the heterodoxy under the Covenant's banner and seeks to reconcile the differences between the various denominations of the Covenant religion as facets of one universal truth. The Cult of the Last Icon actively refutes this, for it regards no part of the Covenant religion, philosophy or social order as salvageable in any form.

This is the icon of an iconoclastic cult, the only one that will endure as every other symbol is thrown onto the fire until it stands alone. Then it too will be destroyed, to make way for a new beginning.

The Foul Heresy
The Cult of the Last Icon is a utopian revolutionary movement. Like with every other utopian movement, it’s hard to pin down the exact ideology that drives it. A movement of true believers, deceivers, and would-be despots who thirst for power is not going to produce a coherent scripture, and one of the central tenets of the Cult is that revolutionary practice is more important than ideological orthodoxy. In other words, the ends justify the means, even if it means lying and self-deception.

If you want to cut through the mysticism to the heart of the movement, to what the leaders and the vanguards truly believe, it is the following axioms:


 * All minds with the ability to think (Cognizance, as the Cult rejects reason as a standard) are equal in worth and latent ability. Once the chains are broken and the minds are truly free, they are truly equal.


 * Objective reality doesn’t exist, but is defined subjectively by beings with the capacity to reason. Cultists consider objective reality, at best, to be buried under so many layers of subjective reality and self-deception as to be completely irrelevant to everyday life. At worst, the very notion of objective reality is a brutal lie used to keep enslaved minds from seeing their chains.


 * Once a mind defines subjective reality, it creates words and icons to anchor that subjective reality and communicate it with other minds. This means that a sufficiently clever mind can alter subjective reality by manipulating words and symbols. Indeed, Muir himself is said to have fed multitudes by convincing them that their hunger was already sated, and that is why the agriculture on the Cultist-held worlds collapsed. The Cultists did not tend to the fields because they had no need to grow food.


 * By that same token, minds and the subjective reality that they perceive is tethered to the words and the icons that they have learned. Since the first words were crafted by stone age chieftains and strong men, the words and the icons they created were inevitably used to enslave the pre-sapient beings around them. Alternatively, the first languages were crafted as a cruel experiment by the Forerunners after they sterilized and repopulated the galaxy. Either way, the slaver/enslaved dynamic persists to the modern day, propagated by the languages they crafted.


 * A tree cannot uproot itself. Reform can be tried, but it will fail, and the only true freedom can only be attained by burning the whole system to the ground and starting anew. Clean slate. Burn the books, smash the signs, uproot the language and start all over. When new languages arose, perhaps with guidance, they would create a truly egalitarian reality.

When the Covenant finally came to Furrowed Crest, they found dozens of villages populated by political prisoners with their eyes gouged out and their tongues scorched, so that they could not pass old language on to the next generation. These were experiments by Muir’s students to see if the clean-slate process would truly take hundreds of years, or whether it could be done in a few generations.


 * Words and symbols anchor subjective reality, and these anchors are in turn fortified by “Wellsprings of power”. These wellsprings of power are institutions such as families, courts of law, and academia that strengthen old habits and old ways of thinking. Muir was well aware of the fact that his Cult was established in a power vacuum because years of fighting and corruption had weakened the old institutions to the point of collapse. These ideas were developed by the students who escaped through the Barrens of Ispik to the August Realms, and they came to advocate methods of secession, subversion and infiltration. These methods came to be recognized by High Charity, which put its inquisitors to work identifying and rooting out the influences of the Cult. The fortunes of the Cult have waxed and waned as peasant rebellions come and go, but many fear that the Cult will spread like wildfire in the wake of the Great Schism, particularly as word of Truth’s deception rocks the faith in the Great Journey.

Author's Intent
The origins of the Cult of the Last Icon lie in a simple question: What enemy would terrify the Covenant the most?

In 2016 or so, I had a number of ideas for conversations between Humans and Elites in the post-War era. These conversations would later coalesce into The Grand Tour and New York City Blues, stories that will see champions of the two species thrown together by odd circumstances and forced to talk their differences out. One idea in particular was a debate over the act of glassing.

Humans of the 26th century see glassing as abhorrent, and it's not hard to see why. It's not just that we Humans are on the receiving end of it. Glassing a planet violates all the moral precepts that 21st-century Humans and 26th-century Humans hold about war. It kills soldiers without giving them so much as the hope of shooting back, it exterminates the civilians and all that they built, and it extinguishes the biosphere. Even a moderate glassing of the populated areas of the planet will likely result in a mass extinction event, let alone the full "Don't stop until the surface is but glass" treatment that many planets were given.

The Covenant have a different view. They do indeed know that glassing a planet is overkill for any conflict, expensive and wasteful to boot. But they also have a concept of sacrifice, of taking something valuable and sacrificing it for the hope of a better future. Glassing a planet is a moral act then, a declaration that whatever lived upon it was so foul that not even the memory could be allowed to persist. We know that the Covenant have  even before they went to war against Humanity, and in the conversation, I wanted the Elite to confront the Human with an enemy that gives even the Human pause.

So. What enemy strikes fear into the heart of the Covenant? That's a very particular question. You can hate an enemy because of a disagreement. If an enemy destroyed Forerunner artefacts or threatened Covenant populations, the Covenant would hate them, but not necessarily fear them. Fear is more primal. Fear is a response to a danger that threatens many things that one holds dear, and which cannot easily be fought. Fear is a feeling of helplessness in the face of malice or entropy.

-