The Lectitio Divinitatus was a forbidden text that proclaimed the Emperor of Mankind to be a god, in direct defiance of the Imperial Truth He Himself had decreed. Circulated in secret during the Great Crusade and spreading swiftly once the war began, it became the seed of the faith that would one day dominate the Imperium entire.
Its origins are bound to Lorgar, the most devout of the primarchs, whose need to worship had first drawn him to the Emperor and then, when rebuffed, toward the gods of ruin. Yet the creed outgrew its author. As the horrors of the conflict mounted and the certainties of reason failed, ordinary men and women found comfort in the belief that their ruler was divine, and the Lectitio's teachings passed from hand to hand like a flame in the dark.
The text embodied the collapse of the Emperor's secular vision. He had sought to free humanity from gods; instead, in the crucible of betrayal, His people made one of Him. From the underground faith of the Lectitio Divinitatus would grow the vast and merciless Imperial Creed of later ages, a church that ruled a trillion souls in the name of the being who had striven to abolish all such churches.