The Adeptus Terra, known also as the Priesthood of Terra, is the sprawling confederation of institutions that collectively administers the Imperium of Man in the name of its silent God-Emperor. It is less a single organisation than a vast family of them, an umbrella beneath which shelter the bureaucrats, adepts, and functionaries who have inherited the machinery of government since the Emperor was interred upon the Golden Throne. To serve the Adeptus Terra is to serve the state itself, in offices whose origins reach back to the earliest days of the Imperium.
Beneath its authority fall many of the greatest bodies of human civilisation. The Administratum tallies the tithes and keeps the records, the Adeptus Astronomica sustains the psychic beacon that makes travel possible, and countless lesser estates and offices carry out the innumerable functions of empire. Each guards its own traditions and prerogatives with jealous pride, and the boundaries between them are policed by rivalry as much as by law.
The Priesthood of Terra emerged when the Emperor's living rule gave way to government by His servants, the men and women who had administered His domain in His name learning to continue without His guidance. Over ten thousand years this stewardship calcified into ritual, and the adepts came to venerate the very act of administration as a sacred duty, their ledgers and cogitators tended like relics of a holy trust.
From the ranks of the Adeptus Terra are drawn many who ascend to the High Lords of Terra, the council that rules the Imperium in the Emperor's stead. The scope and character of this immense priesthood are set out further in the glossary account of the Adeptus Terra, the true government of a realm too vast for any one hand to hold.
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