“I can report that the first two companies of the Chapter created in this thirteenth founding are responding well to the daemonic possession therapy.”
That line is from a memo dated 013.M36, signed by a Genetor-Major of the Xenobiologis called Lauram Clelland and addressed to a lord whose name is replaced with Inquisition Clearance Insufficient. GW put it on the website for the Third War for Armageddon worldwide campaign back in 2003, on a little page for each Chapter you could pledge your games to, and it’s still sitting on the Wayback Machine if you go looking. It’s the first proper write-up the Exorcists ever got, and I’ve been rereading it all week because of Space Marine 2.
The second anniversary update landed on 1 October, and buried under the one-handed thunder hammer and the Lamenters Crucible armour (which I already wrote far too much about) is an Exorcists Cosmetic Pack in Season Pass 3. Two helmets, two sets of pauldrons, two sets of gauntlets, one breastplate. Warhammer Community called them “the mysterious Exorcists Chapter” and “everyone’s favourite daemon-hunting Successor Chapter” in the same article, without saying whose successor.
The memo reads like a quarterly status update
Read the rest of Clelland’s report and it gets worse in the best way. The subjects were possessed “by minor creatures from the daemonic pantheon” under hexagrammatic wards, then exorcised, then trained in the 666 verses of the Book of Exorcisms and dropped onto a daemon world on the northern edge of the Eye of Terror to see what happened. A squad of Grey Knights was held in reserve in case they turned. The kill ratio was 97:1. Adrenal output more than tripled, serotonin “dropped drastically”, and only 1% of the subjects “re-succumbed to daemonic influence on the planet.”
Then the bit I love. Clelland writes that “these figures clearly indicate that the procedure is both safe and effective,” and that “the minor side effects that have manifested in a number of test subjects should hopefully be eliminated” within fifty years. The memo opens with “minor setbacks aside,” which is also how every quarterly status email I’ve had at work from a project that’s on fire opens, more or less word for word.
So in 2003, the Exorcists were a lab project, built on purpose with the possession in from day one and a squad of Grey Knights on standby on that first daemon world.
Then Forge World made it a rumour
When Imperial Armour Volume Ten: The Badab War Part Two came out in 2011, the Exorcists got their big Forge World entry, and it walks a lot of that back. Forge World calls them “the only known Chapter extant from the 13th Founding,” the one some sources call the Dark Founding, and says the “exact nature of their creation and the gene-seed used” were classified by a “special Bull Absolute” issued by the Inquisitorial Representative at the time. The possession therapy is now gossip. IA10 says their training is “long rumoured” to include “controlled exposure to baleful entities of the Warp,” and that outside eyes have never seen it first hand because Banish sits in a quarantined zone called the Narasima Straits.
What IA10 adds instead is texture. Twelve companies, with the 10th, 11th and 12th all Neophyte Scouts, because the recruit fatality rate is assumed to be horrific. The Orisons, which are sub-cults inside the Chapter with their own libraries. The Enochian Guard, the 1st Company Orison, where membership requires you to have killed a manifested daemon in single combat. Every battle-brother has to master all 666 verses of the Liber Exorcismus, “sunder the seven seals of Salomoneth” and learn unicursal hexagrams to ward his kit. The Black Templars, unsurprisingly, think all of this is witchcraft. There’s also a lovely little line that the Chapter’s common practice and insignia are based closely on Ultramarines patterns, which matters in a minute.
The battle honours are great too, especially the Aschen War, where a third of the Chapter died running down a Daemon Prince called the Horned God on a dead world called Belphago. The Venerable Dreadnought Sybra tore a chunk out of it so Librarian Malachite could spear its heart. I’d buy that as a Kill Team box tomorrow.
And then there’s Headhunted, a short story in the Heroes of the Space Marines anthology, where an Exorcist called Darrion Rauth believes his Chapter was made from Grey Knights gene-seed. Which, if you’d only read the 2003 memo, is a reasonable guess. Grey Knights in reserve, daemon-hunting, Inquisition oversight, it all points vaguely towards Titan if you squint.
Pete, the garage, and a fiver I lost
I bought my copy of IA10 second-hand at Games Day, years after it came out, and the Exorcists entry was the one I read first because the profile plates of 8th Squad Idris were on the page it fell open at. Crimson plate, horned skull on the shoulder, a big 8 on the kneepad and a hexagram scratched into the greave. I read the whole thing twice and decided, with the total confidence of someone who had read one book, that the Exorcists’ gene-seed was a mystery GW would never answer.
Pete didn’t agree. This would’ve been early 2021, when the garage group was still mostly a WhatsApp chat because of lockdown, and he was dead set on the Grey Knights theory because of Headhunted. I said it couldn’t be Grey Knights because nobody makes successors of the Grey Knights, which I think is right but I can’t actually remember where I’d read it. Pete said “the memo literally has Grey Knights standing behind them.” I said “the memo isn’t canon, it’s a website.” We put a fiver on it, which in hindsight was stupid, because neither of us had a way to settle it.
Then White Dwarf #462 came out in March 2021 with an Index Astartes on the Exorcists, and it settled it against both of us, because the Chapter’s gene-seed, according to that issue, is Rogal Dorn’s.
I’m an Imperial Fists player. I have about three thousand points of yellow, some of which is even painted. I had read about this Chapter for years without the faintest idea they were cousins, and that turns out to be exactly how GW wrote it. According to WD #462, Dorn’s name doesn’t appear in their battle cries or pageantry, they keep no fraternal links with the Imperial Fists or any of the other sons of Dorn, and the rank and file don’t know either. An Exorcist is only formally told he descends from Dorn when he’s inducted into the 1st Company. It’s treated as a great honour, and the veterans guard it with their lives.
Nobody won the fiver. Pete reckons he did because “they’re still sort of secret,” and I’ve stopped bringing it up in the garage.
The 2021 version breaks the memo, and I keep going back and forth on it
WD #462 also gives a completely new origin for the possession, and I don’t think it can be squared with Clelland’s report. In the 2021 version, the Exorcists were already a working Chapter, with nothing unusual about them except a strange resistance to psychic corruption. During a campaign on Totem IV, a Lord of Change called Keriath the Shrouded got so annoyed by this that it threw its whole essence into Chapter Master Enoch Trismegistus. Trismegistus fought it from the inside, woke up some latent psychic ability in the process, reached into the mind of Chief Librarian Goetos, and the two of them dragged the daemon out and banished it.
A radical Ordo Malleus sect called the Plutonians had a spy planted in a menial job inside Chapter Command. They relieved Trismegistus of command, built quarters on Banish, and interrogated him for months. When they eventually cleared him, he was the one who proposed turning his whole Chapter into their experiment. The Halls of Tempering came after that.
So who’s right, the Genetor or the Chapter Master? My first instinct was that 2021 simply overwrote 2003, the way GW does constantly, and Lexicanum is stuck stapling the two together. But read the memo again with the Plutonians in mind and it’s an Inquisition document, written by a Mechanicus genetor, to a lord whose name is redacted, about a programme that “would be met with outrage if known to the wider Imperium” (that’s WD #462’s phrasing). Is it really so strange if the memo and the Chapter’s own legend don’t match? One of them is lying to somebody. Probably. Or GW just changed its mind in the eighteen years between them, which is longer than I’ve been in the hobby, and I’m doing fan-fiction to make it tidy. I honestly go back and forth.
What I’m sure of is that 2021 made it nastier. Failed initiates turn out to be good at holding daemons, so the Plutonians use them as jail cells for the daemons cast out of the successful ones, stacking entity after entity into the same man until his mind’s gone and his body just carries on. They’re called the Broken Ones, and for about five thousand years the Chapter has kept them on a drifting prison ship called the Purgatomb, out in deep space, well away from Banish. Some of the early failures got loose too. A cardinal attached to the Plutonians, Rodrigo Nessun, decided the possessed initiates were humanity’s future and ran off into the warp with them as a warband called the Swords of Epiphany. Captain Veyon Armadel spent a purge hunting them until the warband was declared extinct.
The survivors carry marks too. WD #462 lists runes on the skin that throb in the presence of warp-spawn, little cuts that never heal, discoloured eyes, scaly patches and spines growing out of the head and limbs. They hide all of it under armour or swap the affected bits for augmetics. Chapter Master Aymir Vasaphon was possessed for seven days by a Nurgle daemon that made a lot of smug predictions before it was driven out, and several of them have since come true. The Index doesn’t say which ones.
Dorn’s sons, and Dorn’s sons don’t know
Okay so, the Dorn thing. Why hide it? Lore-wise you can kind of work it out. If you’re a Chapter whose recruits get possessed on purpose, you don’t want any Imperial Fists Chapter Master turning up asking awkward questions about family. And remember, the IA10 insignia and practices were Ultramarines-pattern. A Chapter dressed as Guilliman’s kids, built from Dorn’s gene-seed, with a classified Bull on the founding. Camouflage, maybe. It also means an Exorcist doesn’t know who his gene-father is until he’s been possessed, exorcised, and lived long enough to make the 1st Company.
WD #462 even admits the gene-seed thing is a mystery inside the fiction. The Exorcists’ resistance to daemonic influence shows up in their Primaris recruits too, which points at the gene-seed, but as to why “similar gifts do not present in the Imperial Fists or their other successors, no further light was shed.” That’s the Chapter’s own Apothecaries not knowing why they’re different from their own family. They didn’t even get any Greyshields to test it on. The Torchbearer fleet sent to Banish got hammered by daemons all the way there, every Greyshield aboard died, and the Rogue Traders decided the trip was cursed. The Magi Biologis handed over the Primaris tech with no living proof, and the Exorcists raised their own Primaris from scratch, under their own rites, with the Plutonians watching.
And yeah, it does sort of retroactively make the Grey Knights comparison funnier. The memo had a squad of them standing behind the first test subjects in case it went wrong. Then GW eventually confirmed the Exorcists are Dorn’s sons. Whatever, I’m not going to rank who’d be more offended…
Space Marine 2, for what it’s worth, went with the 2011 answer. The in-game Chapter description says their Founding is unknown, and I think it’s the smart one for a video game. The key art Focus put out has the trooper in crimson plate covered in white script, top to bottom, which I’m guessing is meant to be the Liber Exorcismus. I haven’t checked it against anything. There’s a horned skull on a chain at his hip, and he’s standing in a mushroom-choked jungle, which is a bit odd for a Chapter whose homeworld is described as acid swamps over an underground fortress. Maybe it’s one of the Operations maps, I haven’t checked that either.
I’m going to buy the pack. I’ll probably build an Exorcist for my Bulwark and never take him off, because I’m a sucker for a Chapter that hides its own family tree. The thing I’m actually worried about is the script. I’ve tried freehand text on a breastplate exactly once, on an Imperial Fists Chaplain in about 2014, and it ended with half a pot of Abaddon Black and a toothbrush. The game does it for you, which is the only reason I can have this many words on one Space Marine. If I ever do an Exorcists squad on the table, it’s getting transfers, a lot of them, and probably Mephiston Red over a grey primer, because red over black took me five coats last time and it still looked like a bruise.
