So I’ve been thinking about the Celestines and the Neo-Celestines and the way they’re presented in Lancer, and I want to kind of dig into them a bit.
Everything we know about the CELESTINE project is... vague. The vast majority of it comes from an incomplete draft of No Room For A Wallflower, and even then the information is presented in such a way that it's not entirely clear how much of it is actually true. All we can reasonably infer is that the Celestines were the result of efforts by SecComm to research decorp, that they either succeeded or came close to succeeding, and that they were wiped out by the Albatross in order to prevent the breaking of the First Contact Accords.
And while you could maybe justify their deaths in the face of the horrifying existential threat that is RA, there's nothing I could see that marked them as particularly malicious in nature. It doesn't seem like they were punished for their arrogance or hubris - instead, at least to me, it seems like they were researchers caught finishing their work at an inconvenient time by the people who told them to do the work in the first place and had to go. It's not entirely clear how much the CELESTINE project knew about the FCA prior to their breakthroughs - it's possible it hadn't even gone public yet, depending on how close these events are (though admittedly, the Albatross knew of the FCA, so maybe it already had).
Anyways, all of this is to say that nothing about the CELESTINE project strikes me as particularly selfishly motivated. This is not so for the Neo-Celestines.
What we know about the Neo-Celestines is frustratingly muddied. It seems like in-universe the Celestines and the Neo-Celestines are conflated with one another, and while this makes sense from a character POV, there are at least a few lore blurbs scattered across the book that do not make any distinction, and so you have to piece together what the Neo-Celestines were based on puzzling out what seems at odds with what little we do know about the Celestines and the timeline. But one of the few things we do know is this: the Neo-Celestines were slavers, and they met their downfall in an event known as the Neo-Celestine Disappointment.
In light of what I've already mentioned about the Celestines, it seems odd that the Neo-Celestines are described as slavers. Like I said, the Celestines don't seem actively malicious so much as they were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. And even if they were, there's nothing that quite suggests they would have taken slaves. So I've been wondering about how that happened exactly, and I think the answer I've personally arrived at (and maybe I'll be wrong if we ever get more Celestine/Neo-Celestine content in official Massif Press material) is that the Neo-Celestines, despite the name, likely don't share any ideological lineage with the Celestines.
Like, sure, the Neo-Celestines were about decorp, but I think the underlying motivations behind why they sought decorp were likely different. If we assume the Celestines were motivated by scientific curiosity (and admittedly, as I'm writing this I do realize that the Celestines existed primarily in the context of SecComm, so maybe that assumption is also flawed), then the Neo-Celestines were likely motivated by something else. My own personal headcanon here is that maybe the Neo-Celestines were much more aggressively Anthro-Chauv, or at the very least incredibly elitist and hierarchical, and they latched onto the Celestine name less because they shared ideological motivations with the Celestines and more for the "branding", so to speak. Maybe after a couple thousand years they got cocky, assumed RA wasn't showing his face again, and instigated a push for decorp as a means of drawing a line between themselves and their lessers - "ascending" to the lofty heights of Posthuman and subjugating the lower, ordinary Humans.
It's worth pointing out here that the Neo-Celestine Disappointment took place in the twilight years of SecComm, likely during Union's civil war that led to the emergence of ThirdComm. In that context, the Neo-Celestine movement could have been a sort of desperate, final grasp for certain Anthrochauvinists within SecComm who maybe decided "fuck it, our way of life is crumbling as we speak, who gives a fuck about RA?".
Again, this is all mostly just headcanon based on what I remember of the precious little Celestine content scattered across the Lancer books. But I am deeply curious about all of this stuff, and I wanted to take a moment to speculate about all this decorp stuff because it is pretty fascinating.
