History
According to Demon: The Fallen, the War in Heaven began when an angel named Ahrimal foresaw a disaster in the future - a disaster which God had either directly orchestrated or would allow to happen. The angels debated whether or not to act against God in order to prevent this disaster; many argued that it would be safer to do nothing, because their action could potentially be the cause of the disaster. The angel Lucifer was the first to make a conclusive decision in favor of rebellion, and he became the leader of the rebel angels.
These "Fallen" revealed themselves to humanity in order to bring them "the light" of knowledge and awareness. In so doing they incurred the wrath of God, who had given humanity the potential to be aware of the Word, the good and evil, yet had not intended Man to have this kind of awareness yet. The humans (Adam and Eve) had been given gifts that they could not use due to their initial innocence ("A child is happy because he is unaware"), and the game's Adam and Eve are portrayed as having had only rudimentary knowledge and awareness, solely concerned with their survival. During the war that followed, the sin of Cain taught the Fallen how to kill and many grew twisted and evil. In the end, the Fallen lost the war, and were banished to the abyss of Hell as a punishment for their transgressions.
This background provides a possible explanation for the conflicting origin stories of the other games in the "old" World of Darkness setting. Reality is presented during the Fall as being far less static than it is in the final nights. The world went from being populated by two humans to having billions of humans with various civilizations and pasts existing at the same time (even when those pasts were contradictory to each other). One could deduce from this that the answer to which game provides the correct world origin story is: all of them were correct, all at the same time, and all at that one point (the Fall).
Read more about this topic: Demon: The Fallen
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“At present cats have more purchasing power and influence than the poor of this planet. Accidents of geography and colonial history should no longer determine who gets the fish.”
—Derek Wall (b. 1965)