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:
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)