Demonic deals were essentially cons, predicated on the belief of the witches participating in them. While a demon always possessed the capacity for supernaturally-empowered violence against those who broke deals, they could have performed this regardless, though it would have harmed their reputation among other potential witches.
Demons cannot all perform Damnation; this is a particular Hex only possessed by some, with Pns the only demon in-game capable of performing it. Being damned required both the Hex of Damnation and the Damned's acceptance, whether this was active enthusiasm or belief that they would be Damned because of their deal or breaking it.
Demonic deals were generally driven on the demons' end by ensuring the triumph of Mistrust and Unsafety. The demons in-game were unusually organised in their attempt to kill God, and Thrl was extremely unusual in their evolving sympathy for humanity and its interests (which led them to reveal much of this information to some characters by the end of the game).
Various heretical schools of thought lurked in the background of the setting. Many were based on a recognition of two empirically-provable, if relatively well-concealed, facts:
1. That God and Heaven's goals were not human welfare per se but the maintenance of Trust and Safety (specifically safety emerging out of present risk). This is a form of the Humanist heresy, which more broadly defined includes the ethical belief that morality comes from human well-being rather than God's will.
2. The fact that any direct action by God created an equal and opposite reaction in the direction of Mistrust and Unsafety (this being why God relied so prominently on others to enforce Their will). This is a form of the Dualist heresy.
Beyond the recognition of these two principles, none of the heresies were meant to be strictly provable or disprovable within the terms of the game.
The most prominent heretical positions beyond Humanism and Dualism include Pantheism, Gnosticism and Georism.
The ethical implications taken from Dualism are many and varied, and not all forms stem from a recognition of the core metaphysical fact of how God's power functioned (termed Metaphysical Dualism), which were widely suppressed throughout much of history. A crucial debate within Metaphysical Dualism is whether this fact about God stemmed from Their own intentions (as, to a Humanist Dualist, seemed most likely), or from something inherent about the cosmos they could not control, which rendered Heaven and Hell equally matched and humanity's decision to 'break the balance' for good all the more important (termed Sympathetic Dualism). A related position, sometimes not stemming from Metaphysical Dualism at all, is Moral Dualism, the belief that there is equal worth in Heaven and Hell, and that they should be equally matched. Moral Dualism was taken most seriously of the Dualist Heresies, as a stepping stone to witchcraft, but in order to repress the true nature of God, Metaphysical Dualism and Humanist Dualism were also rigorously persecuted under the Commission. Sympathetic Dualism lies more on the edge of orthodoxy, as long as it refrains from Metaphysical Dualist speculations, as the scripture continually stresses Hell's real danger.
Josephine Sawnes had some (unrecognised) Sympathetic Dualist tendencies; she leaned more conciously into it once it was legal.
Luke's favourite heresy (and very-much-not-provable head canon), and consequently the one subscribed to by Luke NPCs including Alex Oakley and Winston Lay.
The definitive statement of this position (encountered in the turnsheet Heretical Book Club) was written by the heretical scholar Martha Cobbe, shortly before the previous attempt to kill God. After dismissing other heretical stances, Cobbe states: ‘My own perspective is none of these. They all fall, in my opinion, into the error of a simplistic dualism, which in my eyes is in fact precisely the original failing that has brought us to the tragedy we now live in. In brief, synthesising all I have read, I believe that God is the alienated consciousness of the material creation. The destructive dualistic cycles of equal-and-opposite cause and effect are a result of this primal rejection of the true, beautiful Oneness, the real heart of the numinous, the strange, the artistic, which is ultimately the tugging sensation that leads us to contemplate a Oneness with Being. […] God was once All, and All was once God. This is the true state of things, and the refusal of God to recognise Themself as the material universe, and us thinking beings of the material universe to recognise Ourself as God, is the source of all suffering. If some great work could be performed, a great ritual or artwork akin to a cosmic bonfire, to draw God’s eye to the perspective on being They have for so long missed, then we could restore things to their original wholeness, and live all together in the bliss the Saints and Gnostics alike wish to be theirs alone. The angels, who are happy in the privilege the current arrangement grants them, cluster fiercely around God’s throne, whispering continued encouragement to Them for Their current course. […] The paradox is that all of us, human, angel and demon alike, would benefit from the Wholeness, as, perhaps most of all, would God. Those of us who truly love Them are striving towards this even now.’
Most Pantheists would not see the aftermath of God's apparent 'reunification' with the world as disproving their theory. Those like Winston and Alex believe that God has returned to the world, but that this does not bring about an instantaneous transformation of the consciousnesses of everyone else; people (human, angel and demon alike) must choose to attune themselves to the world, to recognise its wholeness and beauty, and the benefits they would gain from reconciliation with the wholeness of being and rejection of struggles for power and ownership.
More sceptical heretics, like Thrl and Gerard, are not likely to identify with Pantheism in the future given the significant counter-evidence and an aversion to taking anything on faith, but they still share many of the political preoccupations of their Pantheist friends.
A Bexgate-specific heresy (though with parallels elsewhere in the world), this is the term (likely developed post-game) for the philosophy of Winston Lay, author of 'Where The Butterflies Go'. Winston's position is a form of back-to-nature anarchism; the belief that humans should find a way to live by sharing resources rather than buying and selling, and that they should live in tune with nature, and that these ways of life will safeguard people's freedom. For Winston this is undergirded by a Pantheist faith in the unity of all things and the supreme importance of the sublime tug.
Where The Butterflies Go: A History of the Fens (by Winston Lay)
‘Once upon a time, the fens were home to animals and people alike. Our ancestors understood the ecosystem, knew how to eke life out of it, live without letting each other go hungry, without harming the creatures around them more than they needed to survive. They lived where land and water and sky and sunlight met and melded, amidst mud, and reeds, and butterflies. However, over time, things changed. Maybe it was the Word of God. Maybe it was that those who managed to cling onto more of their surroundings than their neighbours wanted more and more still, until it became an ever-replicating cycle. At any rate, it came to be believed that, in contrast to more solid and neatly-divided land, where the elements knew their places, this land was a terrible travesty. A waste land. It needed to be 'improved'. To be made 'productive', and 'safe'.
'There was much talk of demons and witches hiding in the mysteries of the place, needing to be stopped. Perhaps this is why God and the Angels supported the expansion. Perhaps there are other reasons. Perhaps what demons and witches did dwell in the fens were creations of this self-fulfilling prophecy, drawn to the mistrust people felt of all certainties as they were pushed deeper into unsafety, even as they were told it was good and safe and that they should trust it. In the end, there was cultivated farmland, and there was town. People worked for wages, or they did not eat, and were suspected of witchcraft, as their gazes turned to what remained of the fens.' ‘A long time later, some of that shifted. Perhaps as some kind of apology, perhaps because things were different and there had been some curbs on the rich and the powerful, this town was the site of a hospital renowned around the Wesmarch district for the care it provided the suffering. But once again, a thing that called itself ‘progress’ intervened. The hospital was shut down. The outer town and the farmland (our food was transported from further afield now) were abandoned, sinking back into the fens, but nobody was allowed to live in the ruins, to rebuild what once had been, or to recover ways of living with what now was. Bexgate had to be a model community. Gated. Enclosed. If you slipped through the cracks in such a place, you only fell lower down. Into sin. There was no alternative.
‘Except there was, and there is. We of Bexgate are haunted by this. Deep down, we all know. It calls to us. The Outside. The ghost-place. The animals sense it. They flit back and forth, not restrained as we are. We draw pictures of it, of its creatures and its psychic contours, in our minds and dreams if we’re too scared of the angel hovering over our pens to do so in reality. We want to map it, know it, be it. To take a step into the unknown as the sun dapples through the evening mist. Once we acknowledge that, we shall be free.’
OC: a lot of this plot is inspired by Early Modern conflicts around the enclosure of common land, and the names Gerard Lex and Winston Lay are together a reference to Gerrard Winstanley, who formulated similar mystical anarchist theories in the 17th century; Martha Cobbe alludes to the similar Abiezer Coppe.
Gnosticism is the belief that both material reality and God are false reflections of a higher reality. In its origins, it emerges as an attempt to reconcile the problems of Metaphysical Dualism and the problem of evil mmore broadly. It had significant influence in the time before the Commission, and Georism partly arose to refute it.
A synopsis of Gnosticism, taken from the unsympathetic pantheist author Martha Cobbe: ‘The God we perceive to be God is in fact in a sort of middle-manager or usurper (sometimes called a ‘Demiurge’), and there exists beyond them a more powerful God. Whether this more powerful God is less able to impact our world but more moral than the Demiurge [Absolute Gnosticism], or controls the universe’s eternal balancing motion and is thus crueler than the weaker Demiurge [Sympathetic Gnosticism], remains beyond the question; advocates of both and neither position exist. However, it follows in either case that material reality is but a shadow on a cavern wall, cast by the light of some ‘Really Real’ reality. This reality sensed momentarily in all our experiences of the numinous and strange.’
As a result of a part-joke, part-anti-God-propaganda effort by Thrl, the most influential proponent of Absolute Gnosticism in recent times has been Bexgate's own Mr. Theodore Thistlethwaite, whose hospitality and excellent baking has helped spur the belief system's revival. While he still retains some scepticism until the end, Gerard Lex comes to find solace in Gnosticism, partially converted by the peace Theodore showed could be found in it. Miriam, a friend of Morgan and Gerard Lex, became a follower of Theodore in later life, and ultimately received the Thistlethwaite family name when he entered into deeper communion with the Real God.
A heresy widely criticised by those heretics who seek to change the world, Georism is often taken as the position that the world as it is is necessarily a perfect reflection of an omnipotent God's wishes; that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The original theory was subtler, stressing that all things that take place may have some underlying and beneficial purpose, and emerged centrally as an extrapolation from Heaven's emphasis on having humanity experience suffering and unsafety to learn from them and develop on their own, rather than simply providing them with a perfect world. Many have accused Pagatana Geor, its originator, of having little experience with true suffering at the time he developed his theories. Georism initially marked an attempt at refuting the principles underlying much heresy, that God does not ensure human happiness and that opposing cosmic principles appear to be equally matched. Geor was a member of the pre-Commission clerical establishment of his day, only to fall from grace after some extrapolated from his teaching that everything that occurs is preordained and thus morally justified, a position Heaven came to believe extremely dangerous (this is termed Amoral Georism). In its less extreme form, Stoic Georism, there is an emphasis on experiencing all suffering and negative experience with fortitude and the lessons that can be learned from it, and on the idea of suffering as a test, not an imposition.
David Sawnes initially had fairly strong (but unrecognised) tendencies towards Stoic Georism in his belief that the events in St Renagi's were all a divine test; he leaned more consciously into Georism once it became legal.
While demons often spread heretical ideology to support their own ends, few of them subscribe to it; spreading Mistrust and Unsafety is a goal in itself, and most heresies are centered on human concerns. Thrl is unique among canonically-defined demons (though likely not among all demons in history) for genuinely caring about human welfare and seeking to develop principles that allow them to maintain their inherent nature - fighting against the heavenly principles of authoritarianly-imposed Trust and Safety - while championing human well-being. This is partly because of how enmeshed they are with dreams, but primarily because of their experience of being saved by Winston Lay, an act of kindness lacking any ulterior motive. Struggling to fit this into their usual frames of reference, they decided they owed humanity as a whole a debt, and 'repaid' it by rescuing Alex Oakley (formerly Hawthorn Green, Oleander's sibling) from the explosion caused by Manatana.