From the upcoming Book of the Fallen for Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition:

You don’t need to go to Hell, because hell is already here, all around us, every day. We live in it, we play in it, we create it, and we enjoy it.

From the shittiest squat to the tallest gleaming glass towers, human beings feed on innocence, shit out money, and call themselves virtuous for deeds that would shame Satan himself. They even graft the face of their god across churches filled with child-porn and temples built from the literal bones of the men who laid the foundations. They’ll whip a woman to death for loving the wrong person, chase little girls back into a burning school, or jet around the world on a fleet of private planes paid for by food taken from the mouths of starving kids. Who needs a statue of Mammon, after all, when you can feed babies into the fuel-tank of a Lear Jet while calling yourself an emissary of your god?  

This is the face of your Sleeping Masses, kid. This is the reality behind Ascension’s ideals: A cancerous species of self-deluded chromosomes, causing misery by drawing breath. An extermination-level event on two legs, bragging about how the gods it designed in its own flawed image love it best.

There’s so much nonsense out there about my kind. It’s like someone shat out a bunch of bad horror movie clichés and thought they were saying something profound about us. Here’s the truth – the real truth that, as the man said in that old ‘80s movie, you can’t handle.

We are the Fallen. All of us.

We make reality the shitshow that it is.

Who needs “elder gods” and “Dark Masters” from the elder Void when plain old human evil does the job?

It’s been said that man’s a virus. That’s an insult to the virus and gives too much credit to the man. A virus doesn’t know what it’s doing; human beings do. Hypocrisy and violence are in our DNA. We conquer and torture and butcher and destroy and then pat ourselves on the backs for a job well-done because that’s what human beings do. There are, as the man said, none innocent – no, not one. The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow, and all humanity walks within that shadow, averting our eyes from the image on the wall.

Humans don’t require boogie-men to destroy our world. We do it every day for fun and profit, close our eyes, and binge-watch another show on Netflix while whole fucking nations burn.

You can’t save that which does not wish to be saved.

The only “ascension” humanity deserves is the end of our long, bad joke…