Event · M30–M31
Davin Ritual
The Davin Ritual refers to the rites performed on the death world of Davin to save the Warmaster Horus after he was gravely wounded during its Compliance. The wounding occurred when Horus engaged Eugan Temba, a former Imperial commander turned rebel leader who had been armed, unknowingly to Horus’s own retinue, with the ancient serpentine blade Anathame. The weapon had reached Temba through the covert agency of Erebus, First Chaplain of the Word Bearers, whose long design was to draw the Warmaster toward the powers of Chaos; the cut it inflicted carried a corruption that conventional Apothecarion treatment could not master, leaving Horus close to death aboard the flagship of his fleet. With the Emperor’s own intervention judged too slow or too costly to seek, Erebus proposed recourse to the native priesthood of Davin, a secretive order sometimes called the Serpent Lodge, whose rites were held to reach beyond the reach of Imperial medicine. Horus was carried down to the world’s surface and into the Lodge’s temple, where the ritual was performed away from the sight of most of his officers; several of his Luna Wolves captains, including Garviel Loken, were kept as sentries outside rather than admitted to the chamber. The rite drew Horus back from death, but accounts of the Heresy’s opening months record that he emerged from it altered, his convictions and loyalties subtly reshaped by what had passed within. The Davin Ritual is treated in the chronology of the Horus Heresy as the true hinge of the Warmaster’s turning, the private counterpart to the more visible atrocities that followed at Isstvan III and Isstvan V. It bound Erebus and the Word Bearers’ scheme irrevocably to Horus’s fate, gave the Lodge network within the Luna Wolves a new and darker purpose, and left Davin itself marked in later tradition as the world where the Great Crusade’s foremost son first stepped from Compliance into rebellion against the Emperor.
See where Davin Ritual occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.