Cain

"Wherefore Cain was called Master Mahan, and he gloried in his wickedness."

―Glyph #6.

Depictions of Cain murdering Abel

Cain is the legendary forebear of the Templar Order. The oldest son of Adam and Eve, he founded the ideology that came to serve as the fundamental basis of the Templars and infamously killed his younger brother, Abel, to steal an Apple of Eden in his possession.

For these reasons, the cross with which he was branded, known as the Mark of Cain, came to be adopted as the Templar insignia.

Biography

Cain was the firstborn of Adam and Eve; both were hybrids born to the Isu and humans who served as the leaders of the Human-Isu War in 75,010 BCE.

As he matured, Cain came to subscribe to a philosophy that humanity had to be brought under his absolute domination so that he may guide them to enlightenment, spawning a worldview that would serve as the blueprint to Templar political thought. Craving the Apple of Eden, he slew his younger brother, Abel, and seized it from him. As punishment, he was branded with a cross-shaped mark that from then on came to be known as the Mark of Cain. He later founded the Children of Cain, the earliest known incarnation of the Knights Templar and took the title Master Mahan.

Legacy

Though his life would fade away into mythology, notably within Christianity where he is said to have killed his brother out of pure jealousy, Cain's deeds would continue to have profound, even calamitous, effects for the rest of human civilization.

The philosophy of Cain evolved to become the bedrock of Templar ideology and the very engine behind their millennia-long ambition to inaugurate a New World Order under their exclusive rule. His symbol with which he was branded was eventually adopted as the insignia of the Children of Cain, itself a predecessor of the Templar Order under which the emblem evolved to be their signature cross.

Through the Templars, Cain's legacy still reverberates across the fold of human history, even seventy-seven millennia after he lived and died, in the form of the shadow war for world domination against the Assassins who strive to prevent it.

His legend as the origin of the Templars remains a striking narrative for the Templars and Assassins alike. In 2012, the late Assassin Clay Kaczmarek shared the story of Cain and Abel in this context to his successor Desmond Miles via the Glyph messages he hid within the Animus data.

Trivia

• In Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, the Templar pirate Jing Lang references the story of Cain and Abel while talking to Vance Travers about the assassination of his brother, Upton Travers.

Appearances

• Assassin's Creed II (paintings only)
• Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (mentioned only)