The Torchbearers are a psychic coven full of generally fairly decent people.
The Torchbearers are a psychic coven full of generally fairly decent people, although they are Republicans (and also sort of New Agey and flaky, talking about using psi to succeed where the Second Republic failed). The Torchbearers see themselves as preserving the secrets and knowledge that humanity will need to succeed in a new Republic, and this preservation of knowledge is their main objective. This they do almost completely through oral tradition, though there are secret stashes of books and datacubes secreted about in various places. They take the scientific method pretty seriously, always questioning and exploring. This results in the fact that a lot of their oral tradition gets altered as it is "reinterpreted," but they believe that is the only way to keep it alive. They are a very passive group, preferring only to watch and wait (and teach and learn), but part of watching and waiting involves keeping abreast of possible people who might need their assistance. The Torchbearers were originally formed after the ill-fated Feast of Thyestes, where the monk Tiresias cursed the entire House of Atreus. According to Torchbearer tradition, the page Glaucon, who had brought the food and lit the candles, heard this curse, and in a moment of immense insight, saw that the Atreides were a symbol of all of the nobility, and that this fate would befall all nobles eventually. He made it his life's mission to collect all the lore he could of the Second Republic, piece it together, and pass it on to his descendants. He had many adventures, braving Church purges and using his newfound psychic powers to learn as much as he could. An amazingly powerful psi, he lived very long and learned very much, and finally, returning to Byzantium Secundus, found a sufficiently bright descendant and taught him all he had learned. And that is the story. The Torchbearers have grown since then. Indeed, they do not even know how many members there are, as they are not a unified organization so much as a loose confederation or even a religion.