Members of the Alger Lodge, 1913.
Unknown context.
The Society of the Atheist Partisans of Progress for the Halt of the Irrational and Religious Enemy, better known as "SAPPHIRE" ("SAPHIR" in French, La Société Athée Pour la Halte de l'Idéologie Religieuse), is a Group of Interest most established in Western Europe, but also present in Eastern countries, Northern Africa and the East Coast of the United States.
The oldest known actions linked to SAPPHIRE date back to 1909, although the organization remained obscure until the 1960s, when SAPPHIRE seemingly went through a major expansion. The precise cause for this is unknown.
SAPPHIRE opposes all forms of belief, religion and superstition, which they regard as the underlying cause of the woes affecting mankind, as well as SCP objects, which they consider to be the source of the aforementioned beliefs, religions, and superstitions.
In spite of the ideal of rationality and humanism SAPPHIRE claims to adhere to, they do not hesitate to use anomalous means for terrorist purposes, committing attacks against both traditional and occult religions, the primary victims of these attacks often being civilians. Attacks can also be directed against superstitions, targeting civilian clairvoyance enthusiasts, or rival organizations (including the Foundation).
"Selection of RUBIES for the June 12th operation."
Unknown context.
Inner workings:
SAPPHIRE does not follow a real leader or central power but is instead divided in approximately fifty semi-independent Lodges. Each Lodge is free to act in its own way, but they can collaborate with each other if they are willing to do so. However, members of every Lodge are under the responsibility and authority of a Lodge Leader. Those Lodge Leaders assemble each year at Summits, taking place in an indeterminate location known only as "Stoa".
In spite of the egalitarian status SAPPHIRE claims to grant its members, all of its Lodge Leaders and most eminent members seem to be part of an intellectual and/or wealthy elite, authoritative in the fields of civilian science. Several leading figures known by the general public are believed to be secretly part of that elite, including N███ ████████ █████, C███ █████ and R██████ ███████.
Financing:
SAPPHIRE seems to raise part of its finances from the subscriptions of its adherents, and the other part from the generosity of several rich patrons. Among those monetary supporters, the Foundation actively monitors the Silverstein dynasty, based on the East coast of the United States, and the Faustil dynasty in Switzerland, who's members have often been part of SAPPHIRE since at least the 1930s. It is also assumed that other organizations, not part of SAPPHIRE but with an interest in the eradication of the anomalous and/or religion, offer SAPPHIRE additional financial assistance. However, these suspicions remain unconfirmed.
Activities:
The activities of SAPPHIRE focus on intelligence gathering, terrorism, research, active proselytism for the atheist cause, and the destruction of anomalous objects and phenomena. To this end, the organization is divided into several units:
- Repressive Use of Bias and Imaginary Entities Suppression: RUBIES is the field unit of SAPPHIRE, more or less equivalent of the Foundation's MTFs. Their objectives, as the name suggests, are to recover discovered SCP objects, to use them against religions (for example in attacks), and to destroy them, or to counter or limit their effects if they prove to be indestructible.
Since SAPPHIRE does not have military forces at their disposal like the Foundation, and since most of its members are civilians, each RUBIES team is assembled, depending on the situation, from voluntary members known to have relevant knowledge, experience, or skills. Consequently, a RUBIES "team" can consist of a single individual or over one hundred, depending on the operation. Though they are often charged with amateurism, RUBIES operations have a sixty percent success rate.
- Extortion Maneuvers, Espionage and Reconnaissance inside Agencies, Leagues and Dogma: EMERALDs refer to undercover agents inside other organizations linked to the anomalous world. They are especially pernicious and are most likely SAPPHIRE's biggest strategic advantage, infiltrating "Agencies" such as the SCP Foundation, "Leagues" such as the Global Occult Coalition and "Dogmas" such as the Horizon Initiative.
EMERALDs are particularly numerous, discreet, and efficient. As most SAPPHIRE members are scientists, they have no problem infiltrating the Foundation, which often unknowingly selects and recruits them. It is also assumed that several researchers already working for the Foundation and suffering from the "Filbuson syndrome" end up secretly joining SAPPHIRE. ██ EMERALDs have already been discovered within the Foundation since the 70s, and around ███ personnel has been put under surveillance by the Internal Security Department.
- Zetetic Investigation, Rational Cognition and Oddities Negation: ZIRCON is a unit comprised of debunkers, who are the first to be sent to the scene of anomalous phenomena, in order to write a precise report about "why it's not possible". As skeptics and rhetoric experts, they also manage most of the Society's internal and external communications, as well as the "scientific" research (although clearly biased and negationist) into SCP objects.
Research on anomalous objects, pursued independently by SAPPHIRE researchers, seems to be limited to the practical abilities and limits of SCP objects, in order to learn how to destroy, inhibit, and/or use them. SAPPHIRE has no personal interest in learning any more than that, and the recovery of several technical documents from their research mentioning "morphic fields" and "telluric resonance" (largely outdated terms in the field of paraphysics) prove that they are largely behind in the scientific sector.
Note from Michel Saëmons, Site-Aleph MTFs Coordinator:
We call it the Filbuson Syndrome.
It was in the twenties, back when the Foundation was still "spry", if I may say so. Human resources weren’t the same as today, and there weren’t all those tests to pass during recruitment. William Filbuson was one of the best men of the United States army, and one of the first great heroes of American aviation at the time. Strong mindset, unique reflexes, sheer determination, and a long list of achievements behind him. He and fourteen other men from the elite of the military went directly from the US Army to Site-32, near Chicago, to make up a brand-new Elite Task Force: MTF Mu-8, "Titans". They were in charge of tracking and eliminating SCPs that the Foundation could not afford to contain anymore.
Oh, of course, they were given introduction conferences, orientation courses, and a bunch of theoretical and practical training sessions. But they had never been put face to face with an SCP.
It was during their first intervention. In Oklahoma, I guess, a Euclid. Some kind of giant panther with lithokinetic abilities. It was an instance among many others generated by an old anomalous mine, so we could terminate it freely. They tracked it across the forest, they found the beast, and…
They did nothing. "Do you see anything?" Command asked. "Yes" Filbuson said. "A big cat." The SCP was three meters tall for the record. "Are you sure that cat isn’t the SCP? He doesn’t make rocks float or anything like that?" Command asked. "Haha. Sure looks like it." Filbuson answered. "But that can’t be. Probably some kind of hallucination. A big cat that makes rocks float, it doesn’t exist."
It was right in front of them. They had been trained for that. We had taken a lot of time to explain to them the abilities of the creature and its abnormal characteristics. But once it was in front of them. They just… couldn't accept it. Oh, they could see it, of course. They heard it. They smelled it. But their brain just couldn’t conceive something that unbelievable. Only five members of the MTF Mu-8 were not affected by this complete denial of the threat.
They were the only five who survived.
Note from Abigail Hamon, Psychology Department:
SAPPHIRE members don’t really have a specific psychological profile. It is honestly quite difficult to detect an individual who would be able to fully accept the existence of the paranormal from an individual who would be highly short-minded on the inside, similar to how hard it is to distinguish between a fanatic personality and an "I-Don't-Care" attitude. You’d be surprised by the number of pseudo-new age Wiccas who are incapable of tolerating another world than the one ruled by the "banal" rules of physics they know and on the opposite the number of aerodynamics engineers who'd accept to see their home being turned into pudding without batting an eye.
Well, of course, a lot of factors help. Studies and employment in the fields of public sciences, notably, make the discovery of the anomalous an especially hard blow for the discoverer, since it means that everything they dedicated their lives to has to be thrown away. Even if we know now that SCPs follow their own rules, just much more complex, most of the people shaken by it "block" themselves and don't search for more elaborate answers, but instead just jump straight into denial.
We tend to think of SAPPHIRE members as old university lecturers, strict and dull. That was probably true a while ago, and it probably still is among the elite who rule and fund the different Lodges of the Group of Interest, but the fact is that the majority of their headcount are diverse and varied. We can’t pin down an individual who’s at risk to fall in the Filbuson syndrome, the same way we can’t detect an individual affiliated with SAPPHIRE in the crowd.
And yes, this also applies to our own members.
Note from Ernesto Gomez, Assistant Director at the Observatory of the Groups of Interest:
Of course, at the OGI we know very well about Filbuson syndrome.. At each containment breach, each public anomalous manifestation, there always was two or three people that persisted to claim that they saw nothing, that nothing happened or that they had seen something but that it doesn’t mean that it existed. The thing is that the people affected by the Filbuson syndrome decide to mentally separate what they perceive from what they know to be the reality, and this in order to save their perception of reality. They’re conscious of the abnormality around them, but to them it’s just a bug in the real world of comprehensible things.
It’s a bit like a stain on the lens of a camera that ruins the picture, you see. The stain is real, you can’t deny it, and the landscape too, but the two don’t go together. So you have to wipe away the stain.
Against all odds, we’ve got a lot of Persons of Interest who were suffering from it. I remember the case of a Parisian warlock, in the fifties, who was genuinely convinced he was a crook, while all the spells he was casting were absolutely real.
But we always thought these were isolated cases. Frequent, right, but isolated. We knew that individuals suffering from the syndrome often found themselves in a lot of psychological distress, and that’s why most of the time we still gave them amnestics after public events. We also knew that amnestic untreated individuals tended to develop an obsession with the anomalous, but that’s like every conspiracy theorist: they go unnoticed, so we let them play around.
It blew our minds when we discovered they were regrouping themselves in a Group of Interest.
Especially when that group is as dangerous as SAPPHIRE.
Note from Michel Saëmons, Site-Aleph MTFs Coordinator:
The Jewelers were implemented for that, yeah.
There’s still a lot of things we ignore about those "atherrorists". How do they proselytize in the street in broad daylight, and disappear as soon as we get there? Where do they find their SCPs, since they despise creating them? And if their weapons don’t exist, how do their victims die, in their opinion?
Their way of thinking, that’s the problem. We formed MTF Omega-5 to take SAPPHIRE member’s mentality into account, and God knows that it’s a fucking mess in there. Those guys are for the GOC what ISIS is for Islam. And we both know the GOC very well. And yet, 90% of the time, we discover that this fucking anti-religion fanatic was your neighbor, this polite little math teacher, maybe a bit hung-up, but who didn’t seem to be unhinged in the slightest.
You can try to reason with these guys for hours, with foolproof logic, but they’ll never admit that the abnormal could exist. It’s visceral, it'll drive you nuts. Even under torture. You can believe me.
You’re doing your little interview here, but you probably never saw a member of SAPPHIRE who’s just been caught, and who doesn’t care at all. You never had the occasion to watch in the eyes of a guy who believes that all your work is nothing.
This cold but clear soul.
Sharp but still peaceful.
And unbreakable.
Trust me, the guys from Omega-5 know why these lunatics call themselves SAPPHIRE.
English Branch :
Japanese Branch :
French Branch :
See "Recherches Complémentaires" on the French SAPHIR hub for a full list of SAPHIR SCP articles.
SAPPHIRE seems to maintain numerous antagonistic relations in the anomalous world with other groups of interest. This does not minimize their threat, but it does "keep them busy". Notable antagonisms include:
The Office for the Reclamation of Islamic Artifacts:
Status: Defensive / Active
Although the information about it is vague, it seems that several SAPPHIRE-related attacks have already happened in the Middle-East during the last century, in spite of the geographical distance of the targets from the European core of the Society. However, since the implementation of the ORIA in the eighties, the atheist attacks seems to be easily controlled, and dozens of members of the Society have been caught/executed by Islamic forces over the past thirty years.
ORIA’s position about SAPPHIRE is unknown, but the measures taken appear to be effective.
The Global Occult Coalition:
Status: Offensive / Active
The GOC's archives show that SAPPHIRE was previously part of the Council of 108 during the formation of the Coalition, but the Atheist Society left its seat as early as 1953 following ideological divergences, as the Coalition started protecting civilian religions and recruiting numerous consultant thaumaturges.
SAPPHIRE is currently under an Alpha class arrest warrant from the GOC, because of the threat it poses to the organization and the civilian world since its departure.
The Humanist Gentlemen:
Status: Competitive / Active
The historical data seems to indicate that SAPPHIRE and the Gentlemen originate from the same organization which, during the 18th century, fought for the emancipation of Man in the anomalous world. However, a split occurred between the Gentlemen, who were trying to use the SCP objects and make them work for their values, and SAPPHIRE, who felt that Humanity should, before anything else, free itself from irrationality through the destruction of these objects.
SAPPHIRE and the Gentlemen appear to show a mutual "respectful hate", conscious of their shared origin and ideology but convinced that the other camp is wrong. Despite this, they seem to avoid direct conflict.
The Horizon Initiative:
Status: Defensive / Semi-inactive
The alliance of the three biggest Abrahamic religions, dedicated to the management of SCP objects is, of course, the first target of SAPPHIRE, and the only one able to respond to the attacks from the Society, since neither the Vatican, nor Mecca, nor Israel can publicly adjudicate on the field of the anomalous.
A sub-group was recently created within the Malleus Project to face up to the threat of anomalous extremist atheism, but it seems to restrict itself to defensive measures and remains a very small organization.
Mossad:
Status: Defensive / Active
Due to the religious center that Israel and more specifically Jerusalem embodies, it appears that SAPPHIRE took advantage of local geopolitical tensions to orchestrate several undercover attacks , particularly at the end of the nineties. Although most of those attacks were foiled, the Israeli government is warned about the existence of SAPPHIRE, and a national plan of securing against extremist atheism was secretly set up under the responsibility of Mossad and in collaboration with the Shabak.
Although the nature of this plan is unknown, no attack from SAPPHIRE appears to have occurred on Israeli territory since 1998.
The Anomalous Religions:
Status: Unknown / Unknown
Although we know that SAPPHIRE targets anomalous cults and Groups of Interest of religious nature, there is little leaked information about possible attacks (successful or not) against them. These occult religions most often manage these cases internally and allow little information to leak from their underworld.
These groups include but are not limited to: the Sarkic cults, the Church of the Broken God, the Fifth Church, the Order of the Light, and smaller sects such as the Sons of Seth (GOI-0236) or the Holy Proscribed Company (GOI-0092).
Through retrieved documents, it’s known that SAPPHIRE has undercover agents within the Fifth Church and the Order of the Light, in low-ranking positions. It appears unlikely that they would have any within the Church of the Broken God or the Sarkic Cults, since those movements call on their members to perform anomalous modifications to their bodies (bionic implants, diseases propagation, etc.).
The Vatican:
Status: Defensive / Inactive
The Holy See has been officially warned about the threat they were exposed to by the Horizon Initiative in 1979, following the events of the Trevi Fountain. Since this day, it has come to the notice of the Foundation that a secret document called "The Pious Letter in front of the Incredulous" is passed down from pope to pope. The exact nature of this document is unknown, though it’s supposedly a protocol dictating how the Church should react and organize in the event of God's death.
No act of aggression seems to have hit Vatican territory since the apparition of SAPPHIRE. It’s presumed that it’s protected by [DATA EXPUNGED].
For more information, please consult the Observatory of Groups of Interest to learn more about the evolution of these relations and the related hypotheses.
