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Nurglitch, that post was the most awesome thing I've seen in background for months on end.

Nurglitch wrote:In "False Gods" (I think), Horus is shown the future by an emissary of the Dark Gods, a future in which his brother Primarch are venerated and the Emperor is deified. I get the sense that the Dark Gods didn't lie to him so much as editorialize his own role in that future into the marginalia.

It seems to me that they showed him exactly what the future would in fact look like if he was to do exactly what they wanted. That would very much suit Tzeentch's sense of irony.

Nurglitch wrote:I personally believe (and incorporate it into my personal version of the background) that the Emperor himself had actually made a pact with the Dark Powers, and that they were active during the Great Crusade. The Emperor had, in fact, offered humanity to the Dark Gods in exchange for a seat at the table, a buy-in on the Great Game.

I agree that he made a deal with them. But I disagree that he sold out humanity to become one of them. I think the Emperor foresaw only one way to ultimately insure humanity's dominance and thus also survival in the galaxy--and that is to accept a sort of wager with the Chaos Gods. The bet: humanity will survive in the face of the worst self-betrayal. What the Emperor put up for his part: all of the Primarchs, hence being scattered across the Imperium AND being so counterintuitively subject to Chaos-temptation AND Dad not letting them in on the whole picture so that they had reasons to doubt him. What the Chaos Gods put up for theirs: probably nothing that they knew of--but, in the Emperor's mind, he calculated that this would buy him time. What did Gramaticus see? I bet he saw that the Emperor planned the Heresy himself and that the whole thing was a desperate gamble to save humanity and--more terrifyingly--that it was the only choice. How did he get them to accept the wager? They obviously value the Primarchs. But the Emperor may also have wagered his own soul, which would have been infinitely more valuable to them if we are to believe half of what we've heard through the years about how powerful the Emperor is. Plus, the Chaos Gods may actually have feared him. I bet that they were afraid of what Nurglitch is proposing--that the Emperor wanted to become one of them and that they would have to compete with yet another being of their stature in the Great Game.

Negative.

In "False Gods", Horus is shown a possible future. The future that would come to be if Horus was swayed to the powers of Chaos.

The whole thing was showing Horus what would happen if Horus turned traitor, and basically presents a huge issue ala the "Grandfather Paradox" that crops up with time travel.

To put it simply: Horus was shown the future that would come to pass if Horus turned traitor, to ensure that Horus did turn traitor.

Isn't that what I said?


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Or you weren't talking to me, I guess?

I don't recall exactly what that reply was to anymore. Maybe it was to the vague idea that the Emperor made a bargain with the Dark Gods.

Which brings me to another point, actually. John's comment about seeing the "Emperor's true nature" had nothing to do with religion or Chaos.

John was referring to the fact that for all his civilized behavior, the Emperor was no different than the rest of humanity in his savagery or motives.

I think Therion has it perfectly.

And I HATE the idea of the Emperor-Husk for many reasons. I certainly hope this 'idea' never comes to pass.

I think what Grammaticus saw was the Emperor's absolutely horrific amount of psychic power AND he also caught a hint of his plan as well.

At this point, he knows the scale of the slaughter that the Emperor will attempt in order to achieve his vision, and Grammaticus also knows he has the psychic chops to pull it off.

Granted, Grammaticus is no saint on the body count angle himself, he is one of the ones convincing primachs to effectively kill billions.

Alpharius/Omegon had pretty much convinced themselves of murdering billions long before Grammaticus made contact. In Legion they already allowed their subordinate Captains to openly indulge in sedition regarding the Emperor's official goals and methods.

Remember that the whole "wiping out religion and replacing it with Imperial Truth and a Golden Age for Mankind" is the official line rather than the ultimate truth. The general futility of those goals isn't a closely guarded secret, as First Captains Kharn of the World Eaters and Sigismund of the Imperial Fists agree that the Great Crusade will be pretty much eternal.

So I'm inclined to dismiss the notion of Grammaticus being terrified by the Emperor's power and utopian ideals, and instead inclined to accept him as being terrified by the Emperor's nature and dark secrets. The Emperor's power is not sufficient to match his ideals, so either his ideals are bunk, or they're a front for something darker.

It's like the confrontation between the Emperor and Horus itself. It's not a case of whether the Emperor was stupid or negligent, it's a case of there being deeper motives as play that don't cohere with the myth that's been constructed around it.

Likewise I reject the notion that, in the official background, that the worship or attention of mortals makes any difference to the Chaos Gods or their modes of existence. The notion that Chaos Gods come and go is incoherent with the point made in Codex: Chaos Daemons where the dual nature of Slaanesh's temporal and warp presences are explained. To whit the Warp lies outside of space and time, so any attempt to say that existences change within the Warp is clearly false, and Slaanesh had always existed despite the fact that its advent coincided with a particular point in space-time. Remember that Slaanesh isn't created by the Eldar, but merely birthed into the physical universe as an agency or power.

I think that point is something that's getting reasserted in the background from its origins in the original Slaves to Darkness and The Lost and the Damned, that the notion of the Chaos Gods having 'interests' and 'goals' and even an 'existence' like entities within space-time would have are, at best, mere analogies that help mortals make sense of something they cannot. Not to say that statements can't be accurate, but not literally so.

One really really really important thing to remember:

The Emperor is a manifestation of the Warp presence of something like 50 of the most powerful Shaman of the previous age. For all we know, he was manifested exclusively to attempt to unite humanity under the Imperium of Man to directly oppose Chaos.

I don't think we 'know' that for sure anymore, actually...

I'm pretty sure that particular turd of background was abandoned years ago.

I don't think you have it quite right regarding Slaanesh there, Nurglitch, although I admit I don't think Allesandro and Gav had it quite right, either.

Phil Kelly wrote:Amidst the swirling psychic energy of the Empyrean, the corruption of the decadent Eldar became manifest as their departing spirits began to coalesce into a gestalt conscience. What an unimaginably foul and sickening mind it was that the Eldar unknowingly raised in the Warp. [ . . . ] Too late the Eldar realized that they had created a god in their own image . . . (C:Eldar 4th, p. 4)

Cavatore & Thorpe wrote:Slaanesh, the Dark Prince, was given life by the hubris and decadence of the Eldar race. [ . . . ] Created by this growing indulgence and excess, the first motes of Slaanesh began to coalesce. (C:Chaos Daemons, p.7)

Of course, that same text box also tells us:

Cavatore & Thorpe wrote:This is how events are viewed from the chronology of the real universe; in the Warp, things are different. The Realm of Chaos has no true time, and events do not occur in a strict sequence of cause then effect. In essence, Slaanesh has always existed in the Warp, and yet has never existed.

That last part seems a bit rubbish to me. Yes, I get the point: the Warp is mysterious beyond mortal understanding--even IRL mortal understanding, it would seem. In fact, it is even beyond the understanding of the real IRL people who are our only source about it, which is why I call shenanigans. This exists/doesn't exist paradox, in the terms that it is delivered, should apply equally to the other three Gods. And yet they do all exist. Saying that they do not exist is not a true statement in either the Materium or the Immaterium. Perhaps it's a fancy way of describing how the Chaos Gods are inseparable from the very "Fabric" of the Warp itself. But that's really not the same thing as saying the particular manifestation of Slaanesh existed before the Eldar unknowingly created it. Otherwise, this is just an example of the kind of overblown BS that Kid_Kyoto regularly parodies in his sig.

Manchu:

That's actually my favourite part since existence statements aren't rightly applicable to things outside of space-time. I mean that's the whole bit about the Warp to begin with, it's not some "alternative universe" or somesuch, it's a place where the laws of nature (i.e. of space and time) do not apply.

Saying that "the Chaos Gods do not exist" is a true statement when existence is predicated on existence in space and time. The Chaos Gods has no "extension" as Descartes [actually his translator] put it. Likewise saying that "the Chaos Gods exist" is a true statement when existence is not limited to the context of space-time. The apparent paradox is merely an effect of conflating frames of reference.

As over-blown bs goes, it's a surprisingly good piece of straight-forward metaphysics. Similar examples can be seen in pieces of literature like "Flatland", or the "Planiverse" where the authors using projective geometry to speculate about our 4D 'universe' interacting with 3D 'universes'. Being able to move in more dimensions than all the 'usual' or 'material' ones (let's call it 4, rather than whatever String Theorists are claiming this month) makes for some crazy looking paradoxes if you're not aware of how such movement can be plotted.

Personally I really like the implication, going back to Descartes in the modern era, of information being adjacent to a volume of physical space. In Slaves to Darkness (I think) the authors come out and say just that, that a warpstorm brewing in the warp can invade the adjacent volume of physical space, causing a daemonic 'invasion'. Quite aside from the wonderfully Lovecraftian vibe of bizarre things from beyond space and time (I really can't recommend Lovecraft's "From Beyond" enough)

On one hand this recycling of Phil1000 problems (aka the Mind/Body Problem) clashes with the assertion that the Warp is beyond human understanding, but only in the vaguest way since our command of geometry doesn't make most aspects of our own universe particularly clear or un-mysterious, so the Warp itself remains unknowable in both deed and principle despite a solid foundation about how objects in such a space might move and exist. Being able to understand and predict the outcome of events using math is a long way from understanding why things happen and how things work. One can project a hypercube onto two dimensions to draw on a page, but one's understanding of such picture will never equal an encounter with the real thing, you only need to compare a line-drawing of a cube to a cube to understand that. A line-drawing of a cube won't tell you the weight of any cube you find lying around, for example. As such the properties of whatever satisfies an existence quantification in the warp won't necessarily be deducible by the properties they have in common with objects existing in space and time.

Indeed, this fits really well with the idea that a civilization might be able to propel an object through that space (aka 'warp travel') but not really predict the effects of such flight until the object emerges back in material-space. Trying to make such calculations formally would require either crazy computing power, or a human mind that's been tuned to pick up the right information and be accurate enough to pay off, the Navigator (of course Sorcerers that bargain with warp-entities are more accurate but less capable of exerting agency since they essentially mortgage themselves to the will of the guiding entity in exchange for souls to be remitted later in their co-relative tensor). Weird and literally super-natural gak may happen to the object, and almost certainly will given the right conditions.

Similarly it fits nicely with the Warhammer 40k background of teleportation, a form of travel that projects the traveler directly through a universe of pure information. So that's another thing I really like about the background piece about bizarre nature of Chaos Gods existence [probably better called "subsistence" to distinguish it from normal existence in space and time, and to emphasize its more fundamental and foundational mode of being] in the Warp is that is unifies the religious and the scientific: to whit that in this fiction there is a super-nature, beyond the episteme of the subject, which corresponds to fiction and metaphor. Incidentally both Alan Moore and Neil Gaimen play with this same conceit in their respective woks "Promethea" and "The Sandman". Moore even has the God Hermes address the reader directly.

In other words as bs goes it is the highest quality bs, the kind that is pushing back the frontiers of physics, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and math, and not the usual 40k boilerplate fluff.

Nurglitch: The image that has always really struck me about daemonic invasion is the hapless young proto-psyker who is only somewhat aware of his underdeveloped powers becoming the literal liminal point between the Materium and Immaterium. In light of your excellent extrapolation, this image takes on a greater significance for me. In the material realm, the "immaterial" (admittedly a pretty paltry metaphor) exists only in abstract thought, i.e., in imaginative consciousness. In the very act of thinking, it is called forth (evoked, summoned) into the reality of space-time. I wonder if the particular thought or way of thinking influences what is summoned. Is the Empyrean an undifferentiated substance moulded by the mind through which it is perceived and therefore made "real"? For example, daemonettes blosom forth from the lecherous mind while Nurglings ooze from the pustule of a depressed psyche, etc.

Did you by any chance read Ian Watson's Inquisitor War trilogy?


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Nurglitch wrote:Saying that "the Chaos Gods do not exist" is a true statement when existence is predicated on existence in space and time. The Chaos Gods has no "extension" as Descartes [actually his translator] put it. Likewise saying that "the Chaos Gods exist" is a true statement when existence is not limited to the context of space-time. The apparent paradox is merely an effect of conflating frames of reference.

I still insist that this does not comport well with Slaanesh's special relationship to the Eldar or even the relationship between the "souls" of sentient beings and the Warp. Is it the case that "souls" in 40k are eternal in the same sense as the Chaos Gods? Each such soul would then also exist always and never exist in the fashion that you have described.

Is it the case that "souls" in 40k are eternal in the same sense as the Chaos Gods? Each such soul would then also exist always and never exist in the fashion that you have described.

They don't appear to be eternal at all, indeed most souls -- and bear in mind in the 40K setting the term means something a bit different than what we mean via the Judae/Christian perspective, they're really little more than reflections or mirrors in the warp -- fade away when the person dies. There's no "heaven" or Valhalla or actual ethereal IMperial Palace where you can go and sit at the Emperor's side. Just death.

Also certain daemons, weapons and beings are seemingly quite capable of destroying permanently even this "shadowself".

reds8n wrote:

Is it the case that "souls" in 40k are eternal in the same sense as the Chaos Gods? Each such soul would then also exist always and never exist in the fashion that you have described.

They don't appear to be eternal at all, indeed most souls -- and bear in mind in the 40K setting the term means something a bit different than what we mean via the Judae/Christian perspective, they're really little more than reflections or mirrors in the warp -- fade away when the person dies. There's no "heaven" or Valhalla or actual ethereal IMperial Palace where you can go and sit at the Emperor's side. Just death.

Also certain daemons, weapons and beings are seemingly quite capable of destroying permanently even this "shadowself".

Hmmm...

But if you're a 'strong' enough soul, don't you in fact survive in the warp, and, metaphorically anyway, 'sit by the Emperor's side'?

A few, rare, people do, yes.

More likely is if one is "believed in" enough then those emotions "pool" and become, minor, warp powers/entities of their own.

It was my understanding that 40k "souls" were a bit more substantial than that, although not by much. For instance, I thought they could be sustenance for Warp-things (including the Emperor). In such case, they are not merely "mirrors," i.e., the effect of the human psyche felt in the Warp but rather they are the empyrean part of material creatures.

That doesn't make them substantial though does it ? They're pretty much sweets/candy is the way I see it : they give you a short term fill, but you'll need more and more to get the same affect.

Like the Dark Eldar.

You should check out some of the WFB fluff for more ideas about the warp : it's the same place and rules after all.

Actually, the descriptions of the nature of warp entities seems to have more in common with the norse gods from Douglas Adams' 'Long Dark Teatime of the Soul'.

Here, the norse gods were called into existence by the beliefs of the ancient nordic peoples and exhibited the attributes and powers with which their believers wanted to imbue them (the inference is that other pantheons would also have been created in the same fashion)

When people stop believing in them they retain their immortality (because their believers wanted them to be immortal) and many of their powers but find it difficult to use them - Odin is a patient in a nursing home, Thor can't fly home to Norway because he does not have a passport and ends up destroying the check-in desk in a fit of pique, etc.

In a similar vein, the Gods of the warp are created by the beliefs of mortals, whose thought patterns imprint on the warp. As such Khorne is a distillation of violence, Nurgle of despair, etc.

The Emperor is still alive and well when the first of his followers manifests his power (the remembrancer from the early HH books, can't remember her name). This is because the number of believers in the Emperor as a god has already begun to create a warp entity in that image. It is possible that following his incarceration on the golden throne, the Emperor's true psyche and the warp entity already created by the underground religious sects merged together - precisely because of the belief of the vast majority of humans that this was what happened!

This would fit the suggestion that the Emperor wanted an atheistic universe - not because this would necessarily destroy the Chaos gods, but it would render them impotent.

Can someone hand me the bathchair for Khorne please?

Except that Chaos doesn't follow Terry Pratchet's formula for divine ecology. The argument by analogy doesn't work given the rules that GW has set forth for the super-nature of Warp space and Chaos: to suppose that Warp entities can be starved because we can make the analogy of their relationship to souls as predators to prey is unfounded, because such a relationship is precisely metaphorical.

Besides, as true worshippers of Khorne know, the right worship of Khorne is wholesale murder, of which the Emperor provided plenty during the Great Crusade. Likewise the actions of mortals speak louder than their words: the Great Crusade was no more successful at suppressing religion than it was at unifying all of humanity under a single political entity.

Codex: Chaos Daemons makes it pretty clear that the mortal realm isn't even on the agenda most of the time. When it is, it's relevent because The established Chaos Gods co-operated to bring about the downfall of the Emperor not because it's their super-nature: Khorne destroys, Tzeentch changes, Slaanesh perverts, and Nurgle decays. Similarly if one Dark Power gains acendancy then the others naturally undermine it: that ascendancy is destroyed, changed, perverted, or decays.

If anything the Emperor seems to have made a pact with the Dark Powers in order to further his own goals, offering blood to Khorne, change to Tzeentch, power to Slaanesh, and the rotting hulk of the Imperium to Nurgle.

Nurglitch wrote:

If anything the Emperor seems to have made a pact with the Dark Powers in order to further his own goals, offering blood to Khorne, change to Tzeentch, power to Slaanesh, and the rotting hulk of the Imperium to Nurgle.

Controversial, interesting and thought provoking - but almost 100% guaranteed to NOT be what GW intended or what they're doing with the HH Series.

Nurglitch wrote:Except that Chaos doesn't follow Terry Pratchet's formula for divine ecology. The argument by analogy doesn't work given the rules that GW has set forth for the super-nature of Warp space and Chaos: to suppose that Warp entities can be starved because we can make the analogy of their relationship to souls as predators to prey is unfounded, because such a relationship is precisely metaphorical.

Besides, as true worshippers of Khorne know, the right worship of Khorne is wholesale murder, of which the Emperor provided plenty during the Great Crusade. Likewise the actions of mortals speak louder than their words: the Great Crusade was no more successful at suppressing religion than it was at unifying all of humanity under a single political entity.

Codex: Chaos Daemons makes it pretty clear that the mortal realm isn't even on the agenda most of the time. When it is, it's relevent because The established Chaos Gods co-operated to bring about the downfall of the Emperor not because it's their super-nature: Khorne destroys, Tzeentch changes, Slaanesh perverts, and Nurgle decays. Similarly if one Dark Power gains acendancy then the others naturally undermine it: that ascendancy is destroyed, changed, perverted, or decays.

If anything the Emperor seems to have made a pact with the Dark Powers in order to further his own goals, offering blood to Khorne, change to Tzeentch, power to Slaanesh, and the rotting hulk of the Imperium to Nurgle.

I disagree on your description of the chaos gods.

Khorne is about battle rather than destruction, he is happy with a continuous fight that nobody ever wins (see the ork codex's story about tuska). Tzeentch as you said is about change but mostly in the form of renewal/rebirth. Slaanesh is about pleasure and sabotage, so your also right about perversion. Nurgle rather than decay is about stagnation, a continuous state rather than slow demise (for example plague marines, they are filled with a million diseases yet are frozen at a state of near death).

Tzeentch changes things, Nurlge keeps them the same, Khorne is obvious, Slaanesh is devious.

Actually, I thought Nurgle was renewal? Dying and being reborn.


I see the Warp as a plane of quantum flux. Slaanesh exists and does not exist and always has, so the greater approximation of Slaanesh is a wave function that may be interacted with to collapse giving either side. The probabilities of this can be predicted and modified. So to begin with the function that was/would be Slaanesh was weak and was mostly on the 'did not exist' side. Sufficient energy was added to the system to swing that to the 'does exist' side, the major transition over the energy peak being the 'birth' of Slaanesh, now an entity that existed more often than not and that would continue to pool energy (think it a hill: hard to get up, but once you're up little will stop you going down the other side). In effect Slaanesh passed a threshold that gave him sufficient power to enter the Great Game. It fits that he was stated as being the weakest of the Gods but that he very rarely is now.

The same would apply to the others. They have long since passed their threshold so they come down firmly on the 'does exist' side, but occasionally don't exist (I recall Tzeentch has a habit of occasionally flickering out of existence for brief spans).

They all existed and will exist in some fashion as warp entities, but the same can be said of any lesser daemon. The trick is getting enough power to transition to God and join the Game.