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Basically what it says in the title,

We know Slaanesh was because of the eldar, but where did Khorne, Nurgle and Tzeentch come from?

thanks,

my thoughts are that they just "formed" over time due to emotions, (remeber, they started out half good, just all the negative emotions and thoughts have turned them to what they are now,) at least, thats what I have heard the most. (by half good I mean, khorne was the god of honor, warriors, things like that, Tzeentch was change, and knowledge, nurgle was new life.)

I thought that they manifested themselves during periods of earth's history, given that they are so invested in humanity. Stuff like Earth's history of warfare birthing Khorne, or the Black Death birthing Nurgle.

If memory serves me they were originally based upon earth but have expanded to become gods that were birthed simply because they were aspects of mortal life so much that they became such.

Im pretty sure Nurgle was formed during the Black Death, while Khorne started forming during the fall of the roman Empire and finished during the Mongol Hoards. But I may be totally wrong.

I think it's been changed since I don't remember ever hearing about Earth history spawning Chaos Gods.

If the Eldar's fall into silliness created Slaanesh when humans were still evolving, and shle is the youngest God formed, then it stands to reason that the other 3 came about long before humas died to disease and Mongols.

The Mongols sure helped Khorne awakening. Not to mention the two world wars...

I think you've missed my point. The other three were already awakened before humans became a thing. One planet worth of wars and pestilence and schemeing would hardley be enough to awaken a galaxy-spanning omni-prescent being.

Methinks there's a little too much human-hubris going on in here.

 Extreaminatus wrote:
I think you've missed my point. The other three were already awakened before humans became a thing. One planet worth of wars and pestilence and schemeing would hardley be enough to awaken a galaxy-spanning omni-prescent being.

Methinks there's a little too much human-hubris going on in here.

They are described in Realms of Chaos as awakening after the birth of the Emperor. The Emperor spent much of his time on Earth trying to prevent stop their awakening or to curb their power. Obviously he was unsuccessful.

They didn't awake as powerful as they are now in 40K. They have grown in power over the centuries. A single species giving birth to 3 minor gods that then grew in prominence as humanity grew in numbers and spread across the galaxy is quite reasonable. The power of the gods is tied to the power of the race they feed from. The traditional Eldar gods grew weak as the Eldar fell into decadence, essentially sending their worship and souls to the nascent Slaanesh instead of the Eldar pantheon (described in Dark Eldar Codex timeline). The Ork gods are described as the most powerful in the warp, due to the sheer Ork numbers. Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle would have been minor gods that grew vast as humanity became powerful.

Iracundus wrote:

 Extreaminatus wrote:
I think you've missed my point. The other three were already awakened before humans became a thing. One planet worth of wars and pestilence and schemeing would hardley be enough to awaken a galaxy-spanning omni-prescent being.

Methinks there's a little too much human-hubris going on in here.

They are described in Realms of Chaos as awakening after the birth of the Emperor. The Emperor spent much of his time on Earth trying to prevent stop their awakening or to curb their power. Obviously he was unsuccessful.

They didn't awake as powerful as they are now in 40K. They have grown in power over the centuries. A single species giving birth to 3 minor gods that then grew in prominence as humanity grew in numbers and spread across the galaxy is quite reasonable. The power of the gods is tied to the power of the race they feed from. The traditional Eldar gods grew weak as the Eldar fell into decadence, essentially sending their worship and souls to the nascent Slaanesh instead of the Eldar pantheon (described in Dark Eldar Codex timeline). The Ork gods are described as the most powerful in the warp, due to the sheer Ork numbers. Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle would have been minor gods that grew vast as humanity became powerful.

This is more of the answer I've been looking for. I've never gone through Realms of Chaos so I had no idea where the Mongol Hordes and Black Death gak was coming from. I had always figured that the Chaos Gods fed from everything they could, and that they've been around long before humans were walking upright since I've seen them described as "timeless" and "omnipotent" and etc. I also recall some of the greater daemons being placed way back in time, before humanity.

 Extreaminatus wrote:

This is more of the answer I've been looking for. I've never gone through Realms of Chaos so I had no idea where the Mongol Hordes and Black Death gak was coming from. I had always figured that the Chaos Gods fed from everything they could, and that they've been around long before humans were walking upright since I've seen them described as "timeless" and "omnipotent" and etc. I also recall some of the greater daemons being placed way back in time, before humanity.

There may have been warp gods before humanity, but humanity is now the dominant species in the galaxy in 40K. Orks are indestructible due to their sheer number but humanity is dominant due to being at least nominally united in one state. Whatever warp gods existed before humanity, they are either dead when the races they fed from died, or if those races are still alive as minor races, their gods would be minor gods in the warp.

The issue with all of GW's spouting of timelessness in the warp is that plays havoc with causality and risks collapsing the setting and narrative into nonsense. Without causality you cannot say anything meaningful at all about 40K. Slaanesh had a clear chronology of forming from nothing and both the Eldar and Daemons Codex say the decadent Eldar formed the first motes of Slaanesh. For there to be a "first" that means there was nothing before.

If one starts saying Slaanesh always and never existed at the same time, then you run into the unresolvable issue of why Eldar were free from Slaanesh predation in the past. For that matter, you run into the issue of Chaos gods from 20 billion years in the future messing with humans and Eldar today. That's why messing with timelines and causality leads to paradoxes and reduces things down to nonsesnse.

I take the whole "timelessness" thing to be hyperbole from GW in an attempt to make things more "deep". The problems with time travel or any form of messing with time in created universes is the problem of messing with causality, and creating loops, paradoxes, or otherwise rendering things nonsensical. If all causality is rendered meaningless and nothing can be explained, then the universe starts to fall apart in terms of any coherent story or setting.

If one tries to use the linguistic gyration of claiming Slaanesh always existed in the warp but could not interact with anything or be interacted with until its birth with the Fall of the Eldar, then it might as well for all purposes be non-existent. Sort of a variation of Russell's teapot. If an entity meets all the criteria for non-existence and cannot be sensed or interacted with in any way whatsoever and can affect nothing whatsoever, why the insistence on maintaining it with special convoluted metaphysical explanations? Just say it doesn't exist.

Also it presents problems as otherwise the warp would never have been calm and safe for the Old Ones and the Emperor. The whole point of their stories is that things were changing and the warp they knew was becoming dangerous and turbulent. The story of how the warp changed requires time and causality. If one invents a parallel narrative "just for the warp", like the warp was calm for anybody in the Materium but it was also at the same time turbulent so Slaanesh could exist, then it violates parsimony and just creates needless convoluted special examples and paradoxes of mutually exclusive states that just really translate into nonsense under the guise of being "deep".

I'm just reminded of the Ptolemaic model of the universe and how people constructed ever more elaborate "quick fix" theories to patch holes or discrepancies in the model, when the far simpler Copernican model did away with all those tottering jury rigged patches while explaining everything in an altogether more coherent way.

 Extreaminatus wrote:
I think it's been changed since I don't remember ever hearing about Earth history spawning Chaos Gods.

If the Eldar's fall into silliness created Slaanesh when humans were still evolving, and shle is the youngest God formed, then it stands to reason that the other 3 came about long before humas died to disease and Mongols.

You do know that Slaanesh was born in M30, right? This was immediately prior to the Great Crusade. Humanity was already a space-faring civilization during the Eldar Fall.

I remember Nurgle is the oldest so he would have come from before the Mongols or Rome. Also he is a manifestation of people's fear of death so first god as nearly first emotion

The Fear of Death does not originate with Nurgle, that comes from The Nightbringer, which is a C'Tan.

I believe it was stated that Nurgle came into being during the Black Plague, or perhaps the Red Death, in the Middle Ages.

Khorn was apparently caused by Ghengis Khan.

J. Edgar Hoover is probably Tzeentch.

I wonder who Rasputin worshiped.

Probably Tzeentch.

From the Lexicanum:
In Nurgle's case, the source of power is the living's fear of inevitable death and disease, and their unconscious response to that fear, which is the "power of life", the motivating power of mankind and other races
He is the the oldest of the four, most probably because he is the God of Death and Decay and those two have been part of the galaxy since the beginning

 Psienesis wrote:
The Fear of Death does not originate with Nurgle, that comes from The Nightbringer, which is a C'Tan.

I believe it was stated that Nurgle came into being during the Black Plague, or perhaps the Red Death, in the Middle Ages.

Khorn was apparently caused by Ghengis Khan.

J. Edgar Hoover is probably Tzeentch.

Actually that has been changed I do believe. Nurgle, Khorne, and Tzeentch now predate the Imperium. Nurgle was born first of course as his elements are the most basic amongst the galaxy.

Sorry guys I got that all totally wrong my bad D:

I think where I dragged that up is that those events, such as the black death, helped them increase their power and form.

I thought it was stated that Nurgle was technically the first but only fully awakened after Khorne and Tzeentch already did, or something like that.

I too find that whole shoe-horned timelessness thing for the chaos gods to be stupid. Khorne is explicitly stated to have made Doombreed a daemon prince when he himself was still a "young" god. You can't be "young" if you existed eternally. And the warp can't be a mirror of real space (which it explicitly is) if real space has time while the warp does not (if that's the case, then what the hell is the warp mirroring? When wars exist in the real world, they're supposed to be mirrored in the warp, and that can't happen if time exists in one but not in the other). Sounds like something they tossed in just to be "deep" or to try to give Slaanesh more cred or retcon Chaos as a bigger bad to rival old things like the necrons to me.

 StarTrotter wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:
The Fear of Death does not originate with Nurgle, that comes from The Nightbringer, which is a C'Tan.

I believe it was stated that Nurgle came into being during the Black Plague, or perhaps the Red Death, in the Middle Ages.

Khorn was apparently caused by Ghengis Khan.

J. Edgar Hoover is probably Tzeentch.

Actually that has been changed I do believe. Nurgle, Khorne, and Tzeentch now predate the Imperium. Nurgle was born first of course as his elements are the most basic amongst the galaxy.

Ghengis Khan, The Black Death and J. Edgar Hoover also pre-date the Imperium by many, many thousands of years.

 Psienesis wrote:

 Extreaminatus wrote:
I think it's been changed since I don't remember ever hearing about Earth history spawning Chaos Gods.

If the Eldar's fall into silliness created Slaanesh when humans were still evolving, and shle is the youngest God formed, then it stands to reason that the other 3 came about long before humas died to disease and Mongols.

You do know that Slaanesh was born in M30, right? This was immediately prior to the Great Crusade. Humanity was already a space-faring civilization during the Eldar Fall.

You do know that, two posts above this one, I admitted to not having read the Realms of Chaos stuff, right? I was assuming that the Eldar fell long before M30 from the contradictory and vague fluff from other works.

That's not information from RoC, that's from.... just about anything that talks about the Great Crusade and the Fall of the Eldar.

In the ROC era, as they were written for Warhammer Fantasy, Fantasy and 40K were much in the same setting, the Heresy was still very much mythology (predating Black Library's founding). What we know of the "fluff" of much of 40K was not, then, as codified as it is now.

Really, though? I still very much get the impression that there's much more time between Slaanesh and Great Crusade.

I think I read once that Khorne began forming earlier than the fall of the Roman Empire, like the Macedonian Empire.

From what I've read, the creation of the Chaos Gods and them achieving sentience are two separate things. Nurgle came into existence first, and then gained sentience during the Black Death. I'm not sure where Khorne and Tzeentch came in, but they came into existence after Nurgle but gained sentience before him.

However, as Extreaminatus pointed out, this is a very Earth-centered view. You'd think that the whole galactic C'Tan vs. Old Ones thing would have started all of this WAY before apes even considered evolving.

 Extreaminatus wrote:
Really, though? I still very much get the impression that there's much more time between Slaanesh and Great Crusade.

Nope. A thousand years, at the most, to be sure. Birth of Slaanesh is M29/M30. The Great Crusade kicks off in M30.

However, as Extreaminatus pointed out, this is a very Earth-centered view. You'd think that the whole galactic C'Tan vs. Old Ones thing would have started all of this WAY before apes even considered evolving.

That's always bugged me, too, but that's the info we're given.

 Psienesis wrote:

 Extreaminatus wrote:
Really, though? I still very much get the impression that there's much more time between Slaanesh and Great Crusade.

Nope. A thousand years, at the most, to be sure. Birth of Slaanesh is M29/M30. The Great Crusade kicks off in M30.

However, as Extreaminatus pointed out, this is a very Earth-centered view. You'd think that the whole galactic C'Tan vs. Old Ones thing would have started all of this WAY before apes even considered evolving.

That's always bugged me, too, but that's the info we're given.

Could you point to me toward a definitive source? Not trying to call you out or anything, I'd just like the reference.

On what? The birth of Slaanesh or the creation of the other Chaos Gods?

Nevermind, don't worry about it.

 Extreaminatus wrote:

This is more of the answer I've been looking for. I've never gone through Realms of Chaos so I had no idea where the Mongol Hordes and Black Death gak was coming from. I had always figured that the Chaos Gods fed from everything they could, and that they've been around long before humans were walking upright since I've seen them described as "timeless" and "omnipotent" and etc. I also recall some of the greater daemons being placed way back in time, before humanity.

Time is not linear in the Warp. When a power awakens, it now exists in the present, future and yes, the past. So Slaanesh existed before it was born.