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the entire process of "awakening" the craftworlds avatar seems suspect. They sacrifice a powerful eldar ( the young king, leader of exarchs) then a long psychic ritual, the result is a war god with unholy bloodlust tearing gak up on the battlefield. It sounds like the eldar are binding a demon to the physical shell.

Any thoughts or more on this in black library novels?

The Avatar is basically a daemon, if by daemon you mean a warp creature. The Avatar of Khaine is basically a greater daemon of Khaine, in much the same way the Greater Daemons of the 4 major Chaos gods are fragments of their god. That is why it has the same vulnerabilities and immunities of daemons.

However Khaine's fragments appear to be Khaine in miniature, much like how the Great Unclear Ones are Nurgle in miniature, in that they appear to embody their parent god completely, but at lesser levels of power. Khaine was banished from the warp and splintered into fragments that now reside in the wraithbone cores of the Craftworlds, presumably because the highly psychic environment is more conducive to survival for the fragment. That fragment took root and form in the statues that form the Avatars. However the statues are just the physical shell, and the actual fragment (i.e. the fragment of warp power) is actually rooted in the Craftworld's superstructure, and it is here that the fragment flees to/is banished to if the physical form of the Avatar is destroyed.

It is uncertain to what degree Avatars of Khaine are aware of their origin or how much of the original consciousness of Khaine they have. My view is that they only retain such knowledge at a subconscious level, just enough to be stirred to wake by the ceremony of the Young King, which if one pieces together the hints in the Eldar novels by Gav Thorpe, is a symbolic re-enactment of Khaine's victory over the original Young King, Eldanesh.

Boom, thread closed!

Or if you're the conspiracy type: "Kaine" sounds a lot like "Khorne"...

 Mecha_buddha wrote:
the entire process of "awakening" the craftworlds avatar seems suspect. They sacrifice a powerful eldar ( the young king, leader of exarchs) then a long psychic ritual, the result is a war god with unholy bloodlust tearing gak up on the battlefield. It sounds like the eldar are binding a demon to the physical shell.

Any thoughts or more on this in black library novels?

There's this, a retelling of the Ceremony of Awakening in video format;

 Furyou Miko wrote:

 Mecha_buddha wrote:
the entire process of "awakening" the craftworlds avatar seems suspect. They sacrifice a powerful eldar ( the young king, leader of exarchs) then a long psychic ritual, the result is a war god with unholy bloodlust tearing gak up on the battlefield. It sounds like the eldar are binding a demon to the physical shell.

Any thoughts or more on this in black library novels?

There's this, a retelling of the Ceremony of Awakening in video format;

First, adding start time does not work when embedding.

Second, that is fifteen years old. I doubt it's anywhere near canon.

 greyknight12 wrote:
Or if you're the conspiracy type: "Kaine" sounds a lot like "Khorne"...

The warp is one big entity in many ways (which is why some forms of Chaos Undivided worship the 4 chaos gods as aspects of a single entity). Kaine, being the Eldar god of war, consists of the same emotions as Khorne in many regards. A GW writer or something (lost the link) stated that due to the way the warp works, he thus could be considered as much an aspect of Khorne as an aspect of Slaanesh (he has several Slaaneshi aspects to him too, like torturing others, which Khorne wouldn't do). That's why Khorne attacked Slaanesh over Kaine, because he felt Slaanesh tearing away his power or something like that.

So, it's not really a conspiracy to compare Kaine to Khorne. That's canon that there's some connection. Because that's how the warp rolls.

I always thought an avatar was closer to a c'tan shard than a greater daemon, being part of the god rather than a creation of the god? The only difference is that they're bound to the warp whereas c'tan shards are bound to our universe.

The Eldar gods are Warp entities that predate the Chaos Gods. With the Fall of the Eldar and the birth of Slaanesh, their power has been greatly diminished and a lot of them are outright dead.

My interpretation is thus; Greater Daemons are splinters of their patron Chaos God. Khaine is no longer powerful enough to generate daemons (and, as far as we know, the Eldar gods never created daemons, even at the height of their power). The Avatar of Khaine is not summoned by the Eldar, but actually created during the ritual. The Young King's soul is either used as a power source or a binding point for power drawn from the Warp. Either way, the Avatar is an Eldar-made Daemon in the image of their god of war. Whether or not some fragment of Khaine himself is actually present within the Avatar is something else.