Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

How many lives are sacrificed every day to keep the corpse of the emperor alive and the golden throne running?

None.

The 1,000 psykers sacrificed at the Imperial palace every day feed the Astronomicon, not the Golden Throne.

1000 psykers a day, I think?
I'm sure someone will correct me.

EDIT: Furyou got it.

Rogue Trader background section states that the Emperor cannot take sustenance like mortals but can feed only on the souls of psykers. Hundreds are sacrificed this way every day to sustain him.

As far as I know they can't just plug any old psyker into the astronomicon; it actual takes training (and even so those psykers die quickly).

If I remember right, the untrainable / too dangerous psykers get fed to the emperor.

Only the very best psykers get to have a meaningful life.

All to plan.

The fluff section of the BRB triple pack goes in to this in some detail, I believe. someone please correct me if I am wrong as I am unable to go fact check currently.

Most of the training that the Adeptus Astronomican do is about how to live a meaningful life. It is joyful and purposeful.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
None.

The 1,000 psykers sacrificed at the Imperial palace every day feed the Astronomicon, not the Golden Throne.

Is that right? What happens in the chamber of the astronomicon, in Tibet? One thousand untrained and low grade psykers are sacrificed in the throne room in Nottingham.

1000 pyskers a day? Aren't pyskers like mutants so rare? Is there enough of them on terra to keep it going?

They gather them from all over the Imperium don't they?

Black ships scour the empire collecting them to bring to earth. Planets are tithed based on the number pyskers that should require removing according to their planet size. Leaves it incumbent on planetary governments to scour their populations to keep the black ships full. Black ships are staffed by sisters of battle. Metal ones obviously, no plastic in sight.

1000 psykers a day isn't so bad when you figure the Imperium has billions, maybe trillions of base humans to draw upon. So if one-in-a-million is a psyker (hypothetically speaking), there's plenty to go around.

And to be clear: the Astronomicon's Choir has 100,000 (around that, if memory serves) specially trained psykers that constantly project the guiding Light.. They tend to drop dead while doing this (remember: they do not rest or pause!), and new members are added as the old collapse. Being part of the Choir has a fairly short life expectancy, though the training is fairly rigorous and time consuming.

The sacrifice of psykers to the Golden Throne (the Dark Age machine that keeps the Emperor "alive") is unrelated to the Astronomicon; whole shiploads of psykers are taken to Terra by the Black Ships (thanks Knockagh!). Around one thousand of these souls are consumed a day.

Of course, all of this is material I've compiled in my brain over two decades from multiple sources, so take from that what you will. It is, however, the 40k universe as I understand it.

DorianGray wrote:
1000 pyskers a day? Aren't pyskers like mutants so rare? Is there enough of them on terra to keep it going?

Yes, they are. But 1000 is chump change, when you consider there's probably a few trillion people on Terra.

Imperial population is probably more in the range of quadrillions, or higher.

DorianGray wrote:
1000 pyskers a day? Aren't pyskers like mutants so rare? Is there enough of them on terra to keep it going?

1 in 1 million people in the Imperium are born with the Psyker gene. On Hive Worlds, that can be a *lot* of people. The Imperium's total population is so vast as to be uncountable.

 Lord Corellia wrote:
Imperial population is probably more in the range of quadrillions, or higher.

Overall, yes, definitely.

On Terra? Very unlikely. It's unlikely that a planet that size could support that many people without everyone living literally a few feet apart. Even with the condensed nature of the Hives.

Yeah, I meant overall. On Terra, we have 7 billion ish now and we're having a little trouble with food production. Once we get that sorted, and with the push into previously uninhabitable land masses (Antarctica, etc) we can maybe hit a hundred billion under the conditions described in the fluff. Much more than that would be utterly unsustainable.

Terra's population in 40k is massive. It also doesn't produce all of its own food locally, there are ships that arrive daily from elsewhere in the system, perhaps even elsewhere in the galaxy, as is the case with all Hive Worlds.

 Giomancer wrote:
1000 psykers a day isn't so bad when you figure the Imperium has billions, maybe trillions of base humans to draw upon. So if one-in-a-million is a psyker (hypothetically speaking), there's plenty to go around.

HA

The Imperium has quadrillions, not trillions- let alone billions. The Imperium could lose tens of billions of citizens overnight and not even notice the loss and have them instantly replaced by galactic birth rates.