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I’m talking about all the infantry, navy, planetary governors, planetary populations etc

Did Horus just sweet talk then into turning on the emperor, did they do it to save their skin, a bit like fallinging into imperial compliance?

Or did he have some method of slowly corrupting them

Many followed out of Loyalty.

Where The Emperor was a distant figure, Horus and his legion brought many systems into the fold.

The Heresy wasn’t, at least at first, openly driven by Chaos. Because that’s how Chaos works - slowly, by degrees.

I mean, when we think of Chaos Cultists for instance, folk often jump straight to “baby eating raving maniacs”. But the truth is more insidious.

In The Imperium, it often starts with a new found sense of freedom. It could simply be better rations, a debating group, illicit books, a martial arts dojo type thing. Something which chips away at the crushing reality of the average Imperial Citizen’s life.

Then, inch by incremental inch, things get more….shall we say involved.

So it was with Horus. By the time anyone realised what the true driving force was? It was too late. Given he and his fellow turncoat brothers gladly and readily purged their own Legions of elements unlikely to follow into rebellion? You were stuck, even if you found yourself now vehemently opposed to serving Chaos,

So by the end they were all on the eightfold path? My impression of abbadon is that he was never really into chaos but couldn’t avoid it.

I know there was the great purge but was just t full blown genocide then? Chaos has touched this planet so here are the virus bombs?

Kind of? Ish?

It’s hard to say. Whilst 4 Legions largely dedicated themselves to a God, others remained, well I suppose Agnostic.

Abaddon does the God’s bidding for instance, but only as a means to the end. Despite the boons granted, he’s described as using them, not worshipping them. I think much the same is true of the Iron Warriors, but don’t quote me on that unless someone else can confirm.

mrFickle wrote:
So by the end they were all on the eightfold path? My impression of abbadon is that he was never really into chaos but couldn’t avoid it.

Yes and no. It depended on where in the chain of command one sat, what role one played, and what battlefronts they were assigned to.
Those closest to the Primarchs or assigned to fleets containing Word Bearer's elements often felt the touch of the Gods more than those elsewhere. The mortal elements suffered the most without the training, enhancements, or conditioning to resist the powers of Chaos and the swathe of Dark Compliances led to Horus's forces being swelled with poorly trained Militias that were often mad or in the thrall of Chaos. The Mechanicum forces allied with Horus did so the free themselves from the shackles of the Treaty of Mars and eagerly began to conduct experiments with A.I. and eventually Daemons.
That being said, it took the greater part of the Heresy for most of the Legions to truly form into the first stages of their Chaos selves. The Emperor's Children and Word Bearers are the only Legions that were all in from the get-go with the 3rd being primarily corrupted on Laer with their Legion command and most of their troops being adherents of Slaanesh (although they didn't know their Patrons name) by the time of Isstvan 3 and 5 and the 17th being the OG cool kids of Chaos. The Thousand Sons didn't really go all in until after the Siege, the Death Guard became corrupted en route to Terra, and the World Eaters sort of just got worse gradually until the Siege finished their true ascension. The Sons of Horus, Iron Warriors, Night Lords, and Alpha Legion dabbled variously in Chaos and stuff but only the Sons really went all in, to the point of adding Horus to the Pantheon and worshiping him as a God.

I know there was the great purge but was just t full blown genocide then? Chaos has touched this planet so here are the virus bombs?

Post-Heresy many worlds were destroyed by the Imperium in the Scouring. The Traitor Legions and their allies, the Iron Warriors in particular, dug in wherever they could and prepared to make the Imperium bleed for every inch of ground to be retaken as vengeance for the failure of Horus. But the Imperium retook them anyway and just built over the ruins and repopulated them with new settlers.

mrFickle wrote:
I’m talking about all the infantry, navy, planetary governors, planetary populations etc

Did Horus just sweet talk then into turning on the emperor, did they do it to save their skin, a bit like fallinging into imperial compliance?

Or did he have some method of slowly corrupting them

as others said, a lot of those who rebel against the Imperium, in the heresy or later, initially are rebelling against "mundane" things like high taxation, distant, incompetent or corrupt leadership, or atrocious living conditions. However, they often become corrupted by chaos, either because they turn to it for power, are forced to it to survive, or agents of chaos infiltrate & co-opt the rebellion, very much in the manner that magnus and Mortarion both sold themselves and their legions to chaos to survive.

each of the gods has their own patherway to damnation.


Khorne: Strength! the strength to defeat your enemies and lay them low at your feet! The further down the path you walk, the more strenght you gain, and the less control you are able to exercise over who you fight.

Tzneetch: Knoweldge, and Change! Want to know your enemies weakness? Want to rise to the top of the pyramid, and become the boss? Want to watch the word dance to your puppet strings? Want to know the very secrets of the universe? the deeper you go, the deeper knowledge you crave, more paranoid you become, and the less able to hold stable you are, seeking change for change's sake.

Slaneesh: on top of the traditional "pleasures unending" shtick, She Who Thrists is also about perfection, and obession. Warriors, artists and the like, who seek to master their craft can fall to Her, their desire to be the best driving them to make greater and greater sacrifices to Her to gain skill.


Nurgle: More than anything else, Nurgle offers a way out, a end to suffering. Your lot might not improve, but you no longer care. You will carry on living, and indeed be blessed with longer life, safe in the care of Grandfather. Illness will not claim you, lay you low, but become your companion and freind, the thing that preserves you.

The above answers have a lot of good points. Something else you have to remember is that this was at the very beginning of the Imperium. The Imperial Cult had not been established, the existence and rule of the Emperor was not considered almost a natural phenomenon, and a great many worlds still remembered their periods of independence, and many resented Imperial rule. Even on planets where the Imperials acted relatively fairly, many still did not like being conquered. When Horus rebelled, many threw in their lot with him as a way to cripple the Imperium and gain more autonomy, if not outright independence. They themselves could not successfully rebel and destabilize the Imperium, but half of the Primarchs and their Legions could. It didn't hurt that several of the Legions that did rebel were also formerly some of the Emperor's most brutal enforcers. Fear of reprisals from the World Eaters, Night Lords, and Iron Warriors kept many in line, and now that threat had been removed.

When it comes to Chaos, it's also important to note that many worlds had native religions and cults that either passively or actively engaged in Chaos worship. This can seen with planets like Colchis, Cthonia, Barbarus, Davin, and many others. The Imperial Truth tried to actively stamp these out, but many of these religions continued to be practiced at least in part in secret. By the time of the Heresy, the Imperial Truth hadn't been successful in imprinting itself on much of the Imperium's people, probably due to the fact that it hadn't been around for that long, and also that it really wasn't much of a philosophy and provided no set structure of beliefs to supplant any religion beyond the idea that all religion was bad. When the HH broke out, it was often just a matter of bringing these hidden religions to light again and incorporating them into Horus' new structure. As there had been forms of Chaos worship on the homeworlds of several of the Legions, it was easy for those Space Marines to adopt them again. And even though there was no centralized institution for Chaos worship, styles of worship were often very similar across the galaxy, as seen with the comparison of rituals on Cadia and Colchis, thus making it easy for Chaos beliefs to spread far and wide.

The Word Bearers also fell to Chaos years before anyone else and actively suppressed the Imperial Truth on many worlds they conquered by allowing local religions that aligned with the Dark Gods to prosper in secret. When the time to rise against the Imperium came they already had thousands of dedicated and prepared mortal troops to call upon, as was seen at Calth where groups like the Ushmetar Kaul were immensely effective in combating both mortal and Astartes forces. The group even survives into the 41st Millenium.

One of the problems that the Codex Astartes tried to stamp out was the concentration of power in figureheads like the Primarchs. During the Crusade a Primarch had complete authority and control over huge battlegroups and most compliant worlds conquered by those battlegroups tended to view the Primarch as their saviour/leader. Many of the Primarchs also seem to have been engineered to have incredible charisma and strength of personality, making them easy for mortals to follow.

All this meant that when the Primarchs fell to Chaos, the cult of personality that tended to spring up around them pulled many of their followers along for the ride. Those closest to the top often knew something of what they were getting into but those further from the Primarch's direct influence often had no real idea, with the corruption seeping in over time. So it wasn't really a case of "Horus worships Chaos, so now we all do too". It was more a case of "Horus would make a better Emperor" without any real knowledge of Chaos at all.

Slipspace wrote:
One of the problems that the Codex Astartes tried to stamp out was the concentration of power in figureheads like the Primarchs. During the Crusade a Primarch had complete authority and control over huge battlegroups and most compliant worlds conquered by those battlegroups tended to view the Primarch as their saviour/leader. Many of the Primarchs also seem to have been engineered to have incredible charisma and strength of personality, making them easy for mortals to follow.

All this meant that when the Primarchs fell to Chaos, the cult of personality that tended to spring up around them pulled many of their followers along for the ride. Those closest to the top often knew something of what they were getting into but those further from the Primarch's direct influence often had no real idea, with the corruption seeping in over time. So it wasn't really a case of "Horus worships Chaos, so now we all do too". It was more a case of "Horus would make a better Emperor" without any real knowledge of Chaos at all.

Pretty much this.

Now, I’m gonna sail awfully close to the wind on this one, so please bear with and read the whole thing.

Let us consider Populist Politics. No I’m not naming names because frankly it’s not required for this and would be entirely counter productive.

A Primarch is the ultimate Populist Politician in a sense. Forces of exquisite and unfathomable charisma. People can’t help but hang on their every word and fulfil their every whim. Yes. Even Guilliman and his Loyalist Brethren.

Yet….that doesn’t mean everyone in their thrall, literally and metaphorically, was on board for The Head Bangers Ball. Believers yes. But not True Believers. The difference between [insert extremist element of any given movement, social, political or religious, but ideally religious for the next bit] and Church Of England. Ultimately the same belief in the same deity/person/cause/party, just…..more passive. A tradition rather than an observance.

The majority of Horus and his renegade brother’s followers would ultimately be CofE in my rough approximation.

Many were killed in the Scouring, so I think that those who escaped either fled to the Eye of Terror, or probably managed to flee to different worlds and try and start a new life under the Imperial yoke. I think that killed or in hiding would have been the outcome for most non SM traitors.

It should be noted that Horus offered the supposed reward of freedom to those that came willingly to his side. Loyalty was rewarded. Many systems were also bypassed by the main forces due to the time table. For critical systems that resisted the cost of resistance was made extremely high as examples to those that would resist. Basically it was a combined carrot and stick approach. It should be noted how revered Horus was though. His charisma is a huge part of him and many people followed him because they wanted to.

Though one of my favorite anecdotes is when a system declines Horus’s offer to surrender. The system explains that the Night Lords had brought them into compliance and they knew the consequences of turning on the Imperium. Task failed successfully