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Trillions of people worship the Emperor, and their perception of Him has been heavily shaped by the Ecclesiarchy over the course of 10,000 years. Therefore, the Emperor that the Imperium worships is not at all the same man as the one who created the Primarchs, led the Great Crusade, and currently sits on the Golden Throne.

If the Emperor were to die and become a true god, would the combined Warp energies of the Imperium's faithful have an influence on the nature of the new being? Could it even be a separate being entirely, who believes Himself the Emperor but is purely a reflection of the Ecclesiarchy's dogma and half-remembered histories?

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Demons seem to have agency of their own. Even if they are birthed by a certain kind of emotional/belief energy, the demons themsleves appear to be slightly separate from it with their own ideas.

The Emperor is also a living thing with a soul and agency before any belief started to swell. So in theory he can be as he once was just empowered by Warp energies.

Of course that joint process could well change his attitude. Creating something that isn't what the people believe (at large) nor who he once was; but something else entirely.



Even on Earth today we have hundreds to thousands of different interpretations of the main religions of the world. Each one with believers who are certain that their interpretation is correct. Magnify that over 10,000 years and over a billion worlds and an insane population beyond trillions and even IF he's shaped by the belief there'd be no singular unified concept.
Even within the Imperium they openly adapt belief in the Emperor to local religions - which is why things like "The Four Armed Emperor" are not immediately shut down because its "just a local religion adapted to the will of the Emperor"

Kind of? Ish?

It’s an uncertain relationship, because of how powerful the Big 4 have become.

In theory, a Warp God is a reflection of existing mortal emotions. But, the Big 4 can now, directly or indirectly, influence Realspace.

For instance, Nurgle can brew up and unleash a new plague. This causes suffering and desperation which drives His worship, and when he provides relief? His reputation as a respite from plague is assured and propagated.

With The Emperor? Who knows.

The Emperor has already somewhat changed, Guilliman said as much IIRC when he spoke to him. The psykers who are sacrificed to the Astronomicon seem to meld with the Emperor, adding to the gestalt that was formed by the original human Shamans.

The answer is probably, but to a lesser extent since he originated as an amalgamation of psykers and not a feedback loop from sentient beings.

Energy bodies of things are immortal. You can gain power from the warp, and it may influence you in the process, but I reckon your "core" essence ie. values and whatnot, would remain as they were. The big 4 did not exist as energetic bodies before their manifestation into existence, so what happened to them isnt valid for big E I'd think

-Guardsman- wrote:
Trillions of people worship the Emperor, and their perception of Him has been heavily shaped by the Ecclesiarchy over the course of 10,000 years. Therefore, the Emperor that the Imperium worships is not at all the same man as the one who created the Primarchs, led the Great Crusade, and currently sits on the Golden Throne.

If the Emperor were to die and become a true god, would the combined Warp energies of the Imperium's faithful have an influence on the nature of the new being? Could it even be a separate being entirely, who believes Himself the Emperor but is purely a reflection of the Ecclesiarchy's dogma and half-remembered histories?

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This possibility was certainly discussed and speculated upon by the Eldar Farseer accompanying Guilliman in one of Guy Haley's Indomitus Crusade novels. He speculated whether the original soul and nature of the being might be changed by the worship and faith of so many quadrillions of people over thousands of years.

As with all of the speculations in that novel, there was no clear conclusion.

For the Eldar, it could certainly be such a case where the warp god may believe things that are factually not true. For example, the Eldar are supposedly the children of their goddess Isha. Yet the Old Ones also modified the Eldar. Many people jump to the conclusion this means Old One = Isha but another possible speculation is that the Eldar create the warp entity Isha and Isha in turn believes she created the Eldar, because the Eldar believe she did even if this is not truly the case.

Alternately, the belief of the Empire's citizens doesn't influence the Emperor. Rather, a competing warp entity that also calls itself the Emperor is created, and that being is a reflection of the beliefs of the Imperium's citizenry.

Eumerin wrote:
Alternately, the belief of the Empire's citizens doesn't influence the Emperor. Rather, a competing warp entity that also calls itself the Emperor is created, and that being is a reflection of the beliefs of the Imperium's citizenry.

If that is true, then it is also likely that the Emperor is long dead and has been supplanted by such warp entity.

Eumerin wrote:
Alternately, the belief of the Empire's citizens doesn't influence the Emperor. Rather, a competing warp entity that also calls itself the Emperor is created, and that being is a reflection of the beliefs of the Imperium's citizenry.

This is to me how the metaphysics of 40k suggests it should work.

The concept of the emperor and the entity of the emperor are separate things and it's not like calling it the emperor tags it with some kind of attractant so it must immediately get swept up with the warp concept.


The 4 chaos gods are emergent consciousnesses of storms of similar emotion stained souls. But because they are formed of what 40k effectively treats as the 4 elements of sentient consciousness, emotions and actions of worship that align with them will always return to them because that's what they are. Khorne is rage, so him stoking rage means he is powered. We see that every species with a warp presence feels these 4 emotions, even if they are flavoured differently - tau rage appears different to eldar rage. But they are like different spin states of quarks, they're still quarks.

The emperor is not a fundamental emotion unit that collects in the warp. The concept of the emperor is more abstract than rage, despair, hope or desire. Each person that worships the emperor will think and feel slightly differently about him and that energy won't be singular to coagulate.

You would have to really change how the mataphysics of the warp and emotions in 40k works to allow for any creature to be abstractly worshipped and powered directly that way, because the warp isn't sophisticated enough to sort the energies within into abstract conceptual boxes.


Marijan von Stauffer, author of the liber chaotica used to describe the warp and chaos like 4 overlapping circles, a chaos venn diagram. With the centre where they all overlap as chaos undivided and the edges overlapping between various gods being where other warp entities reside, ones that are mixtures of the others.


GW seem to in AoS at least be turning chaos into a generic DnD hell realm with traditional fantasy gods rather than following their original, deeper philosophical and metaphyiscal commentary on consciousness. Whether this is happening in 40k I don't know, but if it is, it's for the poorer.

It can be both.

Nurgle has had his Garden since the beginning, and each God’s Realm is described in the approrpiately named Realms of Chaos books. With plenty unclaimed madness in and around.

My take on the nature of the Gods is otherwise neutral deities gone insane. Nurgle is my best example, as he’s a God of Life and Plenty. Where it sucks to be a sentient life form in his presence is he values all life, from the tiniest virus to the largest mega-fauna exactly equally. Bump me off? And so many bacteria, bugs and worms and that will feast on my corpse, creating an abundance of life. Hence, to Nurgle? The loss of my life is absolutely a net gain.

Khorne? A God of War and possibly Justice, who now embraces wholesale slaughter

The existence of other alien pantheons show that the Chaos gods are not the be all and end all of everything in the warp.

We know that Ynnead exists and has taken some limited action such as reviving Yvraine and creating the Yncarne. We know from Gav Thorpe's Asurmen novel that the ancient Eldar gods also existed as their old temples provided some shelter to the Eldar that would become Asurmen when the rest of the world was overrun with daemons, due to the lingering remnants of the old gods' power in the temples.

So we know that more tightly focused entities revolving around specific concepts are possible within the warp. Therefore it is possible that a warp entity identifying itself as the Emperor might be created from the worship and devotion of so many humans over thousands of years. Alternatively the other speculation is that such worship and the souls of the worshippers accreted around that of the original Emperor, possibly changing him from what he originally was to what his worshippers want him to be and to want what they think he wants.

The Eldar gods would be those entities that lie at the intersections of the 4 great vortices.

Khaine was originally split by khorne fighting slannesh over him because he didn't want to give a piece up. Khaine is what rage looks like when it's Eldar driven.

Before humanity, chaos still existed but khorne would have looked more like khaine, with the proportions of Eldar rage being in ascendency. Modern khorne is just the human face of galactic rage.

This is why I'm not a fan of the flanderising of chaos where they are just the negative aspects turned to 11.

Asuryan has aspects of tzeentch, just not the self destructive ones. Isha and nurgle are mirrors and so on.

If you could actually invent gods in 40k just through mass wishing them into existence then it undercuts the point of the warp and chaos and the fundamental emotions that fill it. They form naturally in the same way stars form from dense clouds, through natural laws. They appear because emotions exist.

The concept of the emperor is too abstract to be something that can congeal without being a part of the great emotion storms. What is actually forming him that doesn't already sit within the emotional domains of chaos?

It's not just mass wishing though it's the collective psychic might of entire races having a reflection in the Warp.

There are loads of entities in Warp Space, the Big Four are just the most powerful in the current era because the Old Ones died out and couldn't keep things in check anymore after the War In Heaven.

To be very clear, before humanity, Chaos, as we know it, didn't exist.
The Warp existed and had entities but the advent of humanity birthed Nurgle, Khorne, and Tzeentch while the non-linear nature of the Warp then allowed them to influence the corporeal races that were technically older than they were.
We have a hard coded date for when Slaanesh burst into existence with The Fall and yet it seeded itself into cultures thousands of years before that because it is a non-linear being.

The idea that all Gods have to be fragments or aspects of the Chaos gods is just nonsense.

 Hellebore wrote:
The Eldar gods would be those entities that lie at the intersections of the 4 great vortices.

Khaine was originally split by khorne fighting slannesh over him because he didn't want to give a piece up. Khaine is what rage looks like when it's Eldar driven.

Before humanity, chaos still existed but khorne would have looked more like khaine, with the proportions of Eldar rage being in ascendency. Modern khorne is just the human face of galactic rage.

This is why I'm not a fan of the flanderising of chaos where they are just the negative aspects turned to 11.

Asuryan has aspects of tzeentch, just not the self destructive ones. Isha and nurgle are mirrors and so on.

If you could actually invent gods in 40k just through mass wishing them into existence then it undercuts the point of the warp and chaos and the fundamental emotions that fill it. They form naturally in the same way stars form from dense clouds, through natural laws. They appear because emotions exist.

The concept of the emperor is too abstract to be something that can congeal without being a part of the great emotion storms. What is actually forming him that doesn't already sit within the emotional domains of chaos?

I don't think the concept of gods in 40k is anywhere near as consistent and developed as you're making out. There have been dozens of different explanations, both in-universe and out-of-universe and they mostly don't really agree with one another. What we do know is the Chaos gods seem to be just particularly powerful manifestations within the Warp. There's no reason to think a similar manifestation couldn't exist given enough directed psychic energy. The Chaos gods seem to be easier to "create" because their essence is universal across all species. That's not to say one especially numerous species (like humanity) all worshipping a similar enough concept couldn't create their own distinct god, with no relationship to the existing Chaos gods. The Eldar basically did that with Slaanesh, which is its own entity, distinct from the other 3 gods.

Slipspace wrote:
That's not to say one especially numerous species (like humanity) all worshipping a similar enough concept couldn't create their own distinct god, with no relationship to the existing Chaos gods. The Eldar basically did that with Slaanesh, which is its own entity, distinct from the other 3 gods.

The Orks have done so as well with Gork and Mork. The Tau's auxiliaries have unwittingly created the Tau'va.

Different races also have different impact on the Warp, some are much more likely to generate Warp entities than others.

There are likely loads of "minor" Gods running around for much smaller races on the fringe, or small races that have a high impact on the Warp. However the setting is so vast and they are so under-powered (right now) compared to the others that they aren't really mentioned.

Another thing to consider, and we see this a lot more in fantasy/AoS really, is that Greater Demons are not beyond pretending to be other Gods to other races. So there is likely that happening here and there in 40K as well. Heck they'll do it to humans as well.



Also lets not forget we have the Hive Mind of the Tyranids as well. An entity that has a connection to the Warp, but where we've honestly no real idea how that connection works; only that it creates a huge "void" that other demons in the Warp cannot (or do not) enter (shadow in the Warp).

 Overread wrote:

Also lets not forget we have the Hive Mind of the Tyranids as well. An entity that has a connection to the Warp, but where we've honestly no real idea how that connection works; only that it creates a huge "void" that other demons in the Warp cannot (or do not) enter (shadow in the Warp).

The Iyanden Spiritseer Iyanna with her witchsight saw the souls of the Tyranids of a fleet linked together like a braid and this fleet itself being a thread in a cord that was the whole entire Tyranid race. The Tyranids are basically the body or avatar of the Hive Mind in the material world.