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As far as I'm aware, even the second mightiest human psyker (most likely Malcador, if we're excluding the Emperor's own creations like Magnus the Red) has but a fraction of the Emperor's psychic ability. And I'm pretty sure Eldar farseers are also dwarfed by His power, so it's as if the world's tallest man came from a tribe of pygmies.

Interestingly, the Emperor also long predates the Eye of Terror and other realspace manifestations of Chaos that may have favored the birth of psykers.

Is the Emperor just a fluke, or is there some explanation provided for this?

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It….depends. If the Realm of Chaos origin story remains? The Emperor is a unique being, comprised of the souls of Shamas.

The tale goes the Shaman could once reincarnate after bathing in the powers of the warp. Once the Warp started going wonky, they realised it was too dangerous.

So they all took their own life, met in the warp, and were reborn as a single entity - The Emperor.

If that holds? His power level comes from his gestalt nature. Ahem…the power of one, the power of two….the power of many.

The Emperor also had thousands of years to hone his abilities and gain esoteric knowledge to increase his power.

One of his first campaigns was to take the Tower of Babel to try and master Enuncia, a language that directly channels the power of the Warp (which, personally, I hate as a stupid Dan Abnett insertion).

Given they have never retconned the shaman creation, that's still canon.

He's a walking eldar infinity circuit.

The shamans were all proto hominids with seemingly a pure connection to the warp. They died out by making the emperor, putting that power in a single entity.

The eldar warlock titans have seer choirs and infinity circuits of dead seers and are able to turn back time and manipulate reality. They are pretty insane.

Now imagine that 1000x time quantity of psykers and you get the emperor's soul gestalt.



If however they decide that the best more interesting idea they can go with for the emperor is that he's just a random highlander immortal that was born just because conveniently humanity has a race of gods randomly born amongst them and he became powerful, because Abnett decided that the concept of a perpetual needed to crammed into 40k. Well there's your answer.

On Perpetuals? That may simply be a side effect (intended or not, we don’t know) of the Old One’s Fiddling.

Certainly we’re told the Eldar of old were all Perpetuals, doing the same as the Shaman of Old Earth. And that their gods appear to have had mortal origins, only later achieving godhood.

The mechanism I’m not sure of. Is it celebration turned adulation turned worship that empowers them? Or is it an inevitable consequence of a race designed to be psychic, and sooner or later notably powerful individuals will arise from the general population, in the same way some are born with a greater capacity for learning, greater physical strength limits etc.

Regrowing from atoms is a lot different from just not being able to die of old age or disease.

The shamans shared the reincarnation that the eldar had which doesn't seem very similar to the abnett perpetual.

Reincarnation is that the soul remained cohesive after death and attached to a newly forming life, being reborn to live again. That's got a lot more narrative consequence and long story compared to the wolverine esque growing back your body as it was previously.

The reincarnation concept slots neatly into 40k metaphysics and how most souls dissolve after death while powerful ones retain coherence.

Atom regeneration is just comic book kitsch and it has very little narrative value, except to make your character look cooler

Yeah, Perpetuals as a basic concept aren't terrible. It's the execution that's dumb. Being unable to die of old age, disease, etc and being able to heal from otherwise fatal wounds all seems kind of fine. It's stuff like people being atomised and then getting better that is monumentally stupid.

It kind of fits though if you consider living beings in the 40K setting to be living in two realms at once. The Physical and the Chaos.

Whilst for the most part you're in one or the other its clear that beings can exist in both at once.

Eg Chaos demons from the big four chaos Gods are simply splinters of that God itself. Thus existing in part in both the physical and Chaos realm

Tyranids do the same, there's clearly a Warp Entity/manifestation of them in the Warp itself plus the countless numbers outside of the Warp in the regular universe.


So you could argue that Perpetuals are simply creatures that exist across both thus being able to repair their form in either realm so long as their form persists in the other.