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Hello, my fellow dakanauts, as a warhammer fan and sort of an amateur theologian, I have wondered what theological justification would be possible in the wake of the horus heresy for the betrayer of the primarchs and the internment of the big E in the golden throne. From what I got from reading parts of the horus heresy series ( note it has been a while since I last readed them) for many normal human the E is the omniscience god figure.( the concept of sins and punishment after death may require this) and the doctrine of the imperial truth enforce the view of the big E as the omnibenevolent ruler of the imperium who lead his armies in the vast (re)conquest of the galaxy with inhuman foresight and vision, so why did he let the horus heresy happen (try to take the view of a normal person in the imperium not the reader) and cause untold damage to the people of the imperium. Oh and please do not insult real world religions, I don't care if you see them as primitive or brutal, it takes away from the decision and can be very offensive. anyway thank you and hope you come up with good ideas.

Well i just feel the Big "E" is overrated.... TO THE DARK SIDE!



Ahem, in all seriousness though i feel that overall the emperor is trying to solidify his rule on the golden throne and that after the heresy by putting his life on the line it enables others to not only feel that he has risked his life to save humanity and that also it allows them to unite under his will as a strong banner... anywho thats just a few ideas of mine as per why it may be.

He didn't 'let' the Horus Heresy happen, many people forget that while he was a masterful tactician, an amazing warrior and all these other things, he was still just a guy in a suit of armour.. He made mistakes, and some of them were on a massive scale, he shunned most of the other primarchs for Horus, Guilliman etc. and didn't see that there was competition, bitterness and envy between the different legions, he didn't even believe that Horus was fully Chaos, as to why he didn't just kill him as soon as he went on board Horus' flagship, and, to the whole 'trying to solidify his rule on the golden throne', nobody was exactly going to dethrone him (he is THE IMMORTAL GOD-EMPEROR AFTER ALL ASDFGHJKL PRAISE THE EMPRAH), and, surely he'd have a greater effect if he was still alive and not a rotting corpse on a chair.. *cough* for the glory of Chaos!! *cough*

 Marit Lage wrote:
Well i just feel the Big "E" is overrated.... TO THE DARK SIDE!



Ahem, in all seriousness though i feel that overall the emperor is trying to solidify his rule on the golden throne and that after the heresy by putting his life on the line it enables others to not only feel that he has risked his life to save humanity and that also it allows them to unite under his will as a strong banner... anywho thats just a few ideas of mine as per why it may be.

ok, so this is one approch that the big E has this planed all along, as a a counter point to what of dualism could the hersey itself not be a struggle between two diffinet gods or two diffent elements of the E, his good side and bad side this could expalin why half of the primarchs turned to chaos as half the E was evil and this evil was haned down to the primarchs. keep going





Automatically Appended Next Post:

 BrotherOfBone wrote:
He didn't 'let' the Horus Heresy happen, many people forget that while he was a masterful tactician, an amazing warrior and all these other things, he was still just a guy in a suit of armour.. He made mistakes, and some of them were on a massive scale, he shunned most of the other primarchs for Horus, Guilliman etc. and didn't see that there was competition, bitterness and envy between the different legions, he didn't even believe that Horus was fully Chaos, as to why he didn't just kill him as soon as he went on board Horus' flagship, and, to the whole 'trying to solidify his rule on the golden throne', nobody was exactly going to dethrone him (he is THE IMMORTAL GOD-EMPEROR AFTER ALL ASDFGHJKL PRAISE THE EMPRAH), and, surely he'd have a greater effect if he was still alive and not a rotting corpse on a chair.. *cough* for the glory of Chaos!! *cough*

true but i wonder what would from an in universe perspective, what would an imperial historian and theologian in the wake of the horus heresy(10 to 300 years afterwards) believe the wars and the bitter betrayal of the space marines and the brutal end of mans second empire showed about the nature of the big E. whose personality cult has already put forward as a an omniscience.

 deoverbum wrote:

 Marit Lage wrote:
Well i just feel the Big "E" is overrated.... TO THE DARK SIDE!



Ahem, in all seriousness though i feel that overall the emperor is trying to solidify his rule on the golden throne and that after the heresy by putting his life on the line it enables others to not only feel that he has risked his life to save humanity and that also it allows them to unite under his will as a strong banner... anywho thats just a few ideas of mine as per why it may be.

ok, so this is one approch that the big E has this planed all along, as a a counter point to what of dualism could the hersey itself not be a struggle between two diffinet gods or two diffent elements of the E, his good side and bad side this could expalin why half of the primarchs turned to chaos as half the E was evil and this evil was haned down to the primarchs. keep going





Automatically Appended Next Post:

 BrotherOfBone wrote:
He didn't 'let' the Horus Heresy happen, many people forget that while he was a masterful tactician, an amazing warrior and all these other things, he was still just a guy in a suit of armour.. He made mistakes, and some of them were on a massive scale, he shunned most of the other primarchs for Horus, Guilliman etc. and didn't see that there was competition, bitterness and envy between the different legions, he didn't even believe that Horus was fully Chaos, as to why he didn't just kill him as soon as he went on board Horus' flagship, and, to the whole 'trying to solidify his rule on the golden throne', nobody was exactly going to dethrone him (he is THE IMMORTAL GOD-EMPEROR AFTER ALL ASDFGHJKL PRAISE THE EMPRAH), and, surely he'd have a greater effect if he was still alive and not a rotting corpse on a chair.. *cough* for the glory of Chaos!! *cough*

true but i wonder what would from an in universe perspective, what would an imperial historian and theologian in the wake of the horus heresy(10 to 300 years afterwards) believe the wars and the bitter betrayal of the space marines and the brutal end of mans second empire showed about the nature of the big E. whose personality cult has already put forward as a an omniscience.

Many Imperial citizens of the time were indoctrinated to worship the Emprah as their immortal God, so I assume that he'd still feel that, although Horus turned to Chaos, this doesn't say anything about the Emperor himself (he did defeat Horus, after all ), and I think that people see him not as the Emperor that let Chaos thrive, but the Emperor who defeated the man who was the embodiment of Chaos, so they'd probably write a pretty good article (and, to be fair, if anyone says anything bad about the Emperor, they get arrested for Heresy, so yano xD)

Y'all might want to take a look into this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_%28cosmogony%29#Chaoskampf

In the Chaoskampf mythological genre, the cultural or civilizational hero fights and defeats a dragon or monster. It represents the triumph of man over the forces of nature (Chaos). Wh40k is essentially that story retold from a Romantic perspective (with perhaps a bit of Oswald Spengler thrown in for good measure) so it ends up depicting the struggle against Chaos as noble, but ultimately pointless.

Many Imperial citizens of the time were indoctrinated to worship the Emprah as their immortal God, so I assume that he'd still feel that, although Horus turned to Chaos, this doesn't say anything about the Emperor himself (he did defeat Horus, after all ), and I think that people see him not as the Emperor that let Chaos thrive, but the Emperor who defeated the man who was the embodiment of Chaos, so they'd probably write a pretty good article (and, to be fair, if anyone says anything bad about the Emperor, they get arrested for Heresy, so yano xD)

 BrotherOfBone wrote:
He didn't 'let' the Horus Heresy happen.

Yeah he did. He says so Himself in Outcast Dead.

Scholars at the time were in short supply, given the deathtoll on Terra, and those that weren't there being elsewhere in the galaxy and unable to report on the actual events. What they heard was the "official story" provided by the survivors of the conflict, and it was not like they could travel from Rynn's World to Terra to see it for themselves and interview survivors.

Add into that 10,000 years of history, and there's no one in the Imperium with first-hand knowledge of the Emperor (Bjorn the Fell-Handed, who is only awake once every century or so, if even that often, doesn't count) or the actual events of the Heresy. Myth and superstition has replaced rational analysis and historical reporting. Those who deviate from this path are removed by the Inquisition for distributing proscribed knowledge, heretical thought, and impious beliefs.

The society of the Imperium is one which holds strength through ignorance as a virtue.

At the time? Even those who worshiped the Emperor did not believe him to be both omnipotent and omnipresent as well as omniscient. The evidence before their eyes would have demonstrated the foolishness of that belief. I would also question any belief that professes the God-Emperor as omnibenevolent. The glimpses we are offered in various sources as to the nature of the Imperial Creed and what the Ecclesiarchy preaches tends to paint the M41 view of the God-Emperor as a rather angry and vengeful god, who will smite down sinners, heretics, and xenos with righteous fury. Very much an Old Testament vibe in the Imperial Creed.

pseienesis, thank you for your reply, yet i think you answer both all and nothing, for one would the omniscience of the emperor be question if the two nature argument that i presented earlier was accepted for a group of emperor worshipers( i know a lot of this is just guessing please bear with me.) Would he still not be omniscience, but at the same time at the weakness of his double nature. secondly what is most history but the superstitions of the current generation transplanted on to the last. thirdly and lastly omnibenevolence can be objective depending on one morals, it helps that in 40k all the actions of the ecclesiarchy are necessary for the continued survival of mankind and so the actions of the emperor can be seen as omnibenevolence. thank you for the intreasting thoughts so far thank you, even if its not quite what i expected.

It's worth noting that the worship of the Emperor as a god was a very touchy subject during the times before the Horus Heresy. Imperial truth was a concept of a completely secular society focused on the proliferation of science and logic over superstition and religion. The Lectitio Divinitatus was a very small sect of humans who went against the societal norms of the rest of the Imperium, so they were hardly a large portion of humanity.

From the perspective of an Imperial scholar, the reason the Horus Heresy happened was ultimately because Lorgar needed someone to worship and ended up turning to Chaos after the Emperor shunned him. This lead him to plant the seeds of betrayal in all the right places to cause Horus' downfall and, ultimately, the Horus Heresy. There was nothing the Emperor could have done to prevent or foresee the Heresy. He was just a man. An incredibly powerful psyker, but not a god; just a man capable of making mistakes like any other man.

 Darth Bob wrote:
He was just a man. An incredibly powerful psyker, but not a god; just a man capable of making mistakes like any other man.

Agreed. He made that clear so many times.

This thread hasn't crashed and burned hilariously. I'm impressed.

I do not think you can really read anything into the "particulars" of the story because of the way it has developed over the years. The fact that half the primarchs were traitors and half were not is not credibly related to some concept of dualism that the original writers had in mind.

People need to remember that the whole thing was just a sketch for a game background written in the late eighties.

Fast forward, 20+ years and the game is immensely popular and the game company is churning out like 50 novels all that have to fit in the framework of a story that has had all the principal actors defined in 3 or 4 pages of text.

Looking for theological meaning is a bit awkward because no one really believes in 40k as a religious system, unless they have some very serious psychological issues. You can certainly find many mythological archetypes and I am sure that the authors could point out what books and literature influenced them.

The 40k mythos has a lot of appeal to gamers and casual fans of science fiction but at the core its not all that deep and the original authors of 40k did not take themselves as seriously as the fans take it now. This is very clear to anyone that reads the first edition stuff and even a lot of 2nd edition material.

JWhex wrote:
I do not think you can really read anything into the "particulars" of the story because of the way it has developed over the years. The fact that half the primarchs were traitors and half were not is not credibly related to some concept of dualism that the original writers had in mind.

People need to remember that the whole thing was just a sketch for a game background written in the late eighties.

...

The 40k mythos has a lot of appeal to gamers and casual fans of science fiction but at the core its not all that deep and the original authors of 40k did not take themselves as seriously as the fans take it now. This is very clear to anyone that reads the first edition stuff and even a lot of 2nd edition material.

That is the precise reason that everyone should trust the background and read as far into it as they can manage. Contingent on that, the Emperor and Horus are very significant.


Development was even more haphazard than you represent lots of settings are created all at once within the space of several years and with the intention of making a unique, self contained song. Designers have to create the aesthetics, the ideology, and the interaction with the associated game all at once. They throw up a tree spirit and a byzantine cavalry unit just because someone doodled them in. Iron kingdoms /warmachine, magic the gathering, and all of the d&d settings had a development process like this and they leave me completely cold. They are too original and comprehensive to be anything more than spiritually bereft.

The primary, true details of 40k, which solidified in second edition, Epic, and Gothic, are by contrast the results of an iterative, non - linear pastiche. They started out in laserburn and early WHFB/WHFRP, and those are sketches of Dune, 2000AD, Tolkien, and Moorcock. Every new iteration and every appropriation involved Rick Priestley or someone intentionally examining or casually modifying the reasons and context around the previous version.

Chaos is the obvious example. Michael Moorcock's was a natural force that heroes sometimes needed to assist to maintain the appropriate balance with order. In Fantasy this was not the case, it was always a menace to the forces of good and order. Then 40k does not intimate any gods or significance of order at all.

40k and the Heresy are the only major settings in which any kind of theology is appropriate.

Horus was, down to his DNA, the greatest and most successful man alive, and that made him inherently and inevitably an exemplar of Chaos. This is the fundament of Chaos undivided: mastery of somatic functions and mortal exaltation. These things Horus perfected by achieving the most victories and the most honors while he served the Crusade.

These things are Chaotic in the sense that after a hero has clawed his way to victory and crowned himself with supremacy over everything, he has created nothing and there is nothing left but to be torn down and surpassed by a newer champion.

The Emperor is something other than the competitor in a zero-sum game that Horus is. He was born from martyrdom of thousands of shamans, who must have had a great deal to live for. He martyred himself again to Horus.

The Imperial Creed opposes Chaos not with order but with devotion, duty, sweat, and sacrifice. The moral of the novels' Imperial Truth, its disappearance and of the Siege of Terra is that order and reason is not enough. Chaos means the accumulation of mortal glory that disappears at death. The Emperor and the Creed mean a value created by sacrifice and death that lives forever.

I don't think attributing the Emperor with omnipotence/science/benevolence is appropriate, even from a citizen's point of view. He was not a god in the christian sense, but more comparable with Zeus or Odin. Like those gods, the Emperor merely inhabited his world and ruled his own dominion, rather than being the absolute master and creator of all of it. And he was vulnerable, like they were. Therefore the mortal wounding and interment of him makes sense - the Warhammer 40k setting is intentionally bleak and gothic, so in a theological sense it's comparable to a post-Ragnarok setting, minus the rebirth of the world thingy the Norse had going. The inhabitants of the Imperium, to the extent that they even knew of the Heresy, live in a theologically post-apocalyptic world where their god sacrificed his mortal shell to destroy the rebel traitor.