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The Eldar had gods before the Birth of She Who Thrists, Orks have Gork/Mork, but Khorne/Tzeentch/Nurgle have always seems non-species specific to me.
While there are incidents of non-human Chaos cults, I've never really viewed they Chaos gods as "human made", but this quote in anther thread got me thinking:

Andersp90 wrote:
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So did humans create Khorne/Tzeentch/Nurgle? And then the proliferation of humans in the galaxy spread the influence of those gods. Similar to how Eldar created Slaanesh, but humans can still fall under her sway.

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No. Their 'history' is written from a massively human-centric POV though and tends to simply gloss over/dismiss/discount anything that suggests the universe existed before humans did.

Much like some 'historians' view history as something that didn't begin until Europeans showed up.

 Excommunicatus wrote:
No. Their 'history' is written from a massively human-centric POV though and tends to simply gloss over/dismiss/discount anything that suggests the universe existed before humans did.

Too true. But still, looking at other gods, they do seem to share a single race as their "creator".
Slaanesh - Eldar. Also their entire original Pantheon, though there is debate as to whether those were just Old Ones or the Eldar race memory of specific Old Ones
Gork/Mork - Okrs

Kh/Tz/Ng don't seem to have a specific progenitor race...or do they? It actually makes sense that it would be humans given there proliferation across the galaxy and the other existing major races already having their own gods in the Warp at the time.
It also makes sense they the Emperor, a human, would be identified by them as their greatest threat.

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Slaanesh isn’t necessarily an Eldar created god, it just so happened the Eldar race were huge and hedonistic as feth, which caused Slaanesh’s birth.

Slaanesh's birth into the Material Universe. Slaanesh had always subsisted in the Warp.

phillv85 wrote:
Slaanesh isn’t necessarily an Eldar created god, it just so happened the Eldar race were huge and hedonistic as feth, which caused Slaanesh’s birth.

Every Eldar codex I've ever owned since 4th would seem to contradict this. Eldar created Slaanesh, pure and simple. This is why many Eldar factions wear spirit stone to capture their soul at death so that it doesn't get consumed. Humans have no such worry with Slaanesh.

And a Warp entity always existing means little, since time doesn't work that same in the Warp.
Slaanesh didn't exist until she/he was born and only at that moment did she/he always exist.

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"Slaanesh's birth into the Material Universe. Slaanesh had always subsisted in the Warp."
Do you have a quote? Because that conflicts with a lot of fluff.

If Slanesh existed as Slanesh the entire time, why wait until he/she came to the Material Universe to fight the Eldar pantheon?

I get the whole time-isn't-linear thing, but that doesn't suggest Slanesh was "born" in the Warp before the Material universe.

Also, Eldar do have history with other Chaos Powers, just not nearly as much. For example, Nurgle is said to have captured Isha.

My understanding is that the Chaos gods have always existed in the immaterium, their distinct personas floating around in a subconcious state where they can influence different species in more minor ways. Then, following some scale of incidents, the hedonism and excess of the Eldar for instance, that distinct personality of Chaos is awakened giving it the ability to more seriously influence the galaxy and, in some cases, tear through the fabric of reality. In turn, each god pays special attention on the species / civilization that caused their awakening, ie. Slaanesh targeting the Eldar.

I'm in no way saying that my understanding is correct. It's just what i've gathered from reading various (mostly conflicting) pieces of lore over the years. Good post!

Well......who knows?

Their origins are unknown. Even the old Necron background, where Old One panic evolving warrior species buggered up the Warp is of at best uncertain canonicity.

It could be that each had their own version of the Eldar at some point. But it seems safe to say that those races are either utterly extinct, or so reduced and debased they might as well be.

Yet Orks aside, it’s Man that is the most numerous and widespread of species. Orks of course have their own Gods, so little food there for the Chaos Gods. But Man? Well. There’s a ready foodsource, especially given The Age of Strife etc.

It seems to me that the sheer influence of Man’s takes on the Gods could well have reshaped them over the millennia.

It seems a little silly to suggest that war, pestilence and change didn't exist before humans.

Especially since we know for a fact (or for as much of a fact as anything is in 40K) that war pre-dates humanity, and Nurgle rescued/enslaved an Eldar god, which pre-dates humanity.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Well......who knows?

Their origins are unknown. Even the old Necron background, where Old One panic evolving warrior species buggered up the Warp is of at best uncertain canonicity.

It could be that each had their own version of the Eldar at some point. But it seems safe to say that those races are either utterly extinct, or so reduced and debased they might as well be.

Yet Orks aside, it’s Man that is the most numerous and widespread of species. Orks of course have their own Gods, so little food there for the Chaos Gods. But Man? Well. There’s a ready foodsource, especially given The Age of Strife etc.

It seems to me that the sheer influence of Man’s takes on the Gods could well have reshaped them over the millennia.

Agreed. From what I've seen, Humanity seems commit itself to a broader range of emotions in the lore compared to other species. Perhaps that attributes to their presence on the Chaos appetites.

 Excommunicatus wrote:
It seems a little silly to suggest that war, pestilence and change didn't exist before humans.

Especially since we know for a fact (or for as much of a fact as anything is in 40K) that war pre-dates humanity, and Nurgle rescued/enslaved an Eldar god, which pre-dates humanity.

I'm not suggesting that. I am suggesting that Kh/Tz/Ng are not THE manifestations of war, pestilence and change, but merely the human manifestations of those.

Khaine, for example, is the Eldar god of war, NOT Khorne. Each psychic race manifests their own gods as a result of their emotions. War, Pestilence & Change would appear to be the strongest for humans, if my hypothesis is correct.

It also seem odd that in many, many stories, the extinction of the human race is something detrimental to the Chaos gods. But if there are other races, why would humans be so important to them?

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"and Nurgle rescued/enslaved an Eldar god, which pre-dates humanity"
This is believed to have happened around M30 - during the Fall. So it doesn't actually predate humanity, although it does predate the Imperium.

Old Lore said they awoke in the human medieval times something something humans are bad.

Current lore it's pretty clear that all four have existed from at least the times the Old Ones and the Necrons royally cocked the Warp up during the War in Heaven.

Bharring wrote:"and Nurgle rescued/enslaved an Eldar god, which pre-dates humanity"
This is believed to have happened around M30 - during the Fall. So it doesn't actually predate humanity, although it does predate the Imperium.

Ayuh. I got my timelines mixed-up.

Mea culpa.

Given that there has always been a God of war in the setting, Khaine and that recently the may have introduced a new chaos god of sorts, peturabo meets a kind of God of weaponised killing, that if released its hinted at that khorne would likely absorb it into itself, then it's highly likely that the gods as they are now are just the reflections of what was always there lurking in the background, life, death, procreation and advancement, but twisted by all the negative emotions into war, hate, excess, debauchery, entropy, disease, fear etc. Etc.

So did the humans create the chaos gods, no, did they fundamentally change how the chaos gods react to our universe, yes, there are always going to be the chaos gods, how they manifest is different.

Isn't it accepted that Khaine is, in fact, Khorne?

Yes as per Realms of Chaos, Khorne, Tzeentch, Nurgle (hereafter abbreviated as KTN) are human gods while Slaanesh is an Eldar god that seems to have effectively jumped pantheons by now feeding primarily from humanity though still with fondness for Eldar souls.

As the gods of originally a minor race, KTN would have been weaker but as humanity spread across the galaxy and became the second most numerous race native to the galaxy (behind Orks), their gods would have correspondingly increased in power. The power of gods in the warp appears to be correlated with the number and fervency of their believers. That is why Ork gods are so powerful as virtually all Orks (minus a few rare outliers like Stormboyz of Khorne) believe in them. That is why the Eldar gods grew weak as the majority of pre-Fall Eldar effectively turned away from their gods.

Khaine is the Eldar god of war. Just as different cultures on Earth had different gods with the same “portfolio”, there can be multiple gods in the warp. The Orks have their gods. The Eldar have their own. Slaanesh gained followers among humans just like how certain cultures on Earth adopted worship of originally foreign gods, such as Romans did with the Egyptian Isis.

According to the new Ynnari book (along with some other tidbits in other novels), Chaos has always existed in the warp. It has no date of creation and Slaaneshi daemons participated in the War In Heaven - predating the Age of Strife by literal tens of millions of years.

In the third Ultramarines novel, Uriel Ventris sees a vision of galaxies rendered lifeless due to the depredations of Khorne's followers, which strongly suggests that the Chaos gods exist outside the Milky Way. They may have been 'activated' in the Milky Way primarily through the actions of humans, but as long as there has been sentient life in the 40K universe, they have probably always existed in one form or another. Then there's the Fantasy/AoS universe, where whole new different species interact with Chaos in new ways, like the Skaven Pestilens Clan who worship Nurgle despite primarily serving the Great Horned Rat. For all we know, there could be countless realities in which the Chaos gods interact with the native races in many different ways, with the 40K universe only being one out of many.

"It has no date of creation and Slaaneshi daemons participated in the War In Heaven"

There are two very different takes on this:
1. That Slaaneshi energies/concepts existed in the Warp since practically forever (technically, not until the first sentient beings considered debauchery). Slanesh wasn't a specific being yet, though.

2. Time is a physical law, and isn't consistent in the Immaterium. If Slanesh is born at some point in time, then Slanesh always exists in the Warp. Same with basically every other Chaos god.

WIth #1, there's certainly a question of if "Slanesh Demons" were really *Slanesh* or just manifestations of excess.

With #2, there's the problem of why Asuryan, Morag-Hai, and the others no longer show up in the Warp - as they did exist at one point in time, if Time really were that inconsistent, they would always exist in the Warp. Or why Ynead hasn't been active in the Warp despite not being fully born yet.

I like solution #1 more, myself. But it's not conclusive.

 Excommunicatus wrote:
Isn't it accepted that Khaine is, in fact, Khorne?

Not by a long shot. In fact when Slaanesh was born and sundered Khaine, She and Khorne fought over possession of Khaine before he was shattered into all the shards that are now embedded in each Avatar of Khaine.

There is, however, a theory I like that states that Khaine is both father and son of Khorne. That as a Warp entity, Khorne always existed and Khaine is an entity that broke off from Khorne and attached itself to the Aeldari patheon and was born first. Then Khorne fully came into being much later off the Warring emotions of humanity.
But that is just a theory

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These are Warp beings. It's possible that Khaine is Khorne and Khaine is not Khorne at the same time.

It seems like the Chaos Gods and the Emperyum were supposed to be Lovecraftian - totally incomprehensible to us.

Over time, fluff and the community has turned them into comprehensible reflections of ourselves instead.

What logic dictates is not supposed to be reliable in respect to Warp beings. But that's hard to play with, so we adjust it to what we can understand.

The Realm Of Chaos books date from the era of half-Eldar Space Marine Librarians drinking in the pub with Inquisitor Obi-Wan Sherlock Clouseau, so I’d not be inclined to treat any of their content not repeated more recently as valid. In the light of thirty years of subsequent development of the fluff, the idea that mankind specifically created the Chaos Gods in the 20th century just doesn’t make sense.

The Chaos Gods are essentially sentient warp storms formed of coalesced emotions that exist in a parallel dimension outside our conventional concepts of space and time. We have to be careful not to over-anthropomorphise them when analysing what they can and cannot do.

Humans viewing things from a human POV is unavoidable, sadly.

Tis why GW used to have a rule of not writing from any perspective but a human's.

 Nurglitch wrote:
Slaanesh's birth into the Material Universe. Slaanesh had always subsisted in the Warp.

Again, we don't know that. It isn't explicitly stated in the lore, and we don't know how an event whose cause is reliant on factors in the material universe where time is a real factor effects events in the warp where time is more malleable.

 Wyzilla wrote:
According to the new Ynnari book (along with some other tidbits in other novels), Chaos has always existed in the warp. It has no date of creation and Slaaneshi daemons participated in the War In Heaven - predating the Age of Strife by literal tens of millions of years.

Can you please give me the title of the book? This seems to contradict even the newest eldar codex stating that Slaanesh was created in M30 by the collapse of the Aeldari Empire.

Slaanesh was fully awakened in M30, it existed before then.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
Slaanesh was fully awakened in M30, it existed before then.

Source?

w1zard wrote:

 BaconCatBug wrote:
Slaanesh was fully awakened in M30, it existed before then.

Source?

Slaanesh blessed Be'lakor, the first mortal bestowed with Daemon Prince-hood.

Codex: Chaos Daemons Page 71 wrote:Be’lakor was the first mortal bestowed with Daemon Prince-hood, though what sacrifices he made and what horrors he inflicted to secure such a reward are not described in even the oldest of tales. What is known is that Be’lakor somehow managed to draw the gaze of all four of the Dark Gods, pleasing them sufficiently that each granted him a portion of their godly might.

Codex: Chaos Daemons Page 71 wrote:Legends tell of Be’lakor ruling over mortal empires since the dawn of time, the Daemon Prince conquering a world and subjugating its people, forcing them to worship him as a god during the time men know as Old Night or the Age of Strife.

8th Edition Rulebook Page 40 wrote:AGE OF STRIFE: M25-M30
Marked by terrible wars and massive invasions that tore Humanity apart, this age was a time of collapse. Warp storms of unprecedented ferocity isolated Mankind’s colonies. The great distances prevented almost all contact between colonised planets, and those who were close enough to remain in communication often became embroiled in internal battles for control

So, unless there is some unknown and unrecorded 4th god that existed up to Slaanesh's awakening and then promptly vanishes when Slaanesh woke up, the only answer is that Slaanesh existed before being awoken by the Eldar's sweaty sexgoblin activities, and despite not being fully awake managed to do wibbly wobbly warpy timey stuff, the same way that in the current timeline Ynnead isn't fully awoken but can still do things via an avatar.