Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Just something that dropped into my head whilst reading the new rule book.

See, the Eldar created Slaanesh through their own hubris. This was mostly due to their highly psychic nature, and long life spans. The birth of course tore the heart from their civilisation.

Humanity, for now, is not as psychically gifted as the Eldar. Nor do we live anywhere near as long. But there are untold trillions abroad in the Galaxy. So it more or less evens out.

Whilst there’s suspicion amongst fandom the Emperor is hoping to ascend through worship etc, that’s not what I’m asking here.

Do you think Humanity is capable of nurturing and manifesting a new God of Chaos. If so, what traits do you think it might have?

I’m going to cheat a bit, and suggest the Emperor may become a god of Order, despite his desire not to be.

Not a god of Good. A god of Order. Not nice. A god as uncompromising of disorder as the Imperium is. This would truly create a state of eternal conflict that the gods desire. This is the true trick they pulled on the Emperor. Corrupting his convictions and turning him into an eternal entity, destined to fuel the conflict that sustains the Chaos gods forever.

To lift off my DnD roots... the Emperor would generate Devils instead of Daemons. Or Angels... call them Storm Cast or something like that.


But to address the OP, yes, I think humanity is capable of creating a god, and are in the process of doing so regardless of the Emp’s desires.

The problem is slaanesh being the most powerfull and best god already covers every emotion

is the old fluff still valid?

as humanity created the other 3 Chaos Gods

If we were to link the seven deadly sins to the Chaos Gods, it is easy to link Khorne to Wrath. We might easily link Slaanesh to Lust and Gluttony, for both are about physical senation and pleasure. I feel that Sloth might be linked to Nurgle, insofar as one surrenders to the inevitable and succumbs to decay. It is not as easily linked to more modern interpretations of Grandpappy, but certainly ties into his earlier lore. Tzeentch, I would argue, is about Pride, or Hubris. A desire to know all, and control all. Magnus epitomised such a flaw.

That would leave us with Greed, by which we refer not to food (which comes under gluttony) but material possessions, and Envy, which can refer to both envy of possessions and envy or another's traits or characteristics, or even their status. Envy could, tenuously, link to Tzeentch.

Either way, that leaves us with a Chaos God who is all about accumulating stockpiles, but never using them. A Chaos God of Waste, but also of Acquisition. Always moving on from one thing to the next. Continuous expansion, driven by a need to satiate the most immediate desires, before leaving the remnents unattended, but also unavailable to others. My word, the Fifth Chaos God is Money, the Chaos God of Capitalism!

Eymon, the Chaos God of Waste, Expansion and Competition!

Slaanesh covers all obsessions

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

Do you think Humanity is capable of nurturing and manifesting a new God of Chaos. If so, what traits do you think it might have?

Yes, in fact humanity has created 3. Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle in that order as per the Realms of Chaos. They arose and first gained consciousness with the humanity's first internecine violence, first organized societies, and Nurgle is implied to have become conscious with the Black Death. Then these small local racial gods grew in power as humanity spread among the stars, eventually becoming dominant with humanity's own dominance. Slaanesh rocketed from zero to major god and is effectively a transplanted god that has been absorbed into the human pantheon, Eldar in origin but now feeding primarily off humans since humans are so common and corruptible in comparison to the now scarce and wary Eldar.

Just as Orks have their racial gods of Gork and Mork, and the Eldar had their own racial pantheon, now mostly dead, humans have their own gods. However due to humanity's general ignorance of the whole warp and lack of the same sort of racial identity that Orks have, humanity's gods were created by accident, much like how the Eldar created Slaanesh by accident.

 Fifty wrote:


Either way, that leaves us with a Chaos God who is all about accumulating stockpiles, but never using them. A Chaos God of Waste, but also of Acquisition. Always moving on from one thing to the next. Continuous expansion, driven by a need to satiate the most immediate desires, before leaving the remnents unattended, but also unavailable to others.

So...that sounds an awful lot like a good proportion of those active in the P&M forums.....Are we creating this god right now?

Iracundus wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

Do you think Humanity is capable of nurturing and manifesting a new God of Chaos. If so, what traits do you think it might have?

Yes, in fact humanity has created 3. Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle in that order as per the Realms of Chaos. They arose and first gained consciousness with the humanity's first internecine violence, first organized societies, and Nurgle is implied to have become conscious with the Black Death.

More recent lore states that the Chaos Gods were created when the Old Ones and the Necrons were having their galaxy-wide slaughter fest.

Which I prefer, to be honest, the idea that a primitive, planet-bound species with a tiny - on a cosmic scale - population was somehow capable of creating warp deities of galactic magnitude never made much sense to begin with.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Do you think Humanity is capable of nurturing and manifesting a new God of Chaos. If so, what traits do you think it might have?

Arguably, it already has - Malal, based of our subconscious self-loathing.

 Esmer wrote:

Iracundus wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

Do you think Humanity is capable of nurturing and manifesting a new God of Chaos. If so, what traits do you think it might have?

Yes, in fact humanity has created 3. Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle in that order as per the Realms of Chaos. They arose and first gained consciousness with the humanity's first internecine violence, first organized societies, and Nurgle is implied to have become conscious with the Black Death.

More recent lore states that the Chaos Gods were created when the Old Ones and the Necrons were having their galaxy-wide slaughter fest.

Which I prefer, to be honest, the idea that a primitive, planet-bound species with a tiny - on a cosmic scale - population was somehow capable of creating warp deities of galactic magnitude never made much sense to begin with.

Read my post more carefully. It never said humanity created the Chaos gods as they currently are. Humanity created its gods, which would have initially been weak local gods of a backwaters race. Only when humanity spread across the galaxy and grew in power did its Chaos gods grow and become dominant. The power of a race's gods in 40K mirrors the overall power or durability of that race and its adherence to whatever ideals or emotions drove that god's formation. That is why the Ork gods, Gork & Mork, are given as the most powerful gods in the galaxy, since Orks are the most widespread and as a race, are survivors. However since they reflect their own race's tendency towards infighting, Gork & Mork spend most of their time fighting each other rather than completely dominating the galaxy. Similarly, that is why the original Eldar pantheon grew weak over time despite the Eldar's dominance over the galaxy, because the Eldar drifted away from the traditional values that sustained those gods.

Praise be to Malal!!

 Argive wrote:
Praise be to Malal!!

Anarchy for the Sake of it, through the fact of Eternal war.
The great game is nothing more then the self canibalisation of Chaos and order.

In some ways the imperium represents all 4 chaos gods at their worst.

The constant fanatical killing of anyone even suspected of anything shws signs of bloodlust worthy of knorne.

The convoluted gordian knot of regulations, dictates, laws, ad infinitum would make tzeentch proud.

The utter fanatical resistance to improvement, the idea that progress is a mental illness reminds one of nurgle's commitment to stagnation and decay.

The fact the upper echelons of the imperium live in opulence behind close doors smells like slaanesh to me.

If anything humanity as embodied by the imperium doesn't need a new chaos god, it already follows all four in various ways shrouded in denial and delusion.

If you read into the ordo hydra - there was the belief that plan to psychically enslave mankind might backfire and create a chaos god.

I see it the other way 'round.

I see the Imperium as a reactionary counter to Chaos.

Violence is *utterly prohibited* by anyone outside of organizational response. Heck, *speaking* against the institutions is punishable by death or worse. The violence that the Imperium uses is *Ordered*. Individual soldiers may succumb to bloodlust, but it's for a specific purpose.

The very blind, needless structure of the Imperium is an over-abundance of order. There is no room for reason... this is strictly order for order's sake. There's no sneaking through... you got to fill out the paperwork in quadruplicate.

There is stagnation... I can't argue with that. But to me, it isn't the wild rot of vegetation, but more the cold, calculated efficiency of trading a resource for a result. We don't need to improve or innovate, because that would upset the order of things.

The upper echelons may be decadent, but I'm thinking less than 1 percent of 1 percent live that way. Untold billions struggle with subsistence living... or less. I can't see that small amount of decadence feeding Slaanesh very well.


Which is my view that the Imperium is a reaction of order *against* Chaos, and the resulting conflict feeds the Chaos gods. Without a system of order, what would Chaos feed on? What could you degrade? What could you corrupt? Sort of the opposite of you need a dark to put a candle in for it to shine... the darkness needs the light to create the dichotomy that feeds the conflict.

Which is why, head canon, the Emperor got sucka'd by the Gods. They corrupted his desire to eliminate religion, by giving him all the tools to make himself an unwilling god. Everything he sought to destroy, he has become.

I don't think the Imperium at this time can create a Chaos God easily.

Right now any forces looking to worship chaos are going to get snapped up by agents of one of the Great Four Chaos Gods. What let Slaanesh be birthed was that the other three weren't tapping into the Eldar at that time. So it allowed a glut of belief power to build up that wasn't being syphoned off by the other gods. Right now the four Gods are very active within the galaxy so their greater demons will steal away belief and corrupt believers.

They regularly do it with fevered believers even in the great Emperor of Mankind. He is the closest they might come, but I think it would take a period of great resounding focus on the religious aspects of the Imperium. They are close-ish but need to tip the scales if that were to happen.

Thing is the way its structured with the breakdown of power blocks, the other groups within the Imperium wouldn't allow the Religious orders to develop that much additional total power unto themselves.Because there is ever the risk that it all goes belly up.

Yes.

At the very least, they helped create a Warp Entity representation of the Greater Good philosophy during the whole T'au Empire 4th Sphere debacle.

Not one that's anywhere even close to the scale of the Big 4, I'm absolutely certain... But yeah. Warp Entity creation should be well within Humanity's wheelhouse.

I don't think so. They all already exist in the metaphysical universe. They are just brought into prominence by human emotions.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
I don't think so. They all already exist in the metaphysical universe. They are just brought into prominence by human emotions.

Given the context of the question used the Eldar "creation" of Slaanesh as an example, are you applying the same understanding of creation vs "already exist[s] in the metaphysical universe[,and] just brought into prominence by ... emotions" to humans as we're using for Eldar?

See this is something that I grappled with when formulating my idea of the chaos god's as dichotomous representations of the emotions of man/sentient beings... That of slaanesh being 'born'

The way I see it, is that 'slaanesh' always existed, in its form of beauty, artistic perfection/hedonism, sadistic pleasure (Apollo/Dionysus) and the depravities of the eldar merely manifested the malicious element of that power, which was so strong that it burst into realspace, forming the eye of terror.

So yes to your question basically. I'm unsure of the exact point in time that the eye was created, whether it was before humans existed or not, but it's irrelevant either way. Humans could feed 'slaanesh' with depravity, but not enough to give it the power that the eldar did.

I think it depends on what cosmology you subscribe to.

I subscribe to the one Marijan von Stauffer alludes to in the liber chaotica, which is a combination of classic 40k cosmology plus some sensible expansion.


The underpinning premise being that the warp is a reflection of the material realm. Everything is reflected. But only living things reflect in the complex way required to generate warp entities.

And they do this because they have emotions. Emotions becoming the fundamental particle or element on which warp entities are formed. The soul is the conduit between the warp and realspace, larger souls are larger conduits or reflections and thus have a more profound impact on the warp.

In this premise, there are effectively 4 fundamental emotions all sentient thought is built from, like a colour palette. Thus warp gods are giant Venn diagrama of overlapping emotions, with rage, fear, hope and desire at the centre of the 4 overlapping storms.

Each species emotes differently, thereby adding a unique tint to the colour pallette. At the moment with humanity in ascendency, their emotional tint is khorne, tzeentch, slannesh (shared with Eldar as there's been 10,000 years of human desire to tint what was once an Eldar creation hence all the cultists are Human) and nurgle, indelibly stamping the primordial warp gods with humanity's foibles. thus gods are not fixed but entirely dependent on life in the galaxy. So the mix of different sentient species creates unique versions of those 4 core gods.

But other gods can exist at the overlap of these 4 storms. Gork and Mork for example are along tzeentch and khorne, but so uniquely tied to the tint of the Ork psyche that they don't mix much with others, so pure are they in comparison.

So yes, anyone can create a new warp god, but not a primordial one as they are eternal.

When the Eldar were ascendent the 4 would have appeared slightly different, more in line with the unique tint of the Eldar psyche. So khaine would have been the dominant colour of rage, morai heg tzeentch and so on. This is arguably why Isha ended up trapped in nurgle as she was the Eldar reaction to fear of death (as they reincarnated it was more of love and life than despair).

Tldr: there are only 4 primordial warp entities, eternal mirrors of the fundamental 4 emotions that are the basis of sentience in life, just as protons, neutrons and electrons are fundamental building blocks of atoms (ignoring quarks which they themselves are made of...). However they blend together as consciousness gets more complex and thus unique mixtures can appear at the peripheries, not purely one or the other of the big 4.

The primordial annihilator is thus inescapable because it is the very reflection of life.

EDIT: The birth of slannesh was simply the birth of the Eldar psyche taking over the primordial desire god in a very sudden explosive manner, which is not something that normally happens, as the population of the galaxy doesn't tend to shift like that, instead various tints ebbing and glowing with wars and expansion of different species.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
So yes to your question basically. I'm unsure of the exact point in time that the eye was created, whether it was before humans existed or not, but it's irrelevant either way. Humans could feed 'slaanesh' with depravity, but not enough to give it the power that the eldar did.

In terms of realspace timeline, the Birth of Slaanesh is the event that is meant to have calmed the Warp enough to allow the Great Crusade to begin - so somewhere around M30.

Of course, with the Warp being the Warp, and time not being so much of a thing in there, there is an argument that once Slaanesh was born, s/he had always existed - it gets messy...

The Chaos gods are not eternal. When the Old Ones first rose, there were no such warp gods in the warp. The warp only started to become turbulent during or after the War in Heaven as newer races like the Eldar started to manipulate the warp in a fashion different from the Old Ones, who are hinted at in the first Necron Codex to be Slann.

I have always had issues with GW and their whole "time is meaningless in the warp" and Slaanesh existing in the past before it was born, because we don't have the Eldar suffering any soul draining effects from Slaanesh before the Fall. We also don't have some future deity born in the year 80k affecting the universe in 40k. For purposes of causality as an IP, Slaanesh has a clear birth date, i.e. the Fall, and Slaanesh's formation is clearly described in the 2nd edition of the Eldar Codex as starting from Eldar souls that started to fuse together rather than disperse and reincarnate.

As eternal as the life that creates it.

The inference being that the slann/old ones either tinted the warp in a colour so beige it and not real effect, or just by happenstance where the one species that had no emotions to stain the warp.

As for slannesh, I see desire as having always been there, but the dominant tint of the Eldar only kicked in at the fall.

I'm ambivalent about non linear time in the warp, but regardless the cosmology I prefer doesn't really care about that. It just says slannesh used to be Jeff before the fall and then took on a new emphasis and became slannesh

 Hellebore wrote:
I think it depends on what cosmology you subscribe to.

I subscribe to the one Marijan von Stauffer alludes to in the liber chaotica, which is a combination of classic 40k cosmology plus some sensible expansion.


The underpinning premise being that the warp is a reflection of the material realm. Everything is reflected. But only living things reflect in the complex way required to generate warp entities.

And they do this because they have emotions. Emotions becoming the fundamental particle or element on which warp entities are formed. The soul is the conduit between the warp and realspace, larger souls are larger conduits or reflections and thus have a more profound impact on the warp.

In this premise, there are effectively 4 fundamental emotions all sentient thought is built from, like a colour palette. Thus warp gods are giant Venn diagrama of overlapping emotions, with rage, fear, hope and desire at the centre of the 4 overlapping storms.

Each species emotes differently, thereby adding a unique tint to the colour pallette. At the moment with humanity in ascendency, their emotional tint is khorne, tzeentch, slannesh (shared with Eldar as there's been 10,000 years of human desire to tint what was once an Eldar creation hence all the cultists are Human) and nurgle, indelibly stamping the primordial warp gods with humanity's foibles. thus gods are not fixed but entirely dependent on life in the galaxy. So the mix of different sentient species creates unique versions of those 4 core gods.

But other gods can exist at the overlap of these 4 storms. Gork and Mork for example are along tzeentch and khorne, but so uniquely tied to the tint of the Ork psyche that they don't mix much with others, so pure are they in comparison.

So yes, anyone can create a new warp god, but not a primordial one as they are eternal.

When the Eldar were ascendent the 4 would have appeared slightly different, more in line with the unique tint of the Eldar psyche. So khaine would have been the dominant colour of rage, morai heg tzeentch and so on. This is arguably why Isha ended up trapped in nurgle as she was the Eldar reaction to fear of death (as they reincarnated it was more of love and life than despair).

Tldr: there are only 4 primordial warp entities, eternal mirrors of the fundamental 4 emotions that are the basis of sentience in life, just as protons, neutrons and electrons are fundamental building blocks of atoms (ignoring quarks which they themselves are made of...). However they blend together as consciousness gets more complex and thus unique mixtures can appear at the peripheries, not purely one or the other of the big 4.

The primordial annihilator is thus inescapable because it is the very reflection of life.

EDIT: The birth of slannesh was simply the birth of the Eldar psyche taking over the primordial desire god in a very sudden explosive manner, which is not something that normally happens, as the population of the galaxy doesn't tend to shift like that, instead various tints ebbing and glowing with wars and expansion of different species.

This is a nice description of what I was trying to get at.

 Hellebore wrote:
As eternal as the life that creates it.

The inference being that the slann/old ones either tinted the warp in a colour so beige it and not real effect, or just by happenstance where the one species that had no emotions to stain the warp.

The WHFB Old One the Lizardmen worshipped known as Tlazcotl IMO best represents the Old Slann's impassiveness and how they differed from the more emotional hot blooded races that came after (and which they may have engineered).

That placidness is also IMO what the old shamans from the original Realms of Chaos that gave rise to the Emperor were aiming for. Only then could they calmly and safely wield the power of the warp. Passionate psykers might be able to fling warp powers around easily but their lack of self-control means they churn up the warp, even when they don't burn themselves out. The Old Slann producing or nudging hot blooded passionate psyker races into being was again IMO an attempt to speed up production of combat capable psykers. An attempt that backfired on them.

More like the chaos God of bureaucracy? Fed by a twist of rule upon more rules which may or may not apply to more thing. Just better hope you aren't selling your children, spouse or soul in the fine print. I imagine tzeentch likes this guy or girl chaos god esp. Since words and meanings can shift with time in the written agreement. Possibly perhaps of their own warp powered accord.

 Fifty wrote:
Either way, that leaves us with a Chaos God who is all about accumulating stockpiles, but never using them. A Chaos God of Waste, but also of Acquisition. Always moving on from one thing to the next. Continuous expansion, driven by a need to satiate the most immediate desires, before leaving the remnents unattended, but also unavailable to others. My word, the Fifth Chaos God is Money, the Chaos God of Capitalism!

Okay, trying to add some more nuance, and running with the I believe valid criticisms that Marx failed to break orbit with capitalist logic of production, isn't this about (particularly in the dystopian 40k human civilization in which capital is often a lesser concern or conflict motivator*) efficient resource exploitation?

If 40k represented a capitalist dystopia, planets would be enterprises and armies would be competing under contracts**. The Imperium is certainly the remnant of colonial empire, but now most of what we see is the non-Terran races that remain are generally able to handle their own, so we're not really there anymore, at least in practice if not intent: the Imperium is an empire in decline, and I think that one could probably make the argument that it fits a late 20th c European anxiety and/or more classically the fall of the Roman empire. I would say that the critique of "immediate" desires kind of break down, as that stockpile is long term, and that the dystopia is more typically fascist. I'm not sure a pithy term to represent this, but in the 40k setting, this already nearly exists in the less literal mirror than Chaos, in the Tyranid model of consumption.

(BTW, I'm not at all defending capitalism, just saying that I don't think that symbolism really fits 40k.)

* I'm not super-duper read up on 40k but cash as a motivator seems limited to more local enterprise. Necromunda and the spark that lit the Badab War are pretty large scale economic concerns, but I feel like most other monetary motivators appear at a much smaller scale, maybe at largest a Rogue Trader's enterprise.

** This gets into the style of conflict and culture most often seen in cyberpunk, but also in stuff like the ALIEN series.

 greatbigtree wrote:
I’m going to cheat a bit, and suggest the Emperor may become a god of Order, despite his desire not to be.

Not a god of Good. A god of Order. Not nice. A god as uncompromising of disorder as the Imperium is. This would truly create a state of eternal conflict that the gods desire. This is the true trick they pulled on the Emperor. Corrupting his convictions and turning him into an eternal entity, destined to fuel the conflict that sustains the Chaos gods forever.

To lift off my DnD roots... the Emperor would generate Devils instead of Daemons. Or Angels... call them Storm Cast or something like that.


But to address the OP, yes, I think humanity is capable of creating a god, and are in the process of doing so regardless of the Emp’s desires.

Honestly that'd be interesting. I'm guessing slaanesh and tzeentch would hate this new chaos God of order as it would hate them back.

There is also the case that if the imperium is about destroyed then the chaos gods would fight amongst themselves.