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This is something grinds my gears. The Emperor pushed the Imperial truth onto humanity, but the Lecticio Divinitatus pushes him as a God. This is prior to him being interned onto the Golden Throne. So how does Euphrati Keeler get her abilities? Does the Emperor actually hear people psychically call his name and then act?

Literally she was a huge problem for me with the first Horus Heresy Novels. Her abilities appear to come out of no where. And as far as I know later on the Emperor doesn’t mention how people can use his name to banish daemons?

In 40k I understand why this might be the case with him almost dying and Warp related psyker shenanigans, but I don’t understand how it can be done in 30k before he has died/gone coma.

I tend to believe that "belief itself drives the warp."

So Euphrati Keeler believed so hard that the Emperor could banish Daemons, than when she said his name, it banished Daemons. The Emperor didn't have to "do" anything, the Warp simply manifested her belief that the Emperor could banish daemons and made it to be true.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I tend to believe that "belief itself drives the warp."

So Euphrati Keeler believed so hard that the Emperor could banish Daemons, than when she said his name, it banished Daemons. The Emperor didn't have to "do" anything, the Warp simply manifested her belief that the Emperor could banish daemons and made it to be true.

The power was in her (and the Warp) all along!

The Emperor was simply wrong, or he was trying to delude humanity for the sake of their own safety.

It's kind of like that Ork gestalt psychicness that makes their technology work.

Ork technology defies all laws of the physical world. There is nothing that says it should work. A human picks up a shoota, and tries to fire it nothing will happen. An ork picks it up though, and it will work. The difference? The ork knows it will work, and his belief in that makes literal magic happen.

Sort of the same thing with the 30K stuff. These folks were probably low level psykers who believed so much that they just made it happen.

Isn't the warp running on a non-linear timescale anyway? Once Empy is interred in the Golden Throne, surely he's free to act throughout history as well?

You don't even need to be a low-level psyker.

The way the Warp has always seemed to me is that ritual and faith are very important. It's why non-psyker cultists can still summon Daemons, if they have the "sacred book of wanna wanna" that gives you the daemon summoning ritual and however much blood & cakemix you need.

Similarly, there are "imperial" rituals too, that call upon the power of the Warp (though usually with no daemons involved). Like the Sisters of Battle Shield of Faith: their sheer bloodyminded faith causes the warp to bend reality slightly to conform to their beliefs. But not every single sister of battle ever is a low-order psyker.

craggy wrote:
Isn't the warp running on a non-linear timescale anyway? Once Empy is interred in the Golden Throne, surely he's free to act throughout history as well?

Yes, Warp history is very different to ours. Things like Slaanesh and the Emperor are both new to becoming large warp entities and have been since the beginning.

Cause and effect get a bit funky when you're dealing with two connected universes, only one of which obeys the usual physical laws.

The Warp doesn't have any truck with the concept of linear time. If the Emperor becomes a true Warp god at any point in the timeline of the material universe, then that Warp god retroactively has always existed and can theoretically influence things in the material universe at any point.

See also the Colchisian pantheon, which had four gods even before the Fall of the Eldar. Slaanesh had enough influence on the material universe to be recognised as a god on Colchis even before she was 'born'.

EDIT: This seems a bit superfluous now. Just goes to show I shouldn't let myself get distracted halfway through typing a post...

 djones520 wrote:
It's kind of like that Ork gestalt psychicness that makes their technology work.

Ork technology defies all laws of the physical world. There is nothing that says it should work. A human picks up a shoota, and tries to fire it nothing will happen. An ork picks it up though, and it will work. The difference? The ork knows it will work, and his belief in that makes literal magic happen.

Humans have used Ork technology. Armageddon Ork Hunters took captured Ork guns and fired them. Just because an in-universe Tech-Priest believes Ork weapons don't work, doesn't mean they don't. You need to differentiate between in-universe and out of universe views.

Divine magic comes from the midi clorians. Or in some cases it can be bought in volume on alibaba.

The emperor himself doesn't do anything that a extremely powerful psyker couldnt do. He is a mortal. Just a very powerful one.

Any answered prayers or whatever is the result of the warp being maliable by belief and emotion. People call and the warp answers.

 Lance845 wrote:
The emperor himself doesn't do anything that a extremely powerful psyker couldnt do. He is a mortal. Just a very powerful one.

Any answered prayers or whatever is the result of the warp being maliable by belief and emotion. People call and the warp answers.

And it appears that if enough people believe. Gods and Goddesses can be created - although they might also be part of the Chaos Gods as well.

 Mr Morden wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
The emperor himself doesn't do anything that a extremely powerful psyker couldnt do. He is a mortal. Just a very powerful one.

Any answered prayers or whatever is the result of the warp being maliable by belief and emotion. People call and the warp answers.

And it appears that if enough people believe. Gods and Goddesses can be created - although they might also be part of the Chaos Gods as well.

Right. But if a warp entity was born from the faith in the emperor it wouldnt BE the emperor. It would be a new warp entity that is a reflection of peoples beliefs not the man bimself. It would be a cruel horrible beuracratic dogma obsessed god of order and mankinds purity.

 Lance845 wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
The emperor himself doesn't do anything that a extremely powerful psyker couldnt do. He is a mortal. Just a very powerful one.

Any answered prayers or whatever is the result of the warp being maliable by belief and emotion. People call and the warp answers.

And it appears that if enough people believe. Gods and Goddesses can be created - although they might also be part of the Chaos Gods as well.

Right. But if a warp entity was born from the faith in the emperor it wouldnt BE the emperor. It would be a new warp entity that is a reflection of peoples beliefs not the man bimself. It would be a cruel horrible beuracratic dogma obsessed god of order and mankinds purity.

Which could very well be what the Imperium now worships as the Emperor and which now resonates through time?

I doubt anything has actually awoken yet. 1, actual emperor is still alive. 2) the last time a warp god woke up it caused the eye of terror and hundreds/thousands of years of warp storms that completely cut mankind off from itself and plunged them into a dark age/caused the downfall of the eldar.

If a real big E warp god woke up i think gak would be way worse in the warp right now with a whole host of the emperors deamons going to war with the other 4.

Iracundus wrote:

 djones520 wrote:
It's kind of like that Ork gestalt psychicness that makes their technology work.

Ork technology defies all laws of the physical world. There is nothing that says it should work. A human picks up a shoota, and tries to fire it nothing will happen. An ork picks it up though, and it will work. The difference? The ork knows it will work, and his belief in that makes literal magic happen.

Humans have used Ork technology. Armageddon Ork Hunters took captured Ork guns and fired them. Just because an in-universe Tech-Priest believes Ork weapons don't work, doesn't mean they don't. You need to differentiate between in-universe and out of universe views.

It's made pretty clear that a lot of Ork tech works logically, while a lot of it has no right to function anything like it does. For example, an Ork guns down five guardsmen with his shoota, dies in turn, and, when the weapon is picked up, it's literally just a pipe with some bullets in it and a trigger without any firing assembly of any kind. There's a pretty good thread on this down below:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/4a1k5k/wh40k_how_powerful_is_the_ork_collective_gestalt/

I have always held that Ork psychic power just makes their stuff NOT break down as much as it should, rather than make miracles happen.

And lots of higher level Imperials hold belief in the power of the Imperial Tarot, and how it is guided 'by the will of the Emperor'.

Umak wrote:

Iracundus wrote:

 djones520 wrote:
It's kind of like that Ork gestalt psychicness that makes their technology work.

Ork technology defies all laws of the physical world. There is nothing that says it should work. A human picks up a shoota, and tries to fire it nothing will happen. An ork picks it up though, and it will work. The difference? The ork knows it will work, and his belief in that makes literal magic happen.

Humans have used Ork technology. Armageddon Ork Hunters took captured Ork guns and fired them. Just because an in-universe Tech-Priest believes Ork weapons don't work, doesn't mean they don't. You need to differentiate between in-universe and out of universe views.

It's made pretty clear that a lot of Ork tech works logically, while a lot of it has no right to function anything like it does. For example, an Ork guns down five guardsmen with his shoota, dies in turn, and, when the weapon is picked up, it's literally just a pipe with some bullets in it and a trigger without any firing assembly of any kind. There's a pretty good thread on this down below:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/4a1k5k/wh40k_how_powerful_is_the_ork_collective_gestalt/

A Reddit thread is not evidence. And even in that thread there is no such claim regarding the Orks using pipes as guns. Provide a GW source citation including page number and quotation. People on the internet have gotten carried away and exaggerated the claim regarding Orks, which is what this pipe with bullets claim seems to be. Again merely an in-universe opinion from a Tech Priest is not really conclusive or reliable evidence. Tech Priests in the Necron Codex claimed to have proven that Gauss weapons were an impossibility yet clearly the Necrons did it.

The Imperial Truth ("there are no supernatural things or gods") taken literally means "there are no things operating outside defined physical laws", sure, which is clearly bulls*** in the light of the Warp and the behaviour of certain entities within it.

Taken in a different spirit "there are no supernatural things or gods" means that you should treat the properties of the Warp as if they're predictable and explainable, and from that you should be reacting to the manifestation of said properties as things that happen and have no broader significance implying a higher power rather than jumping to the Word Bearers' conclusion ("oh my god the Emperor has been lying to us all this time there are totally gods let us worship them") or the Imperial Cult's conclusion ("oh my god hyperspace is full of daemons we need a god to protect us from them").

I've always read "Imperial saints" as a sort of developmental breakthrough in humanity manifested as a "psyker" who accesses the Warp intuitively/naturally without the risks inherent in more primitive psykers; they're the 'goal' the Emperor was trying to work for in creating the Webway project and trying to free humanity of dependence on said more primitive (presumably more vulnerable) psykers. The Great Crusade and the effort to unite humanity/create a common knowledge base would have put these people in a position where they could be identified, taught, and help guide humanity forward rather than misinterpreting their abilities as divine and starting their own cults and religious wars, but unfortunately they started to emerge way too late (after Magnus had blown up the Webway project) and didn't end up helping much before the end. In a similar vein I imagine beings like the Emperor and the Old Ones to have more in common with "Imperial Saints" than with more primitive psykers in their more harmonious interactions with the Warp rather than dragging what they want out of it while its denizens try to eat their brains.

 Lance845 wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
The emperor himself doesn't do anything that a extremely powerful psyker couldnt do. He is a mortal. Just a very powerful one.

Any answered prayers or whatever is the result of the warp being maliable by belief and emotion. People call and the warp answers.

And it appears that if enough people believe. Gods and Goddesses can be created - although they might also be part of the Chaos Gods as well.

Right. But if a warp entity was born from the faith in the emperor it wouldnt BE the emperor. It would be a new warp entity that is a reflection of peoples beliefs not the man bimself. It would be a cruel horrible beuracratic dogma obsessed god of order and mankinds purity.

That actually would be a pretty neat idea for 30k. The Emperor is walking around as a wise, immortal, psychic demigod doing planet shaking stuff.

Meanwhile in the warp people's faith and impression of him is taking form as a new warp entity the God Emperor, a force people can tap into. The GEmp is more based on what people think the Emp is like, now what he is like, combined with all sorts of tropes and beliefs and assumptions.

The Emp slowly realizes there's this emerging force in the warp the GEmp and now has to decide if he'll foster it or try to kill it.

Before he can make that call comes the heresy, his entombment and he becomes one with the GEmp.

 Lance845 wrote:
I doubt anything has actually awoken yet. 1, actual emperor is still alive. 2) the last time a warp god woke up it caused the eye of terror and hundreds/thousands of years of warp storms that completely cut mankind off from itself and plunged them into a dark age/caused the downfall of the eldar.

If a real big E warp god woke up i think gak would be way worse in the warp right now with a whole host of the emperors deamons going to war with the other 4.

Actually didn't the birth of Slaanesh clear the warpstorms from terra allowing the Great Crusade?

Ahead in 40k The Emperor-entity has had 10,000 years of sacrifice, worship and death in His name. His daemons are appearing - St Celestine, the Legion of the Damned and the powers gifted to those who worship Him. Now its likely awake or at least near awake and so can reach back through time via the warp.

Iracundus wrote:

A Reddit thread is not evidence. And even in that thread there is no such claim regarding the Orks using pipes as guns. Provide a GW source citation including page number and quotation. People on the internet have gotten carried away and exaggerated the claim regarding Orks, which is what this pipe with bullets claim seems to be. Again merely an in-universe opinion from a Tech Priest is not really conclusive or reliable evidence. Tech Priests in the Necron Codex claimed to have proven that Gauss weapons were an impossibility yet clearly the Necrons did it.

Yea the 'Ork technology only works because they think it does' theory has to be one of the most misquoted bits of background ever*. It is weird that people are so credulous of it when in the very same codex there is a theory about how Orks don't reproduce but fall fully formed out of a pocket universe!

GW used to have multiple unreliable sources in Codices so that events and explanations were kept open to encourage player creativity. Whilst it is certainly possible that Ork technology only works because of Ork brain power, it should not be painted as the definitive explanation of how their technology works.

*possible beaten out by the 'Ultramarines absorbed the two lost legions' theory coined by a Word Bearer Space Marine!

I've always thought that it is a combination of a few things.

On a note, first... 40K actually seems to be one of the few universes where "magic" is explained as something slightly more substantial than handwavium. Most just say it's a mystical force and don't bother explaining it. Star Wars has it initially as this, but then puts in midichlorians, which at least in my opinion, was a pretty poor explanation.

In 40k I always thought that things like blessing guns and tanks, purity seals, the machine spirit, expelling daemons with prayer, etc were manifestations of the emperor's psychic abilities. He is just a seriously powerful psyker and rather than actually going out and leading, he is doing what he can. All of these prayers, blessing and interventions must take it's toll on the Emperor and I can imagine him getting more and more tired of having to deal with humanities petty bickering and being led down the wrong paths by priests and those that worship him as a God.

With Orks, their uncanny ability to make technology work, where it should be less reliable, is a manifestation of their collective, latent psychic abilities.

Most races have a psychic imprint in the warp, mostly just through emotions, so I can ALSO imagine that if enough of them feel/believe something then it could manifest. Things like rage and hatred give birth to Khorne. Something like the average humans fear and enslavement and dedication to order (through that fear) might manifest yet another chaos god or entity. This would not be the Emperor, nor what he would want.

If people loved the emperor and were kind to one another, then a chaos god of love and peace might be born, but the overwhelming emotions of the galaxy are negative ones.

What would it take to "kill" a chaos god? I assume it would be that the emotion that feeds it is eliminated or controlled. I assume this is what the emperor was trying to do with the Great Crusade and his rationalist/spiritual materialism, and also throughout history (if you believe that he was other religious figures throughout human history).

It seems at least vaguely relevant at this point to mention that in Master of Mankind, the term used for how the daemon Drach'nyen thinks of the Chaos Gods, 'Choirs' (with a capital C), is later also used to refer to the 1000-psykers-a-day sacrifice used to power the Golden Throne so the Emperor can leave it (which as we know will continue for 10,000 years to keep the Emperor alive). I think ADB was pretty clearly suggesting that the psyker sacrifice is what eventually turns the Emperor into something on a par with the Chaos Gods.

Iracundus wrote:

Umak wrote:

Iracundus wrote:

 djones520 wrote:
It's kind of like that Ork gestalt psychicness that makes their technology work.

Ork technology defies all laws of the physical world. There is nothing that says it should work. A human picks up a shoota, and tries to fire it nothing will happen. An ork picks it up though, and it will work. The difference? The ork knows it will work, and his belief in that makes literal magic happen.

Humans have used Ork technology. Armageddon Ork Hunters took captured Ork guns and fired them. Just because an in-universe Tech-Priest believes Ork weapons don't work, doesn't mean they don't. You need to differentiate between in-universe and out of universe views.

It's made pretty clear that a lot of Ork tech works logically, while a lot of it has no right to function anything like it does. For example, an Ork guns down five guardsmen with his shoota, dies in turn, and, when the weapon is picked up, it's literally just a pipe with some bullets in it and a trigger without any firing assembly of any kind. There's a pretty good thread on this down below:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/4a1k5k/wh40k_how_powerful_is_the_ork_collective_gestalt/

A Reddit thread is not evidence. And even in that thread there is no such claim regarding the Orks using pipes as guns. Provide a GW source citation including page number and quotation. People on the internet have gotten carried away and exaggerated the claim regarding Orks, which is what this pipe with bullets claim seems to be. Again merely an in-universe opinion from a Tech Priest is not really conclusive or reliable evidence. Tech Priests in the Necron Codex claimed to have proven that Gauss weapons were an impossibility yet clearly the Necrons did it.

Here's your source.

https://www.amazon.com/Xenology-Research-Bestiary-Biegel-Warhammer/dp/1844162826


Automatically Appended Next Post:

TarkinLarson wrote:
I've always thought that it is a combination of a few things.

On a note, first... 40K actually seems to be one of the few universes where "magic" is explained as something slightly more substantial than handwavium. Most just say it's a mystical force and don't bother explaining it. Star Wars has it initially as this, but then puts in midichlorians, which at least in my opinion, was a pretty poor explanation.

In 40k I always thought that things like blessing guns and tanks, purity seals, the machine spirit, expelling daemons with prayer, etc were manifestations of the emperor's psychic abilities. He is just a seriously powerful psyker and rather than actually going out and leading, he is doing what he can. All of these prayers, blessing and interventions must take it's toll on the Emperor and I can imagine him getting more and more tired of having to deal with humanities petty bickering and being led down the wrong paths by priests and those that worship him as a God.

With Orks, their uncanny ability to make technology work, where it should be less reliable, is a manifestation of their collective, latent psychic abilities.

Most races have a psychic imprint in the warp, mostly just through emotions, so I can ALSO imagine that if enough of them feel/believe something then it could manifest. Things like rage and hatred give birth to Khorne. Something like the average humans fear and enslavement and dedication to order (through that fear) might manifest yet another chaos god or entity. This would not be the Emperor, nor what he would want.

If people loved the emperor and were kind to one another, then a chaos god of love and peace might be born, but the overwhelming emotions of the galaxy are negative ones.

What would it take to "kill" a chaos god? I assume it would be that the emotion that feeds it is eliminated or controlled. I assume this is what the emperor was trying to do with the Great Crusade and his rationalist/spiritual materialism, and also throughout history (if you believe that he was other religious figures throughout human history).

Look up Soft Magic/Hard Magic. 40K is kind of a Soft Magic, with Hard Magic elements.

 djones520 wrote:

Iracundus wrote:

Umak wrote:

Iracundus wrote:

 djones520 wrote:
It's kind of like that Ork gestalt psychicness that makes their technology work.

Ork technology defies all laws of the physical world. There is nothing that says it should work. A human picks up a shoota, and tries to fire it nothing will happen. An ork picks it up though, and it will work. The difference? The ork knows it will work, and his belief in that makes literal magic happen.

Humans have used Ork technology. Armageddon Ork Hunters took captured Ork guns and fired them. Just because an in-universe Tech-Priest believes Ork weapons don't work, doesn't mean they don't. You need to differentiate between in-universe and out of universe views.

It's made pretty clear that a lot of Ork tech works logically, while a lot of it has no right to function anything like it does. For example, an Ork guns down five guardsmen with his shoota, dies in turn, and, when the weapon is picked up, it's literally just a pipe with some bullets in it and a trigger without any firing assembly of any kind. There's a pretty good thread on this down below:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/4a1k5k/wh40k_how_powerful_is_the_ork_collective_gestalt/

A Reddit thread is not evidence. And even in that thread there is no such claim regarding the Orks using pipes as guns. Provide a GW source citation including page number and quotation. People on the internet have gotten carried away and exaggerated the claim regarding Orks, which is what this pipe with bullets claim seems to be. Again merely an in-universe opinion from a Tech Priest is not really conclusive or reliable evidence. Tech Priests in the Necron Codex claimed to have proven that Gauss weapons were an impossibility yet clearly the Necrons did it.

Here's your source.

https://www.amazon.com/Xenology-Research-Bestiary-Biegel-Warhammer/dp/1844162826

That is also not evidence. I have that book and it is an in-universe opinion of a half insane Tech Priest who among other things cannot use proper biological terms when distinguishing between cardiac and respiratory systems.

There is no actual GW evidence for that level of Ork belief making things so. All the "evidence" presented so far has been in-universe, and hence fallible, opinions by Tech Priests. As I stated earlier these Tech Priests's colleagues claimed Gauss weapons were "proven" to be impossible. Tell that to all the Imperia soldiers being flayed by non-existent impossible weapons.

Again, just because a character in the universe says or believes something does not mean it is actually true.

I mean, Xenology is as much a source as anything else. I think that damn near everything except the rules is written from an in-universe perspective, and is written to be deliberately contradictory ("the Baneblade is the most super-duper awesomest thing ever"- Codex: Astra Militarum. "Big lumbering slow things we eat for lunch and have never ever lost a battle to a slow lumbering thing." - Codex: Tau)

Much of the background in Codices is written from an omniscient third party narrator POV. It was only in 3rd edition that GW tried to go for an all in-universe fallible sources POV only.

For example in the latest Craftworlds Codex we get told what the Fall was, not what the Eldar believe it was. We get told in the Custodes Codex in broad strokes at least what their creation and education involves, when this would be a secret virtually no one outside the Custodes could possibly know. We get told in the Necrons Codex what happened when they were Necrontyr even though there is no one outside of the Necrons and C'tan that would know it. We get told the Lion is still alive in the Rock even though no one save maybe the Emperor knows this.

All such third party narrator sources are more valid as a source when it comes to determining what is or is not true about the 40k universe, than fallible in-universe accounts.

I don't know about the Saint, but a number of miracles and mysteries in 30k can be put down to 3rd party interventions, from sources such as the chaos gods or the cabal.

Always with plausible deniability of course.