Can Primarchs Truly Die?

[Conn Eremon]

False hope, twisted honor.

 

And aren't those the purview of the Warhammer Gods of the same name? I thought since the split the 'positive' elements stopped carrying over to the 40k gods.

 

Edit: For some reason I thought you were quoting me. I apologize for the ego.

[Wade Garrett]

False hope, twisted honor.

 

And aren't those the purview of the Warhammer Gods of the same name? I thought since the split the 'positive' elements stopped carrying over to the 40k gods.

 

The Black Crusade RPG still has those elements as falling under their banner, although that also gives us things like the Emperor's Children falling to Slaanesh because the Sons of Horus invited them to a party and it was so wild that everybody woke up Chaos tainted.

 

Which is actually more sensible than "Because Evil Swords", so yeah, I'm going with BC on this.

[GhostMalone]

But if strength of faith hope and love go to the god emperor then who says that they are extinct?

 

I'm just saying that the gods weren't as strong during the unification wars. The heresy caused a massive power increase for them but I always felt horus was their last gambit otherwise the emperor eventually would have handed them their tainted arses.

 

So maybe those facets exsisted in the warp and the reason they no longer exist is because the emperor utilised them in the primarch project

[Wade Garrett]

_{The Emperor was going to hand them their....what? How?}

 

_{His big secret project was to access the Webway, which would have made traveling around the galaxy a lot easier for the Imperium, but given the fates of the Eldar (actually, weren't they already utilizing the Webway when they orgied Slaanesh into existence?) it is doubtful that would have made any progress towards offing the Ruinous Powers.}

 

_{Spreading atheism? Silly Emperor, it doesn't matter whether or not you believe in Chaos, it believes in you. Chaos draws power from every act of rage, despair, betrayal, ecstasy, and deception performed by sentient beings. Faith in a higher power not required (See Magnus the Red, Perturabo).}

 

_{The only way to kill or severely injure the Ruinous Powers would involve something like mass splicing the Pariah gene into the human race, which would have its own unique brands of suck. The Emperor certainly managed to act on a scale that got their attention, respect where due, but as soon as they started paying attention to him his little Imperium of toy soldiers and slaves was doomed. You really want to see Chaos taking direct action, look at the Fall of the Eldar, wherein they offed an entire pantheon and covered most of the galaxy in Warp Storms. Or the end of the Dark Age of Technology.}

[FunkyMonkey]

I don't think the Chaos Gods did a gambit on Horus out of their own weakness.  They did it to maintain the status quo.  Chaos Gods, thriving on natural human emotions, are gods of the status quo.  Obviously not in the Nurgle sense of it, but it's in the sense that humans are naturally debased beings who take little to no prodding to produce the psychic emanations that sustain the Chaos Gods.  The Emperor came as a challenger of the status quo, and if allowed to succeed, he would have focused human emotions toward something other than the baser emotions, presumably towards Order.  Now I don't know if the Emperor could ascend to higher godhood whilst in his material body, or if his ascension required the semi-detachedness of his vegetable state on the Golden Throne, but either way, he was a threat to the cycle of base emotions that feed the Chaos Gods.  For the sake of elaborating, we could assume the Chaos Gods to be at their strongest during the Horus Heresy (though we know it to have been during the Age of Strife), but let's assume.  Their strength was derived the amount of the core emotions from which they are formed, but for these emotions themselves come from a self-perpetuation of the emotions (think eye for an eye).  This self-perpetuation depended on a natural human emotional landscape.  If they had allowed the Emperor to succeed, they still could have been at their most powerful, but without the self-perpetuation due to the Emperor's upsetting the status quo, they would be renewing themselves and thus would have died out.  Again I must emphasize, they would died out not because they are weak, but because they would have had little (in the human emotional landscape) to demonstrate their power.  

 

Of course, the whole premise of the Emperor's success is that he could indeed focus human emotion into something greater than the base emotions.  However, what seems to be an important theme of Warhammer 40K, as well as what is probably similar in real life, is that the base emotions are called base for a reason.  They are fundamental, and the emotions that the Emperor is trying to make the new fundamentals are themselves based on the old fundamentals, thus making the destruction of Chaos impossible, short of eliminating all souled beings (we're looking to you, Necrons).

[Conn Eremon]

I don't buy it, Jasp. The descriptions of the warp, especially during the time of the shamans, suggests to me that whatever relative goodness was in the Warp, it was rapidly receding and quickly gone, tens of millennia before the Emperor even thought of the Primarchs.

[GhostMalone]

 

Yes I see that but we don't know the true extent of the projects he may have been taking. For all we know he may have been attempting to settle the warp. Kill of all xenos to ensure that they can't direct the growth of chaos utilise the webway to ensure troops can be bought straight to rebellious planets in moments and maybe utilising similar tech that the necrons have on cadia to calm regions this lowering the effect of the warp.

 

I'm not saying I'm right but this is a man that the chaos gods feared. It's not like they one night went here's the plan, there was millennia of planning just on the emperors part let alone the chaos gods. Even tzeentch couldn't see the true outcome eldrad Magnus and the big e couldn't foresee the 100% outcome.

 

His biggest mistake was mornicha.

If lorgar had stayed loyal chaos would never have gotten as much power, he needed his father to be a god. When denied he found the next closest thing to divinity.

 

I'm all for chaos but for the big four to outright fear the emperor the webway may have just been the beginning.

 

If you can genetically create 20 of the most amazing beings the universe would ever see something tells me that he wasn't just going to run and hide.

 

Someone mentioned previously in another thread that he was borrowing the elders webway that they created when in fact it was the old ones that created the webway and the warp for that matter

[GhostMalone]

I just don't feel that they are warp and genetics, the primarchs must have divinity within them wether its a bound daemon or a bound entity I'm not sure but soul forge strongly hinted that the binding of daemon and machine wasn't that different to the creation if the primarchs

[Kol Saresk]

I don't buy it, Jasp. The descriptions of the warp, especially during the time of the shamans, suggests to me that whatever relative goodness was in the Warp, it was rapidly receding and quickly gone, tens of millennia before the Emperor even thought of the Primarchs.

Well, interactions between the warp and the material realm are very dangerous and almost always end badly for the material realm. Scratch that. It always ends badly. Laws of Physics are warped, mountains are turned inside out and etc etc. So it is entirely possible that any "good entities" are simply not interfering with the material realm. If they do truly give a hoot about the Materium, then they know that even by helping, they will do more harm than good. So instead, there is that eternal war behind the veil that is more than just the bickering between the gods and that we never see a glimpse of. Just because we don't see it, it does not mean it isn't there. Look at oxygen.

[Wade Garrett]

You mistake "saw an interesting diversion from their eternal bickering with one another" for fear. The Emperor never controlled the Immaterium like the Four do. A Warp rift opens beneath the palace and he's out of the Heresy for seven years (with a possibility that the whole reason he was interred on the Golden Throne was to keep said rift shut) meanwhile the Chaos Gods are chunking around things like the Ruinstorm and generally having a grand old time all over the place.

 

As for Monarchia being his worst foul up...Magnus and the Thousand Sons, Curze and the Night Lords, and Angron were all situations where the question was not IF it's going to blow up in his face, but WHEN. (I think it's also illustrative of Big E's character that when the time comes to personally take an Astartes Legion and wag his finger at one of his kids, he picks not the Legion of rage monkeys scouring whole planets clean of life as their higher cognitive functions burn out, not the Legion of albino sadists turning flaying into a galactic sport, but the Lorgar, who isn't conquering fast enough.)

 

As for the various foresighted types failing...it's weird that Konrad Curze was the one whose visions most accurately predicted the exact form the Heresy would take.

[WarSpirit]

To answer the question of the post, no primarchs can't truly die because they always live in our hearts.

[Kol Saresk]

Curze saw the worst possible outcome. It just so happened that was the outcome that happened. And thus, GRIMDARK was born.

[Wade Garrett]

To answer the question of the post, no primarchs can't truly die because they always live in our hearts.

 

I believe in the Ferrous Manus that believes in me!

 

He believes I'm a puny meatbag who should replace my doomed to fail fleshy bits with superior iron ones, but that's beside the point!

[GhostMalone]

See I agree with you wade but at the same time I feel that the emperor can't be called weak considering enduring a slow painfull death for 10000 years and the fact is the chaos gods are strong but all four saw the threat he posed.

 

Not just yeah he's a pain in our butt, they genuinely feared what he could do to them.

[WarSpirit]

To answer seriously, I think yes they can. We know from the audio books that Rubio can see the specters of the dead. I imagine that a being like a primarch, Ferrus Manus in that case have à truly stronger spirit than a normal man. It's quite possible that Fulgrim and Vulkan sees the spirit of Manus. Being a Primarch with a power soul probably allows him to linger longer than a mortal in the physical realm and contact his more attuned brothers.

[Wade Garrett]

Now, I'm not trying to hold up my interpretation of the fluff as the One True Way, follow it or be bur...okay, I totally am, but son of Lorgar, man. What can you do?

 

It's possible that the Emperor still has some cards up his sleeve, like the whole ascending into the deity of Humanity thing (although given what happened when the eldar created a new god, I don't think this is a good thing either, but again, bias and interpretation.) There are things in the fluff that support my idea that the Emperor was just a new chew toy for Chaos. (A lot of them coming from various Chaotic and daemonic types who might be somewhat less than objective.)

 

There are things that directly contradict it (coming form various Imperial or elder types who may be somewhat less than objective.) It's a big galaxy, we can all have our own opinions about things I suppose.

[FunkyMonkey]

Personally, I would go with the handling of the Lorgar case as the Emperor's greatest failing, though not limited just to Monarchia. In my opinion, the whole way he dealt with Lorgar was a display of the Emperor's great capacity for hypocrisy, though people often rationalize it as being for the good of humanity.

 

The Emperor, being the amalgamation of the souls who know how many shamans, knows that there is such thing as the Immaeterium.  They might not be considered spirits and gods, proper, but given that the Emperor created religions that incorporated belief in such beings, I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that the Emperor would expect any other material being to call the beings of the warp as spirits, daemons, or gods.  Yet he goes around telling everybody, with the exception of those who should already know, that no such things exist, and that the Immaeterium is simply just another realm with nothing, or at most, benign things within it.  But that's just the tip of the hypocrisy.

 

Here we have the Emperor expounding Reason as the chief desirable mode of human mental cognizance, yet he denies Lorgar's use of reason.  Reason is not the same as atheism.  Reason is using available evidence, apparently solid available evidence mind you, and using that to draw conclusions.  Galileo used reason and good evidence to support his theory of helicentricism.  Darwin used reason and good theoretical rationalizations later supported by evidence to conclude the theory of evolutionary descent through survival of the fittest.  Lorgar uses what he knows about the universe (growing up on a world like Colchis, I'm sure he has had to have pretty good knowledge of the beings of the Warp, though he might have not known them as such, in addition to his suppressed psyker powers, and other bits of evidence) to conclude that there are indeed gods of the universe, and that the Emperor is one of them.  The Emperor might have not viewed himself as a god, but honestly, when you look at him and everything else in the universe related to psykers and the beings of the warp from the perspective of one without such absolute knowledge, then it's hard not to call the Emperor a god.  Yes, Lorgar has a need for religion that is unhealthily obsessive, but he's the kind of person that has also done his homework to support his beliefs, as evidenced by the Lectitio Divinatus.  Lorgar has done his homework, and I'd dare say that he has used Reason to come to his conclusions about religion and gods, his obsession notwithstanding.

 

So the Emperor is proclaiming Reason, but punishing Lorgar for the use of his own reason, just so that he could use the Immaeterial concept of belief manifest as a weapon against the beings of the Immaeterium.  If that's not hypocrisy, then I don't know what is.

 

 

Yes, Lorgar is a terrible commander who could never get his legion to move fast enough to keep up with the pace demanded for the Great Crusade, but that's not grounds to attempt to totally dismantle his faith by destroying that which he held dear.

 

If Lorgar was a man of reason, he would have worshipped deities (though not necessarily the Chaos gods) even after the Emperor destroyed Monarchia.

 

 

 

As you can tell, I don't have a very high opinion of the Emperor, other than for the fact that he is the god-emperor.

[GhostMalone]

I agree with the chaotic text but iirc there was a background book like a decade ago on the emperor I read it a decade ago and unless it's been retconned it shows the emperor as not only being chaos's fear and the fact they invested so much time and effort into the heresy and usurping the emperor shows he's a problem.

 

It's not like with the elder where they left them to it and in doing so let them slowly kill themselves and bring into exsistence another god

[Conn Eremon]

But then, the Eldar didn't ascend one of their own. Who knows what would have happened if they had.

[GhostMalone]

Well that's the thing now isn't it, all the gods of the elder where devoured by the big 4 so there were once benevolent gods like isha

[FunkyMonkey]

Well, supposedly, if the storyline of Warhammer 40K ever gets past the end of the 41st Millennium, the Eldar will create an Emperor-like being from the amalgamations of the souls of every Eldar, who by that point, will be dead.  It's similar to how the Emperor was created from the souls of all the human seers of prehistory and antiquity.

 

Of course, the plot will never move that far.

 

 

 

Edit:  Khaine's still around, just in many pieces.  Isha's still alive in Nurgle's realm, and Cegorach is still trolling people who knows where, and it's arguable that Slaanesh is an Eldar god as much as he/she/it is a Chaos god.

[Wade Garrett]

Were the eldar gods really that benevolent? The one we see the most often is Khaine, and he seems to tread very close to that other fellow who favors a red and brass color scheme and is a bit grumpy all the time, the one who constantly demands skulls?

[GhostMalone]

He loved isha, never seen khorne love anything other than khorne flakes

[FunkyMonkey]

Many Eldar Gods, like Vaul and Isha were benevolent.  Khaine's like Ares in Greek mythology.  He is what he is because he is, nothing more.  He may be reviled for being what he is, but it's not a reason to claim him malevolent.  With that regard, he is like the Chaos Gods.  However, he seems to be more aligned with his race then the whole order/disorder thing as the Chaos gods are.  I think that's the main difference between him and Khorne.

[FunkyMonkey]

I don't know if it was ever mentioned whether or not the Eldar Gods, with the exception of Ynnead, were actually beings independent on the emanations of the Eldar, of if they, like Slaanesh and Ynnead, were the result of psychic emanations.  If they were the result of psychic emanations, then I don't think it's fair to call any of them, including the Chaos gods, as evil.  Like I said before, they are what they are simply because they are.  They act according to their essence, and their essence is the basis for their existence.  They are perfect: essence, purpose, and existence perfectly unified into one.

 

What we call good and evil are simply reflections of our own preferences and not the actual natures of the gods themselves.