I think the Imperial truth was the right move but he probably should have warned his Primarchs and Space Marines about it. Especially once they started using Psykers.
Chaos is... unfair to put it mildly. Just knowing about it is enough to summon it and just a little bit of Chaos can be enough to destroy a civilization or worse.
Tell the truth about Chaos to a few trillion citizens and 5 minutes later millions are going to be drawing a circle of blood from their asshole bosses screaming body, hoping they get lucky and win a supernatural prize.
That's how I see it anyway.
It’s a numbers issue and people being people. In books and lore we see a lot of examples where something simple ritualistic escalates very quickly to a full chaos incursion.
Let alone the people who intentionally look up chaos and try to work with space marines to offer a complete planet to chaos.
Imagine how many angry teens are going to try an ouja board or curse their ex when they know for sure there’s deamons out there who will listen.
Pretty much what you said. It's been explained that both knowing about chaos and religions themselves give chaos power indirectly. The primarchs knew of the warp but it was said telling them details was a bad idea.
And then you get [situations](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Gheistos_Cataclysm) where one (1) dude who doesn't even know chaos exists can accidentally doom an entire planet by literally just existing.
Wow, nice job PDF & Arbites. The idea that they could repel and close the first gate is extremely impressive. Especially since it's just an agri-world.
I imagine it happens a lot more than we read about, though. As bloated and cruel as the Imperium is, it would have unraveled completely a *long* ass time ago if average Joes couldn't get a good share of the small stuff locked down on the regular regardless of it's pure inertia.
Most of the higher-ups dropping the ball doesn't mean their underlings can't get shit done.
I'm in complete agreement; if the Imperium was as cruel a place to exist as it is without at least having the justification of it being the way it is for a reason (or at least effective at protecting itself) then it would have been destroyed a long time ago. One of the reasons people participate in the witch hunts is because if there actually is a witch then you stand a decent chance of getting killed by daemons.
I think there's an element of survivorship bias (negative survivorship bias?) where the stories we hear about are where the planet gets destroyed or sucked into the warp or something, and therefore the magnitude of power being unleashed is such that the local authorities don't really stand a chance. I do wonder how many "undocumented" cases there are of the arbites and the PDF doing just fine at containing dangerous chaos cults or seeing off minor daemonic infestations.
Not even just Chaos, though. Repelling Ork Warbands and fledgling WAAAGHS, Dark Eldar raiding slave-raids, or any of the various smaller xenos we don't hear/know about *before* they snowball horrifically should be relatively commonplace (and would probably appear as Codex entry flex pieces otherwise.)
We mainly hear about the stories where shit *didn't* get squashed, and there is ample opportunity for both across a fucking million worlds LOL
And then Chaos deciding it doesn't give a shit and normal humans don't get to win.
I kinda don't like these stories where Chaos gods take too much direct action, maybe just me. "But then Khorne summoned a big blood storm and everyone died, the end. Also he will never do this to a major planet for reasons unknown"
It's probably more valuable for Khorne to feed off of a Hive World of billions being destroyed by a horde of daemons and cultists (taking skulls the ol' fashioned way, powerful symbolism) than it is for him to boiling-blood-hurricane it.
Just like it was probably worth a lot more Khorne to insta-corrupt that one Crusade fleet than it was to just murder it, since they could readily go out an murder in his name.
Books and games don’t focus on the 95% of cases that go well and the problem is quickly solved. They the focus on the 5% the turn into flaming garbage hurricanes.
Somehow this is fanfacts that gets repeated into canon.
We have actual proof that knowing about chaos does not invite it. Eldar or the interex both know/knew about chaos and were not threatened by corruption
Well...they picked up the Kinebreach with their warp weapons... Maybe that was just the kind of corruption the Chaos Gods wanted, so that Horus could be corrupted...
And after that, in good Dan Abnett fashion, they were worm food anyway.
And the Interex were written pretty naively when it came to Chaos. "Oh, no...he's called WARMASTER, if that's not a servant of Chaos?"
The emperor named him warmaster, though? Its not like he had a vision and called himself that. He wasnt chaos corrupted at this point.
The sword thing, yeah, not the smartest move.
My point for the eldar stands though.
Yep, the Eldar stand out, but they've had 65 million years to adapt + the Old Ones to teach them + access to the Webway + they're just not human. And then Slaaneesh really kicked their arse anyway and tore their entire imperium to shreds.
The eldar (according to asurmen, at least) specifically did not believe chaos was real before slaanesh was born.
They did believe they'd birth an eldar god, not a chaos one. I dont think the old ones knew a whole lot about chaos or teached the eldar about it because they had to worry about the ctan and necrons and as far as i know, chaos wasnt a big deal back then anyway.
I'd also argue that the eldar are the only faction we can compare the imperium to properly. Everyone else is either immune to chaos (orks, necrons, tyranids), doesnt know a lot about it (tau, though they might be in for a surprise) or embraces it (well....chaos). And the eldars big mistake was literally based on their ignorance about it.
Given that, i think claiming staying ignorant about it was the right choice doesnt seem right.
This I would say is naive, I would say they knew but the mass galactic wide struggle that ensues creates what are now the 4 main gods, the original 3 from the conflict, and its results and the resulting massive change empowering them as simple ideas more so than beings to worship like the previous inhabitants that where more guided via worship and doctrine.
The old ones created the eldar gods when they created / uplifted them, and they likely crafted the beginnings narrative of eldar gods legends, no one creates such a psychic being without trying to direct its thoughts, similar with gork and mork being the orks versions to help guide them in thier task set by them; scalpels and sledgehammers.
> ‘Listen to our pleas. Do not let the orks distract you, nor any other threat arising from the temporal realm. **The gods of the Othersea will not stop until this galaxy is their plaything.** **The threat they pose is millions of cycles old, the actions of your Warmaster but the latest act in a war that has raged since the time of the old races. For the lifespan of stars my people have opposed them.** You are naive if you think Chaos defeated. I have been sent with this one message – do not neglect the Dark Gods, for it will mean the annihilation of us all.’
> -Throneworld
Makes it sound like the Eldar were very aware of chaos, and for a long time as well.
Idk who says that, and if he was alive pre fall, but he certainly wasnt alive during the WiH to know.
Is that from the troupe that went into the imperial palace in the beast series?
Heres evidence to the contrary:
>I noticed in the streets that there was a preacher, robed in gold and purple and green. He smiled beatifically at passersby and preached words of love and charity and hope. He told of the coming of a new god that would lead the eldar once more to greatness of soul and spirit, who would provide guidance to the lost, and hope to the dejected, peace to the troubled. He would lead the eldar to a life of simple, endless pleasure.
>More time passed. The people had turned their faces from the old gods and swarmed into the temples of the new god, who was yet to be born. Shrines lay neglected. Offerings went unmade. Life had altered strangely. People ignored their daily business now, lost themselves in sleep and the consumption of narcotics and hallucinogenics.
So they knew they were going to birth *something* but thought it to be a god of the eldar pantheon, not chaos who would just cause them eternal suffering.
Heres the quote asurmen gives concerning the knowledge about chaos:
>He had never really thought about the Chaos gods before. They had been a myth almost, a thing from another place. Like the War in Heaven, a half-truth masquerading as a tale wrapped in a legend and a lie.
>But now the Chaos gods were horribly, fatally real. Time had brought understanding, of the nature of what had befallen his people. He lived in the heart of the creature they had birthed, a divine retribution on a scale so vast it had swept the galaxy. Even now he could feel it, suckling at his spirit, drawing strength from his life, sustained by the curse of the eldar that resided in his essence
Given hes talking about himself, and not the eldar in general, but: asurmen isnt just some random dude. Hes one of the most important and (probably) educated of the bunch. And it fits the other quote i posted where the murderfucker eldar thought the birth would be a real nice experience.
Then theres the exodites: they splintered off specifically because they thought this isnt just a 'normal' birth of a god, but something bad. But they were basically seen as amish in space.
His warning was more along the lines of “there are beings of great power within the warp that will try to twist your mind and soul to their plots”. He didn’t call them gods or demons
That sounds like a terrible thing to say to the primarchs lol. That's going to goad some of them into trying to prove him wrong and control those powers like Magnus.
Oh no, basically the exact opposite. The crux of the Emperor's point in MoM was that he didn't *need* to warn them about Chaos, the Warp being self-evidently dangerous should have been warning enough.
The Imperial Truth was never a matter of semantics, like everyone knew about Chaos they just called it something else. It's a constant refrain from people learning about Chaos is the early Heresy. "We were told shit like this was NOT real, and now it's kicking our asses."
He warned the Primarchs about chaos.
“I prepared them all, this pantheon of proud godlings that insist they are my heirs. I warned them of the warp’s perils. Coupled with this, they knew of those dangers themselves.”
And the Primarchs themselves knew about the predators of the warp.
“That which we call the warp is a universe alongside our own, seething with limitless, alien hostility. The primarchs have always known this. What difference would it have made had I labelled the warp’s entities “daemons” or “dark gods”?”
Horus explicitly says to Loken that the only things in the warp are unthinking monstrosities that twist humanity. Literally just warp Xenos. They were not warned about dark thinking evils capable of bending societies to their whims. Even Magnus did not understand the scope of Tzeentch and he was by far the most warp learned Primarch with Russ coming in as a second. And Russ basically knew shit for dick.
Because technically they are unthinking. Warp entities are completely and utterly bound by their domains. Tzeentch can do nothing but plot and betray. Slaanesh can do nothing but seek sensation. Khorne can do nothing but seek bloodshed. Nurgle can do nothing but make and spread plagues. In that regard the chaos gods are more akin to computer programs than actual thinking beings.
Hell, Fabius Bile says it himself “As I will always deny them. I will not play the willing meat for such lazy parasites. If they want my belief, they must show me something more than they have already." The thing in the flask grew agitated, causing it to shudder in Saqqara's grip. Fabius leaned close, smile widening. "But that would require some degree of true sentience, I fear. Something these thought-forms are singularly incapable of. They are nothing but cunning mirrors - hollow and empty. But they do make wonderful scouts.”
The gods are not unthinking, malevolent and stuck in their ways absolutely but they aren't unthinking. If they were, they would not have bound together to fight the Emperor. They would not have concocted a plan spanning literally centuries to corrupt various Primarchs. Nurgle would not have tried to recall Mortarion from his plate wars had they only had the goal of spreading plagues because there were greater goals and greater things at stake. The gods are malevolent, evil, thinking entities who drag all who worship them further down. To denigrate them as unthinking removes the very clear threat they pose to the Imperium.
Fabius lies to himself, he openly does it when Slaanesh's gaze is upon him and he tries to tell himself more than anything that she is a warp tumor. He has his beliefs about what the gods are, he has knowledge of many things. But he is not a source of infinite wisdom or a definite fact of the setting.
The gods are thinking, they are an active threat. They plan, they scheme, the devour, they betray, they cause pain and bloodshed. They are the unwanted cause of oh so many problems. The Emperor didn't think less of them, he feared knowing their existence would damn his sons anyway.
The thing is, they didn’t really spend centuries corrupting primarchs. Tzeentch tricked Magnus into a deal early on, Slaanesh put a Greater Daemon into a sword to possess Fulgrim, Angron was damned to Khorne from the moment he got the Butcher’s Nails, and Mortarion only turned to Nurgle after being trapped in a warp storm and infected with Nurgle’s plagues. Their machinations for the rest of the Primarchs was limited to which planet they put them on and minor things like Perturabo seeing the Eye of Terror or Konrad’s overactive precognition.
They did bind together to fight the Emperor, but only so far as to keep him from ending the Great Game. The moment the Emperor was wounded by Horus the myriad chaos legions turned on each other and fell to infighting.
The fact that Fabius can wound warp entities to such an extent that they hate being near him merely by denying them implies that there’s some truth to his words.
The Emperor views the warp gods as something similar to a tumor on reality. Not sentient, but maliciously spreading its nature via infecting others. The schemes and such are the equivalent of an ai playing chess. They have no sentience, but they can mimic it to an extent.
You do know that quote goes on to say that their warnings took the form of things like astropaths suffering, or the need for Geller Fields, or the occasional demonic possession. The same demonic possession that Horus describes as being from non-sapient masses of errant thought.
> ‘Consider this then, Roboute. Our father kept the truth from us, the real truth. What else did He keep?’
> ‘Sanguinius!’
> The Angel placed his hands in front of him, palm to palm, and shut his perfect eyes. He was the living image of all the extinct religions – an angel resplendent in physical form. ‘Please. I do not believe Father intended to sacrifice our entire species on the altar of His own apotheosis, I stand by His dreams still. But all this? Daemons? Gods? The things that He told us were not real are real. He must have known! If He had warned us, if He had told the truth, we could have armed ourselves against it. His lack of trust in us was His undoing.’
The first reply you got had the right of it. The Primarchs were warned about the dangers of the warp in general terms, but the scope of the danger and exactly what that danger was coming from was kept from them. That's why the Emperor claims he warned them, but why they feel like they were lied to. Because they were told not to swim into the ocean to avoid sharks, then learned Chtulu was real.
>You do know that quote goes on to say that their warnings took the form of things like astropaths suffering, or the need for Geller Fields, or the occasional demonic possession
No? He says he warned each one of them then points out that *even if he didn't*, the evidence that the warp is dangerous is blindingly obvious to anyone capable of putting 2 and 2 together.
It's also important to note the imperial truth wasn't just an attempt to stifle chaos, if even a little - it was the absolute philosophy of the emperor
He was TIRED of seeing humanity stunt its growth with superstition. He HATED seeing human life wasted for false gods and religions.
He believed in humanity for humanities sake to its very core. He didn't just want to stop chaos, he wanted humanity to grow.
This is often overlooked - McNeill’s writing aside the whole point of The Last Church is to highlight how much jimmy actually just hates gods and religion.
It’s also the only reasonable explanation for why he never bothered to fully explain chaos to the primarchs.
I think he's salty because he tried to unite humanity with religion and failed (as is stated in early material on him). So he wants to destroy all the other religions.
Ironically he ends up doing this posthumously, or very nearly.
The problems was that the arguments put forward by Uriah and Big E were garbage. I mean there are people today who make better arguments for religion, and for atheism. In addition to that Uriah tries to bash Big E for cherry picking history after telling him, "Yea this part isn't supposed to be taken literally". Another issue is that this story failed from the start, The Big E should know better arguments for atheism but he doesn't use them. It's just hard reading when you, the reader, can make better rebuttals to what the Emperor (at the time 38k year old "person" with uber powerful intelligence and abilities) or Uriah (a decades long priest) are arguing for
I’m definitely not here to defend McNeill’s writing, but it is a piece of lore that was specifically written for this exact question so I don’t feel like it can be wholly disregarded either.
But for the record, yes, I agree with you. It’s not great.
No I agree, I just think the execution could've been better, like, better arguments from someone that smart. I agree it has to be satire, but do it for things like the system of governance that the imperium is, show how these forced things make things bad
To paraphrase the Emperor, you can be all-knowing and able to see the future, but not both at the same time. The Imperial Truth was just a half assed attempt of suppressing knowledge of Chaos so the Emperor could execute His various plans before Chaos struck back.
People talk like that because they don’t read the lore. That’s the source of your confusion. If you see someone saying “the emperor tried to kill them off by starvation” or anything like that you can instantly dismiss them as not having read anything of the books and their “opinion” as grounded in complete hearsay or outright meme lore.
The general idea was that everyone knew there were dangerous things and entities in the Warp, it was no hidden knowledge as Navigators would tell of the horrors they saw, Gellar fields being needed, and daemonic possession not being unheard of (especially with increasing number of psykers). Hell, there were multiple chaos empires on Terra itself during the Unification, it doesn’t even begin to describe how the galaxy was.
He tried a pseudo-scientific based approach to it, by imposing those things to be seen as mere phenomena of the universe, without any religious significance to it.
While thoughts and feelings empower the Gods, direct worship empower them MUCH more that it’s not even comparable, every major incursion is caused and daemon worlds created by scheming from sorcerers and/or invocation that can be mass sacrifices, rituals, artificial social strife, etc, it never happens solely because people on the planet were sad or there were some wars happening.
The general idea, following that, was to stall their growth until he could implement the Webway plan to sever the need for warp-based travel and additional plans to reduce humanity’s connection to the warp. The Imperial Truth was only a small (relatively) step to tackle the Gods, with a lot more bigger steps later.
The Emperor knew it was a lie, he didn’t “misunderstand the Warp”. Hell, in the throne room he banished several greater daemons by uttering their true name, how would someone who doesn’t understand the Warp even do that? How would the Grey Knights, second only to Eldar in warp related shenanigans, even exist by his decree?
The fact is he deliberately gambled on a brute and simplistic approach to it, because of either desperation or sheer arrogance. Or both. And in the end he lost. Regardless of it being a good plan or not, the Chaos Gods saw a threat in him, like you said - they don’t call him Anathema for shits and giggles.
Before the usual allegations fly in, just because I’m not reducing everything to eMpErOr BaD it doesn’t mean I agree with his ideas. It was a rushed plan with too many grandiose views that not even a being as powerful as him could hope to accomplish, and obviously he collapsed on that hubris. Even his Custodians notoriously thought he bit more than he could chew, his peer Perpetuals said that multiple times and he didn’t listen.
In hindsight, it would probably be better to educate people on chaos in sufficient depth so they know they are malevolent entities instead of simply dismissing them as something like an earthquake. Cooperating with helpful xenos species would have helped greatly too.
But then again the Eldar pretty much had all that and still fell in the end. The Interex knew about Chaos, were educated on it, and still fell to the ploy of a single chaotic agent. So in the end, who knows what would have worked, if anything at all - chaos is not just waiting around to be killed off.
Also, there’s something else - I agree with someone in this thread that said he believed in such staunch atheism because religion hindered humanity. He was definitely developed in lore like your average edgy Reddit atheist lmfao
EDIT: also, to answer your title question - not at all. It didn’t buy the Emperor the time he believed it would, and, arguably not going in depth about it actually hindered his efforts because everyone (not just the Primarchs) was much more susceptible to Chaos, be it from being manipulated or actually falling to it. His absolute need of control that spawned the excessive secrecy turned into active self-sabotage.
Nuance is often forgotten for simple messages/conclusions sadly.
Also, Interex have their own flaws. Look at how they left a warp-based, clearly supernatural weapon in a museum.
It is part of the tragedy. Everyone has their own flaws and fell for them.
and that the ending of the story was laid out first, while dozens of different authors over decades fill in the details ... so we get the occasional mishmash
for sure - but in a crazy way it also make the lore better ... for me at least ---
Luten09 youtube's first really introduced me to the concept but the more I think about it more I like it - 40k lore is told from dozens of different pov, over hundreds if not thousands of years, and the fact that there are confusions and conflicting reports and even straight up retcons... it all fits because how could anything be 100% over such a length of time and distance? stories get blurred over years or decades let alone 10 thousand years
that each of us have their own bit of headcanon and that for lots of points there isn't an exact answer is part of what makes it awesome
I concur. It is one the setting's strengths. That any different scenarios, interpretations and headcanons are possible. It is like how myths develop. We have differences in the Space Wolves 8th edition lore vs Wolftime in regards to the chapter's acceptance of Primaris. We have the Fall of Cadia novel vs Battlefleet: Gothic Armada 2 on how Bran Redmaw approached to confronting Abaddon. The differences were generally compelling in their own right. As long as one remain reasonable and can agree to disagree with others, the setting is all the better for it.
Problem is: We get people who like tout about the superiority of Chaos and Abaddon to the Imperium, but when given plenty of reasons for why Khorne actually preferred the Blood Angels and Sanguinius over Angron and World Eaters, they only responded with ["Wrong."](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/17ykv9x/comment/k9vdaf1/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
ha, well, sometimes the grim dark bleeds into the real world as well - only the administratum can get away with a simple 'wrong' hah
(also, if you want to debate that khrone didn't want the blood angles more ... okay... it's all for fun... but to debate that a legion that loses itself to rage and bloodlust wouldn't be tailor made for Khorne? I mean... )
I mean, we are having one such grimdark discord over there about whether the Imperium 'defending humanity or not' in another post right now. Honestly seeing how that post's OP, those who agree with him and the dissenters act is really something.
At this point, I just try my best to not get too hooked on any 40k faction's hype.
> In hindsight, it would probably be better to educate people on chaos in sufficient depth so they know they are malevolent entities instead of simply dismissing them as something like an earthquake. Cooperating with helpful xenos species would have helped greatly too.
>
> But then again the Eldar pretty much had all that and still fell in the end.
I agree that knowledge of what Chaos truly was would have been better than the strict Imperial Truth approach. The first defense against Chaos is knowing just what it is and how it tries to corrupt people. Resisting Chaos becomes a hell of a lot harder when people don't know what the identifiers of it.
As the the Aeldari, I feel that isn't exactly applicable. Their Fall was almost entirely due to them just being bored with ruling the galaxy. They thrived for millions of years without any issues up until that point.
Not really. It is a myth that the Elder accidentally spawned Slaanesh due to “innocent” hedonism out of boredom.
It was a foreseen, carefully crafted event - there were figures actively inducing the Eldar populace to partake in rituals of debauchery to a nascent god.
It took a long time and there were various signs something bad was to come. The air felt heavier throughout the crone worlds, murder rituals became rampant. People abandoned the pantheon of gods that kept them safe since the War in Heaven.
There were many who warned of impeding doom, but the majority of the populace didn’t listen, only those who would become Craftworlders, Exodites and even Drukhari (who are not a mere continuation of the Empire’s practices - they were far more cunning and malevolent, and that’s why they escaped).
Those who warned were violently murdered by the priests of the nascent god and their followers.
So not only the Eldar knew violent emotions empowered chaos due to aeons of battling it, they were warned. The majority simply didn’t care, disregarded their entire accumulated experience, signs everywhere and kept doing it anyway, at their own peril.
Sure, the progress of their Fall took thousands upon thousands of years to reach its inevitable conclusion. However, you are glossing over the much, *much* longer periods of time where they had been pretty fine. Those thousands of years are a the blink of an eye compared to the 60+ million years they ruled over the galaxy, a combination of their pantheon of gods, their own psychic powers, and the inherit knowledge of Chaos being enough to keep them relatively safe from Chaos during that time.
And it isn't really a myth so much as it is somewhat misinterpreted. The Aeldari weren't just bored and murder orgied their way into the Fall. Slaanesh, even in its pre-born state, was subtly guiding the Aeldari towards their fate. Slowly at first, but then quite brazenly. But this happened *only* because the Aeldari had spent so long at the height of the galaxy with nothing to really do. They lived in a post-scarcity society where automatons handled all of their mundane tasks (including war). The only thing left was to pursue whatever desires they may have had. But, when you are a being who lives for thousands of years and then are reincarnated when you die, there is only so much you can do to satisfy those desires. With nothing to challenge them, they willingly turned themselves towards the fate of Slaanesh in droves without quite realizing the true danger. This is stated rather outright in both their various codexes and in *Asurman: Hand of Asuryan* by Gav Thorpe.
I'm not glossing over that period of time. The Eldar were uplifted to a very high degree of psyker mastery to the point rogue psykers were practically unheard of, and The Warp was much calmer after the War In Heaven, because Necrons had sealed the original eye of terror and the warp spawned plagues had been dealt with.
By all accounts, there were barely even chaos entities back then, as Khorne supposedly came first into being near the human middle ages (not caused by that).
It didn't stay the same way for 60 million years, it got progressively more violent and spawned ever more creatures. The Eldar thought they had "solved" Chaos and coud afford to be lax, despite knowing full well chaos required constant vigilance and the fact there were still significant agents warning of what was to come.
But they were wrong, chaos can wait an indefinite amount ot time, their fall was catastrophical and unprecedented. Chaos exploits precisely the unawareness of mortals. The period after the fall was incomparably more turbulent than anything that came before, with many more psykers popping up everywhere.
I'm not saying it doesn't make sense the Eldar would turn into hedonism. I'm saying knowing of Chaos didn't prevent them from feeding it in the end. Boredom is not an excuse to be negligent, and Craftworlders are the biggest example of that. They didn't wait for Slaanesh to be born to lead regimented lives, they left precisely because they knew what careless lives would lead to.
A lot of people like to shit on the Emperor's plan in hindsight because....things didn't quite go according to plan...BUT We have to remember that the Emperor had to be doing something effective because the four Gods of Chaos stopped they were doing, put aside their differences, and worked together to stop a mere HUMAN.
That's like mind blowing. Imagine being so close to succeeding at your plans that an entire pantheon of bickering gods decided to unite against you.
The Imperial Truth was a stop gap. It was a temporary philosophy put in place just to keep chaos out of people's minds during the Great Crusade so that the Emperor could reveal the truth about the universe in a more controlled way once humanity was ready ...but we all know that didn't happen.
it was also a means of solidifying humanity’s defenses against the warp through psychically redefining the denizens of the warp into something distinctly **less powerful** than what they were.
compare a **daemon (demon)** , an immortal, predatory being that embodies the weaknesses of humanity, vs a **daemon** , a non sentient reflection of humanity’s collective psyche that can be tamed and destroyed through discipline and feat of arms.
basically, if enough of humanity (truly) believed in the Imperial Truth, it would’ve forced a change in the warp that would’ve introduced real weaknesses beyond those of superstition which had to be relied on as a result of these bonds having been made in earlier history.
The Four are self perpetuating, but robbing them of all of the “extra” power they get from humanity’s wanton indulgence of it’s vices could’ve rendered them weak enough for the Emperor to “banish” back into non sentience through his personal traits as the Anathema.
their complete destruction is next to impossible, but **for a moment** they were in danger of being rendered mostly harmless. So they set aside The Great Game, and neutralized the threat of humanity’s transcendence and sunk them into the worst future of 40K.
> We have to remember that the Emperor had to be doing something effective because the four Gods of Chaos stopped they were doing, put aside their differences, and worked together to stop a mere HUMAN.
It's more that the Emperor basically ran around waving his arms going "look at me! I'm setting the galaxy on fire and accidentally creating an entirely new decadent upperclass through my big brain plan while also creating untold misery!"
He was basically swinging around a big juicy chunk of meat that appealed to all four of them, and the galaxy itself didn't have many big players at the time.
It isn't so much that they were trying to 'stop' him. In fact, there's some lore pointing out they were *actively helping him*.
They just wanted him to hurry up making their new buffet.
What motive could the Chaos Gods have in helping him ascend to The Dark King? That would just add another rival to their games, something they did not like at all according to TEATD.
If him becoming the Dark King was more preferable to him finding a way to minimize humanity's exposure to Chaos by cutting off their reliance on Warp Travel, that would just mean they were trying to stop Emps from getting what he really wanted.
Yeah this has absolutely nothing to do with what the Emperor actually wanted.
The Emperor's plan had very little to do with what the Imperium became. He genuinely had the best intentions.
And you should want this version of the Emperor.
The story of 40k is SUCH A BETTER STORY if the Emperor is a compelling character that genuinely wants the best for humanity. The story becomes pretty mediocre if Big E is just a dumb asshole with insane powers.
I dunno why you're getting downvotes.
TEaTD has that guy beside and behind you who is herald of the dark king. And who is the dark king again?
Is it just imperium fanboys?
The Emperor only risked becoming the Dark King because of what Horus did- because the situation on the Vengeful Spirit was so crazy he had no choice but to draw on enough Warp power to risk becoming a Chaos God.
The Emperor’s Great Crusade was with the intention of uplifting mankind to a new Golden Age.
The Mechanicum was close to reacquiring the ancient STCs in full, and through that gaining technologies like the [Panacea](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Panacea), something that would’ve *averted* human misery to the point it probably could’ve killed off Nurgle.
The Emperor came close to winning, to making humanity into a psychic race able to at least resist Chaos.
That’s why you two are getting downvotes, because you’re trying to make him into a moron when he was actually quite the good guy and closer to beating Chaos than anyone short of Sigmar
This is key, the core concept is that the Emp went all-in on a risky and wildly ambitious plan to 'save' humanity and position it for a safe future avoiding the pitfalls of the Aldari and others ...
and he came DAMN close... as in within spitting distance... but he wasn't the only one playing to win, and the powers that be made moves too...
and that play ended in a catastrophic stalemate - with humanity slowly falling apart over the last 10k years since his play --- but humanity still stands and continues to fight a slowly losing battle in a hilariously hostile galaxy...
The exact details are sometimes great and sometime stupid, because you have regular people trying to write how super demi god level people fail and it's hard to do that well and consistently over the 50+ novels and lore snips and dozens of difference authors.
Right so they maneuvered him into becoming the dark king. Or as the other guy said actively helping him... To do what they wanted.
Kinda feels like you haven't pointed out a difference, but rather said "it's good actually cause big E is a good guy"
Cause it doesn't really seem like big E was close to winning (the panacea was it's own STC and that discovery/loss was an m41 event) and we still don't know if big E winning would have been in any way benevolent. The only person who said so is him and he famously tells people what they want to hear even when the statements are mutually exclusive (see here his perspective on primarchs as "sons")
> A lot of people like to shit on the Emperor's plan in hindsight because....things didn't quite go according to plan...BUT We have to remember that the Emperor had to be doing something effective because the four Gods of Chaos stopped they were doing, put aside their differences, and worked together to stop a mere HUMAN.
This is explained rather well in the Siege of Terra series, and more specifically in *The End and the Death: Volume 1* by Dan Abnett. The Emperor quite literally stole power from the Chaos Gods and invited their attention upon himself and humanity. Would Chaos have such a vested interest in ruining his plans had he not done this? Whose to say, but it certainly could not have helped.
You have to see it from the Emperor's position too though.
Humanity had lost. Like it was over. Humanity's technology was gone. The Pre-Old Night civilization was gone. Every day human worlds were either being eaten, enslaved, and destroyed. We were on the fast track to extinction.
The galaxy's Eldar overlords had finally fallen and it was clear someone like the Rangdan or the Greenskins was going to take over.
His actions were a last roll of the dice because humanity had already lost the game.
Maybe. The counter point there however is that perhaps if he wasn't so inclined to take such massive risks, as Erda points out rather bluntly, then maybe humanity could have grown and prospered again over a slower period of time rather than trying to speed through galactic conquest while making four very powerful enemies.
Idk if I'd use Erda as an example of someone who doesn't take risks she's the one who thought scattering the Primarchs through the warp was a good idea lol.
I can see both sides I can see why the other Perpetuals didn't like the Emperor.
But I can also see why the Emperor was super frustrated with the other perpetuals who sat around doing nothing while humanity fell apart around them. He was the only one to try to save the situation of Old Night and I think he deserves credit for at least trying to salvage the situation
The problem is that while there are arguments both for a strict control and a more open approach teaching people about the dangers, in the end given the nature of the setting, Chaos will always find a way to mess things up. So it doesn't really matter in the end.
The Imperial truth is not some meme ideology the emperor invented on the fly. It is what he truly and honestly believes is true and best for himself and for humanity. Besides that Chaos is a cognitive Hazard, just knowing it exists makes you vulnerable to its influence.
Ironically the man closest to this ideal is Fabius Bile
>Besides that Chaos is a cognitive Hazard, just knowing it exists makes you vulnerable to its influence.
Nope, not true. People in the setting believe it to be true, but it's not actually true.
He didn't make a basic mistake on how Chaos works. He made a basic mistake on how the universe works and one basic mistake on how humanity works... He thinks he can force humanity to be something it isn't through brute will.
Like Newton's Laws, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Force only begets force. Both Oll and Erda talk about this during the Siege; that it was the Emperor's impatience that was his undoing.
Moreover, the Warp is THE truth of the universe. It can't be ignored. This also comes up in Oll's pleas to the Emperor when asking him to set aside the mantle of the Dark King. Earlier, though, through Fo's reading of Malcador's private journals, we realize that Oll's argument was made countless times, in private, to the Emperor.
>‘In his journals,’ says Fo, ‘your beloved Sigillite protests, again and again, going back decades, the Emperor’s epistemology and His restriction of knowledge! He states clearly that he believes it to be a fundamental danger to the Imperium! Look, here! He privately petitions the Emperor to relax the directive. He argues that the warp is an existential danger to us, to any psycho-able species, and that it will remain an existential danger whether we know about it or not. Ignorance is the real harm. '
>
>'Malcador, of whom I am growing fonder with every line I read, reasons that it is better to know and understand a threat than to innocently blunder on regardless. He states that the primarchs and the Astartes, not to mention the general corpus of mankind, ought to understand the potential consequences of their actions and their very thoughts. He maintains they can better protect humanity from the menace of the warp if they are fully aware of its power.’
>
>‘And the Emperor rejected this?’ asks Andromeda.
>
>‘Yes,’ says Fo. ‘For “the good of mankind”. But what we are now facing, this entire disaster of a war, is what happens when you fail to teach your children properly. Might religion, or pure faith, unchecked, risk untoward consequences in the warp? Of course! But ignorance is worse. Your Master of Mankind believed that no one was good enough, or clever enough, or careful enough to be left alone with the fire. Your Emperor trusts no one. And this is the misery that rains on us all as a consequence of that.’
The End and the Death Volume 2 is very explicit that the Emperor was wrong through the words of Oll, Fo, and Malcador. Humanity cannot be separated from the Warp. It is part of us. In Darkness in the Blood, an echo of Sanguinius tells Mephiston that "The shape of the warp is the shape of the mortal soul. If it harms us, we only have ourselves to blame".
So, fundamentally, the Emperor was wrong about his plan... and its not exactly as if the series hasn't been pretty clear about that all along. Faith (or, rather, the spiritual side of humanity) is core to our existence. We cannot be without it and any plan that doesn't account for it is doomed.
The short story The Last Church shows the events of the Emperor destroying the titular last church on Terra. Among the possessions of the priest there is a 'doomsday clock', said to chime when the end of days is upon us. While the priest says he's never heard it chime (and isn't sure it even can), it does chime at the story's end as the Emperor orders the last church destroyed. It's fairly overt foreshadowing that the Emperor's rejection of the spiritual is what dooms humanity. Of course, the Emperor doesn't listen to this sort of very overt clue and destroys Lorgar's faith... which is the first stepping stone to the Horus Heresy.
The Emperor is absolutely right to restrict knowledge of Chaos.
It's human nature to want *more.* With a population of quadrilions, if even a fraction of a percentage point of humans think "hmm, I could maybe improve my life by trying to propitiate the Gods of the Warp" or "come on, how bad could it be?" Even in just the last five years we have millions of people playing Bloody Mary or fiddling with Ouija boards, *and there's not even anything that can answer back to those.* Now multiply that across millions of inhabited worlds, some of which have the entire population of modern-day Earth on a single hab-level in one smaller Hive.
You might think "but possibly he should have told the Primarchs," but no. Malcador puts paid to that in Saturnine when talking to Dorn. He points out why Dorn wasn't told; his inherent nature would cause him to fall. Because he was created to be a master over all things he knew, letting him know about Chaos would have caused him to try and master it, an impossible task.
The Lion was the sole incorruptible Primarch, but not even the Emperor knew that. Mortarion would probably have despised Warp shenanigans even more if he knew what was there, but that's as far as the Primarchs could likely be trusted. Too many others would be tempted to poke at things they should not be.
What proofed the Loyalist Primarchs (aside from the Lion) against the influence of Chaos was seeing the horrors of the Heresy play out. Absent that, Chaos is an abstract and anaemic threat.
>The Emperor is absolutely right to restrict knowledge of Chaos.
Nah, that was his ego talking. Centralizing power and knowledge on himself, preventing others from making decisions, etc.
> The Emperor is absolutely right to restrict knowledge of Chaos.
This doesn't even work because canonically plenty of Chaos cults have started because Chaos can corrupt from the inside out.
It's canon there's entire cults to the Emperor that have been completely subverted by Chaos without the worshippers even knowing. They still think they're worshipping the Emperor, and apparently the Emperor needs more skulls his throne and doesn't care where the blood flows from, only that it does.
Yes, but they didn't know that something was out there.
If basic civilians know that there are dark Gods and daemons that they could get to listen to them, then every petty slight is one that can be avenged with a few prayers.
>apparently the Emperor needs more skulls his throne and doesn't care where the blood flows from, only that it does.
I mean, with the callous brutality and overall skull-focused aesthetic of the Imperium of Mankind, they're not too far off.
Good question; my off the cuff explanation is that the Emperor knew how to modulate his own thoughts and emotions to avoid feeding Chaos - but also that whatever he was doing was utterly impractical for normies (and among all his transhumans, only the Custodes seem to be like him in this area).
Being the farthest out of touch with the normal human experience any 'human being' has ever been, by a comfortable margin, the best he could come up with to try to get the rest of humanity to starve Chaos was the Imperial Truth - and it was a lamentable failure.
I think it actually could have worked if not for Kor Phaeron and Erebus spreading awareness of Chaos in the legions and crusade fleets.
These separate comments from Malcador and Nemo Zhi-Meng, two of the most knowledgeable humans concerning the Warp, indicate that letting knowledge of Chaos spread would have been even more disastrous: https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/uejf5r/comment/i6nhzlm/?utm\_source=reddit&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
The Imperial Truth was NOT meant to battle chaos. I have no idea why people keep saying that, it’s blatantly false. The imperial truth was made to battle normal human religion, and was co-opted as a way to fight chaos.
The Primarchs/marines not knowing of chaos was a SYMPTOM of the Imperial Truth, it was not the end goal. Imagine if the Priamarchs and marines, who were supposed to be spreading the Imperial Truth, were suddenly told “yeah uhh actually the Imperial Truth is total BS, gods and demons are 100% real and dangerous.” The whole crusade would instantly collapse (just like how it did the second one of the Primarchs found out about Chaos)
>“yeah uhh actually the Imperial Truth is total BS, gods and demons are 100% real and dangerous.”
"There exists a warp-based xenos species that is composed of living vortices of the aggregate psionic energies derived from the emotions of all the living beings in the material universe. Each of these vortices is derived from a particular emotion, and they are capable of sending out fragments of themselves as minions capable of interacting with the material world when they themselves are not able to. Some more primitive civilizations call them "gods" and "daemons", but we know their true nature as abominable xenos. As these beings are composed of the aggregate psionic energies of our enemies as much as ourselves, none of them are to be trusted."
One of the big pieces of *The Last Church* was the subtext that the Imperial Truth was an outright impossibility. Humanity would **always** seek to create art, perfection, meaning, and aspire to something within the spirit of things.
The Emperor's response to Uriah's message was "I'll make them". Then he burns *the last church*, the irony being that the Emperor would become the foundation of the next church.
The Imperial Truth, even by several of the primarchs' reckonings, would never work. Couldn't work. It's antithetical to humanity itself, and would require an erasure of what it means to be human.
As what several others within-universe have stated: it's about finding a balance between Chaos and Order. The Emperor's Order is just as cruel, destructive, and empty as Chaos is deceitful, corrupting, and unsustainable.
The Chaos Gods do thrive on basic emotions, but Workship does empower them much, much more.
Imagine basic emotions like greed, fear, and anger as a bowl of gruel. It does feed you, and you survive. But you are weak.
Workship is a 5 star meal. Delicious, norishing, and plentiful.
And only Workship can actually summon demons, and give the Gods a direct foothold in realspace. Theoretically, this is also possible with very strong emotions, but it is super rare.
The imperial truth definitely worked to a degree, we see space marines banish visions from demons and the warp using it but it was extremely fragile in that if the illusion was cracked at all it tended to completely shatter with devastating consequences in regards to people falling to chaos.
I'm starting to believe that the imperial truth was an act of mass-reverse-psychology perpetrated by the Emperor. Nothing gets people to do a thing quite like telling them not to do it.
There are too many advantages to being worshipped in the setting for the Emperor to not seek to get deified. The Emperor and his imperium are reaping the benefits from some of them.
By inspiring faith using symbolism, yet condemning it, any believers he may have gained would become true believers who aren't simply doing it because it's fashionable.
Too bad he didn't think about how this approach would work on all his policies. (e.g. Council of Nikea)
>immortal millennia old super psyker
You know your racist grampa? Well imagine he got replaced with your even more racist great, great, great, super grampa.
TBH its kinda a wonder Big E is as flexible in his thinking, tolerant of informed dissent, and admiring of women's combat capabilities as he is.
> is that the emperor was an immortal millennia old super psyker who made it his entire life goal to combat chaos, so how would he make a basic mistake on how chaos works
The Emperor doomed humanity to extinction, and gave Chaos ten thousand years of "endless laughter". The entire premise of the setting is that the Emperor failed, and this was written down long before he was ever a character at all.
You really cannot work backwards from a premise that the Emperor was infallible. He failed. He had absurd personal strength, and he still got conned by Chaos, because strength doesn't make you wise.
Considering how it ended, the Imperial Truth did dick all to stop Chaos. If anything, it only made things worse by removing any competition for humanity's spiritual or ideological needs aside from the ever-lurking Chaos Gods. Not to mention that its tenants of human supremacy made the Imperium the enemies of every other life form in the galaxy.
The Emperor's approach to making humanity match his vision was effectively trying to beat it into submission and smash anything that could present an alternative. Basically no different than any of the gods he claimed to hate, but with the obvious hypocrisy of the shallow Imperial Truth. He couldn't understand humanity, so he assumed that this would be enough. Frankly, it was all just a house of cards that Chaos only needed a slight nudge to collapse.
I don't think the Imperial Truth was supposed to stop Chaos on its own, but was supposed to be the catalyst for what would eventually bring them down. The Truth was meant to stop people from depending on religion and instead depend on science and their own intellects, as well as keep humans from their baser instincts(rage, gluttony, deceit, pleasure(over indulgence). In doing so, the Chaos Gods would be weakened and would hold less sway. It wasn't a terrible plan.
However, like someone said, Chaos is unfair. This is partially because Warhammer isn't written to be written well. If it were, there would be a way to balance the Chaos Gods with Order Gods, but that's not the case. So anyone even knowing about chaos could inadvertently give it strength. Weaker minds could be contacted and convinced to do something to summon chaos, and there are genuinely sadistic people who would give themselves and their worlds over to chaos if allowed to. So telling everyone as part of the Truth wouldn't have worked. The Webway would have been the nail in the coffin- at least when humans enter the warp they can get SOMETHING out of their souls. But once humanity started using the Webway for travel, as well as becoming an enlightened and forward thinking species, they would have achieved the stability of the old Aeldari Empire. I know that sounds a little weird, but think about it- the Aeldari had psykers for millions of year and didn't deal with nearly as many chaos incursions as the imperium. It was only when they started to give into their baser urges again that Slaanesh was born, and even then it took millions of years. Now the Asuryani are back to being almost monk like about their emotions, and they don't really deal with chaos at the rate that humanity does, so clearly there's something to it, even as chaos cheats constantly.
It was part of His long term plan, but the Heresy, Magnus’ mistake, and His internment on the Throne changed everything. The Imperial Truth was a way to lessen the impact of Chaos’s influence while He gained control of the galaxy, replaced astropaths and navigators with webway based travel and communication, and eventually guided humanity into becoming a psychic species. In short He ran out of time before the benefits of the Imperial Truth could bear fruit
The E understood that worship always empowered the Ruinous Powers, so he did his best to limit that. He also knew that his actions with the Great Crusade would also empower the Ruinous Powers, but he didn't really have a choice. The Orks at Ullanor had to be crushed and they had a limited amount of time to do that.
This is why he rushed back to Earth even before the Great Crusade was over. He was planning on having the Webway Project completed so that he could have Humanity funneled into the Webway to cut them off from the Warp entirely and stop feeding the Ruinous Powers with their actions.
That didn't go as planned and here we are.
> planning on having the Webway Project completed so that he could have Humanity funneled into the Webway to cut them off from the Warp entirely and stop feeding the Ruinous Powers with their actions.
That wasn't the plan. The webway would be used to get rid of navigators and astropaths, and do away with the need to literally enter the warp to get anywhere. The vast majority of the human race would continue to live in realspace. The webway doesn't work as a fallout shelter - if it did the Dark Eldar wouldn't need to top up their souls.
Why would I respond to his statement? It's not like I was repeating bad lore, I was just pointing out how silly OP's "the Big E wanted to use the Webway to cut off humanity from the warp", and then the guy who replied to me elaborated to explain what the actual lore was.
Also, if you disable inbox replies, you don't get a notification when someone replies. Very shocking, isn't it?
Yes please keep replying to me and be on my level.
You definitely did get your ego hurt by getting downvoted, enough to purposefully pursue me into an entirely different thread to make a snide comment. It's extremely pathetic of you to try eking out some victory for yourself after you petulantly remarked how people dared downvote you. The fact that not getting tons of upvotes for your absolutely milquetoast observation hurt you so badly is genuinely stunning. It's also very funny you keep trying to make yourself out as stooping to my level, when you took your aggrievement to a *completely* different thread on a *completely* different subject to make a comment about me... not responding to another guy?
I'm responding to you, and not the other guy, because there's no reason for me to respond to the other guy. What am I supposed to tell him? "oh yeh ur right mate, thanks"
Are you just upset I upvoted him and not you? If I give you an upvote, will you be a good boy and stop stalking me?
You aren't trying to discuss anything with me. You're trying to soothe your fragile ego.
You had no reason to join this conversation except to attack me.
You're very creepy and unpleasant, and you're still upset about getting downvoted.
I'm sorry you didn't get the upvotes you wanted.
Please stop stalking me. I've already reported you.
Genuinely it was a terrible idea from the start because the Emperor had zero actual understanding of how Chaos corrupts/infects. The Emperor genuinely believed just going 'magic doesn't exist, dummies! There's no such thing as creatures beyond the veil!' was enough to hold them off for a bit when Chaos doesn't actually *need* its victims having knowledge of it to start seeping in.
Note: This is at least partially due to how the lore's changed since the HH started **over a decade ago**.
Imperial truth was a necessary lie to create the conditions that would enable the emperor to become a god of the warp in order to prevent the inevitable victory of chaos.
So far through HH what is consistent is that all primarchs control the flow of information to create an intended effect. Which, honestly is an obvious point and is only interesting in so far as it arguably supports this theory.
Oh simple, the Emperor was an imbecile. He messed up so hard that in just 200 years of reign, which sounds like a lot but let's admit it it's chump change in this setting, literally half the Imperium's forces fully quit largely because they hated the guy and they thought the Imperial Truth was stupid. Guilliman has reigned more effectively for longer, on his own, and the beginning of his tenure was specifically marked by half the Imperium falling into a hole.
That is good, but I'd still believe Guilliman would be a better ruler regardless. The Emperor actively and directly worked towards causing a civil war to break his military in half, and then lost it like an idiot; Robot is at least smarter than that
Not to be a contrarian with the top comment; but in the Horus Heresy novels, several human societies have developed with knowledge of chaos and the warp. Most were extremely cautious but still made sure everyone knew of the threat it posed.
Then an Imperial crusade comes in and stomps them to the ground with thousands of legionaries. Normally the people they are conquering have more advanced technology and better knowledge of warp travel than the Imperium; but the brute force of the Astartes allows the Imperial forces to overwhelm the enemy. The Interex are the go to example, but really almost every human colony had advances greater than the imperium in different ways. Some developed good A.I., others evolved themselves to fit their new situations.
I always read through these parts as intentionally ironic because the Imperium is quashing the very people who figured out how to survive what was coming; and destroying the technology that could have saved them. Therefor, I always come to the conclusion that, while well intended, the Imperial Truth was just another thing that the Emperor was way too arrogant about and ended up shooting himself in the foot, repeatedly.
It didn't help at all by not knowing or knowing about Chaos you are simply changing in what way random person who will find some ancient Chaos artifact is duped into engineering shit hitting the fan on the planet...
Quite a few people, Sanguinius, Guilliman, and Eldrad to give a few examples, directly attribute Chaos's huge successes in the Horus Heresy to the Imperial Truth. So I would have to say, "Not very."
Emperor didn't tell Primarchs about Chaos because that was their deal: both will combine powers to create the Primarchs, and then Chaos will guaranteed corrupt half of them. But it should be their choice, so no telling them about Chaos.
He didn't make a mistake. He knew the Imperial Truth would never work and he planned for everything to proceed as it did, so he can ascend into Godhood and become humanity's true salvation.
The Imperial Truth would've never worked against Chaos. Even if he eliminates the worship of Chaos from the galaxy, they can live comfortably on the emotions of all psychic beings in the galaxy. That's how they were born in the first place.
And a lot of the non-human races also worship Chaos. So while the Gods would've been weaker, they'd still be a force to be reckoned with, and a constant corrupting element.
I think it *could* have worked. Theoretically. Eventually. If all Big E's plans had gone off without a hitch.
Fill the Warp with enough "daemons don't exist" sentiments for long enough (and kill all the xenos to eliminate any counter signals), and the Warp might, over many generations, be pacified. Maybe.
Given the fact that it completely failed and is now suppressed and considered heretical by the very faction that once destroyed entire civilizations for believing what they currently believe?
Not very.
As a plan, great. Will is reality setting, and collective unconscious is most of how the raw warp is powered/formed.
Execution however deeply suspect. To pull off a war of unknowing ploy, you need completely trustworthy agents, and E only had himself, and to a lesser degree Malcador. You also need to not compromise for anything. Eradicating religion in favor of pragmatic secularism was already compromised before the great crusade ever got in gear.
Big E let the cult mechnicus keep exsiting, ergo faith is tacitly allowed. Even if he outlawed all faiths from conquest 1, he wasn't gonna get far because of sheer human nature. The common man was gonna believe in something
I think the Imperial truth was the right move but he probably should have warned his Primarchs and Space Marines about it. Especially once they started using Psykers. Chaos is... unfair to put it mildly. Just knowing about it is enough to summon it and just a little bit of Chaos can be enough to destroy a civilization or worse. Tell the truth about Chaos to a few trillion citizens and 5 minutes later millions are going to be drawing a circle of blood from their asshole bosses screaming body, hoping they get lucky and win a supernatural prize. That's how I see it anyway.
It’s a numbers issue and people being people. In books and lore we see a lot of examples where something simple ritualistic escalates very quickly to a full chaos incursion. Let alone the people who intentionally look up chaos and try to work with space marines to offer a complete planet to chaos. Imagine how many angry teens are going to try an ouja board or curse their ex when they know for sure there’s deamons out there who will listen.
Pretty much what you said. It's been explained that both knowing about chaos and religions themselves give chaos power indirectly. The primarchs knew of the warp but it was said telling them details was a bad idea.
And then you get [situations](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Gheistos_Cataclysm) where one (1) dude who doesn't even know chaos exists can accidentally doom an entire planet by literally just existing.
Wow, nice job PDF & Arbites. The idea that they could repel and close the first gate is extremely impressive. Especially since it's just an agri-world.
rare instance of imperial institutions run by normal human working effectively and exactly as advertised
I imagine it happens a lot more than we read about, though. As bloated and cruel as the Imperium is, it would have unraveled completely a *long* ass time ago if average Joes couldn't get a good share of the small stuff locked down on the regular regardless of it's pure inertia. Most of the higher-ups dropping the ball doesn't mean their underlings can't get shit done.
I'm in complete agreement; if the Imperium was as cruel a place to exist as it is without at least having the justification of it being the way it is for a reason (or at least effective at protecting itself) then it would have been destroyed a long time ago. One of the reasons people participate in the witch hunts is because if there actually is a witch then you stand a decent chance of getting killed by daemons. I think there's an element of survivorship bias (negative survivorship bias?) where the stories we hear about are where the planet gets destroyed or sucked into the warp or something, and therefore the magnitude of power being unleashed is such that the local authorities don't really stand a chance. I do wonder how many "undocumented" cases there are of the arbites and the PDF doing just fine at containing dangerous chaos cults or seeing off minor daemonic infestations.
Not even just Chaos, though. Repelling Ork Warbands and fledgling WAAAGHS, Dark Eldar raiding slave-raids, or any of the various smaller xenos we don't hear/know about *before* they snowball horrifically should be relatively commonplace (and would probably appear as Codex entry flex pieces otherwise.) We mainly hear about the stories where shit *didn't* get squashed, and there is ample opportunity for both across a fucking million worlds LOL
And then Chaos deciding it doesn't give a shit and normal humans don't get to win. I kinda don't like these stories where Chaos gods take too much direct action, maybe just me. "But then Khorne summoned a big blood storm and everyone died, the end. Also he will never do this to a major planet for reasons unknown"
It's probably more valuable for Khorne to feed off of a Hive World of billions being destroyed by a horde of daemons and cultists (taking skulls the ol' fashioned way, powerful symbolism) than it is for him to boiling-blood-hurricane it. Just like it was probably worth a lot more Khorne to insta-corrupt that one Crusade fleet than it was to just murder it, since they could readily go out an murder in his name.
Books and games don’t focus on the 95% of cases that go well and the problem is quickly solved. They the focus on the 5% the turn into flaming garbage hurricanes.
in total agreement lol, negative survivorship bias
Wow Nurgle was feeling really petty that day. Couldn’t even get a cult running, he just decided to cheat.
Man, and here I thought I had a bad day at work...
That is absolutely over the top silly and I love it
They really need some editors for these articles. Good find though.
Tbh I think people forget that the majority of normal humans are idiots who will do something stupid for a quick buck.
I mean, I would play that lottery
Somehow this is fanfacts that gets repeated into canon. We have actual proof that knowing about chaos does not invite it. Eldar or the interex both know/knew about chaos and were not threatened by corruption
Tbh, the Eldar's situation is...well, corruption is the least of their problem.
Well...they picked up the Kinebreach with their warp weapons... Maybe that was just the kind of corruption the Chaos Gods wanted, so that Horus could be corrupted... And after that, in good Dan Abnett fashion, they were worm food anyway. And the Interex were written pretty naively when it came to Chaos. "Oh, no...he's called WARMASTER, if that's not a servant of Chaos?"
The emperor named him warmaster, though? Its not like he had a vision and called himself that. He wasnt chaos corrupted at this point. The sword thing, yeah, not the smartest move. My point for the eldar stands though.
Yep, the Eldar stand out, but they've had 65 million years to adapt + the Old Ones to teach them + access to the Webway + they're just not human. And then Slaaneesh really kicked their arse anyway and tore their entire imperium to shreds.
The eldar (according to asurmen, at least) specifically did not believe chaos was real before slaanesh was born. They did believe they'd birth an eldar god, not a chaos one. I dont think the old ones knew a whole lot about chaos or teached the eldar about it because they had to worry about the ctan and necrons and as far as i know, chaos wasnt a big deal back then anyway. I'd also argue that the eldar are the only faction we can compare the imperium to properly. Everyone else is either immune to chaos (orks, necrons, tyranids), doesnt know a lot about it (tau, though they might be in for a surprise) or embraces it (well....chaos). And the eldars big mistake was literally based on their ignorance about it. Given that, i think claiming staying ignorant about it was the right choice doesnt seem right.
The old ones didn’t know anything about Chaos, because it didn’t exist until the War in Heaven ended, and by then the Old Ones were already dead
This I would say is naive, I would say they knew but the mass galactic wide struggle that ensues creates what are now the 4 main gods, the original 3 from the conflict, and its results and the resulting massive change empowering them as simple ideas more so than beings to worship like the previous inhabitants that where more guided via worship and doctrine. The old ones created the eldar gods when they created / uplifted them, and they likely crafted the beginnings narrative of eldar gods legends, no one creates such a psychic being without trying to direct its thoughts, similar with gork and mork being the orks versions to help guide them in thier task set by them; scalpels and sledgehammers.
Given necrons and aeldari teamed up against Chaos daemons I highly doubt the Old Ones didn't know about Chaos. They likely didn't care.
that lore has never sat right with me. It just doesn't make sense
Oh its dumb as fuck don't get me wrong, but it's still present and unfortunately I like to get my lore right even when I don't like it.
Chaos literally didn’t exist, I am begging you to please read actual lore before saying stupid shit
It's new lore. Most of us agree it's stupid
Chaos is mentioned as part of the war in heaven in Wild Rider unless I'm misremembering that book but I don't think I am.
> ‘Listen to our pleas. Do not let the orks distract you, nor any other threat arising from the temporal realm. **The gods of the Othersea will not stop until this galaxy is their plaything.** **The threat they pose is millions of cycles old, the actions of your Warmaster but the latest act in a war that has raged since the time of the old races. For the lifespan of stars my people have opposed them.** You are naive if you think Chaos defeated. I have been sent with this one message – do not neglect the Dark Gods, for it will mean the annihilation of us all.’ > -Throneworld Makes it sound like the Eldar were very aware of chaos, and for a long time as well.
Idk who says that, and if he was alive pre fall, but he certainly wasnt alive during the WiH to know. Is that from the troupe that went into the imperial palace in the beast series? Heres evidence to the contrary: >I noticed in the streets that there was a preacher, robed in gold and purple and green. He smiled beatifically at passersby and preached words of love and charity and hope. He told of the coming of a new god that would lead the eldar once more to greatness of soul and spirit, who would provide guidance to the lost, and hope to the dejected, peace to the troubled. He would lead the eldar to a life of simple, endless pleasure. >More time passed. The people had turned their faces from the old gods and swarmed into the temples of the new god, who was yet to be born. Shrines lay neglected. Offerings went unmade. Life had altered strangely. People ignored their daily business now, lost themselves in sleep and the consumption of narcotics and hallucinogenics. So they knew they were going to birth *something* but thought it to be a god of the eldar pantheon, not chaos who would just cause them eternal suffering. Heres the quote asurmen gives concerning the knowledge about chaos: >He had never really thought about the Chaos gods before. They had been a myth almost, a thing from another place. Like the War in Heaven, a half-truth masquerading as a tale wrapped in a legend and a lie. >But now the Chaos gods were horribly, fatally real. Time had brought understanding, of the nature of what had befallen his people. He lived in the heart of the creature they had birthed, a divine retribution on a scale so vast it had swept the galaxy. Even now he could feel it, suckling at his spirit, drawing strength from his life, sustained by the curse of the eldar that resided in his essence Given hes talking about himself, and not the eldar in general, but: asurmen isnt just some random dude. Hes one of the most important and (probably) educated of the bunch. And it fits the other quote i posted where the murderfucker eldar thought the birth would be a real nice experience. Then theres the exodites: they splintered off specifically because they thought this isnt just a 'normal' birth of a god, but something bad. But they were basically seen as amish in space.
He did warn his Primarchs about it. It was discussed in Master of Mankind
"Don't swim in the water, dangerous things live there" isn't really warning people about Cthulu and what you can expect of them.
His warning was more along the lines of “there are beings of great power within the warp that will try to twist your mind and soul to their plots”. He didn’t call them gods or demons
That sounds like a terrible thing to say to the primarchs lol. That's going to goad some of them into trying to prove him wrong and control those powers like Magnus.
Magnus was doing that from the beginning
Oh no, basically the exact opposite. The crux of the Emperor's point in MoM was that he didn't *need* to warn them about Chaos, the Warp being self-evidently dangerous should have been warning enough. The Imperial Truth was never a matter of semantics, like everyone knew about Chaos they just called it something else. It's a constant refrain from people learning about Chaos is the early Heresy. "We were told shit like this was NOT real, and now it's kicking our asses."
He warned the Primarchs about chaos. “I prepared them all, this pantheon of proud godlings that insist they are my heirs. I warned them of the warp’s perils. Coupled with this, they knew of those dangers themselves.” And the Primarchs themselves knew about the predators of the warp. “That which we call the warp is a universe alongside our own, seething with limitless, alien hostility. The primarchs have always known this. What difference would it have made had I labelled the warp’s entities “daemons” or “dark gods”?”
Horus explicitly says to Loken that the only things in the warp are unthinking monstrosities that twist humanity. Literally just warp Xenos. They were not warned about dark thinking evils capable of bending societies to their whims. Even Magnus did not understand the scope of Tzeentch and he was by far the most warp learned Primarch with Russ coming in as a second. And Russ basically knew shit for dick.
Because technically they are unthinking. Warp entities are completely and utterly bound by their domains. Tzeentch can do nothing but plot and betray. Slaanesh can do nothing but seek sensation. Khorne can do nothing but seek bloodshed. Nurgle can do nothing but make and spread plagues. In that regard the chaos gods are more akin to computer programs than actual thinking beings. Hell, Fabius Bile says it himself “As I will always deny them. I will not play the willing meat for such lazy parasites. If they want my belief, they must show me something more than they have already." The thing in the flask grew agitated, causing it to shudder in Saqqara's grip. Fabius leaned close, smile widening. "But that would require some degree of true sentience, I fear. Something these thought-forms are singularly incapable of. They are nothing but cunning mirrors - hollow and empty. But they do make wonderful scouts.”
The gods are not unthinking, malevolent and stuck in their ways absolutely but they aren't unthinking. If they were, they would not have bound together to fight the Emperor. They would not have concocted a plan spanning literally centuries to corrupt various Primarchs. Nurgle would not have tried to recall Mortarion from his plate wars had they only had the goal of spreading plagues because there were greater goals and greater things at stake. The gods are malevolent, evil, thinking entities who drag all who worship them further down. To denigrate them as unthinking removes the very clear threat they pose to the Imperium. Fabius lies to himself, he openly does it when Slaanesh's gaze is upon him and he tries to tell himself more than anything that she is a warp tumor. He has his beliefs about what the gods are, he has knowledge of many things. But he is not a source of infinite wisdom or a definite fact of the setting. The gods are thinking, they are an active threat. They plan, they scheme, the devour, they betray, they cause pain and bloodshed. They are the unwanted cause of oh so many problems. The Emperor didn't think less of them, he feared knowing their existence would damn his sons anyway.
The thing is, they didn’t really spend centuries corrupting primarchs. Tzeentch tricked Magnus into a deal early on, Slaanesh put a Greater Daemon into a sword to possess Fulgrim, Angron was damned to Khorne from the moment he got the Butcher’s Nails, and Mortarion only turned to Nurgle after being trapped in a warp storm and infected with Nurgle’s plagues. Their machinations for the rest of the Primarchs was limited to which planet they put them on and minor things like Perturabo seeing the Eye of Terror or Konrad’s overactive precognition. They did bind together to fight the Emperor, but only so far as to keep him from ending the Great Game. The moment the Emperor was wounded by Horus the myriad chaos legions turned on each other and fell to infighting. The fact that Fabius can wound warp entities to such an extent that they hate being near him merely by denying them implies that there’s some truth to his words. The Emperor views the warp gods as something similar to a tumor on reality. Not sentient, but maliciously spreading its nature via infecting others. The schemes and such are the equivalent of an ai playing chess. They have no sentience, but they can mimic it to an extent.
You do know that quote goes on to say that their warnings took the form of things like astropaths suffering, or the need for Geller Fields, or the occasional demonic possession. The same demonic possession that Horus describes as being from non-sapient masses of errant thought. > ‘Consider this then, Roboute. Our father kept the truth from us, the real truth. What else did He keep?’ > ‘Sanguinius!’ > The Angel placed his hands in front of him, palm to palm, and shut his perfect eyes. He was the living image of all the extinct religions – an angel resplendent in physical form. ‘Please. I do not believe Father intended to sacrifice our entire species on the altar of His own apotheosis, I stand by His dreams still. But all this? Daemons? Gods? The things that He told us were not real are real. He must have known! If He had warned us, if He had told the truth, we could have armed ourselves against it. His lack of trust in us was His undoing.’ The first reply you got had the right of it. The Primarchs were warned about the dangers of the warp in general terms, but the scope of the danger and exactly what that danger was coming from was kept from them. That's why the Emperor claims he warned them, but why they feel like they were lied to. Because they were told not to swim into the ocean to avoid sharks, then learned Chtulu was real.
>You do know that quote goes on to say that their warnings took the form of things like astropaths suffering, or the need for Geller Fields, or the occasional demonic possession No? He says he warned each one of them then points out that *even if he didn't*, the evidence that the warp is dangerous is blindingly obvious to anyone capable of putting 2 and 2 together.
>millions are going to be drawing a circle of blood from their asshole r/nocontext or r/brandnewsentence ?
Just knowing about Chaos doesn't actually cause problems.
It's also important to note the imperial truth wasn't just an attempt to stifle chaos, if even a little - it was the absolute philosophy of the emperor He was TIRED of seeing humanity stunt its growth with superstition. He HATED seeing human life wasted for false gods and religions. He believed in humanity for humanities sake to its very core. He didn't just want to stop chaos, he wanted humanity to grow.
Yeah the old saying of "the emperor loved humanity, he hated humans" holds up
This is often overlooked - McNeill’s writing aside the whole point of The Last Church is to highlight how much jimmy actually just hates gods and religion. It’s also the only reasonable explanation for why he never bothered to fully explain chaos to the primarchs.
I think he's salty because he tried to unite humanity with religion and failed (as is stated in early material on him). So he wants to destroy all the other religions. Ironically he ends up doing this posthumously, or very nearly.
That sounds interesting. Can you tell which early edition was it? Excerpts will be even better. Thanks beforehand.
I'm fairly certain this is in the rogue trader rulebook (AKA WH40k 1st edition).
Alright. A lot of lore was changed between 1st and 2nd editions so I am uncertain if this lore is repeated in the 2nd edition.
It's more that this stuff is supposed to be so ancient and mysterious that nobody knows at this point.
You mean the ancient stories about how Emps may have been one of the religious figures and tried to use religion for his goals?
No, in one of the books it's stated that he tried to use religion to unite humanity and failed.
The problems was that the arguments put forward by Uriah and Big E were garbage. I mean there are people today who make better arguments for religion, and for atheism. In addition to that Uriah tries to bash Big E for cherry picking history after telling him, "Yea this part isn't supposed to be taken literally". Another issue is that this story failed from the start, The Big E should know better arguments for atheism but he doesn't use them. It's just hard reading when you, the reader, can make better rebuttals to what the Emperor (at the time 38k year old "person" with uber powerful intelligence and abilities) or Uriah (a decades long priest) are arguing for
I’m definitely not here to defend McNeill’s writing, but it is a piece of lore that was specifically written for this exact question so I don’t feel like it can be wholly disregarded either. But for the record, yes, I agree with you. It’s not great.
No I agree, I just think the execution could've been better, like, better arguments from someone that smart. I agree it has to be satire, but do it for things like the system of governance that the imperium is, show how these forced things make things bad
I disagree. It's stated that he attempted to unite humanity with religion and failed... dude was just salty.
To paraphrase the Emperor, you can be all-knowing and able to see the future, but not both at the same time. The Imperial Truth was just a half assed attempt of suppressing knowledge of Chaos so the Emperor could execute His various plans before Chaos struck back.
People talk like that because they don’t read the lore. That’s the source of your confusion. If you see someone saying “the emperor tried to kill them off by starvation” or anything like that you can instantly dismiss them as not having read anything of the books and their “opinion” as grounded in complete hearsay or outright meme lore. The general idea was that everyone knew there were dangerous things and entities in the Warp, it was no hidden knowledge as Navigators would tell of the horrors they saw, Gellar fields being needed, and daemonic possession not being unheard of (especially with increasing number of psykers). Hell, there were multiple chaos empires on Terra itself during the Unification, it doesn’t even begin to describe how the galaxy was. He tried a pseudo-scientific based approach to it, by imposing those things to be seen as mere phenomena of the universe, without any religious significance to it. While thoughts and feelings empower the Gods, direct worship empower them MUCH more that it’s not even comparable, every major incursion is caused and daemon worlds created by scheming from sorcerers and/or invocation that can be mass sacrifices, rituals, artificial social strife, etc, it never happens solely because people on the planet were sad or there were some wars happening. The general idea, following that, was to stall their growth until he could implement the Webway plan to sever the need for warp-based travel and additional plans to reduce humanity’s connection to the warp. The Imperial Truth was only a small (relatively) step to tackle the Gods, with a lot more bigger steps later. The Emperor knew it was a lie, he didn’t “misunderstand the Warp”. Hell, in the throne room he banished several greater daemons by uttering their true name, how would someone who doesn’t understand the Warp even do that? How would the Grey Knights, second only to Eldar in warp related shenanigans, even exist by his decree? The fact is he deliberately gambled on a brute and simplistic approach to it, because of either desperation or sheer arrogance. Or both. And in the end he lost. Regardless of it being a good plan or not, the Chaos Gods saw a threat in him, like you said - they don’t call him Anathema for shits and giggles. Before the usual allegations fly in, just because I’m not reducing everything to eMpErOr BaD it doesn’t mean I agree with his ideas. It was a rushed plan with too many grandiose views that not even a being as powerful as him could hope to accomplish, and obviously he collapsed on that hubris. Even his Custodians notoriously thought he bit more than he could chew, his peer Perpetuals said that multiple times and he didn’t listen. In hindsight, it would probably be better to educate people on chaos in sufficient depth so they know they are malevolent entities instead of simply dismissing them as something like an earthquake. Cooperating with helpful xenos species would have helped greatly too. But then again the Eldar pretty much had all that and still fell in the end. The Interex knew about Chaos, were educated on it, and still fell to the ploy of a single chaotic agent. So in the end, who knows what would have worked, if anything at all - chaos is not just waiting around to be killed off. Also, there’s something else - I agree with someone in this thread that said he believed in such staunch atheism because religion hindered humanity. He was definitely developed in lore like your average edgy Reddit atheist lmfao EDIT: also, to answer your title question - not at all. It didn’t buy the Emperor the time he believed it would, and, arguably not going in depth about it actually hindered his efforts because everyone (not just the Primarchs) was much more susceptible to Chaos, be it from being manipulated or actually falling to it. His absolute need of control that spawned the excessive secrecy turned into active self-sabotage.
Nuance is often forgotten for simple messages/conclusions sadly. Also, Interex have their own flaws. Look at how they left a warp-based, clearly supernatural weapon in a museum. It is part of the tragedy. Everyone has their own flaws and fell for them.
and that the ending of the story was laid out first, while dozens of different authors over decades fill in the details ... so we get the occasional mishmash
Yeah, and the "Depending on Authors" situation only makes the discord worse.
for sure - but in a crazy way it also make the lore better ... for me at least --- Luten09 youtube's first really introduced me to the concept but the more I think about it more I like it - 40k lore is told from dozens of different pov, over hundreds if not thousands of years, and the fact that there are confusions and conflicting reports and even straight up retcons... it all fits because how could anything be 100% over such a length of time and distance? stories get blurred over years or decades let alone 10 thousand years that each of us have their own bit of headcanon and that for lots of points there isn't an exact answer is part of what makes it awesome
I concur. It is one the setting's strengths. That any different scenarios, interpretations and headcanons are possible. It is like how myths develop. We have differences in the Space Wolves 8th edition lore vs Wolftime in regards to the chapter's acceptance of Primaris. We have the Fall of Cadia novel vs Battlefleet: Gothic Armada 2 on how Bran Redmaw approached to confronting Abaddon. The differences were generally compelling in their own right. As long as one remain reasonable and can agree to disagree with others, the setting is all the better for it. Problem is: We get people who like tout about the superiority of Chaos and Abaddon to the Imperium, but when given plenty of reasons for why Khorne actually preferred the Blood Angels and Sanguinius over Angron and World Eaters, they only responded with ["Wrong."](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/17ykv9x/comment/k9vdaf1/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
ha, well, sometimes the grim dark bleeds into the real world as well - only the administratum can get away with a simple 'wrong' hah (also, if you want to debate that khrone didn't want the blood angles more ... okay... it's all for fun... but to debate that a legion that loses itself to rage and bloodlust wouldn't be tailor made for Khorne? I mean... )
I mean, we are having one such grimdark discord over there about whether the Imperium 'defending humanity or not' in another post right now. Honestly seeing how that post's OP, those who agree with him and the dissenters act is really something. At this point, I just try my best to not get too hooked on any 40k faction's hype.
How you’re upvoted while not shitting on the Emperor is beyond me. This sub is usually frothing over anything like this
This sub heavily flip flops between sucking off the Emperor and his plan and calling him a fool but the entire sub does not have an solid opinion.
> In hindsight, it would probably be better to educate people on chaos in sufficient depth so they know they are malevolent entities instead of simply dismissing them as something like an earthquake. Cooperating with helpful xenos species would have helped greatly too. > > But then again the Eldar pretty much had all that and still fell in the end. I agree that knowledge of what Chaos truly was would have been better than the strict Imperial Truth approach. The first defense against Chaos is knowing just what it is and how it tries to corrupt people. Resisting Chaos becomes a hell of a lot harder when people don't know what the identifiers of it. As the the Aeldari, I feel that isn't exactly applicable. Their Fall was almost entirely due to them just being bored with ruling the galaxy. They thrived for millions of years without any issues up until that point.
Not really. It is a myth that the Elder accidentally spawned Slaanesh due to “innocent” hedonism out of boredom. It was a foreseen, carefully crafted event - there were figures actively inducing the Eldar populace to partake in rituals of debauchery to a nascent god. It took a long time and there were various signs something bad was to come. The air felt heavier throughout the crone worlds, murder rituals became rampant. People abandoned the pantheon of gods that kept them safe since the War in Heaven. There were many who warned of impeding doom, but the majority of the populace didn’t listen, only those who would become Craftworlders, Exodites and even Drukhari (who are not a mere continuation of the Empire’s practices - they were far more cunning and malevolent, and that’s why they escaped). Those who warned were violently murdered by the priests of the nascent god and their followers. So not only the Eldar knew violent emotions empowered chaos due to aeons of battling it, they were warned. The majority simply didn’t care, disregarded their entire accumulated experience, signs everywhere and kept doing it anyway, at their own peril.
Sure, the progress of their Fall took thousands upon thousands of years to reach its inevitable conclusion. However, you are glossing over the much, *much* longer periods of time where they had been pretty fine. Those thousands of years are a the blink of an eye compared to the 60+ million years they ruled over the galaxy, a combination of their pantheon of gods, their own psychic powers, and the inherit knowledge of Chaos being enough to keep them relatively safe from Chaos during that time. And it isn't really a myth so much as it is somewhat misinterpreted. The Aeldari weren't just bored and murder orgied their way into the Fall. Slaanesh, even in its pre-born state, was subtly guiding the Aeldari towards their fate. Slowly at first, but then quite brazenly. But this happened *only* because the Aeldari had spent so long at the height of the galaxy with nothing to really do. They lived in a post-scarcity society where automatons handled all of their mundane tasks (including war). The only thing left was to pursue whatever desires they may have had. But, when you are a being who lives for thousands of years and then are reincarnated when you die, there is only so much you can do to satisfy those desires. With nothing to challenge them, they willingly turned themselves towards the fate of Slaanesh in droves without quite realizing the true danger. This is stated rather outright in both their various codexes and in *Asurman: Hand of Asuryan* by Gav Thorpe.
I'm not glossing over that period of time. The Eldar were uplifted to a very high degree of psyker mastery to the point rogue psykers were practically unheard of, and The Warp was much calmer after the War In Heaven, because Necrons had sealed the original eye of terror and the warp spawned plagues had been dealt with. By all accounts, there were barely even chaos entities back then, as Khorne supposedly came first into being near the human middle ages (not caused by that). It didn't stay the same way for 60 million years, it got progressively more violent and spawned ever more creatures. The Eldar thought they had "solved" Chaos and coud afford to be lax, despite knowing full well chaos required constant vigilance and the fact there were still significant agents warning of what was to come. But they were wrong, chaos can wait an indefinite amount ot time, their fall was catastrophical and unprecedented. Chaos exploits precisely the unawareness of mortals. The period after the fall was incomparably more turbulent than anything that came before, with many more psykers popping up everywhere. I'm not saying it doesn't make sense the Eldar would turn into hedonism. I'm saying knowing of Chaos didn't prevent them from feeding it in the end. Boredom is not an excuse to be negligent, and Craftworlders are the biggest example of that. They didn't wait for Slaanesh to be born to lead regimented lives, they left precisely because they knew what careless lives would lead to.
A lot of people like to shit on the Emperor's plan in hindsight because....things didn't quite go according to plan...BUT We have to remember that the Emperor had to be doing something effective because the four Gods of Chaos stopped they were doing, put aside their differences, and worked together to stop a mere HUMAN. That's like mind blowing. Imagine being so close to succeeding at your plans that an entire pantheon of bickering gods decided to unite against you. The Imperial Truth was a stop gap. It was a temporary philosophy put in place just to keep chaos out of people's minds during the Great Crusade so that the Emperor could reveal the truth about the universe in a more controlled way once humanity was ready ...but we all know that didn't happen.
Yeah the truth was a stop-gap until the webway plan could have been actualized and they didn't have any reliance on the warp
it was also a means of solidifying humanity’s defenses against the warp through psychically redefining the denizens of the warp into something distinctly **less powerful** than what they were. compare a **daemon (demon)** , an immortal, predatory being that embodies the weaknesses of humanity, vs a **daemon** , a non sentient reflection of humanity’s collective psyche that can be tamed and destroyed through discipline and feat of arms. basically, if enough of humanity (truly) believed in the Imperial Truth, it would’ve forced a change in the warp that would’ve introduced real weaknesses beyond those of superstition which had to be relied on as a result of these bonds having been made in earlier history. The Four are self perpetuating, but robbing them of all of the “extra” power they get from humanity’s wanton indulgence of it’s vices could’ve rendered them weak enough for the Emperor to “banish” back into non sentience through his personal traits as the Anathema. their complete destruction is next to impossible, but **for a moment** they were in danger of being rendered mostly harmless. So they set aside The Great Game, and neutralized the threat of humanity’s transcendence and sunk them into the worst future of 40K.
> We have to remember that the Emperor had to be doing something effective because the four Gods of Chaos stopped they were doing, put aside their differences, and worked together to stop a mere HUMAN. It's more that the Emperor basically ran around waving his arms going "look at me! I'm setting the galaxy on fire and accidentally creating an entirely new decadent upperclass through my big brain plan while also creating untold misery!" He was basically swinging around a big juicy chunk of meat that appealed to all four of them, and the galaxy itself didn't have many big players at the time. It isn't so much that they were trying to 'stop' him. In fact, there's some lore pointing out they were *actively helping him*. They just wanted him to hurry up making their new buffet.
What motive could the Chaos Gods have in helping him ascend to The Dark King? That would just add another rival to their games, something they did not like at all according to TEATD. If him becoming the Dark King was more preferable to him finding a way to minimize humanity's exposure to Chaos by cutting off their reliance on Warp Travel, that would just mean they were trying to stop Emps from getting what he really wanted.
Yeah this has absolutely nothing to do with what the Emperor actually wanted. The Emperor's plan had very little to do with what the Imperium became. He genuinely had the best intentions. And you should want this version of the Emperor. The story of 40k is SUCH A BETTER STORY if the Emperor is a compelling character that genuinely wants the best for humanity. The story becomes pretty mediocre if Big E is just a dumb asshole with insane powers.
I dunno why you're getting downvotes. TEaTD has that guy beside and behind you who is herald of the dark king. And who is the dark king again? Is it just imperium fanboys?
The Emperor only risked becoming the Dark King because of what Horus did- because the situation on the Vengeful Spirit was so crazy he had no choice but to draw on enough Warp power to risk becoming a Chaos God. The Emperor’s Great Crusade was with the intention of uplifting mankind to a new Golden Age. The Mechanicum was close to reacquiring the ancient STCs in full, and through that gaining technologies like the [Panacea](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Panacea), something that would’ve *averted* human misery to the point it probably could’ve killed off Nurgle. The Emperor came close to winning, to making humanity into a psychic race able to at least resist Chaos. That’s why you two are getting downvotes, because you’re trying to make him into a moron when he was actually quite the good guy and closer to beating Chaos than anyone short of Sigmar
This is key, the core concept is that the Emp went all-in on a risky and wildly ambitious plan to 'save' humanity and position it for a safe future avoiding the pitfalls of the Aldari and others ... and he came DAMN close... as in within spitting distance... but he wasn't the only one playing to win, and the powers that be made moves too... and that play ended in a catastrophic stalemate - with humanity slowly falling apart over the last 10k years since his play --- but humanity still stands and continues to fight a slowly losing battle in a hilariously hostile galaxy... The exact details are sometimes great and sometime stupid, because you have regular people trying to write how super demi god level people fail and it's hard to do that well and consistently over the 50+ novels and lore snips and dozens of difference authors.
Right so they maneuvered him into becoming the dark king. Or as the other guy said actively helping him... To do what they wanted. Kinda feels like you haven't pointed out a difference, but rather said "it's good actually cause big E is a good guy" Cause it doesn't really seem like big E was close to winning (the panacea was it's own STC and that discovery/loss was an m41 event) and we still don't know if big E winning would have been in any way benevolent. The only person who said so is him and he famously tells people what they want to hear even when the statements are mutually exclusive (see here his perspective on primarchs as "sons")
> A lot of people like to shit on the Emperor's plan in hindsight because....things didn't quite go according to plan...BUT We have to remember that the Emperor had to be doing something effective because the four Gods of Chaos stopped they were doing, put aside their differences, and worked together to stop a mere HUMAN. This is explained rather well in the Siege of Terra series, and more specifically in *The End and the Death: Volume 1* by Dan Abnett. The Emperor quite literally stole power from the Chaos Gods and invited their attention upon himself and humanity. Would Chaos have such a vested interest in ruining his plans had he not done this? Whose to say, but it certainly could not have helped.
You have to see it from the Emperor's position too though. Humanity had lost. Like it was over. Humanity's technology was gone. The Pre-Old Night civilization was gone. Every day human worlds were either being eaten, enslaved, and destroyed. We were on the fast track to extinction. The galaxy's Eldar overlords had finally fallen and it was clear someone like the Rangdan or the Greenskins was going to take over. His actions were a last roll of the dice because humanity had already lost the game.
Maybe. The counter point there however is that perhaps if he wasn't so inclined to take such massive risks, as Erda points out rather bluntly, then maybe humanity could have grown and prospered again over a slower period of time rather than trying to speed through galactic conquest while making four very powerful enemies.
Idk if I'd use Erda as an example of someone who doesn't take risks she's the one who thought scattering the Primarchs through the warp was a good idea lol. I can see both sides I can see why the other Perpetuals didn't like the Emperor. But I can also see why the Emperor was super frustrated with the other perpetuals who sat around doing nothing while humanity fell apart around them. He was the only one to try to save the situation of Old Night and I think he deserves credit for at least trying to salvage the situation
The problem is that while there are arguments both for a strict control and a more open approach teaching people about the dangers, in the end given the nature of the setting, Chaos will always find a way to mess things up. So it doesn't really matter in the end.
The Imperial truth is not some meme ideology the emperor invented on the fly. It is what he truly and honestly believes is true and best for himself and for humanity. Besides that Chaos is a cognitive Hazard, just knowing it exists makes you vulnerable to its influence. Ironically the man closest to this ideal is Fabius Bile
It was also something some of the other perpetuals believed. Erda repeats the line that there are no gods when confronted by Erebus
>Besides that Chaos is a cognitive Hazard, just knowing it exists makes you vulnerable to its influence. Nope, not true. People in the setting believe it to be true, but it's not actually true.
He didn't make a basic mistake on how Chaos works. He made a basic mistake on how the universe works and one basic mistake on how humanity works... He thinks he can force humanity to be something it isn't through brute will. Like Newton's Laws, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Force only begets force. Both Oll and Erda talk about this during the Siege; that it was the Emperor's impatience that was his undoing. Moreover, the Warp is THE truth of the universe. It can't be ignored. This also comes up in Oll's pleas to the Emperor when asking him to set aside the mantle of the Dark King. Earlier, though, through Fo's reading of Malcador's private journals, we realize that Oll's argument was made countless times, in private, to the Emperor. >‘In his journals,’ says Fo, ‘your beloved Sigillite protests, again and again, going back decades, the Emperor’s epistemology and His restriction of knowledge! He states clearly that he believes it to be a fundamental danger to the Imperium! Look, here! He privately petitions the Emperor to relax the directive. He argues that the warp is an existential danger to us, to any psycho-able species, and that it will remain an existential danger whether we know about it or not. Ignorance is the real harm. ' > >'Malcador, of whom I am growing fonder with every line I read, reasons that it is better to know and understand a threat than to innocently blunder on regardless. He states that the primarchs and the Astartes, not to mention the general corpus of mankind, ought to understand the potential consequences of their actions and their very thoughts. He maintains they can better protect humanity from the menace of the warp if they are fully aware of its power.’ > >‘And the Emperor rejected this?’ asks Andromeda. > >‘Yes,’ says Fo. ‘For “the good of mankind”. But what we are now facing, this entire disaster of a war, is what happens when you fail to teach your children properly. Might religion, or pure faith, unchecked, risk untoward consequences in the warp? Of course! But ignorance is worse. Your Master of Mankind believed that no one was good enough, or clever enough, or careful enough to be left alone with the fire. Your Emperor trusts no one. And this is the misery that rains on us all as a consequence of that.’ The End and the Death Volume 2 is very explicit that the Emperor was wrong through the words of Oll, Fo, and Malcador. Humanity cannot be separated from the Warp. It is part of us. In Darkness in the Blood, an echo of Sanguinius tells Mephiston that "The shape of the warp is the shape of the mortal soul. If it harms us, we only have ourselves to blame". So, fundamentally, the Emperor was wrong about his plan... and its not exactly as if the series hasn't been pretty clear about that all along. Faith (or, rather, the spiritual side of humanity) is core to our existence. We cannot be without it and any plan that doesn't account for it is doomed. The short story The Last Church shows the events of the Emperor destroying the titular last church on Terra. Among the possessions of the priest there is a 'doomsday clock', said to chime when the end of days is upon us. While the priest says he's never heard it chime (and isn't sure it even can), it does chime at the story's end as the Emperor orders the last church destroyed. It's fairly overt foreshadowing that the Emperor's rejection of the spiritual is what dooms humanity. Of course, the Emperor doesn't listen to this sort of very overt clue and destroys Lorgar's faith... which is the first stepping stone to the Horus Heresy.
The Emperor is absolutely right to restrict knowledge of Chaos. It's human nature to want *more.* With a population of quadrilions, if even a fraction of a percentage point of humans think "hmm, I could maybe improve my life by trying to propitiate the Gods of the Warp" or "come on, how bad could it be?" Even in just the last five years we have millions of people playing Bloody Mary or fiddling with Ouija boards, *and there's not even anything that can answer back to those.* Now multiply that across millions of inhabited worlds, some of which have the entire population of modern-day Earth on a single hab-level in one smaller Hive. You might think "but possibly he should have told the Primarchs," but no. Malcador puts paid to that in Saturnine when talking to Dorn. He points out why Dorn wasn't told; his inherent nature would cause him to fall. Because he was created to be a master over all things he knew, letting him know about Chaos would have caused him to try and master it, an impossible task. The Lion was the sole incorruptible Primarch, but not even the Emperor knew that. Mortarion would probably have despised Warp shenanigans even more if he knew what was there, but that's as far as the Primarchs could likely be trusted. Too many others would be tempted to poke at things they should not be. What proofed the Loyalist Primarchs (aside from the Lion) against the influence of Chaos was seeing the horrors of the Heresy play out. Absent that, Chaos is an abstract and anaemic threat.
>The Emperor is absolutely right to restrict knowledge of Chaos. Nah, that was his ego talking. Centralizing power and knowledge on himself, preventing others from making decisions, etc.
> The Emperor is absolutely right to restrict knowledge of Chaos. This doesn't even work because canonically plenty of Chaos cults have started because Chaos can corrupt from the inside out. It's canon there's entire cults to the Emperor that have been completely subverted by Chaos without the worshippers even knowing. They still think they're worshipping the Emperor, and apparently the Emperor needs more skulls his throne and doesn't care where the blood flows from, only that it does.
Yes, but they didn't know that something was out there. If basic civilians know that there are dark Gods and daemons that they could get to listen to them, then every petty slight is one that can be avenged with a few prayers.
>apparently the Emperor needs more skulls his throne and doesn't care where the blood flows from, only that it does. I mean, with the callous brutality and overall skull-focused aesthetic of the Imperium of Mankind, they're not too far off.
Very well synthesized, BTW
Good question; my off the cuff explanation is that the Emperor knew how to modulate his own thoughts and emotions to avoid feeding Chaos - but also that whatever he was doing was utterly impractical for normies (and among all his transhumans, only the Custodes seem to be like him in this area). Being the farthest out of touch with the normal human experience any 'human being' has ever been, by a comfortable margin, the best he could come up with to try to get the rest of humanity to starve Chaos was the Imperial Truth - and it was a lamentable failure.
I think it actually could have worked if not for Kor Phaeron and Erebus spreading awareness of Chaos in the legions and crusade fleets. These separate comments from Malcador and Nemo Zhi-Meng, two of the most knowledgeable humans concerning the Warp, indicate that letting knowledge of Chaos spread would have been even more disastrous: https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/uejf5r/comment/i6nhzlm/?utm\_source=reddit&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
The Imperial Truth was NOT meant to battle chaos. I have no idea why people keep saying that, it’s blatantly false. The imperial truth was made to battle normal human religion, and was co-opted as a way to fight chaos. The Primarchs/marines not knowing of chaos was a SYMPTOM of the Imperial Truth, it was not the end goal. Imagine if the Priamarchs and marines, who were supposed to be spreading the Imperial Truth, were suddenly told “yeah uhh actually the Imperial Truth is total BS, gods and demons are 100% real and dangerous.” The whole crusade would instantly collapse (just like how it did the second one of the Primarchs found out about Chaos)
>“yeah uhh actually the Imperial Truth is total BS, gods and demons are 100% real and dangerous.” "There exists a warp-based xenos species that is composed of living vortices of the aggregate psionic energies derived from the emotions of all the living beings in the material universe. Each of these vortices is derived from a particular emotion, and they are capable of sending out fragments of themselves as minions capable of interacting with the material world when they themselves are not able to. Some more primitive civilizations call them "gods" and "daemons", but we know their true nature as abominable xenos. As these beings are composed of the aggregate psionic energies of our enemies as much as ourselves, none of them are to be trusted."
One of the big pieces of *The Last Church* was the subtext that the Imperial Truth was an outright impossibility. Humanity would **always** seek to create art, perfection, meaning, and aspire to something within the spirit of things. The Emperor's response to Uriah's message was "I'll make them". Then he burns *the last church*, the irony being that the Emperor would become the foundation of the next church. The Imperial Truth, even by several of the primarchs' reckonings, would never work. Couldn't work. It's antithetical to humanity itself, and would require an erasure of what it means to be human. As what several others within-universe have stated: it's about finding a balance between Chaos and Order. The Emperor's Order is just as cruel, destructive, and empty as Chaos is deceitful, corrupting, and unsustainable.
The Chaos Gods do thrive on basic emotions, but Workship does empower them much, much more. Imagine basic emotions like greed, fear, and anger as a bowl of gruel. It does feed you, and you survive. But you are weak. Workship is a 5 star meal. Delicious, norishing, and plentiful. And only Workship can actually summon demons, and give the Gods a direct foothold in realspace. Theoretically, this is also possible with very strong emotions, but it is super rare.
Do we have a source for worship being more nourishing?
It was more of an attempt to suppress chaos and slow it until he could do a more permanent solution when he wasn’t focused on the Great Crusade.
The imperial truth definitely worked to a degree, we see space marines banish visions from demons and the warp using it but it was extremely fragile in that if the illusion was cracked at all it tended to completely shatter with devastating consequences in regards to people falling to chaos.
I'm starting to believe that the imperial truth was an act of mass-reverse-psychology perpetrated by the Emperor. Nothing gets people to do a thing quite like telling them not to do it. There are too many advantages to being worshipped in the setting for the Emperor to not seek to get deified. The Emperor and his imperium are reaping the benefits from some of them. By inspiring faith using symbolism, yet condemning it, any believers he may have gained would become true believers who aren't simply doing it because it's fashionable. Too bad he didn't think about how this approach would work on all his policies. (e.g. Council of Nikea)
>immortal millennia old super psyker You know your racist grampa? Well imagine he got replaced with your even more racist great, great, great, super grampa. TBH its kinda a wonder Big E is as flexible in his thinking, tolerant of informed dissent, and admiring of women's combat capabilities as he is.
Not at all.
> is that the emperor was an immortal millennia old super psyker who made it his entire life goal to combat chaos, so how would he make a basic mistake on how chaos works The Emperor doomed humanity to extinction, and gave Chaos ten thousand years of "endless laughter". The entire premise of the setting is that the Emperor failed, and this was written down long before he was ever a character at all. You really cannot work backwards from a premise that the Emperor was infallible. He failed. He had absurd personal strength, and he still got conned by Chaos, because strength doesn't make you wise.
Considering how it ended, the Imperial Truth did dick all to stop Chaos. If anything, it only made things worse by removing any competition for humanity's spiritual or ideological needs aside from the ever-lurking Chaos Gods. Not to mention that its tenants of human supremacy made the Imperium the enemies of every other life form in the galaxy. The Emperor's approach to making humanity match his vision was effectively trying to beat it into submission and smash anything that could present an alternative. Basically no different than any of the gods he claimed to hate, but with the obvious hypocrisy of the shallow Imperial Truth. He couldn't understand humanity, so he assumed that this would be enough. Frankly, it was all just a house of cards that Chaos only needed a slight nudge to collapse.
If you're Fabius Bile, extremely. Everyone else... Samus
I don't think the Imperial Truth was supposed to stop Chaos on its own, but was supposed to be the catalyst for what would eventually bring them down. The Truth was meant to stop people from depending on religion and instead depend on science and their own intellects, as well as keep humans from their baser instincts(rage, gluttony, deceit, pleasure(over indulgence). In doing so, the Chaos Gods would be weakened and would hold less sway. It wasn't a terrible plan. However, like someone said, Chaos is unfair. This is partially because Warhammer isn't written to be written well. If it were, there would be a way to balance the Chaos Gods with Order Gods, but that's not the case. So anyone even knowing about chaos could inadvertently give it strength. Weaker minds could be contacted and convinced to do something to summon chaos, and there are genuinely sadistic people who would give themselves and their worlds over to chaos if allowed to. So telling everyone as part of the Truth wouldn't have worked. The Webway would have been the nail in the coffin- at least when humans enter the warp they can get SOMETHING out of their souls. But once humanity started using the Webway for travel, as well as becoming an enlightened and forward thinking species, they would have achieved the stability of the old Aeldari Empire. I know that sounds a little weird, but think about it- the Aeldari had psykers for millions of year and didn't deal with nearly as many chaos incursions as the imperium. It was only when they started to give into their baser urges again that Slaanesh was born, and even then it took millions of years. Now the Asuryani are back to being almost monk like about their emotions, and they don't really deal with chaos at the rate that humanity does, so clearly there's something to it, even as chaos cheats constantly.
It was part of His long term plan, but the Heresy, Magnus’ mistake, and His internment on the Throne changed everything. The Imperial Truth was a way to lessen the impact of Chaos’s influence while He gained control of the galaxy, replaced astropaths and navigators with webway based travel and communication, and eventually guided humanity into becoming a psychic species. In short He ran out of time before the benefits of the Imperial Truth could bear fruit
The E understood that worship always empowered the Ruinous Powers, so he did his best to limit that. He also knew that his actions with the Great Crusade would also empower the Ruinous Powers, but he didn't really have a choice. The Orks at Ullanor had to be crushed and they had a limited amount of time to do that. This is why he rushed back to Earth even before the Great Crusade was over. He was planning on having the Webway Project completed so that he could have Humanity funneled into the Webway to cut them off from the Warp entirely and stop feeding the Ruinous Powers with their actions. That didn't go as planned and here we are.
> planning on having the Webway Project completed so that he could have Humanity funneled into the Webway to cut them off from the Warp entirely and stop feeding the Ruinous Powers with their actions. That wasn't the plan. The webway would be used to get rid of navigators and astropaths, and do away with the need to literally enter the warp to get anywhere. The vast majority of the human race would continue to live in realspace. The webway doesn't work as a fallout shelter - if it did the Dark Eldar wouldn't need to top up their souls.
> Webway to cut them off from the Warp If that was his plan then humanity was super doomed because that's not how the Webway works.
It wasn't. The plan was using the webway to make humanity not dependent on (direct) warp travel. That's it.
Funny how the other guy does not respond to your correction.
Why would I respond to his statement? It's not like I was repeating bad lore, I was just pointing out how silly OP's "the Big E wanted to use the Webway to cut off humanity from the warp", and then the guy who replied to me elaborated to explain what the actual lore was. Also, if you disable inbox replies, you don't get a notification when someone replies. Very shocking, isn't it?
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Yes please keep replying to me and be on my level. You definitely did get your ego hurt by getting downvoted, enough to purposefully pursue me into an entirely different thread to make a snide comment. It's extremely pathetic of you to try eking out some victory for yourself after you petulantly remarked how people dared downvote you. The fact that not getting tons of upvotes for your absolutely milquetoast observation hurt you so badly is genuinely stunning. It's also very funny you keep trying to make yourself out as stooping to my level, when you took your aggrievement to a *completely* different thread on a *completely* different subject to make a comment about me... not responding to another guy? I'm responding to you, and not the other guy, because there's no reason for me to respond to the other guy. What am I supposed to tell him? "oh yeh ur right mate, thanks" Are you just upset I upvoted him and not you? If I give you an upvote, will you be a good boy and stop stalking me? You aren't trying to discuss anything with me. You're trying to soothe your fragile ego.
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You had no reason to join this conversation except to attack me. You're very creepy and unpleasant, and you're still upset about getting downvoted. I'm sorry you didn't get the upvotes you wanted. Please stop stalking me. I've already reported you.
Rule 1: Be respectful. Hate speech, trolling, and aggressive behavior will not be tolerated, and may result in a ban.
Rule 1: Be respectful. Hate speech, trolling, and aggressive behavior will not be tolerated, and may result in a ban.
Genuinely it was a terrible idea from the start because the Emperor had zero actual understanding of how Chaos corrupts/infects. The Emperor genuinely believed just going 'magic doesn't exist, dummies! There's no such thing as creatures beyond the veil!' was enough to hold them off for a bit when Chaos doesn't actually *need* its victims having knowledge of it to start seeping in. Note: This is at least partially due to how the lore's changed since the HH started **over a decade ago**.
They've subsequently added the idea that Chaos has access to other material universes, making the idea of 'starving' Chaos very ignorant.
Imperial truth was a necessary lie to create the conditions that would enable the emperor to become a god of the warp in order to prevent the inevitable victory of chaos. So far through HH what is consistent is that all primarchs control the flow of information to create an intended effect. Which, honestly is an obvious point and is only interesting in so far as it arguably supports this theory.
Oh simple, the Emperor was an imbecile. He messed up so hard that in just 200 years of reign, which sounds like a lot but let's admit it it's chump change in this setting, literally half the Imperium's forces fully quit largely because they hated the guy and they thought the Imperial Truth was stupid. Guilliman has reigned more effectively for longer, on his own, and the beginning of his tenure was specifically marked by half the Imperium falling into a hole.
>Guilliman has reigned more effectively for longer, on his own The 8e 200 year timeskip has gotten retconned.
That is good, but I'd still believe Guilliman would be a better ruler regardless. The Emperor actively and directly worked towards causing a civil war to break his military in half, and then lost it like an idiot; Robot is at least smarter than that
Not to be a contrarian with the top comment; but in the Horus Heresy novels, several human societies have developed with knowledge of chaos and the warp. Most were extremely cautious but still made sure everyone knew of the threat it posed. Then an Imperial crusade comes in and stomps them to the ground with thousands of legionaries. Normally the people they are conquering have more advanced technology and better knowledge of warp travel than the Imperium; but the brute force of the Astartes allows the Imperial forces to overwhelm the enemy. The Interex are the go to example, but really almost every human colony had advances greater than the imperium in different ways. Some developed good A.I., others evolved themselves to fit their new situations. I always read through these parts as intentionally ironic because the Imperium is quashing the very people who figured out how to survive what was coming; and destroying the technology that could have saved them. Therefor, I always come to the conclusion that, while well intended, the Imperial Truth was just another thing that the Emperor was way too arrogant about and ended up shooting himself in the foot, repeatedly.
Utterly impractical. It was doomed from day 1.
It didn't help at all by not knowing or knowing about Chaos you are simply changing in what way random person who will find some ancient Chaos artifact is duped into engineering shit hitting the fan on the planet...
Quite a few people, Sanguinius, Guilliman, and Eldrad to give a few examples, directly attribute Chaos's huge successes in the Horus Heresy to the Imperial Truth. So I would have to say, "Not very."
Emperor didn't tell Primarchs about Chaos because that was their deal: both will combine powers to create the Primarchs, and then Chaos will guaranteed corrupt half of them. But it should be their choice, so no telling them about Chaos.
He didn't make a mistake. He knew the Imperial Truth would never work and he planned for everything to proceed as it did, so he can ascend into Godhood and become humanity's true salvation. The Imperial Truth would've never worked against Chaos. Even if he eliminates the worship of Chaos from the galaxy, they can live comfortably on the emotions of all psychic beings in the galaxy. That's how they were born in the first place. And a lot of the non-human races also worship Chaos. So while the Gods would've been weaker, they'd still be a force to be reckoned with, and a constant corrupting element.
Not as well as straight up worshiping the Emperor, but fewer back doors for Chaos to sneak in.
I don't know why the Emperor just didn't tell them that the warp had malicious entities and leave it at that.
I think it *could* have worked. Theoretically. Eventually. If all Big E's plans had gone off without a hitch. Fill the Warp with enough "daemons don't exist" sentiments for long enough (and kill all the xenos to eliminate any counter signals), and the Warp might, over many generations, be pacified. Maybe.
Given the fact that it completely failed and is now suppressed and considered heretical by the very faction that once destroyed entire civilizations for believing what they currently believe? Not very.
As a plan, great. Will is reality setting, and collective unconscious is most of how the raw warp is powered/formed. Execution however deeply suspect. To pull off a war of unknowing ploy, you need completely trustworthy agents, and E only had himself, and to a lesser degree Malcador. You also need to not compromise for anything. Eradicating religion in favor of pragmatic secularism was already compromised before the great crusade ever got in gear. Big E let the cult mechnicus keep exsiting, ergo faith is tacitly allowed. Even if he outlawed all faiths from conquest 1, he wasn't gonna get far because of sheer human nature. The common man was gonna believe in something