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Was the Emperor born before or after the (first three) Chaos Gods? or were they born at the same time?

yes he was born prior to the 4 chaos gods manifesting in the 40k setting but once they are born they have always existed as time in the warp is not linear.

As far as I know the oldest three were born during/as a result of the war in heaven, which google tells me ended 60 or 70 million years ago. So the gods should precede emps by quite a bit.

There is a difference between the creation and awakening of the Dark Gods. They didn't "exist" as it were until they awoke, sort of like how clay isn't a pot until you shape it to be so.
Khorne and Nurgle both awoke during Terra's Middle Ages, linked to the many conflicts and plagues of the period.

The Emperor popped up around the 8th millennium and it is confirmed that He was Alexander the Great, and very possibly Xenophon, a Greek military leader and philosopher who led the Ten Thousand against Babylon. It is also implied He was Jesus and that He conquered the Tower of Babel before it was destroyed.
Then again, the Emperor we all know and love didn't really come into being until the Dark Age of Technology when He traveled to Molech to make a bargain with the Chaos Gods. The man who made the bargain and the man who later emerged on Terra during the Age of Strife were not the same person.

Kind of? Ish? Maybe?

The creation myth of The Emperor can be found in Realm of Chaos, Slaves to Darkness.

Potted version is early Psykers were Shaman’s, and a kind of perpetual. When they died, their soul bathed in the warp, and when regenerated, they reincarnated.

But, the warp became unstable, and reincarnation became harder and harder, with not all of them making it.

So the remaining Shaman (Shamen?) committed ritual suicide, pooled their souls in the warp, and reincarnated as the being that would become known as The Emperor.

The Warp eventually destabilised enough that the Gods were born. But, it was their birth pangs that upset it in the first place.

I thought it was the backlash from the War in Heaven that caused the Warp to go bananas and in turn, led to the conditions that would allow for entities such as the Enslavers and Daemons to form.
Pre-War the Warp was something the Old Ones would use quite frequently but then they started making soldier races that utilised it as a weapon which combined with the galactic scale genocide that has never been replicated, messed up the once calm Sea of Souls.

Consider also that humanity is not the only species to influence the warp.

Slannesh was an eldar warp god.


Just because the rage identity khorne woke up in 800 ad doesn't mean rage gods created by other species didn't exist.

The 3 chaos gods are humanity's imprint on the roiling warp but rage, despair and hope existed before them.


Khorne is just the human flavour of the eternal warp storm that is sentient rage.

Due to the supernatural nature of the Dark Gods, the moment they awoke they had in turn always existed which allowed species like the Laer to worship Slaanesh for thousands of years despite the Prince of Pleasure only technically being at most a few decades old.
The Dark Gods started as human gods but became so much more as they are paracausal beings.

 Gert wrote:
I thought it was the backlash from the War in Heaven that caused the Warp to go bananas and in turn, led to the conditions that would allow for entities such as the Enslavers and Daemons to form.
Pre-War the Warp was something the Old Ones would use quite frequently but then they started making soldier races that utilised it as a weapon which combined with the galactic scale genocide that has never been replicated, messed up the once calm Sea of Souls.

That background cropped up in the original Necron Codex, and it’s not clear if that’s still canonical, allegorical etc.

I think it’s still canon that some kind of plague (believed, perhaps erroneously to be The Enslavers) did for The Old Ones in the end, and the resulting denuding of Galactic life is why the Necrons decided “sod it, we’re off to bed”. But I’m not 100% on that.

 Gert wrote:
Due to the supernatural nature of the Dark Gods, the moment they awoke they had in turn always existed which allowed species like the Laer to worship Slaanesh for thousands of years despite the Prince of Pleasure only technically being at most a few decades old.
The Dark Gods started as human gods but became so much more as they are paracausal beings.

Is that necessarily right? Wasn't Slaanesh's birth the cause of Old Night? That's like 5k years before the Heresy or somesuch. Don't need timewimey fiddling for the Laer to worship Slaanesh when it had existed for 5k years by that point.

The Birth of Slaanesh ended the Long Night and was the signal the Emperor was waiting for to launch the Unification Wars/Great Crusade.

The birth of Slaanesh effectively cleared up the choppiness of the Warp caused by the proliferation of unchecked human psykers and the shenanigans of the Aeldari.

 Gert wrote:
There is a difference between the creation and awakening of the Dark Gods. They didn't "exist" as it were until they awoke, sort of like how clay isn't a pot until you shape it to be so.
Khorne and Nurgle both awoke during Terra's Middle Ages, linked to the many conflicts and plagues of the period.

The Emperor popped up around the 8th millennium and it is confirmed that He was Alexander the Great, and very possibly Xenophon, a Greek military leader and philosopher who led the Ten Thousand against Babylon. It is also implied He was Jesus and that He conquered the Tower of Babel before it was destroyed.
Then again, the Emperor we all know and love didn't really come into being until the Dark Age of Technology when He traveled to Molech to make a bargain with the Chaos Gods. The man who made the bargain and the man who later emerged on Terra during the Age of Strife were not the same person.

It was only Nurgle that awoke in the Middle Ages, Tzeentch awoke with the rise of civilisation and Khorne even earlier than that.

And interesting thought experiment though - did the events in human history RoC linked with the awakening of the first 3 gods cause their awakening, or did their awakening cause the events?

E.g. were humans inspired to violence by the birth of Khorne, to build civilisation by the birth or Tzeentch, and the Black Death the aftereffects of the birth of Nurgle?

That feels like an unanswerable question

We know from Slaanesh’s birth, that before being fully fledged, Slaanesh’s gestating consciousness was able to create a sort of feedback loop. As the Ancient Eldar slid into depravity, Slaanesh was fed, and was by degrees able to influence the Ancient Eldar to ever greater indolence, indulgence and depravity.

But, it seems the Ancient Eldar started that particularly dance.

Mankind however, especially in ages past, lacked the numbers and psychic talent of the Eldar. So I’m not particularly persuaded Man ever created a Chaos God. Not back then, anyway.

Lord Zarkov wrote:
It was only Nurgle that awoke in the Middle Ages, Tzeentch awoke with the rise of civilisation and Khorne even earlier than that.

Lex has Khorne waking in the Middle Ages as the first Chaos God. The only Chaos book I have to hand is Realms of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness and it doesn't go into a whole lot of detail because the background isn't where it is now.
Khorne is definitely the oldest though. That explains why he's always in a foul mood.

And interesting thought experiment though - did the events in human history RoC linked with the awakening of the first 3 gods cause their awakening, or did their awakening cause the events?

E.g. were humans inspired to violence by the birth of Khorne, to build civilisation by the birth or Tzeentch, and the Black Death the aftereffects of the birth of Nurgle?

It's sort of a mix of both. The Gods would have been fueled by the acts that awoke them but in so awakening caused yet more of those acts.
I believe the Black Death is specifically a result of Nurgle's awakening rather than the "cause" though.

Lord Zarkov wrote:


And interesting thought experiment though - did the events in human history RoC linked with the awakening of the first 3 gods cause their awakening, or did their awakening cause the events?

E.g. were humans inspired to violence by the birth of Khorne, to build civilisation by the birth or Tzeentch, and the Black Death the aftereffects of the birth of Nurgle?

Six and two threes.

It would be good to see some art of Khorne looking old as gak, making some skull sculptures in his shed down the bottom of the garden.

 Hellebore wrote:

Just because the rage identity khorne woke up in 800 ad doesn't mean rage gods created by other species didn't exist.

Where has the idea of species generating their own unique/individual God in the warp came from? The Chaos Gods aren't owned by a specific set of species, they're for the entire galaxy and species actions fuel them regardless of even if they know of them or not.

Ork and Eldar Gods are a different matter due to their creation by the Old Ones, and I know there's the stuff with a supposed Greater Good God but I've seen this sort of thing suggested before that even (and that doesn't seem to have been elaborated on since anyway). I just don't know where the idea that the Warp works like Neil Gaiman's American Gods where each species or set of beliefs can get their own Warp God for that belief/species has been established before that recent stuff.

The Warp is a reflection of emotion and feeling, the emotions felt from one species to the next aren't going to differ or be exclusive to them to the point a new warp god would be needed to manage over it.

 Mentlegen324 wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

Just because the rage identity khorne woke up in 800 ad doesn't mean rage gods created by other species didn't exist.

Where has the idea of species generating their own unique/individual God in the warp came from? The Chaos Gods aren't owned by a specific set of species, they're for the entire galaxy and species actions fuel them regardless of even if they know of them or not.

Ork and Eldar Gods are a different matter due to their creation by the Old Ones, and I know there's the stuff with a supposed Greater Good God but I've seen this sort of thing suggested before that even (and that doesn't seem to have been elaborated on since anyway). I just don't know where the idea that the Warp works like Neil Gaiman's American Gods where each species or set of beliefs can get their own Warp God for that belief/species has been established before that recent stuff.

The Warp is a reflection of emotion and feeling, the emotions felt from one species to the next aren't going to differ or be exclusive to them to the point a new warp god would be needed to manage over it.

Except emotions are different from different species, that's why Eldar fear Slaanesh even more than any other Chaos God.
There's also a strong standing theory that belief in the Emperor is creating the Emperor into a kind of Warp God (its one argument that the blessings Sisters of Battle get are from this source).

Tyranids meanwhile generate such different elements within the Warp that its not just different, but an active repulsion to others creating the Shadow in the Warp.



Different races most certainly can create different kinds of emotional reading and different kinds of soul that will attract different entities within the Warp. I'd also argue that the very powerful Warp Entities guard those variations like a resource. They fight over souls and having their own "niches" gives them room to grow and establish themselves and harvest/protect what is theirs. Even if many of those elements cross over each other.


It would be well to think it less that species own gods and more that gods guard and own species. However within that there's also elements of scale. The Warp Gods that feed of Orks, Eldar and Humanity are feeding of very numerous and very psy attuned races. Giving those gods a lot of raw "Food" to make them powerful and dominant entities within the Warp. Lesser races might well have their own "gods" but those gods might well be only lesser demons in power. Not enough to make them worth the concern nor even competing with the greater gods. Just hiding in small corners and surviving. Many perhaps lacking enough energy to even properly manifest in the physical world; thus trapped only in the warp

It is my personal thought that Emps formed from the Shamen because they knew the Chaos Gods were coming and/ or there already. But, I also think back in older lore it was Humans that caused the Chaos Gods- which is a Narcissism at it's finest, that humans who weren't even off Earth yet could spawn the great beings of chaos (Minus She who is Thirsty- thanks, Aeldari!).
I also have a headcanon that says Emps was walking around Earth and helping humanity- but during Old Night, he was researching genetics and found a way to change his own DNA into a super-being by use of his mighty Psyker powers. This would explain why he was able to make Thunder Warriors/ Primarchs, marines, etc, etc.

.. So, to answer the question I join the "we have no clear idea" camp.

 Mentlegen324 wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

Just because the rage identity khorne woke up in 800 ad doesn't mean rage gods created by other species didn't exist.

Where has the idea of species generating their own unique/individual God in the warp came from? The Chaos Gods aren't owned by a specific set of species, they're for the entire galaxy and species actions fuel them regardless of even if they know of them or not.

Ork and Eldar Gods are a different matter due to their creation by the Old Ones, and I know there's the stuff with a supposed Greater Good God but I've seen this sort of thing suggested before that even (and that doesn't seem to have been elaborated on since anyway). I just don't know where the idea that the Warp works like Neil Gaiman's American Gods where each species or set of beliefs can get their own Warp God for that belief/species has been established before that recent stuff.

The Warp is a reflection of emotion and feeling, the emotions felt from one species to the next aren't going to differ or be exclusive to them to the point a new warp god would be needed to manage over it.

Simply that two different species may feel rage but they aren't identical. This was the thesis at the heart of the liber chaotica books.

And that it makes 0 sense that a backwater planet with a few million ignorant humans that lacked psychic power created 3 chaos gods that somehow affected the whole galaxy while it took the trillions strong galactic Empire of psychically potent and immortality reincarnating Eldar millennia to create one god that was weaker than each previous chaos god...



The point being that the warp is a reflection of reality and filled with emotion. There was more emotion poured into it in the 60 million years prior to the existence of humanity than all of human history combined.

So if khorne wasn't created by the rageites 45 million years ago, something must have been for 40k metaphysics to make sense. Ergo, as humanity came to dominate reality their emotional 'flavour' took over the personality of the rage god from the gestalt of all galactic rage from all species. Khorne is now the face of galactic rage due to pure human numbers and the coinciding genocides of everything else that could also rage.

If humanity went extinct suddenly the rage god would still exist but it would come to adopt the face of the next most dominant raging species.


This is true of slannesh as well - created by the Eldar which simultaneously removed them from being a big warp influencer (is they're almost all dead) and becoming more and more aligned with humans, taking human followers etc.


If you accept the metaphysics of 40k in that the warp is where all emotions go, that emotions create warp gods, and that the 4 chaos gods reflect the 4 primordial emotional conditions common to sentience, then there is no way the current galactic domination chaos gods were created solely from the barbarism of ancient Earth. Or that no other species (except the Eldar once) could be involved in their creation.

To hammer home the incongruity, the entire trillions strong Eldar empire collectively tried their hardest to do nothing but slannesh creating things for millennia and we're supposed to believe the totality of all chaos was created by a few million humans just living their lives with the Occasional war, plague or scheme?

Thus it only makes sense if it was just the equivalent of humans entering the galactic stage by stamping their own image into the ancient swirling maelstrom of emotions that had been there forever and full of far more collective emotion and souls than a few primitive humans had ever put in.

 Gert wrote:
The Dark Gods started as human gods but became so much more as they are paracausal beings.

Exalted for using the word paracausal, and double exalted for not mispelling it "paracasual."

 Talking Banana wrote:

 Gert wrote:
The Dark Gods started as human gods but became so much more as they are paracausal beings.

Exalted for using the word paracausal, and double exalted for not mispelling it "paracasual."

Not sure that’s correct.

Not the grammar and word usage stuff, but the claim the Chaos Gods began as human Gods.

Does the human experience of the Gods and their Daemons match preconceived notions? Yes. But, that’s been offered the explanation that you see Daemons as your culture expects Daemons to appear. Because the Daemon doesn’t have a fixed form as such. Rather, it’s presence as this not-really-real-but-real-enough-to-chop-your-legs-off entity is interpreted by the human brain, and perhaps soul I guess, into something culturally rooted in the subconscious.

Rather I think the Chaos Gods exist, whereas man’s Gods never really did. And so when we first encountered these….things? We again applied our cultural understanding to them, assigning them “maybe X was Y all along!” type identities.

I don’t want to go too far with this due to No P&R, and a genuine desire not to tread on anyone’s faith based toes. But hopefully you can see where I’m going. Think The Life Of Brian, except it’s Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch or Slaanesh, and they of course said “well yes, I am your god and totally have been all along” type stuff. Humans seeing what they want to see.

Chaos Gods and the Warp have a connection to time and place in reality but also have no connection to time and place in reality. This is why ships entering the Warp can, if it goes wrong, arrive before they left or many generations later.


First I think its important to note that Chaos Gods are no different from regular Chaos Demons. Chaos Gods is simply a term used to describe vastly powerful Chaos Demons within the Warp.
In theory any Demon within the Warp that can secure for itself a big enough food source (emotional energy/souls) can become a "god".


So humanity could well have created/been fed upon 3 Chaos demons. Many races likely have similar minor powers within the Warp. However as humanity grew and grew those Chaos entities also grew and grew. And because time has no meaning they were as powerful then as they are now comes into play.

Thus you end up with 3 God like beings who are far older than Slaanesh, but who didn't require the violent sudden birth that Slaanesh had. Don't forget until Slaanesh the Eldar had several other powerful entities within the Warp that were there Gods feeding off them.


In the end the Warp operates by its own rules and trying to work them out will drive you insane.

 Hellebore wrote:

And that it makes 0 sense that a backwater planet with a few million ignorant humans that lacked psychic power created 3 chaos gods that somehow affected the whole galaxy

So my question has always been what about the rest of the universe? Are the chaos gods local entities confined to the regions of the warp that correspond to the milky way or can they interact with other galaxies?

 Arschbombe wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

And that it makes 0 sense that a backwater planet with a few million ignorant humans that lacked psychic power created 3 chaos gods that somehow affected the whole galaxy

So my question has always been what about the rest of the universe? Are the chaos gods local entities confined to the regions of the warp that correspond to the milky way or can they interact with other galaxies?

Closest we know about this is how the Tyranid Hive Mind creates a Shadow in the Warp which pushes back native demons in the Milkyway. Which I think suggests that the Warp does have some connection to the physical plane. It might be like a sine wave - a galaxy creates a huge peak of influence within the warp; and then when you get outside of that between galaxies you get a huge vast lull. Basically no energy, no food and potentially such a vast span that even in the Warp it creates a barrier. So the Warp entities are bound to a Galaxy and if they were to try and move they might have to be like Tyranids - feast and then fast between. With the risk that they arrive weaker at the next Galaxy and might have to contend with powerful Warp gods from that region who might destroy them.

So in an ideal universe any warp god wanting to make the jump might have to engineer their mortal believers to make the jump as well to bring "food" with them

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Not sure that’s correct.

Not the grammar and word usage stuff, but the claim the Chaos Gods began as human Gods.

Does the human experience of the Gods and their Daemons match preconceived notions? Yes. But, that’s been offered the explanation that you see Daemons as your culture expects Daemons to appear. Because the Daemon doesn’t have a fixed form as such. Rather, it’s presence as this not-really-real-but-real-enough-to-chop-your-legs-off entity is interpreted by the human brain, and perhaps soul I guess, into something culturally rooted in the subconscious.

Rather I think the Chaos Gods exist, whereas man’s Gods never really did. And so when we first encountered these….things? We again applied our cultural understanding to them, assigning them “maybe X was Y all along!” type identities.

I don’t want to go too far with this due to No P&R, and a genuine desire not to tread on anyone’s faith based toes. But hopefully you can see where I’m going. Think The Life Of Brian, except it’s Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch or Slaanesh, and they of course said “well yes, I am your god and totally have been all along” type stuff. Humans seeing what they want to see.

Obviously with GW writers being human and all that, having the human perspective makes the setting easier to understand. But seeing as Slaanesh is very specifically noted as being caused by the Aeldari while both Khorne and Nurgle are specifically noted as having after-effects on Terra, I'd argue that at least those two were created by humanity.
Humanity does hold a special place in the setting as a species and although it's just conjecture on my part, surely with the hundreds of other species out there and the War in Heaven, why did it take until the Terran Middle Ages for both these Gods to form?
There isn't anything wrong with some of the Pantheon starting off with that nice tasty human boost and then acquiring new palettes as they branched out into time and space. I think it's a neat idea that even before humanity stepped into the stars it had already royally screwed everything for everyone else.

For me it remains a question of numbers and psychic potential.

Were 40k true, yes the Chaos Gods would absolutely be exerting some kind of influence on our species right now.

But Slaanesh and the Eldar just isn’t a good comparison. At the time of the Fall? The Eldar likely numbered in the trillions. Each and everyone psychically talented beyond baseline humans, their emotions running deeper and more intense than humans.

And so I just can’t see humanity causing the other three to achieve consciousness.

It could be the humanity was the tipping point so to speak.
The Gods could have been slowly feeding on the rest of the galaxy before humanity gave Khorne and Nurgle that final boost, which in turn tied them to humanity for eternity.

I think it’s more that as mankind spread out into the Galaxy, became ever more numerous and, ever more psychic, we eventually became the main source of, well, nourishment I guess, for the existing Gods. And so those without a “pet species”, such as Gork and Mork, shifted and changed in aspect and appetites, finding in us a readily provoked and corrupted species.

Now I’ll freely admit my thinking here is inherently coloured by Pratchett’s Discworld series, and how the inhabitants of Discworld, and their faith, inherently change the Gods of Discworld - and there being little the Gods can do about it.

So whilst Man didn’t create the Gods? Our later successes and evolution has changed and reshaped them into a peril unique to us.

I'd argue that due to a combination of needing relatable material for players and the wealth of historical options available whatever was originally intended has long been surpassed by the notion that most of the Pantheon are "human" gods.

Famous examples of Daemon Princes or Greater Daemons often draw their origins to real-world history or myth such as Drach'nyen being created at the moment of the first murder (Cain and Abel) or Doombreed being strongly hinted as being Genghis Khan later raised as the first Daemon Prince of Khorne.

Again, though I raise the paracausal nature of the Gods themselves. Even if they were created as "generic" beings associated with their emotional traits, the fact that they exist as they are in every moment in history means that the Gods of M41 are the same gods of M1. So as they have become shaped by humanity, they have then also always been in their current state.
It's the head wreck of beings that don't exist within linear time or obey the laws of physics.

Even with the wibbly wobbly timey wimey oddities?

There will still have been times when Slaanesh didn’t exist, even though right now, Slaanesh has always existed.

Though whilst that’s a massive (and fun!) question to explore? I’m now wondering what might happen were one to somehow annihilate and utterly destroy a given God. Would its sudden absence also be retroactive? To the point it’s ending means it never existed in the first place?