The First Heretic

[Melon-neko]

************This is a spoiler from Angel Exterminatus********************************












I don't think that the Emperor caused the rebellion, although there are certainly hints to it. One of the very good things about they HH books is that things are told from different perspectives. Anyway, why i don't believe he is responsible is because:

In a flashback of Perturabo talking to the Emperor, the emperor mentions that he can no longer see the future.
It also heavily implies that his entire purpose for creating the primearchs and spacemarine legions was to defeat Chaos.

[Katharon]

POSSIBLE SPOILER WARNING

You guys need to read "Mechanicus," then "First Heretic" and then "The Outcast Dead." Now time for wall-of-text and my chance to give you my full theory considering what facts we know.

The Emperor is - we can all agree - a singular being. There has never been a more powerful individual in entire universe (I don't consider the Tyranid Hive Mind to be an individual, but a gestalt consciousness and therefore on the same level as the Chaos Gods) and can be imagined as a man standing with a foot in both the material world and the immaterium. Due to his vast power and foresight, the Emperor traveled the length and breadth of time, seeing innumerable outcomes for Humanity (the last chapter of "Fear To Tread" is a perfect example of where a psykic with foresight sees varied outcomes of the future, also see the Eldar books). It was in the course of these ethereal travels that the Emperor saw that there was a slim path by which Humanity might be able to reach a point of apotheosis; to harness the powers of the Empyrean without fear of corruption from the Chaos Gods -- or at least at greatly reduced risk from them. Once he had determined this path he then set about making it a reality.

As it says throughout different points of the HH series, hints here and there, the Emperor created seeds within the socio-psychology of the human race. He created thousands upon thousands of myths and religious whispers that would one-day bear fruit and allow Him to step into the picture and claim suzerainty over all Mankind by self-fulfilling prophecy (pretty damned clever imho).

Once the Emperor took power over all of Terra (finally) and began the Great Crusade, he was prepared for the next step of his plan: galactic domination and the first step in eradicating Chaos.

Because the Emperor knew that Chaos was the primary foe against which Humanity must win, he set about cutting the Chaos Gods off from their main source of power: faith. The Warp is a reflection of reality and is fueled by the emotions of living beings in reality -- and the Chaos Gods feed upon those emotions, but even more so they feed upon the praise and worship that is offered them. By creating a galactic-wide Human empire that is ruled by secular thought and non-spiritual belief (with a strong undercurrent of faith changing to being put into the Emperor), the Emperor was -- in essence -- turning off a spout of water that the Chaos Gods required for sustenance. If he could manage to destroy the last vestiges of religion (many of which were twisted to worshiping Chaos in its varied forms) then that would be the great first step to fully defeating Chaos.

But the Emperor, beloved by all, failed in one thing: he underestimated the frailty of his greatest creations - the primarchs.

As I said before, the Emperor is a singular being -- none are as He is. In His mastery the Emperor forged 20 sons, beings unlike any other, but as close to the power of the Emperor as any other living being could become. They were to be his generals and crusade leaders, the exemplar of all the power and virtues of the Adeptus Astartes that were the gene-sons of their primarchs. It was his greatest and proudest moment of creation, when he bore the primarchs into existence. It was that -- pride and a mix of faith in his sons -- that was His downfall. Because the Emperor believed in his sons and thought them so far removed from the petty emotions that undermine the Human soul, he underestimated their fragility. Horus was not brought low by a promise of power or majesty; he was brought low by envy and a sense of abandonment.

In His effort to bring about an ascended Humanity, the Emperor put upon himself the burden of sole guardianship of that task -- only ever giving responsibility for lesser tasks to others when he felt it was necessary to concentrate on other, more important things (such as when he created the Order of the Dragon to keep the Void Dragon locked up on Mars; or made Horus the Warmaster to continue the Great Crusade). He was not able to relinquish the sense of responsibility that he felt in regard to guiding Humanity upon His chosen path.

This focus the Emperor had upon the chosen path for Humanity meant that he would miss various things and that Chaos would do everything in its power to oppose this plan. It is only with daemonic intervention and twisting of truth and lies that the primarchs are scattered in the first place (Ingethel manipulates the Word Bearers and preys upon their loss of faith in the Emperor -- and is capable of placing Argel Tal in a position where he can physically affect what was one of the most well protected locations in the galaxy, the gene-vault where the primarchs were forged and watched over by the Emperor himself).

And so the Emperor failed to fully understand his greatest creations (his sons), failed to fully educate them in the true threat of Chaos, and failed to share the burden of Humanity's path with any other. These combined to change the course of history and led to his placement upon the Golden Throne -- forcing Him to skip step two of his plan and onto step three: the creation of a religion based solely upon the God-Emperor that would find no opposition in a galaxy that had been cleansed of other religions. By being placed upon the Golden Throne, the Emperor ascended his mind and stepped fully into the Empyrean (no longer a man with two feet in two different places), taking on the responsibility of being a god-head figure and gaining the power from faith in the same manner that the Chaos Gods do.

Where it will lead from there? That's anyone's guess...

[The Last Lamenter]

Katharon, I've been following your posts, you've been busy.

Because the Emperor knew that Chaos was the primary foe against which Humanity must win, he set about cutting the Chaos Gods off from their main source of power: faith. The Warp is a reflection of reality and is fueled by the emotions of living beings in reality -- and the Chaos Gods feed upon those emotions, but even more so they feed upon the praise and worship that is offered them. By creating a galactic-wide Human empire that is ruled by secular thought and non-spiritual belief (with a strong undercurrent of faith changing to being put into the Emperor), the Emperor was -- in essence -- turning off a spout of water that the Chaos Gods required for sustenance. If he could manage to destroy the last vestiges of religion (many of which were twisted to worshiping Chaos in its varied forms) then that would be the great first step to fully defeating Chaos.

wow, just, wow. They say being able to explain something simply is the true measure of understanding for yourself. Never heard it put so clearly. I believe all that you said concerning the emperor's nature. I also believe that this story is first and foremost a tragedy, and second that the emperor did indeed set up certain things to allow his ascendance but he also saw the danger of a mythless humanity, he was in that regard also serving his people by fulfilling that need which Nietszche says is vital for great society. A mythology . I'll be reading all of your posts from now on. please feel free to send a message too. check out a thread I posted a couple of years ago, titled Ave Imperator, You might like it. I tend to revel in the myth of 40k, some might find it quaint theism, but I think it makes the tragedy all the more profound.

[eldargal]

Of course the great irony was he tried to spread his enlightened secularism by spreading ignorance of the truth, that the Chaos Gods do exist even if they exist because of belief. By suppressing that fact, apart from being hypocritical, it also meant people were more susceptible to the lure of Chaos (notably Magnus, who has his good intentions twisted by Tzeentch) because they had no idea how to defend themselves. It really is tragedy in the Greek sense, great heroes brought low by their own flaws and the Emperor is its apotheosis, everything he strove for, an enlightened secular humanity, was undone because it was built on lies and ignorance.

Anyone who thinks 40k is just cheap pulp fiction anymore really hasn't a clue what they are talking about, Black Library have fleshed it out splendidly in my opinion.

Though:

The Emperor is - we can all agree - a singular being. There has never been a more powerful individual in entire universe (I don't consider the Tyranid Hive Mind to be an individual, but a gestalt consciousness and therefore on the same level as the Chaos Gods) and can be imagined as a man standing with a foot in both the material world and the immaterium.

This is problematic, I believe the gestalt consciousness thing is considered of dubious canonicity. It may be the case, it may not. In either case I would question whether or not the Emperor is more powerful than a Chaos God, as a Corpse-God possibly he is on their level, as the man he was I do not think so. This in my opinion enhanced the irony of his hypocrisy and arrogance in that he is now better able to protect humanity in this transcendent form as a God then he was as the atheist mortal, gestalt or otherwise.

[Katharon]

@eldargal: My mistake! I should have been more clear. When I said that the Emperor was the most powerful individual in the entire universe, I meant the material universe; reality in other words. He wasn't yet existing as the God-Emperor upon the Golden Throne yet during the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy. However, I would argue that the fact that Chaos tried so hard to stop his plans from coming to fruition is a rather tell-tale sign -- that he was a genuine threat on an order of magnitude that even the Chaos gods feared what might happen should he succeed.

But yes, until he ascended to the Golden Throne, he had not yet released his full potential; nor gained the extra power from the creation of the Ministorum and the Lectitio Divinitatus.

[Cap'nSmurfs]

Nice post, Katharon. It's pretty close to my personal take, as well, except for one thing: I genuinely don't think the Emperor ever intended to be worshipped. I don't see what follows as Phase Three of the plan; more like the fallback, the final option when the Heresy ensured his plan to defeat Chaos utterly was impossible to achieve. As I understand it, the plan was firstly to reunite a human race totally purged of faith of any kind, totally ignorant of Chaos and its corrupting influence, and then also to sidestep the need to interact with the Warp entirely through the annexation of the Eldar Webway. The first punch in the plan is a kind of "just don't look"; the second is to render the Warp irrelevant. After that - who knows? It does rather leave open the question of what was going to be done with the human (and transhuman) psykers, after all. As far as we know, the Emperor would rather not have issued the Nikaea edict, but is the distinction some of the Astartes make between the safe use of psychic powers and psychic sorcery really a valid one?

That all is a different can of worms, though, I think.

But who can say? You might be right. The Emperor is a complicated figure; at times - and I suspect this will happen - I wish we were getting more of the story from sources closer to the Emperor. A lot of "information" on the creation of the Primarchs (to take just one example) that we have are the lies and whispers of Daemonic creatures and the mutterings of insane, jaundiced traitor Primarchs. We only have part of the story. Which is really the fun of the series and the setting; I doubt we'll ever have full answers (nor should we really want them), but the constant drip-drip of details from the story is thrilling.

But what I absolutely agree on:

The Emperor didn't intentionally start the rebellion. Doing so is totally counter to his grand plan of vanquishing Chaos.

We know that as of the Heresy the Emperor's ability to see clearly into the future is diminished. The Heresy is a period of intense Warp activity as the Chaos Gods rear their heads in their gambit. His ability to guide his subjects is also diminished by his situation atop the Golden Throne; on the other hand, by throwing his consciousness into the Warp, he's increasingly able to intercede in the lives of his subjects in moments of dire peril. Euphrati Keeler receives such power (also she's totes a psyker); Vulkan receives a very helpful intervention also. There's others scattered around. Such is the enormity of the task the Emperor faces, he can't help everyone everywhere; or even most of the people he'd like to. He has to focus on where his intervention is possible, and where it will matter most.

The creation of the Primarchs is certainly more than just genetic science. The Primarchs are variously... other. It's debatable whether any of them can completely die unless their soul is utterly annihilated (as Horus' was). The psychic echoes of Sanguinius linger in the Blood Angels' minds, for instance. There's something else going on here; whether it was actually a pact with the Chaos Gods is debatable, but personally I doubt it.

Keeping knowledge of Chaos from his sons and subjects seems like it's a flawed strategy; but given what the Emperor had seen happen to humanity in Old Night, maybe it seemed like the best idea of a bad bunch. Humanity had almost genocided itself to extinction with knowledge of Chaos, afterall.

That said, not being completely honest with the Primarchs seems like it was definitely a bad idea. Too many difficult characters were allowed to roam unchecked and unguided for too long. Just look at what happened to poor Angron, who never had a chance. Maybe things would've been better if they hadn't been spirited away by the Chaos powers; maybe the war was lost the moment that happened.

The Emperor's rebuke of Lorgar was, we might say, heavy handed - although I suspect the reason the Ultramarines were called in to do it is that the Ultramarines had the discipline to carry out their orders, not to rejoice in it, and to minimise casualties as far as physically possible, and also to have the sheer manpower to be able to respond if the Word Bearers... reacted. Again, we only have Lorgar's side of it. The fact is that Lorgar was doing it wrong; the Crusade is to reunite humanity and liberate it from faith (and thence Chaos); not to make the Emperor some kind of new God. By going so slowly and not doing what he was supposed to, Lorgar threatened the spirit and the achievement of the Crusade. (Also, we know that Kor Phaeron was deliberately ensuring cults remained behind on ostensibly compliant planets behind Lorgar's back, so that's another mark against them).

Basically, if the Emperor has a single major flaw, it's that he feels that all of humanity's future is his personal cross to bear. He feels he has to go it alone because nobody else can be completely trusted. By not supplying his subjects with either time or information, his later actions can seem capricious and nonsensical. Certainly a lot of his sons were hurt; after Ullanor; at Monarchia; at Nikaea. Again, maybe if all the Primarchs had been able to grow and develop at the Emperor's side, all would've been different.

But it wasn't. And that's how they got into the mess they're in.

[eldargal]

Actually the webway thing opens up another irony: it was never going to work. If the webway can seal itself against the far more technologically advanced Necrons there was little chance of the Emperor being able to maintain access though ONE entry point on earth. Especially when that entry point was so fragile it was able to be shattered accidentally by Magnus pre-daemon primarch power level.

[Cap'nSmurfs]

A fair point. Nobody ever says it was a watertight plan; it was just the plan he had.

[eldargal]

Yep, but that's what I love about the whole thing. It's a proper tragedy on so many levels, heroes being undone by hubris but even if they weren't their ambition outweighed their ability.

[MrBo]

the first heretic post by the last lamenter...
..wait,what? XD