Why are there Librarians? [Minor 1K Sons Spoilers]

[Cryl]

Lets get this puppy back on track shall we...

To summarise the known duties of a chapter's Librarium so far:

High quality interstellar communications, making astropaths unneccesary.
Psychic battlefield communitcations that cannot be easily thwarted by technical means, improving synchronized and complex battle plans.
Analysis, collation and storing of the chapter's battlefield performance and history.
Psychic screening of initiates to weed out the tainted or unworthy.
Psychic advisors who can aid the chapter master greatly in dealing with other parties during interactions and negotiations.

Finally, if needed, they manifest very handy battlefield powers.

Librarians: they do more before 8:00 AM than most marines do all day!

That's all true and fair but I think the original question was why are they even allowed to be present in the Astartes when the Emperor himself decreed that no Legion should maintain a Librarius department. So far we've got the options that the Emperor changed his mind sometime before he placed himself on the Golden Throne and allowed Librarians to continue to serve. That Gulliman and the other authors of the codex: Astartes decided that legion vs. chapter was a lovely wording loophole and put them in place or that they just plain ignored the Emperor.

Personally I think that the former is the most likely as I can't see the loyalist primarchs responsible for the codex ignoring the emperors literal commands and I've not convinced that a Primarch would play word games in the same way as the church did with the "no men under arms" given that the command came direct from the big E.

That said, was Guilliman at Nikaea? I don't think he was, in which case he could legitimately claim never to have heard the dictat and so ignore it when writing the codex possibly?

[Just_Me]

All of this talk of changes after the fact and rewrites in the absence of the Emperor ignore the simple fact that we know with certainty that at least SOME chapters maintained Librarians from the beginning of the Great Crusade all the way through to the beginning of the Heresy. So any solution has to take this into account. Unfortunately, if we are to take the decree as reported in A Thousand Sons at face value (still have not read it yet btw), then this it is in direct contradiction to what we KNOW to have happened. I am still inclined to believe that the information in A Thousand Sons is in error; either the full subtleties of the decree at Nikea are not yet understood and they allowed for the continuation of Librarians in some capacity, or the esteemed Graham McNiell simply made a mistake (it CAN happen). Alternatively, as has been pointed out, A Thousand Sons is told from the point of view of the Thousand Sons, and they might have viewed, in addition to outlawing sorcery, the restrictions placed on chapter psykers as making them all but defunct. After all, in Battle for the Abyss the other marines were quite aware that the Thousand Sons legionary was a psyker, and didn't really seem to care all that much, until he demonstrated sorcerous techniques.

[Melissia]

I don't necessarily think the Emperor opposed all psykers, however, seeing as he used those with the navigator gene if I'm not mistaken. Similarly, I think he likely used some form of astropaths, as well, as I'm certain he didn't want to relay every single message from across the entire Imperium himself even if he could. The decree forbidding psykers was likely an attempt to prevent chaos' corruption from taking place, rather than actual opposition to them.


Also, because I don't really take this subject seriously, allow me to insert a strange insight into this subject which has not yet been presented. There are librarians in the Space Marines because you touch yourself at night. *has been watching too much "[url=http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/thatguywiththeglasses/ask-thatguy/]Ask That Guy[/url]"...*

[Just_Me]

He most certainly did use both navigators and astropaths throughout the Great Crusade, that much is quite clear. And what's more, nobody seemed to think it was even the least bit odd. Heck, the second most powerful man in the Imperial government at the time was an enormously powerful regular human psyker. These, along with other facts, suggest that a blanket ban on psykers at Nikea just doesn't make sense, either we as readers don't correctly understand what the Emperor's decree at Nikea actually specified, or A Thousand Sons is just plain in error and the decree at Nikea was only against sorcery (as it was originally presented).

Unfortunately, in the absence of new information I think we may have taken this just about as far as it can go.

[Melissia]

My guess is that the Thousand Sons are douchebags and remember things in an incredibly biased way, and therefor the ban was probably on sorcery and its corrupting nature. Not on psychic powers in general.

[Gotthammer]

But if you're saying the narrative structure of the books are flawed with biased perception (towards the 1kSons in this case) it's pointless reading them at all.

I mean how do we know Horus turned to Chaos at all? The books are just written to make him look like the bad guy, maybe none of this ever happened and it's just written that way to make the Emperor look good.

Maybe it was really Loken who introduced the lodges into the Legions, and the books don't show it because he went mad with guilt and created a delusional alternate reality where he was the good guy.

Extremely exaggerated examples but they illustrates my point.


The foreword and afterword are written 'by' Ahriman, so can contain author bias. Codexes include 'historical accounts', so are biased. A first person novel (such as the Dark Angels one from some time ago by Gav Thorpe) is inherintly biased, and that's usually the point. But a third person novel relies on the narrative being concrete fact, escpecially when it's something like:

'Hear now the words of my ruling,' said the Emperor, (...) Henceforth it is my will that no Legion will maintain a Librarius department.'

pgs 354-355

I highly doubt if we see the proceedings from Russ or Wyrdmake's perspective the text will change to:
'Actually guys, Librarains are totally ok,' said the Emperor, 'I just don't want you guys making deals with warp entities or actively drawing power from the warp. So Magnus, knock it off and get back to work, ok?' - this isn't Rashomon we're dealing with here.



I still think it is either an oversight by McNiell in regards to the old stuff, or it's deliberate and iit will be worked around in a later book, probably during the Lunar Campaign or thereabouts when the traitors become more and more corrupted.

[Melissia]

It's a book called Thousand Sons which is about Thousand Sons trying to make people buy more Thouand Sons. It's biased towards Thousand Sons, and until we get the counterpoint book (in Prospero Burns) I take anything in it with a grain of salt. Once we get that, we can look at the two in comparison and try and guess a true unbiased history.

[rkiviman]

There weren't that many legions that were using Librarians, because not all of them trusted Psykers. The primary one's listed in Thousand Son's were (besides them) , Ultra-Marines, Space Wolves, Blood Angels ( I don't recall the rest). It's already been said that probably the reason they were banned and ordered back into the ranks was the fear of Chaos corrupting the Legions. Magnus and gang had already been seduced and were already leaning to serve entities in the warp. The only thing that makes sense is that when the Heresy went down the value of the Librarians once again may have rose because Chaos forces were now out of the bag and storming across the galaxy!? Just speculation on my part. Probably more of the story will come out with the release of the continuing Heresy saga.