40K - THE EMPEROR OF MAN [4] A Self Fulfilling Prophecy | WARHAMMER 40,000 Lore/History

[Music] today's video is brought to you by audible audible provides a great service for members that i personally use and why i highly recommend it it's also one of the best ways to make huge savings on warhammer audiobooks today we're returning to discuss the emperor of man and as part of that i'm considering the details within the audio only short first lord of the imperium if you've never heard this before i greatly recommend it but due to its short nature you might want to consider purchasing this through audible as premium members get a 30 discount on audiobooks and this is generally my preferred option for shorter stories as an audible premium member you receive one credit every month for any title across their entire premium selection and these are obviously best used on full length audio books most 40k narratives are for example over 10 hours long a great many of you in my audience are already using audible but if you're yet to try on it you can start today with a free 30-day audible trial and get full access to thousands of audio books originals and podcasts also included in the plus catalog just visit audible.com luton and for those in the us you can also text luton to 500-500 details of my other upcoming selections till the end of this year follow at the end of the video [Music] [Music] time seems to pass by so quickly and i feel like i somehow have not spoken of anything heresy era for a long time which is seemingly pretty accurate as it has in fact been two years since we last considered the story of the emperor of mankind in my last exploration of the emperor we considered the interpretations of the emperor via the last church in relation to faith and religion and how it sits in a wider context of humanity plus of course his attempts to eradicate religion from human culture by outlawing all mythical and superstitious belief and worship within the imperium this of course later unfolds in the wider timeline of 4dk to become wildly ironic and his actions in seeking eradication of all religion from humanity finally look to be something if not near to then fully hypocritical as the story of the birth of the imperium and heresy have further unfolded alongside the future developments of the imperium in the distant imperium of m41 we see that humanity having fallen back on religion has moved from being backward looking and against everything the emperor stood for to now become so important to its very survival we even begin to see the unbelievable possibility of the lord commander of the imperium questioning both the nature of the emperor and the importance of religion it's always difficult to decide a specific area for discussion when talking about the emperor because anything you touch upon inevitably will just lead to further questions interpretations and speculations and this is because despite all that has been revealed the true nature of the emperor his intentions and his ultimate goals in truth no matter how confident the theorizing remain entirely unknowable and i'm going to restate that many times through this video now you might think to yourself hold on now aren't i the law orator here the researcher and i'm supposed to reveal to you my grand interpretations lay it all out for you and say gather around now friends i've arranged all the puzzle pieces and i'm gonna let you in on the big secret that you're not meant to know i could do that of course but it would all be a lie because i've spent many years reading rereading details saving relevant quotes and excerpts from novels shorts novellas and all the material that together should bring us firm conclusions yet despite this beyond some vague leanings toward possibilities which i will get to at the end the true nature and the core objective for the emperor remains still completely inexplicable but i still maintain that anything else is pure guesswork now despite this i will by the end of today try and arrange for you where i think we are at but that is not the same as laying everything out and saying i know how it goes because that isn't the case now are there theories for sure there's speculations guesses interpretations and i could probably do videos for an entire year speaking about only the emperor because every single sliver of information gives you such minuscule amounts of insight that you feel like you're never truly getting anywhere and even when they are more clear usually something misdirecting or contradictory comes along not to mention at this point you often can't tell if it's a truth a half-truth a brazen lie or perhaps just a misinterpretation of something said or done despite all we know about the emperor he remains a figure that unless you're willing to trust his intentions on faith alone like malcolm his true nature and intentions are really just as much a mystery as they always have been compounding this is the fact that as you know i try my best to generally speaking operate primarily on the details that we do know and offer my interpretations of the verse and its adjacent themes i always try to flag when something is pure speculation or not and clarify things which generally speaking appear to be accepted when they probably shouldn't be plus as i've stated many times before it remains my opinion and as i've noted also before has been stated by multiple core 40k authors that in the verse of 40k the very concept of canon itself is a fallacy and those are not even my words the very nature the very landscape of 40k bucks against the idea of having such sanctioned standardized constraints almost by the definition of the parameters it operates within and this is a fact which for many is a cause of much annoyance for the people who enjoy ticking boxes and tidying things away neatly the funny thing of course is that in many ways as i've said my life would be a lot easier if everything was neatly sorted and labeled and marked but on the other hand also far less interesting i think a good reference would be as john french said in the afterword of mortis speaking to the idea of current authors still sowing the seeds for future revelations in the 40k verse he said it is more plausible that the stories of the future would not match reality the people of that time if they know anything of the horus heresy don't know fact they know stories that have grown and twisted and merged from multiple people and events how was the inquisition formed who was mariana who was olanius the pious who saved who and how how did the belief in the god emperor take hold in a broken formally secular society reality is not clean and neither are stories so an unclean broken society this is the galaxy of 40k it's not about things being tidy and clean and easily defined it's the shattered twisted remnants of information scattered across an ever-changing reality that actively attempts to distort twist and manipulate information and facts the very dimensions of the galaxy itself are actively working against those within it and even if you only were to consider the heresy series but still over 60 novels we as those outside the verse are then left to somehow try and pick apart the confusing knotted and ragged threads of a destroyed but rich tapestry and decide for ourselves just what pattern they were originally supposed to form after some time i often thought how you end up starting to feel like all p himself you have memories of events conversations things you thought you knew for sure things that happened references you read but then you stop and you consider wait were these real or were they just badly stored memories corrupted details of discussions that you in one moment discarded but simultaneously remembered albeit incorrectly and then later recalled and blurred that memory with some other piece of information sounds over dramatic and absurd yet i have regularly had conversations with people and or read comments who are as confused as this such is the nature of the narrative that forms the 40k verse so pity the authors who are required to do continuity checks as i've so often said 40k is a fiction begins to mirror itself more and more with its increasing difficulty to keep the actual reality of things clean and certain if it ever were and then you have the emperor which somehow always starts off feeling easy and then when you start to get into it becomes migraine inducingly vague and when you actually reference his recounting his visions supposed memories pearls of inexplicable reference and philosophical wisdom contemplation even when he isn't being vague you can rarely tell if he's lying right to somebody's face constructing some house of lies to imprison them within or if he's telling the truth in such an unbelievably assertive fashion that any individual cannot decide if it were even the truth or not this is the case all too often when the emperor speaks with his closest aides and companions you're never really sure if he's being truthful or setting them up with some web of intentional misdirection most of the time his deepest seeming revelations precede an event that results in a horrifying end for said individual and so his revelations are some method of preparing them for this fact consider custody's ra or malcador himself this is of course what i presumed he often referred to himself as revelation it's occurred multiple times urea in the church of the lightning stone magnus maukador himself the emperor's choice of being revelation among so many other names i always assumed to be something of an amusement likely to the emperor himself knowing his astonishing levels of arrogance in the sense that he has seemingly never truly revealed his honest intentions to anyone or not that we've seen anyway in a pure sense and even when it appears to have occurred its authenticity or entirety are questionable at best whenever a character is speaking with the emperor candidly it always feels like someone doing a deal with the devil where you're trying to figure out what are the extremely important pieces of information that he's not telling you and that will likely cost you your soul in very short order the emperor's choice of revelation also seems applicable as an ironic reference to the book of revelation itself and we know that there is a current attempt in the 40k verse to connect the events between it and the history of ancient earth and the fact that the emperor is believed to have existed in this time although as i note this usually occurs through dreams and singular accounts that i consider still personally questionable you have all p for example a long remembrance of himself and the emperor destroying the tower of babel babel in this same lucid vision all also references the use of dark powerful knowledge laying waste to cities the enuncia till they were nothing but ash and salt this way obviously is reference to the destruction of sodom and lot's wife who looked back upon the city during its annihilation when told not to and turned to a pillar of salt so yes we've come so far in the storytelling of 40k that its newest novels are now making biblical references which means we really are getting dragged even further down into the cultural and philosophical rabbit hole my personal thinking was always that the emperor calling himself revelation was an entirely deliberate biblical reference simply based on the fact that it's hardly subtle and therefore fits entirely for the emperor because for as mystical and vague as he is in gifting information towards his ultimate goals his execution of symbolism and metaphors generally leaves a lot to be desired but considering this is a verse where space marine chapters were decided to number one thousand marines and not ten or one hundred thousand i probably should let the emperor's clumsy cultural winks and nods pass by i'm far more irritated when a planetary battle is talking about having cost hundreds of thousands of guardsmen's lives but i'm not going to rant about that yet again or how the fact that hive cities even with a tiny percentage of conscription would form guard forces in the millions but let's put a pin in that so in referencing himself as revelation while interpretations and acceptance vary overall it is predominantly seen as presenting an apocalyptic hope for humanity or for true believers anyway and i think however you may choose to interpret his actions and goals you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a more appropriate title for the emperor of mankind than one which alludes to an apocalyptic last hope but only for the souls who look to him the most difficult detail for us to unravel in the puzzle of the emperor is of course his ultimate aim at face value everything we know of him points toward him being a benevolent savior for humanity he is after all the god emperor of mankind the all-seeing all-knowing all-powerful immortal moving silently down through the centuries living many secret lives struggling to reach the time when those who remain will battle to the last and i would have done that with a sean connery voice except that i can't so eventually after doing highlander for a bit the emperor emerged out of the destruction and chaos and ruin of humanity's own making to lead us onto an all-new time of chaos and ruin that is to say the true path of our eternal glory and enlightenment but somewhere along the way let's just say mistakes were made and now humanity exists on the edge of destruction yet again over 10 000 years if only things have been different if only the primarks the emperor's beloved sons had not turned away from him but of course for the foul corruption of chaos the damned demon gods of the warp twisted and infected the minds of his sons for the longest time we believed and in my opinion the matter is not yet settled that the gods themselves reached out from the warp and scattered the primarks and in so doing whispered the initial corrupting doubts to some of their number which makes more sense to me than an embittered companion of the emperor stealing them somehow and then dispersing them somehow the early seeds of corruption were sown these incepted doubts by the chaos gods inspired those in the future to throw off their shackles of loyalty to the emperor and instead aligned themselves with the ruinous powers along with several true believing instigators to push things along the way but so much of what we thought were true now lies even more in doubt was it the gods of chaos or did enraged trusted companions of the emperor attempt to separate him from his primarchs in a futile attempt to disrupt this course this has been precisely what i've been trying to get people to understand about 40k for so long things are only true until they aren't one person's account opinion perspective reference anecdote is only worth its weight in contextual evidence when i myself talk about 40k law i often try to walk a line between imagining myself in the verse and how that would shape my perspective and opinion as opposed to purely being an outside observer this means that i tend to view snapshots of information stories told and so on to a very skeptical lens because we simply cannot verify said person's authenticity you're relying on the author to be sincere through what a character is telling you at a meta level and very often in 40k this is demonstrably proven to be inaccurate and this often again annoys people and it has done so with the steady development of certain details in the heresy some things were previously believed to be known events get distorted things horus said all p taking a stand but actually not scattering of the primarks but then maybe not you get the idea why is this important to understand that narratives operate on several levels it's important because as i've often referenced before narratives as complex as 40k are often telling you details and interpretations within wider contexts usually through an invisible narrator who describes what's happening and how characters are feeling what they observe and so on when a new narrative opens it's rarely a character speaking it's an invisible narrator and so we as the external viewer are therefore not necessarily always able to see things in their complete form you feel like you do but that's only if you just accept everything as it appears to be and some people do really get defensive about this kind of thing it says x happened or a character did x or felt x therefore because it says so it must be true now again being skeptical about something doesn't equate to meaning that literally anything goes and the verse is just a free-throw it simply means we have to be cautious about how much weight we give to certain things because usually there's some truth in most things unless it's a just full blatant lie now not wanting to get overly technical but like so many narratives it's helpful to think of 40k in terms of diegesis now all this means is that the narrator tells the story it's how it's presented to us diegetic elements are part of said world whereas non-diegetic refers to elements outside of the world in a movie it might be a sound we as the audience can hear but characters inside the movie cannot in fictional narratives it's helpful to understand the structure because digesis has three levels there is the extra diegetic level you might want to think of this as the highest level surrounding everything as this is the level of the narrator they're telling the story next we go into a verse at the intradigetic or just diegetic level this is the world of the characters their spoken interactions their internal thoughts their physical actions and then you have inside of this the meta-diegetic level this is where characters will tell or present a story within a story for example a spoken anecdote a dream shared a vision why is this important to me it's important because i always think of each level being less reliable from the position of an external viewer and i want to note this is my personal opinion now not something established or set in stone i always see the highest level that of the extra diegetic as being the most reliable the author themselves the individual least likely to lie or misrepresent something deliberately so for example if a narrative tells us horus walked down the darkened corridor it was cold and damp i feel pretty confident that i can trust the corridor was cold and dark and damp if horus was telling us himself or speaking to another character at a diegetic level that the corridor was dark it felt cold and damp we can trust this fairly confidently but what other factors might be affecting his perception too he's within the fictional verse maybe what he sees and feels is being distorted then at the meta level if someone was merely retelling this well then you're getting into things like bias personal agenda distortion of reality poor memory the list goes on so the point i'm trying to make is simply that when we consume something fictional but most especially thinking of the 40k verse it's just important to understand things are operating at different levels of reliability in my opinion anyway would you trust something a demon said in 40k probably not because it's a demon and when it's telling you things at a meta level you know it has all manner of potential contamination issues with the validity of that information now in astate's recounting something is going to be more reliable than a demon you'd think but my point is only that we should be cautious at the meta level and especially within 40k because we cannot know what other factors are or were at play in distorting that account but i hope what i just noted helps to see how the path and narrative for the emperor that has been told was already far from being solid when did he gain his power what was his plan how did he work with malcador how powerful is his foresight the primarks were flawed yes but intentionally or through lack of foresight some were twisted and corrupted to turn against the emperor but was it truly the gods of chaos who orchestrated it was it the emperor himself is the emperor truly benevolent loving father or a cold calculating entity as far removed from humanity as the astartes and primarks and demon gods themselves many have noted that there is something underneath the emperor something behind the psychic veil of power and beauty john grammaticus crorex ra gilman many have seen momentary glimpses of something beneath the veil of his power something much more cold much more inhuman in deliverance lost corax notes is this your true face i have no such thing replied the emperor i have worn a million faces over the millennia according to need or whim i remember this one said corax dimly recalling a dream he glimpsed when overcome by his wounds in the crashing thunderhawk this was how you appeared to me when i was born within my pod yes it is strange that you should remember that said the emperor his expression becoming sterner it's very clear that the emperor hates for anyone to see through to his true self but why as i noted at the end of episode 3 in this emperor's series the primordial truth uncovered the greatest lie of the emperor the greatest cost of this lie seems to have been the imperium imploding into the heresy as unwitting astati's legions are caught off guard and are thrown into absolute chaos the galaxy burns and kauth as i noted though there is this deeper hidden but i admit speculative truth for the primarks and astartes that he is possibly not their singular father what i meant by this was our discovery in vengeful spirit the well-known discovery through horus that the emperor visited the world of moloch where it is known there is a portal to the warp long before the great crusade itself now as i said this is far from a new revelation it's formed the core of discussions for years about the origins of the emperor and just what he has done in the past or his personal agenda i will note in some ways it's actually largely irrelevant because whatever he achieved by visiting molok we know how he ended up and so much time has passed that any repercussions have already played out in a real sense what matters is the modern progression of events in m41 and just what occurs there historically though and specifically in regard to the emperor himself it's still interesting and important to consider this reference to the emperor's visit to molok is something people have often discussed and leveraged to bolster speculations about the emperor theories intentions it's very important to remember though that there exists little evidence that suggests to us exactly what the emperor did during this visit we really only have a reference from horus which is likely an opinion and considerably biased and a perpetual who is seemingly more reliable but also very thin with her information and so not particularly helpful we're left instead to infer for ourselves likely very deliberately what occurred which has inevitably led to widespread disagreement like i said though ultimately it is somewhat irrelevant at this point generally it is presumed that the emperor traveled to moloch and went into the warp for this was the only reason for his coming there but it is wholly speculative that he made a deal with the chaos gods there are vague allusions to him having stolen from the dark gods so many presume this is suggestive of having gained knowledge which presumably would be in exchange for something or the promise of something although i would argue power and psychic strength of other powers might equally have been gained as well we know the chaos gods grant this to their champions mortarion fulgrim horus etc now any potential deal or theft might also explain why during the crusade the emperor is so urgent to complete his goals for someone who is so powerful and such a perfectionist he accepts the degradation of space marine genetics just so they can churn out as many as possible to get the crusade concluded now we do know that the emperor is just frustrated with humanity he wants to push it forward and that's one of the thrusting goals that we are aware of he just wants to move things forward and get on with it but throughout the entire sequence of events until the end of the heresy even before horus turns there is this immense sense of urgency on behalf of the emperor where he's cutting corners and just really pushing the envelope as much as possible which makes us question if he were not working against some invisible imposed time constraint or some other form of impending deadline and there is in fact a small sliver of evidence toward this although it's thin but it's where malcolm actually says the war began before we were ready it's never wise to put too much weight into a singular statement but it is malkador and he is speaking specifically of his and the emperor's plans like i say many have grown to accept the emperor's speculative bargain with the chaos gods as a near enough certainty now within the 40k law but it's anything but it's merely implied the emperor may have made a deal he later broke with the chaos gods deceiving them and promising something he had no intention of delivering or he may have promised them something in the form of a terrible unknown sacrifice for humanity is entirely unknown for it's just as plausible that the emperor not honoring such agreements are in fact what caused the apocalyptic descent of corruption that caused the horus heresy this tends to be the view of other perpetuals who are known to the emperor olp being the most notable who outright made a point of telling the emperor that his actions may well be what brings the doom of mankind and he's just better off staying out of all of it so this is one possibility that in attempting to save humanity the emperor has in fact forced certain realities to become true and perhaps entirely unintentionally this is a very common principle within time that if you for example saw a glimpse of the future you may feel compelled to try and avoid it stop something happening by taking actions but those actions could then inadvertently cause the future you saw and you'd actually have been better off by doing nothing at all except the very fact that you saw the future at all means at that point you probably have already been affected and set on a changed path this is the whole issue related to time travel and cause and effect and meddling in things and altering the course of stuff but this is why i continue to maintain that time is an important factor in the 40k verse i wish it weren't but i think it is horus being shown a vision of the future real or not it affects him in a way that changes his actions and i'm not going to go off on another time rant here and now but suffice to say a lot of time travel narratives deal with this issue okay just quickly then [Applause] [Music] now i'm kind of getting ahead of myself here but my personal opinion is that it's fairly clearly established by now that the emperor is far from the all-seeing individual he is perceived to be he can see into the future certainly he is wise and he understands humans better than they know themselves and he is powerful compared to nearly all others in the galaxy but he is far from being perfect and neither are his visions and associated plans he references this heavily when speaking to many of his companions a prime example being when he's speaking to custody's ra and master of mankind where you stand now the emperor said is the present do you see the top of the cliff of course sire says ra that is the future you see it you know what it is now reach it we're hesitated now climb custodian you question the nature of my foresight i am granting you an answer raah moved to the rock face looking over the stone finding his first grips he tested them finding them strong even against the weight of his armor the weaker ones he avoided less than 10 heartbeats had passed when a rock cracked and crumbled in his gauntleted hand ra skidded resting his fall by clutching at the stone another gave way sending him the last few meters to the rocky ground in a breathy cloud of white dust you looked for places to safely grip said the emperor yet you have already stumbled you did not know the stone was weak it looked strong the emperor smiled and it was by far the most unpleasant sight ra had ever witnessed emotion painted across a human face as false as the grotesques at any masquerade yes the emperor agreed it did and you only learned the truth too late the emperor then gives ra another example of seeing a distant shore and trying to get across to there accuracy while speaking the emperor's eyes glaze over as if he's either lived this moment or considered it deeply many times he tells rav all the things that could go wrong during the crossing eventualities that were unpredictable from the ship being poorly built to sea monsters devouring the vessel and the emperor describes how each passing moment is rich with a hundred thousand possible pathways minute after minute possibility upon possibility path after path all variables you're unable to see from where you stand at this moment the emperor reached out as if he could crush the coast in his golden gauntlet his expression was cold in its pale ferocity i can see the coast ra i know what awaits me there but i cannot see all the infinite vicissitudes between here and there that is foresight ra to know a trillion possible futures and to be left to guess that the infinite ways of arriving at each one to map out even one possible eventuality taking into account every decision that every living being will make that will impact upon the others around it would take all the lifetimes i've already lived the only way to know anything for certain he trailed off gesturing to the distant shore is to reach the other side said ra now if you were to believe the emperor you come away with the sense that he is unable to see clearly the future which fits with what we know of 40k as even the most powerful eldar sears cannot see the future clearly as it were they seem more like possibilities moments in the future but not necessarily what implicitly happens between then and now it also yet again depends on what sort of time principles you're operating on and this is where you could splinter off into talking about multiple timelines and so forth one quick thing to note multiple timelines does not necessarily mean that every decision possible creates a split into a new timeline but it may do or it may not but truly this is something for another day the point is that the emperor may well be operating on the principle of being a self-fulfilling prophecy which he regularly fails to note when giving examples of his inability to clearly see how to successfully get from a to b he sees a potential future vision but not what occurs in between through his actions to prepare for said future he ends up creating the vision he saw meaning had he not had the future vision he may not have taken those actions and therefore not created that reality an example being maybe if he saw a vision of the future where the galaxy is in flames burning worlds being slaughtered he may consider the need to try and save humanity yet in so doing create the very forces which cause the galaxy to be consumed by the fires of war now that's a clumsy example but it's the basic principle now a self-fulfilling prophecy is a specific type of causal loop and it need not happen purely from psychic precognition it could simply occur via access to knowledge or some other gained awareness of the future it's also worth noting that not all sfps self-fulfilling prophecies are true causal loops a prediction of something that alters your behavior does not necessarily equate to being a causal loop that's just normal cause and effect like if someone told you that wearing a headband while playing sports ball on the weekend would ensure you just score a goal and so you wear one and you score a goal the fact that you did is unrelated there's no loop because it's just something someone randomly determined even if you had ignored the advice you may well have still scored these kind of non-looped sfps can go in both directions in the sense that if someone said to you well if you didn't do something then x would happen well if it happened as they told you this is not necessarily suggestive of it being a causal loop it's just like saying to someone it's gonna rain tomorrow if you don't take an umbrella you're gonna get wet well that may be true and predictive but it's not a causal loop the key thing when it comes to an sfp causal loop is that there needs to be some means by which one entity has access to information beyond our four-dimensional verse namely a future vision that vision or extra information that causes actions that would in all reasonable likelihood not have occurred were it not for that vision it could be also some other information you find a book from the future or whatever this is what causes the loop because without the vision you would not have taken the steps to either attempt to avoid or deliberately create it and thereby not enable the vision in the first place that caused those actions this is of course another of my irritations with time stuff interesting as it is because it tends to screw everything up and things like sfps can often stray into territory like predestination paradoxes backwards causation go watch my dark origin series for more on that stuff if you like it the core underpinning idea though of a self-fulfilling prophecy is not actually just knowledge as i've said before you know what is knowing sfp causal loops are more about belief than they are about knowledge so example if you had a truly powerful dream of some inexplicable event like say saving a family member from drowning in a lake that your family regularly visit and swim in but to which you rarely attended but the vision is so clear you can't shake off the feeling there's something to it and later somebody tells you hey we're heading up to the lake this weekend you feel compelled to go maybe just out of curiosity more than anything but at the back of your mind you have this sense within you this small shred of belief that what you felt was so strong you feel like it's gonna happen at the lake some of your family are sitting and standing out on a jetty you feel more tense than usual because of your dream and somebody startles you you spin around knocking the person behind you off and the surprise causes them to hit their head on the deck as they fall in quickly they're struggling you jump in to save them from drowning now most sfp because of their nature for people in our normal world where we don't have psyches running around all over the place it's extremely unlikely and if they occurred very inexplicable i don't know if i would classify maybe very strong deja vu within that category but perhaps importantly though in this example it's not the knowledge of the dream that's important like i said we all have dreams about things that may or may not happen it's the person who had the dreams unshakable feeling their belief that causes them to take an action they ordinarily may not have and by doing so they end up in a position they otherwise likely would not have been thereby creating the sfp as i say in our everyday reality this kind of thing is not at all commonplace it's more just a theoretical musing on the nature of such things but within something like the 40k verse this stuff becomes far more applicable especially when you're talking about beings like demons of the warp alien seers bizarre entities like the emperor of mankind to go any further we'd have to start talking about closed time loops backwards causation eternalism origins of information paradoxes various other philosophical ideas all very interesting but not for today now in relation to the emperor the most important thing for me is what does this tell us about the emperor's intentions well most importantly it tells us that he has likely caused much of what has occurred directly or indirectly and it also tells us that he's likely playing a very long game although side reference much like star wars this concept of someone to bring balance to the force in the sense of right but when specifically is that going to occur feels very similar to the concept of the emperor saving humanity everybody obviously presumes the emperor was trying to save humanity prior to the horus heresy everybody presumes this was his grand plan and that he failed except what if it weren't what if this were all part of his vision still and that he knew from the beginning he would be interred on the golden throne he knew that in fact the heresy was not the point at which he would save humanity and that this is all par for the course i believe there is a very real possibility that this is the case and in fact the emperor's ultimate vision based on the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy may still come to pass there are though many many unknowns still remaining but there are indicators the emperor knew of what was to come for example the golden throne was prepared from the beginning to accommodate massive amounts of psychos to be sacrificed so why would the emperor design and prepare the device to do so if he had every intention of just leaving into the web way or using magnus to help with the golden throne initially the golden throne didn't even require the emperor to be on it all the time so why when initially they set up the golden throne and the sisters of science bring a load of psyches to be sacrificed to the golden throne the sisters note how even in that first instance the psychos being sacrificed only occupy one of 10 alcoves for the thousands that they have brought there meaning potentially it's going to be 10 000 in the future but the sister of silence rationalizes and consoles herself with the fact that this is only going to be necessary for one day of course that's a lie it was going to happen for the next 10 000 years so again why would the emperor design and prepare the device to do so if this wasn't going to be necessary if he hadn't foresaw this was going to be the case was it just a precaution was it future proofing or perhaps the emperor's vision thousands of years previous was of himself sitting atop a golden throne with thousands of psyches fueling him daily horus and some of the other traitor primarks fulgrim mortarion were upon the planet of dwell horus has discovered some of the population had been placed into cryogenic capsules one thousand generations according to horus he states to his brothers how everything these people knew is preserved and blended with the hundreds of remembrances and iterators who came to this world after gunman restored it to the imperium horus explains he came to dwell because he had become aware of gaps in his memories time that he could not account for and primarks have perfect memories they recall every moment of every second every day from the moment they became self-aware and so to have gaps in their memory was extremely unusual and disturbing with so much having happened and the crusade been taking all of their attention this was not something horus had been apparently aware of until now but when he heard robert goleman describing the library constructed by the ultraman's highest epistolary that it rivaled the more solistic of dwell's repository of the dead he realized he had an opportunity to fill the voids in his memory so evidently this world contains the shared memories of remembrances iterators and many thousands of individuals more spanning the last millennia fulgrim makes an offhand dismissive comment but horus presses him to recall every moment does he recall all of his battles fulgrum confirms of course all of it so horus asks him so what of molok to which fulgrim realizes he too struggles to recall the nature of moloch this is thus an erasure of memory by the emperor than it is a manipulation he has likely additionally psychically distorted their memory so that these gaps were not so apparent he hasn't just purely erased he's also bothered to try and cover it up huge gaps would be too obvious so this obfuscation is designed to make them less noticeable in fact they start to realize the logs of the crusade state several primarks in the emperor traveled to moloch and it was a compliant world no battle no bloodshed the populace were meticulous in their record-keeping and well-remembered terror welcomed the crusaders unification so why horus wonders did they remain there as the ships logged state for 111 days and when they finally left the emperor deployed heavy defensive forces including three titanicus cohorts imperial army regiments and astarte's legion detachments the reason as to why they are there is a mystery and this is where horus reveals his discovery the iterator in the stasis they stand around arthel specialized in the early history of the emperor himself the unification wars the myths and legends surrounding the emperor and how he took the throne of old earth not only this but his remembrance is blended with the memories of those on dwell some of which go back to presumably before the disturbances of old night that is the age of strife horus master stroke here is that some of those who exist in stasis on dwell originate from moloch and have memories from the ancient times before the crusade ever began before the astartes or the primax were even created but most importantly of all some of these settlers remember the visitation of the emperor's first expedition to moloch horus reveals that the emperor traveled to the planet of molex centuries or most likely millennia prior to the unification wars on earth and that his ship was left on molok meaning he used it only one way but returned still to terror fulgrim remembers this detail he says how there are cannibalized ship structures left there what horus says next seems something of a leap though hora states that whatever the emperor found there made him into a god or as near makes no difference and many people see this as a problematic statement horus seems to jump suddenly to making this wild assumption when one could just presume the emperor used either the warp or potentially the web way to return to terror there's nothing that suggests he suddenly had god-like powers where he could just blink across the galaxy but similarly the warp and the web way these are just also a possibility there's no real evidence for either of these things we don't really know what happened the larger question is about the dark gods did they give the emperor power or just knowledge this is more difficult what's also worth considering is that as fulgrim realizes the power to distort the memories not just on the primarks but of three entire legions of astartes and you start to get the sense here that fulgrim is perhaps for the very first time realizing the true level of power held by the emperor and that it is by orders of magnitude far superior to anything the primox world now this whole discovery leads into questions about just how powerful is and was the emperor people often say well why didn't the emperor appear as some earlier point in human history why not during the dark age of technology and so forth and the thing is that's always a possibility but with caveats related to how much knowledge we have about him we just don't know the figure known as all p another perpetual has shed light on this as have other perpetuals from what we have shown through their arguably biased and perhaps misrecord memories but either way they're all we effectively have to go on the emperor is seemingly not as powerful as he would later become in these ancient times just why he became more powerful remains a mystery this feeds into speculation as horus suggests that this trip to moloch is why he became powerful now as i say this really is quite the split in the audience of the 40k verse around these details because horus also tells us how at the dawn of the great diaspora the emperor traveled here in humble guys and found the gateway to a realm of immortal gods he offered them things only a god in waiting could offer and they trusted him they gave him a measure of their power and with that power he wrought the science to unlock the mysteries of creation this is a very well-known quote in the 40k verse and is often surprisingly still debated now because despite it having been many years we still are no really further forward in understanding some of these details horus goes on also to explain how the emperor had no intention of honoring his debt to the gods he turned on them taking their gifts blending them with his gene craft to give birth to demigods the primarks the emperor condemns the warpers unnatural but only so no other they'll wield it the blood of the immaterial realm flows in my veins it flows in all our veins for as i am the emperor's son you are the sons of horus and the secret of our genesis was unlocked upon moloch the gateway to that power is in lupercalia far beneath the mountain rock sealed away from the light by a jealous god who knew that someday one of his sons would seek to surpass his deeds and of course this all depends on if you want to just accept horus's version of events a diaspora by the way is a scattering of ancient people from their homeland likely what this is referencing is humanity's first attempt at settling the stars and what that means is that the emperor likely traveled to moloch in a non-warped vessel meaning this is why it was crewed by perpetuals as they were the only crew able to live through such a lengthy voyage we also hear from another ancient perpetual olivia soreka who accompanied the emperor on his long voyage he leaves her behind to protect the warp portal gateway on molok and she describes in a first-hand account how the emperor emerged changed from the portal in her eyes he appeared to have aged at least a century but what was for her just a moment later when horus goes to moloch he goes there not for information not to make a bargain or some clever deal but for power he needs to be empowered by the gods his desire is to be as powerful as the emperor so that he might defeat him some have questioned why did the emperor in all his power not just seal the warp portal if it was so dangerous well olivia also considers later how she knew that he couldn't do it after what he had taken from the realm beyond it would be suicide for him to draw so near to those whose power he'd stolen we also don't know precisely who created this portal to the warp realm sometimes it's been speculated it was the old ones sometimes speculated even the necron honestly we don't really know the description of it being sort of black irregular smooth stone it's pretty vague now the emperor gaining power here on molok is likely one of the most controversial aspects of the 40k verse like so much of 40k there are many questions about past issues such as if the emperor gained power here how could he have dealt with issues like katan shards in the past the void dragon yet we should also consider if the emperor was so powerful why did he need to travel to moloch in a ship at all many seem to presume that he can just blink teleport around wherever he wants to although there's little to no evidence of this then of course there's the famous deal with the chaos gods the information he gained to create the primox but again this is extremely vague horus is pretty specific about it in manners of speaking but again do you want to take his word for it how much is he inferring how much is he guessing just what was it that the emperor needed that only the chaos gods could provide by the time we get to the period of unification the emperor had the vast resources of scientists and soon the mechanicum working for him yet he needed also to go to the chaos gods to provide the knowledge for the primarks somehow this seems unlikely but again this is something that is incredibly discussed and raked over so much some people speculate that he needed the chaos gods to provide souls for his primox some people say it was just very complex genetic stuff and so on and so on but here's really the question if the emperor so desperately needed this detail of how to create the primarks why didn't he also bother to get other information that was equally difficult that would have enabled him to successfully create say the black carapace which ended up being incredibly difficult and apparently nearly failed the astartes project so why didn't he get that too really here's my final thought on molok a note from here these are obviously my opinions and primarily i'm of the view that people just get way too caught up on this whole thing and overall given the descriptions even if you wanted to just put horus's stuff all to one side it's very difficult for anybody to really say that the emperor didn't gain something from traveling to molok and entering the warp it certainly seems from the various scattered references throughout the heresy later that those beings of the warp feel like they were wronged by the emperor and they've got an axe to grind this is not brand new information what i think people seem to get most twisted up about is the blunt statement of things like the emperor got his powers from molok meaning like he was just an ordinary person and then when he went to moloch he became this super being it's pretty clear that's not the case i think as nearly always is the case with people seeking things to be determined definitively once and for all they get very tunnel visioned and as a consequence kind of end up missing the point entirely it's very clear to us that the emperor was already a powerful psycho before molok we know this there's lots of references lots of anecdotes sorts of spoken meta character references about it he likely didn't gain all his power there but i always think why could he not simply have become a bit more powerful and also have done a deal why is it always spoken of in terms of it has to have been he got all of his powers or a deal that's what i tend to see a lot i think in actuality he probably gained a little of both but even this is really besides the point because the point of it all regardless of whatever the emperor needed and came away with his actions accordingly triggered the chaos gods to begin to move against him i think that's clear and that for me is the critical thing because tick-tock and that my friends is the point it's not about how much power did the emperor get from molok that is mostly irrelevant is the fact that he went there at all and came away with some measure of something and triggered a ticking clock a deadline to where we see the outbreak of war between the astartes and the imperium itself to happen ahead of schedule the clock in the church of the lightning stone the clock of the eternal gods of darkness the clock which as i noted in part three is seen not only during the last church but also appears in thousand suns where magnus is given a vision of the future where the galaxy is in flames magnus another example also of a self-fulfilling prophecy when he comes out of his vision he has this momentary sliver of sight of the same clock in the last church chiming the doom of mankind and i think it's pretty clear that this is the whole point of the emperor's story it's about his hubris it's about the empress seeking to save humanity from disaster set himself and the imperium on course 4 disaster he started the clock that would chime the doom of mankind and when the outbreak of the heresy began amid a collapsing of planned events that malcolm references in first lord of the imperium their time was up [Music] so finally we come to first lord of the imperium now before we go further there are a few things to clear away immediately the first is that as an audio short and not a short story this small but quite important narrative gets overlooked by many almost always when i bring it up most people have not even heard of it which is very surprising but just a recommendation for me listen to more audio shorts put out by black library you never know what you might be missing out on the second is to reference anybody suggesting that anything that isn't a main novel ie the heresy series or any other large full-length novel is not to be taken seriously or as part of the main verse as it were this as far as i can tell is nonsense and purely the opinion of individuals as far as i'm concerned everything that exists in the 40k verse including the codexes supplementary material comics anything else that's controlled and approved through gw and therefore are all applicable and equally valid because they're all signed off on they're all part of the same verse so be it an audio short a short story a novella it's all approved and part of the verse so first lord of the imperium the setting of this short is that the heresy has already broken out and it is looking grim and severe for the loyalists they speak about numbers from beta garman coming in but the actual date is unspecific remembering the chord the heresy actually took place over an astonishingly short period of time malkador is on terror at the imperial palace and has been called to the side of his personal astropath and initially appears to be simply comforting a dying aid he's reminiscing to comfort and dispel her fears or is he this is again what people tend to presume but in truth what this feels like is less malkador putting her mind at ease that only comes at the end it seems more that malcolm is offloading some of the things that have a great burden to him upon the only person he can a trusted close confidant who is literally about to die and will never reveal his words to anyone malcold for example reveals in first lord that he is truly ancient malcolador states that he is in fact 6718 years 241 days old this means if we are to believe him and again in this context we have no reason not to because why would he choose to randomly invent details just for this dying woman especially one who already knows likely more about him than any other barring a select few why there's no good reason at all for him to invent details that she actually finds shocking and pretty devastating it's hardly putting her at ease so the argument that he's telling her what she needs to hear to feel at peace or whatever it's nonsense and based on this assertion of his age we can speculate that malkador was born or originated in the early centuries of m24 this is interestingly just prior to the age of strife and to put that in perspective we currently exist in the time period of zero to one m3 the astropath is known as sybil niasta and she voices a theory that many have speculated that malcador is being kept alive by the emperor's psychic power that this is what sustains him malcolm explains no this is quite wrong in fact it's actually backwards malcolm explains to us that he is the last of his order the last sigilight and more curiously malcado explains that the emperor was not the emperor until he met malkidor before he knew malcador the emperor was quote only the greatest of many warlords of old earth they knew him by a different name and this is a detail confirmed by erda later in saturn that the emperor was known by a different name in the ancient times although the emperor himself has said as much many times that he had many names but again it slightly is working towards corroborating generally what malkador is saying malcolm also reveals that the imperial aquila is not a symbol purity of the imperium and the emperor he explains that the emperor has almost pure focused tunnel vision on his goal on his ultimate desire for humanity which of course we know and that this focus is so strong that he often forgets to look to the mistakes of the past and not recall the lessons learned malcolm tells us that the sigilite order by contrast was created to remember human history to remember humanity to preserve of course this is referencing the long period of the age of strife and perhaps even before that as he is the last of his order it's suggestive that the sigilite order has been going on for a very long period of time malcolm explains that without himself the reunification of terror would have been impossible it's a pretty big statement to make and he explains that therefore our future is built on its past malcador showed the emperor why all others have fallen thus allowing him to build on the stability of malcador's revelations now this is actually all pretty vague and in some respects not particularly helpful beyond this understanding that maukar has seemingly provided levels of invaluable counsel to the emperor and enabled him with knowledge and visions that he himself did not hold or at least in malcador's mind that's the case el cador even during the heresy is of the position that the imperium cannot hold but reveals that the imperium was not designed for the post humans but for mankind ordinary humans not the astartes and the primarks this has of course been abundantly clear and the premise of the emperor's plan from the outset after all the high lords of terror etc etc the astartes are the tools to protect humanity but it is humanity itself that ought govern in practice that hasn't worked out especially well and again high lords of terror van dyke the shambles of ultra painfully rectified by gulemon on his return the list of human leaders in the imperium proving themselves hopelessly flawed and easily corruptable is endless and a small tangent just to note that despite all the pretense of the emperor and the clarity that his creations existed only so as to achieve brief immediate goals before being promptly and bloodly consigned to history all in all this has proven to be something of a bizarre miscalculation now 10 millennia down the line the emperor also does not seem to view the primax as his loyal and loving sons but as objects things tools to achieve a task and then be discarded there's likely a reason why each of them was so specifically different and had very different traits and characteristics it's because they're there to fulfill a specific role and then be thrown away just as he did when he slaughtered the thunder warriors in fact with regularity the emperor refers to his primarks as it and only calls them sun if they are in his direct presence or he has need to speak to them in such a manner otherwise he refers to them in extremely disconnected cold emotionless terms now again some speculate this is just part of the emperor's grand misdirections but i can't think for the life of me why it would be necessary because usually when he refers to them as being less than human he's speaking with close aides people he can theoretically trust so that seems to undermine such ideas also gulemon when speaking with the emperor in m41 reveals to us that the emperor seemed different cold not as he remembered not at all like a father this is likely because the emperor so drained from 10 000 years on the golden throne no longer has the ability the power to maintain his illusions and it's why gilman walks away deeply troubled having now seen the truth of things and again as others have captured glimpses of before quite simply the astartes were never meant to exist for ten thousand years the fact that they have no restrained lifespan is not because they were designed to outside eternity not because they were supposed to shepherd humanity it was simply easier for the emperor malcador to create warriors with no lifespan because of the nature of what they had to achieve in the crusade crossing the galaxy was no task that could be achieved in ordinary human lifespans warp travel or not this simple fact ended up creating the oddity that is the imperium of mankind it's really a freakish creation it's not by design but happenstance the imperium of mankind was never meant to exist as it does in m41 malcador says quite clearly in this story that he can see sybil is not afraid to die so he is not at all reassuring her with the information that he will impart she is in actuality terrified that the imperium will fail and that too many errors and mistakes have occurred already plus horus is closing in on terror the doom of all beckons but malcold appears unshaken he tells her believe me when i say this sybil and i asked her this was always intended to be the final actor the crusade we wanted the primarks to turn against one another against their father be assured we maneuvered each of them from the moment of their rediscovery pitting them against one another stoking their brotherly rivalries with his unequal favor it was not difficult no more so than positioning pieces on a chiap's board which is curiously a chess variant played in the june verse malcolm also notes that those who could not be managed well they would never reach the end game this is possibly suggestive of the missing primarks erased from all records but it could also be referencing traitor primarks malcador says you fear that the emperor cannot control his sons and yet i tell you that this war is the method of that control the primarchs have no more free will than we gave them civil answers can it be true mankato exclaims how his failure was in underestimating the true enemy that the ruinous powers emboldened their champions and the war began before they were ready he talks about how every toll of the bell gives pause to question was it a death they intended or another innocent soul they may have saved and that this is his burden to bear and that he does so that the emperor may concentrate on the final battle to come in his final words malkador tells her to fall and he will catch you this i swear give yourself to him of course meaning the emperor as the dawn comes civilized dead malkador contemplates his further thoughts through a bitter and frustrated tone he considers how the emperor promised it wouldn't be like this but most critically he says i lie to them to spare their sorrow even as i envy their mortality and it breaks my heart it breaks my heart swallowing his grief and loneliness he lays her hands on her in the sign of the aquila now this short is a difficult one it's clearly intended to be many people dismiss malcador's revelations as i noted earlier but it is the nature of 40k information and details are fractured and even without this revelation you can largely piece together what is happening the real difficulty comes in knowing what the overall plan would be precisely the one thing i feel sure of is that the emperor wanted to or needed the heresy to happen it's pretty clear as malcolm notes that the primarks have all been positioned to agitate and create jealous doubts between them you see this throughout the heresy where the emperor hardly is acting like a father figure and there's many times where you just think what the hell why didn't he just appease and calm down that situation instead he allows these frustrations and jealousies to fester under the surface but as malcudor notes perhaps the timing of their plan was off and this threw things into disarray also it seems plausible that individuals like magnus were not meant to turn to the dark gods as we believe magnus was meant to be if not the power than the controller of the golden throne in whatever role that was going to ultimately play again remembering that before the end of the heresy the emperor was able to leave the throne for periods of time this didn't cause disaster or stop the astronomican from working again because the emperor remember he was so powerful that he can control these things at a distance it's only after the heresy that the emperor is weakened and so then must remain on the golden throne aided by continual psycho sacrifice now a small tangent about that in the heresy we see how magnus is baited with visions of himself being the corpse on the throne by the dark powers to attempt to turn him of course he resists this for the most part and we know this is another attempt at creating a self-fulfilling prophecy which kind of is what happens although again just as with the temptation of horus how accurate was this vision of the future was it the future or just one possible future and then like i said of course ultimately it does become another self-fulfilling prophecy because of magnus and another causal loop this is what makes the end period of the heresy and the emperor's ultimate goals to us so difficult because many of the things he planned for appeared to be with a different outcome in mind entirely but then also not things that he really voiced a very obvious line of thinking that many people including me have considered is could the emperor's positioning on the golden throne be intentional is he trying to achieve ascension to godhood via the now galactic religion of the imperium was this his goal all along this is like i say not a new idea by any means but it's difficult to see why that would be necessary given that essentially the emperor was already a god by any definition up until his battle with horus and even in the aftermath for that matter there's just too much we don't know so we cannot say what malkador is lying about also in reference to the first lord because we do not know exactly what the emperor promised malcador also where he says i lie to spare them their sorrow what is he referencing here saying them could mean a lot of things but it's most likely mortal humans or maybe primarks i think it's fair to assume that as he's just spoken to this loyal astropath he is more likely speaking about having to lie to those close members of the imperial service about how things are going in the heresy or the plan overall but this also does not necessarily mean that what he is saying generally speaking is a lie there's always a foundation of truth to most lies anyway after all but here's the thing if you were to just take these things at their most simplistic face value the whole thing makes no sense we're meant to believe that malcolador told her this grand tale about how the emperor and malcolm basically wanted to bring down their studies because this was their whole plan and she's meant to be comforted by this horrifying revelation why even bother he could have just said don't worry sybil this is all part of our plan we will all surely emerge victorious but no he tells her this was part of our plan but now it's all gone tits up that's a strange way to reassure somebody on their deathbed it's hardly textbook where you lie and tell them everything's gonna be fine and both of you not understanding it's a lie the whole point of this exchange is that he gives her a harsh truth that yes she can feel reassured that this was part of a plan malcolm the emperor forged but also that it's not going exactly as planned he's reassuring her by giving her actual truth the lie is that the emperor will not be there to catch her only darkness and the nightmare of the warperweight and it is this which is what is breaking malkador's heart now play devil's advocate and say well okay what if this whole thing was just a lie and the only reason he told her all of this was to save her from the far worst truth that the emperor and malcolm do not have a grand saving vision for humanity at all and that their best laid plans lay in ruin now everything's gone catastrophically wrong and at this point they're completely winging it and hoping that they haven't inadvertently caused the doom of all humanity to total extinction and eternal misery in a version of hell now i'm not gonna lie that's actually a possibility but personally i just don't see it it's too bleak even by 40k standards and it's also not really what the story of 40k in the emperor is about it also somewhat sets up the emperor as being an incompetent bumbling four not to mention it would also give this short the equivalent of an it was all a dream ending it would be like those star trek episodes where everybody dies and at the end they're like haha not really i just think the premise of malcolm laying out all this stuff and then saying actually it was all a lie however you want to cut it it just doesn't work for me the much more telling revelation is when malcolm says you promised me it wouldn't be like this in reference of course to himself and the emperor i think if anything this is what helps the most to confirm what he just revealed because again otherwise it doesn't make any sense that the emperor malcador had planned things with a grandiose scheme but that the emperor perhaps promised things wouldn't be as catastrophic as they ended up being that fits perfectly why would he say that to himself if that wasn't the case it wouldn't make any sense also when malcolm tells sybil that the war began before we were ready as i noted earlier i believe this to be a reference to the chaos gods pressuring them perhaps having realized just what the emperor was up to or just part of some larger timeline and wanting to close things down now as quickly as possible and that fits within generally speaking the wider picture of what we know and beyond this of course in the widest sense there are many many other heavy questions about figures like the king in yellow now believed to be constantine valdor we know this via the eisenhorn raven of bequin novels this is of course talking about the cognite and we learned that the king seeks to obtain the true name of the emperor in order to obtain power over him precisely why and for what reason is unknown we also know he has an army of winged space marines possibly even custodies like in stasis but again this is strange considering how custodies are essentially genetically engineered to be loyal to the emperor but if it were possible for valdor and his circle of the eight able to overcome this it's believable that they could be rightly outraged by the emperor's actions and his plans if they were able to kind of get their heads straight as it were there of course exists possibilities that they retain information which also give greater context to their actions that's certainly a heavy topic for another day unlikely when there's also more information to go on because right now sparse is an understatement the point is there is a lot that supports malcador's explanations to sybil i believe that most of what malcolm said here is the truth or at least from a certain point of view because like i say the alternative makes no sense then at the end also when he says i lied to spare them their sorrow even as i envy their mortality malcolm's heart breaks for the fact that any who die are not being saved by the emperor but they're falling into the horror of the warp that is what he laments it's why he also speaks about the death of innocence being his burden to bear and that is why he lies to her and he tells her the emperor will catch her to spare her the sorrow of knowing she and importantly all others who are dying are about to be sent straight to hell lastly malcador's sorrow that's breaking his heart likely because he truly believed in the emperor and they were going to be able to save the majority of humanity from a dark fate to secure humanity in the web way and thereby guide them into a new age of existence but for malcador the writing is now on the wall it's clear this will not come to pass hence him saying it wasn't supposed to be like this [Music] so to state the exceedingly obvious when considering the emperor of man we must assume he is playing the long game perhaps the longest game for he has walked across millennia and the true scope of his vision remains unknowable in terms of how he perceives time itself i sometimes heretically question if the emperor not unlike demons has something of the ability to see time from the eternalist viewpoint whereby he sees past present and future together and he sometimes gets visions of the future enabling him to adjust his plans but the certainty of such future events as we've discussed may not excuse difficulties faced in the present which to be quite honest somewhat conflicts with that concept of time but perhaps it's somewhere within that view or perhaps it's somewhere where there are future possibilities we've been shown glimpses of the past that suggest it was as far back as the ancient time on earth that he decided his true path waiting for an ideal time until the situation presented itself he would wait passing through human history observing learning and undoubtedly manipulating i think the most disturbing and perhaps most telling aspect is when the emperor chose to emerge as a force for humanity not during the golden age prior to the cybernetic revolt he appears after this when humanity is at its weakest not when it was necessary but when he needed it that being when humanity can put up arguably the least resistance to his plans and when the necessary tools are at his disposal which gives me to be honest a deep sense of unease as to his true intentions coupled with the fact that so often when those who know him well capture a brief glimpse of the truth inside they seem not comforted warmed heartened curious but shocked horrified even and that's of great concern malcador says that the emperor was not the emperor until he met him but this does not mean to say the emperor was not aware he needed to and would also meet malcador we see many further glimpses of the emperor malcador's relationship example in the short the board is set where the emperor prepares malcador for his most critical role for humanity and by the way that's the core aspect of that story there's some other stuff in there but people get carried away with it the emperor's continued deception has left a galaxy racked by war tearing itself apart the empire of humanity the imperium is holding itself together but with ultimately near to no forward direction was this the emperor's grand vision or is it merely a pause has he through his lies and arrogance doomed humanity itself to a slow death via attrition as angron rightly observed we fight to silence anyone that dares draw breath and whisper a different opinion from ours we fight because the emperor wants every world in his hands for each time i wage war against worlds that threaten the imperium's advance there comes another time when i'm told to conquer peaceful worlds that wish i need to be left alone i am told to destroy whole civilizations and call it liberation i am told to demand millions of men and women from these new worlds to make them take up arms in the emperor's hordes and i'm told to call this a tithe or recruitment because we are too scared of the truth the truth anger on is speaking to of course is that the emperor like any tyrannical dictator has enslaved humanity to his will his unbreakable singular vision that must be executed and followed at all costs on pain of death and this would then be continued for another 10 000 years under the banner of the all-powerful imperium the god emperor of mankind again was this the emperor's grand vision to emulate the despots dictators and freakish cults of the barbaric wastelands of earth in the aftermath of the age of strife or was it for all of humanity to exist in a stagnating dying pool of despair the emperor all along has operated on the principle of going all in on his vision for the future there was never going to be any half-measure in his imperium his future for humanity and that's not my speculation it's very clear from the beginning when all p decided to turn away from the emperor for this very reason that the emperor would allow no compromise no adaptation ever this is later supported by accounts of other perpetuals the emperor demands absolute loyalty absolute devotion and sacrifice or suffer his unconstrained wrath the emperor will destroy and lay waste to entire civilizations across the galaxy that i've often argued if only they were stronger retained a little more from the dark age of technology may well have been able to actually resist the imperium modern interesting galaxy things would have turned out to be then if of course they were also able to resist the emperor but that's entirely another matter as things stand there is far too much which remains out of reach to us most critical being to discover just what the emperor's overall plan was because for someone who set out with an agenda of forming a civilization a culture based not on myth religion or superstition as somebody not wanting to be seen as a god he surely went far out of his way to do just about everything possible to be seen as one while telling everybody continually that he wasn't and if that isn't the abc of how to form a religion i don't know what is so i think it's safe to say the emperor doth protest too much i mean he literally made a primark who looked like an angel things got so confusing that even one of his own primarks couldn't tell which way was up as always the emperor appears as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face just a heads up if you don't want to be seen as a god don't walk around as a giant dressed in gold performing miracles and laying waste to entire civilizations humans aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer we tend to let our imaginations run away with us like i said from the beginning the emperor of man is nothing if not single-minded arrogant and unshakable in his vision he decided upon this path long ago we have scanned few perpetuals to corroborate anything of the ancient times but they seem to have no major stake in lying so although their accounts are scant we can probably trust them the only question is if they even remember things accurately over 30 or 40 000 years what we've been told is that upon the ancient earth the emperor was not as powerful as he would become although it was also told that he was always stronger than the others than the other perpetuals the other early psyches of humanity if you will and this is very important because slightly more powerful is quite a step from erasing the memories of legions of astartes and physically being a guiding beacon for all humanity across the galaxy and all of the other insane things the emperor can achieve by the period of m30 now we might well consider okay this is a very long time and just as we see other psyches emerging in human history over this time perhaps the emperor simply became more and more powerful however several things stick in my mind firstly that doesn't seem to have happened with other perpetuals and also horus states that the emperor traveled to moloch potentially several millennia previous and that's just his guess it could have been even earlier we know that he traveled there with perpetuals and i also presume this to have occurred prior to the age of strife which occurred in m25 now malcador himself has stated in the early years of m31 that he is 6718 years old placing his birth or however he came into being around m24 the millennia just prior to the age of strife additionally i've always had a difficult time discarding how malcolm explains so clearly in first lord where the woman he is consorting on her deathbed presumes his extended ages due to his close association with the emperor the emperor's powers gifting malcolm life beyond that of a human and malcolm laughs and says no no you have it backwards the emperor was not the emperor until he met me so he's suggesting here that something significant occurred between the emperor and malcador early on in their companionship now who knows when that is but it's very plausible that this could have occurred within our let's say the first 1000 years of malcador's lifetime well within the scope for the emperor to then travel to moloch because let's just go back over this how did the emperor know he needed to travel to molok again did he just know off the top of his head that this place was there did he sense it how did he acquire that knowledge now possibly he would have had access to records through the time he lived through but it's also possible that somebody told him of what lay there in the depths the ancient discoveries of human civilization post dark age of technology say somebody who belonged to an order whose entire purpose was to remember critical information malcador says for the longest time he was only the greatest of warlords of old earth they knew him by a different name malcador talks of the aquila's symbolism and how its blindness is not always representative of a lack of sight in this i believe he is alluding to things that they do not wish to see or more importantly do not wish to acknowledge he states the emperor does not dwell upon the past his attention is always focused on his vision for mankind's destiny he doesn't want to talk about the untoward things that they maybe did in order to get to here i believe in my current headspace that maukar provided the emperor with the knowledge of molok so that the emperor and other perpetuals would travel there with the express purpose of gaining whatever it is he brought away which i believe to be probably both knowledge and power malcolm and the emperor then began planning their grand scheme to guide humanity into a new age within the web way as the emperor has been pretty clear about and thereby enable us to become a truly all-powerful psychic race and sever our connection to the warp which the eldar failed to do sometimes the emperor sounds a little bit more like headed in a necron direction but regardless the big point is what happens with the heresy and the astartes and this is really where things become difficult in one respect it's reasonable for us to perhaps assume okay perhaps instead of one almighty extermination event similar to the thunder warriors the astartes engage in a more staggered destruction the emperor would not have the forces to destroy the combined power of the astartes or i presume so anyway so perhaps alternatively to a large slaughter some would have had some use in the interim like magnus dawn gilman whereas the more unstable and reliable primarks would be twisted into darkness ultimately destroyed except this doesn't work because gilman has had several attempts at killing mortarion fulgrim and has been readily slapped down to the ground every single time in fact one of the few things that saved him was a form of religious intervention on behalf of the saurotas so this concept of the astartes just fighting to the death and basically extinguishing each other sort of as malkador states or alludes to i feel like there is something in there but the precise details are kind of unknowable also something that never comes up with the emperor's grand plans what happens to all the mechanicus i have a feeling they're not going to be too thrilled at the concept of having to leave mars leave all their cogs oils incense and giant robot toys behind so is the emperor's plan to really have a huge civil war and then after that have another civil war it's hard to really put together in a reasonably logical way once you actually start to think about it this is in fact perhaps why the emperor's plan has never been fully revealed because the more you put the puzzle pieces together you start to realize you're missing way too many pieces to make any kind of coherent picture you've got maybe one corner that sort of looks like something but the rest is just bits of possible things now do i think that the remaining astartes and primox would have to eventually be destroyed yes absolutely it's clear repeatedly that no matter what he says at a surface level the emperor has got no care for his creations they're just tools to complete a task and be discarded he doesn't consider them human even because later down the line if humanity eventually became so psychically developed what would then be the need for the throne and magnus and the primarks and the astartes also of course there will be no need for navigators astropaths and so on if we take malkador at his word which for the most part i feel you can the heresy was planned to some degree it was schemed to occur but if that were true it's also difficult to see how the emperor's plan could have worked at all was his plan to usher most of humanity into the web way then slam the door shut put up some kind of psychic bubble around the throne room and gateway just let everything outside annihilate itself which it probably wouldn't again to a degree that kind of seems like the necrons plans go to sleep let everybody destroy themselves via entropy and awaken to a lovely clean galaxy in truth the emperor of man seems something of a nightmarish being but only in the sense that he exists in my mind as the ultimate distillation of a species when people see through to the core of the emperor i always imagine they're seeing something like humanity in its most raw terrifying form or another possibility is of course that yes the emperor if we take any number of wildly speculative origin stories most of those lean toward the emperor being something not entirely human by any measure of definition really this starts to get into more philosophical terminology because we start to think about things like okay what makes us human how do you define this is a psycho still human is it custodies and a studies what is it that's different between a human and a not why does that matter why does the emperor care so much about the difference of what makes a human and what doesn't why does he care about that is it just purely our eternal survival the more you pilot this thread the more it starts to become difficult to place just what it is he's so invested in and that in itself is pretty troubling and this is perhaps why you have figures like old p john gramaticus who have taken this position that the emperor should be stopped and that humanity should be allowed to take its own course of course with old p that wasn't really his opinion for the longest time and worth discussing another time but in my mind the emperor is more of a tragic figure so consumed by his own belief his own purity of vision his own hubris mostly that he's unable to see clearly at all that he's very likely doing far more harm than good even if his intentions are positive pure and he really believes he can achieve what seems impossible a small tangent in many ways i see the emperor not dissimily to davoros in doctor who genesis of the daleks and i'm sorry to throw in such a wild tangent reference but i really see a lot of similarity and i'm not talking about davos in the new shows but just in this classic serial genesis of the daleks because davoros like the emperor also seems to have this maniacal obsession to see his species survive not unlike the emperor he was looking only at the big picture he saw the perpetuation of his race via the daleks also partly the himself you are afflicted with a conscience and the daleks were to be the ultimate genetic evolutionary form kind of like what the emperor is looking toward so to davros this becomes the only important thing at all i allowed this gerard to be played out for one reason only to find those men who were truly loyal to me and to discover those who would betray me we i will go on you must stop them he will sacrifice everything even all the souls of his civilization in the current time to see his ultimate form be perpetuated into the future because in his mind all of the things in the current time no longer mattered he was looking at the much bigger picture another thought is that the emperor understood the impossibility of his task and was trying to just walk a line i've often thought perhaps the reason his goals were not clear is because he was just trying to play the odds knowing the unpredictable nature of humanity and that maybe he thought well if this doesn't work i've sown enough seeds in the minds of all that maybe things will go in a different direction that still will help to protect humanity say for example turning the entire galaxy into a hyper religious state that spends all their efforts worshiping the emperor so much so that it becomes an immense power in its own right if we think about the emperor's goals in the most basic terms his plan was to unite humanity and lead it to a newly evolved state secure from the most dire threats except if that were true then why in the hell did he wait until after the golden age of humanity as i said before to get involved and sort things out by all accounts humanity was actually smashing it in the golden age but instead he opted for no i'm gonna let everything turn to absolute ruin and then start from scratch as i said something seriously doesn't add up here and as many have suggested before for the emperor it might have been a plan to just you know save a few functional stc somewhere just store them away in a big underground safe in a mountain range just in case just on the off chance they're needed let's play it safe this of course though is not the point the emperor is meant to be a flawed figure just like the rest of humanity and so when he asserts that he is just a man just a human not a god i believe he's actually being honest in how he sees himself for the humans who look upon him and see this godlike being of immense power they're only able to see what he appears to be not what he truly is the vision he projects is what in part enables him to marshal such respect and awe among humanity and it's only for those who see through this to what lies beneath do they see the true face and as john grammaticus would say a bloodthirsty bastard the emperor's plan to my mind however you want to approach it could never have worked for the simple reason of humanity the emperor had some early success but even before they were setting out on the crusade the imperium was already failing the hypocrisy was just far too clear to see before things even began this is illustrated perfectly in valdor birth of the imperium kandawya wants to put valdo on trial for the slaughter of the thunder warriors because despite what the emperor had promised that humans themselves would play a strong actual part in the new imperium she quickly discovers that this is not the case kandawya remembers stories from her father about earth as it was this is what she's built herself around and so she knows first hand that humanity was ruled differently in the past but she begins to see that the emperor is no different than any of the other warlords and autocrats in the end she is vanquished for no other reason than attempting to fulfill her role as the head of terror's arbites instead she's told to ignore the outright massacre of the thunder warriors and is exiled to live in a small desert camp home spared execution by the grossly hypocritical imperial custodies who sanction her for attempting to carry out the job they assigned her in the first place and the imperium would only spiral downhill from here but it was truly this undermining of the civilian government so early on that exposed and betrayed the truth of the imperium that it was purely to be the emperor's autocracy this may have been more palatable had he clearly laid out his plans to anybody at any time but apparently no this was too dangerous or unnecessary the empress plan failed not because of horus or erebus or any of the primarks not because of humanity not because of chaos the emperor failed because he placed himself at the center of everything because he believed in his almighty hubris that only he could be the salvation of humanity and he couldn't bear to share the burden not even with his most close companions and allies instead speaking forever in vague riddles and metaphors and stories and tales and all this other crap his arrogance was his most human flaw and ironically the eldar's flaw as well both so highly advanced both so certain of themselves they were perhaps unable to even contemplate the possibility of failure the possibility perhaps it was they who were the main problem in short when you lay it all out everything the emperor did from start to finish was either one of the most deep carefully delayed visionary plans conceived ever ever so much so that because of such visionary levels of genius even now we still cannot see how it was all meant to work or perhaps far more likely the emperor had this vision of where he needed to get to what he needed to achieve and was thereafter for the most part winging it all the way trying to paper over the cracks as they appeared and hoping somehow it was all going to work out the final and far more disturbing plan is that this continues on as some kind of unseen master plan that involves him dragging humanity into the state of miserable decay as it has been for some 10 000 years meanwhile the emperor has not come close to completing his goals still and that this remains just another piece in his grandiose galactic puzzle primark gilman has not shared his insight with the emperor for us that would have been nice beyond the fact of course that the emperor was not how the primark remembered him and that this greatly disturbed him i feel we're unlikely to glean a significant amount of new information from the ongoing heresy but there are still some aspects to dive in on regarding the emperor past and future much like molok regardless of how it turned out the emperor's grand plan as far as we're able to understand as presented appears to have failed the only question now is was this part of a far longer grander plan that perhaps the emperor himself was not even able to fully understand the scale and scope of will he now as a figure of powerful worship within the imperium empower humanity further there are signs of this already within the imperium as lord gilman is discovering himself important questions remain to unravel further like what of the cognite and perhaps who knows what even still of the cabal perhaps what of the great rift or blackstone of the necrons moves in the galaxy and the inari what of the state of the ecclesiarchy in the imperium could the emperor be reborn as many factions of the inquisition believe could he become more powerful than all of chaos combined through the power of the imperium's god emperor religion permanently fueling and empowering the emperor to fight an eternal war in the warp to become as so many have speculated a positive god of light in the warp to become that which he had always intended and enabled humanity to be led into a new age a perhaps continued war but also evolution and enlightenment i think a short quote from mortis best summarizes the emperor in his entirety where in the ancient past he's speaking with all p the emperor is arguing that in the interests of humanity in its far distant future he should secure some dark extremely powerful knowledge the emperor says take this knowledge and the fate changes leave it and it unravels it is a simple choice there are no simple choices said all but there are said the emperor it's just the consequences that are complicated [Music] so now let's talk about my next selection for you on audible i decided that it would be good to give everybody time to work through a trilogy that i completed relatively recently and overall the series i'm talking about is the updated dark imperium plague war and god blight series now there's a whole variety of twists and turns across these three audio books and the story delves into a plethora of topics there's many different perspectives presented and a huge amount of discussion to be had of course the heresy series is one that people always want to gravitate to but because i really enjoyed this trilogy overall i think it's a very valuable series also in understanding where things stand right now for humanity and the imperium in m41 i also thought it would be best to complete this trilogy through the remaining months of this year and then i'll make an overview of the entire series later along the line but i'll still be recommending other additional options to listen to in upcoming months i know so many of you have contributed thoughts to me about why you enjoy audible as a service before now and it's one that i continue to enjoy remember if you're new to all of this you can get involved today by starting your 30-day audible trial with premium plus this gets you a free audio book as well as full access to thousands of originals audio books and podcasts you'll also get access to the plus catalog all are included with your membership so you can download and stream all you want no credits needed visit audible.com luton or for those in the us text looting to 500 500 and as always very big thanks to all of you for supporting me here on the channel so as always i'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Luetin09

Views: 466,845

Rating: 4.939117 out of 5

Keywords: Gaming, Discuss, Channel, Future, 40K, Warhammer 40K, Imperium, Humanity, Mankind, Doom, Fall, Space Marines, Heretic, Heresy, The Emperor of Man, Lore, History, Guide, Warhammer 40000, Warp, Immaterium, Rift, War, Slaughter, Horror, Nightmare, Tabletop, Inquisition

Id: tIWJFDHQL2I

Length: 97min 20sec (5840 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021