Emperor of Mankind

The Emperor of Mankind is the leader of the Imperium of Man, and is described by the Imperial Ecclesiarchy and the Imperial Cult as the Father, Guardian and God of humanity. He has sat immobile, his body slowly crumbling, within the Golden Throne of Terra for over 10,000 standard years. Although once a living man, his shattered, decaying body can no longer support life, and it is kept intact only by the cybernetic mechanisms of the Golden Throne and a potent mind itself sustained by the daily sacrifice of thousands of lives. The Emperor chose to sacrifice his immortal life in the service and protection of Mankind. To humanity's countless trillions across the galaxy-spanning Imperium, he is nothing less than a God. Through his Imperium, Mankind is united and remains one of the most powerful intelligent races in the Milky Way Galaxy as well as its most dominant in terms of both population and territory held. United under one government, Mankind is able to survive the myriad numbers of deadly threats it faces from aliens, the Forces of Chaos and the Traitors, heretics and mutants within. The Imperium's rule, carried on in the Emperor's behalf since the end of the Horus Heresy by the High Lords of Terra and a multitude of Imperial organisations, has been long, oppressive and necessarily harsh. It has also resulted in technological and cultural stagnation, even a regression into superstition and religious obfuscation, that would have horrified the Emperor. Though he is no longer responsive to external stimuli, the Emperor still lies at the very center of the Imperium. Although he cannot be directly involved in the day-to-day running of humanity's galactic government, his presence on the Golden Throne is vital to sustaining the Imperium, since his powerful mind's presence in the Immaterium maintains and directs the Astronomican, the psychic beacon that makes possible faster-than-light Warp travel and is vital to Imperial shipping, transportation, commerce and communication. He is said to guide his race through the psychicaly-reactive divination tool known as the Emperor's Tarot, which select psykers can consult to gain a glimpse of the future and the Emperor's will. He is also said to constantly battle the Chaos Gods in the Warp and prevent their further intrusion upon the material universe. His mind must remain vigilant at all times throughout the entire Imperium to safeguard the human race and to offer his protection to the faithful. Above all else, it is Mankind's collective belief in the Emperor's divinity that serves as humanity's greatest protection from Chaos and the other hideous dangers that plague the galaxy. As the Imperial Creed has taught for over 10,000 standard years, the Emperor protects...

First Origin Tale
In the current Warhammer 40,000 background story, the Emperor's origin and history prior to unifying Terra is left mysterious and undetailed. The first mention of the Emperor in Imperial records is when he unified Terra at the end of the Age of Strife. In Horus Rising, Horus mentions that the Emperor lived "in Anatolia, in his own childhood" when talking of his first meeting with the Emperor. It is known he had been immortal and ancient even before his ascension to the Golden Throne over ten thousand years ago.

The Emperor is the "New Man", the first and greatest of the race of human psykers. He is also the collective reincarnation of the extinct shamans, sorcerers and wisemen who had guided primitive humanity since prehistoric times. As the Emperor grew older his powers began to manifest themselves and he gradually remembered his thousands of past lives.

For thousands of years before becoming the Emperor, he guided and watched humanity develop over the course of its history, assuming the guise of a large number of historical personages. He was aware that the extremes of human nature were feeding the growth of the Chaos Gods in the Warp, and so he sought to promote peace and harmony on Earth and thereby curb the growth of the Ruinous Powers' strength. The Chaos Gods themselves recognized the Emperor as their greatest enemy among all the intelligent beings of the galaxy. Only during the Age of Strife did the Emperor emerge from obscurity to take a more direct hand in the future of humanity, conquering the warring factions of mankind's homeworld and establishing his direct rule over the Earth. The Emperor accepted the deaths of innocents that resulted from his conquest with great remorse in order to achieve the greater good of unifying humanity and protecting it from the manifest predations of the Warp.

With the assistance of the Adeptus Mechanicus on Mars, the Emperor created the first Space Marines and fleets of interstellar starships that would carry his armies across galactic space. The objective was a Great Crusade that would unify all of the planets colonized by man during the Dark Age of Technology prior to the Age of Strife into one Imperium of Man, and also subdue, destroy, or chase away all alien races from what was to be the Imperial Domain, the manifest destiny of Mankind. The Emperor also created the Primarchs from whom the Space Marines' gene-seed was later developed. The Chaos Gods, however, sought to thwart the Emperor's grand plan. The Primarchs were sucked into the Warp even as they developed beneath the Imperial Palace, and scattered across the inhabited worlds of the galaxy. During the Great Crusade all but two of the twenty Primarchs were found and united with their Space Marine Legions. As the Emperor traveled across the stars, some humans wanted to worship him as a god, however he forbade this proclaiming "I am not a god, rather than enslaving humanity I want to free them". However, Lorgar, the Primarch of the Word Bearers Legion, gave into the constant whispers of the Chaos Gods and, after corrupting his Legion to their service, sent his First Chaplain Erebus to poison the minds of the other Primarchs as well as their Legions. Just as the Imperium had reached its apex, the Emperor's most trusted son, the Primarch Horus of the Luna Wolves Legion (later renamed the Sons of Horus), fell to Chaos and betrayed the Emperor, and along with fully half the Space Marine Legions, initiated a massive civil war for control of the galaxy. This rebellion is known to history as the Horus Heresy. Though the Emperor ultimately defeated Horus during the Traitor Marines' siege of Terra, he was all but destroyed in the battle; only the life-supporting Golden Throne has sustained his living corpse in a kind of stasis, neither dead nor truly alive.

Second Origin Tale
The Emperor is the collective reincarnation of all the shamans of Neolithic humanity's various peoples, the first human psykers. The foul Warp entities that would became the four Great Powers of Chaos had not yet formed when the Emperor was born on Earth during prehistoric times, somewhere in ancient central Anatolia (modern Turkey) in the 8th Millennium B.C. But even before the birth of the Emperor, as humanity grew and progressed, the Warp began to become increasingly disturbed, and the shamans began to lose their ability to reincarnate into new bodies - instead, upon dying, their souls were being consumed by the creatures and daemons of the Warp. Eventually the shamans of humanity, unable to reincarnate, would become extinct, and without the shamans and their psychic abilities to guide them, humanity would inevitably fall prey to the corruptions of Chaos, just as eventually happened to the Eldar. In these ancient days, all the shamans of Earth gathered in conclave to decide what must be done. In the end they decided to pool their psychic energies by reincarnating as a single soul in a single human body. The thousands of shamans, as one, took poison, and as one, died. A year later the man who would become the Emperor was born. His psychic power was so potent that its energies altered his physiology and rendered him immortal so he would no longer need to reincarnate and could not be assaulted by the daemonic creatures of the Immaterium upon his death. As he grew older, his potent psychic powers began to manifest. Over many millennia, he traveled among the many peoples of mankind, using his ancient wisdom to help where he could in the guise of many different legendary, historical and religious personages.

The Rise of the Emperor and the Great Crusade
The man who would later become known as the Emperor of Mankind first appears in Imperial records as just one of the many warlords struggling for control of Terra during the later part of the Age of Strife. The Emperor undertook a series of military campaigns against all the other warlords on the planet that would later become known as the Unification Wars. During these conflicts the Emperor employed several military formations - such as the genetically-engineered warriors of the unit designated Geno 5-2 Chiliad who would go on to serve in the Imperial Army - that consisted of using genetically altered/engineered warriors to maximize his tactical prowess. These warriors played a significant role in his eventual victory over all the other warlords of Terra. With this victory, the planet and population of Terra were at last unified under a single rule; that of the Emperor. With this achievement behind him, the Emperor then set in motion his plans to take his purpose of uniting and guarding mankind out into the galaxy, to unify those bastions of humanity scattered across the myriad stars. This extraordinary undertaking, in both conception and sheer scope, would become known as the Great Crusade. The Emperor prepared extensively for the Great Crusade; he created the special astro-telepath (Astropath) corps to link his eventual dominion together through the use of telepathy, and engineered the creation of the Astronomican, a supremely powerful psychic signal device powered by the Emperor's own will and psychic abilities that would allow simplified and safer interstellar travel through the Warp. Chief amongst his designs, however, was the creation of superhuman, genetically-engineered warriors, the logical extension of the gene-troopers already under his command. He had first undertaken the Primarch Project, the creation of 20 superhuman infants whose genomes had been designed using his own genetic code as the foundation, who were intended to mature into powerful generals for his armies. However, this plan went awry with the intervention of the Ruinous Powers. While accounts vary as to exactly what happened, the end of the tale is always the same; the Primarchs were cast into the Warp from their gestation chambers beneath the Himalaya Mountains in the Emperor's gene-labs and thought lost. In the aftermath of these events, the Emperor conceived a new plan. Using genetic material which had been derived from the Primarchs' genomes, he created a caste of warriors who would possess some of the same superhuman qualities of the Primarchs and himself. These successors to the genetically-enhanced human warriors of the Unification Wars-era were the Legiones Astartes, the Space Marine Legions of the First Founding.

The Emperor led the twenty Space Marine Legions in the reconquest of the Solar System, driving alien slavers from the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and most importantly, achieving peace and the eventual integration of Imperial Terra with the Cult Mechanicum of Mars. This crucial military and political alliance provided the Emperor with much of the technological means and materiel required to extend his crusade into the stars.

With the final abatement of the Warp storms caused by the birth-pangs of the Chaos God Slaanesh, the Emperor began the Great Crusade. The Emperor's forces rediscovered lost human worlds, cast out alien oppressors, and claimed new territory for the Imperium across the galaxy. Perhaps most importantly, the Emperor, leading his crusade, rediscovered his lost sons, the Primarchs. Scattered throughout space, the infants were found one-by-one, over a period of many decades, and reunited with their father and their genetic kin in the Space Marine Legions. All were placed in command of the Astartes Legions created from their respective gene-seed and played their part in forging their father's Imperium.

Foremost amongst the Primarchs was Horus, the first discovered and first honoured. Some great length of time into the Great Crusade, the Emperor decided to return to Terra to oversee a special project that he intended to cap his ambitions for humanity and he placed Horus in charge of the military advancement of the Great Crusade in his stead. Granting him the unique title of Warmaster, the Emperor declared that the time had come for his sons to show him what great leaders they were. Turning his back on direct military matters, the Emperor then created the Council of Terra (precursor of the High Lords of Terra), the Imperial Tithe, and expanded the civil governing bodies of the Imperium like the Adeptus Administratum, before retiring in seclusion beneath the Imperial Palace to begin work upon the Golden Throne and his secret plan to invade the Webway of the Eldar and bring at least a portion of it under humanity's control.

The Horus Heresy
This turn of events did not please all of the Emperor's subjects, several of his Primarch sons in particular. In the final stages of the Great Crusade, the Emperor's most trusted son Horus succumbed to the temptations of Chaos. Horus was told in a vision granted by the Ruinous Powers that the reason the Emperor had left the Great Crusade was so the he could attempt to reach godhood, abandon all his sons and betray one of the central tenets of the Great Crusade (to enlighten humanity and free it from the bonds of false gods and organized religion). Horus saw it as his duty to save the Imperium of Man from such a fate and turned on his father. Having corrupted fully half of the Space Marine Legions to the service of Chaos, Horus led them against the Emperor and plunged the fledgling galactic empire into a colossal civil war. This conflict became the most terrible in human history, and billions perished as the Traitor Legions tore apart the empire they had helped to forge.

The last act of this terrible treachery was played out above Terra, as the Emperor led a desperate teleport assault against Horus' Chaos-corrupted flagship. Though the Emperor was a being of unfathomable psychic and physical might, Horus had become mighty indeed, bloated with the powers of all four Chaos Gods. After a tragic battle, and though heartbroken at the loss of his favored son, the Emperor finally slew Horus, though the struggle left him close to death. In this state he was found by Rogal Dorn, the Primarch of the Imperial Fists Space Marine Legion. The dying Emperor dictated plans for the use of the arcane life support machine that would sustain his remaining cells in a state between life and true death for over ten thousand years, and he was subsequently interred in this altered version of the Golden Throne.



Present Day (Late 41st Millennium)
The Emperor's broken body was discovered by the Primarch of the Imperial Fists, Rogal Dorn who, following the Emperor's instructions, oversaw the Emperor's interrment in the Golden Throne, an arcane device intended to sustain his mind and decaying body. The Emperor has remained in the Golden Throne since his 'ascension' to this day, neither fully living nor wholly dead. Although certain disputed material states that this was initially designed as the hub of the Emperor's secret project to utilize the Eldar Webway for humanity, the Golden Throne also functions as a complex life support device. The Golden Throne itself lies in the Sanctum Imperialis, a great hall in the heart of the Imperial Palace guarded by the Emperor's Companions, a special and highly elite bodyguard contingent of the Adeptus Custodes. The Emperor's decaying physical form is preserved by the vast machinery of the Golden Throne, which itself is maintained by Tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus. His psychic essence is spread out across the whole of the galaxy through the Warp, watching over as much of humanity as he can manage in his current depleted state, in order to keep the Ruinous Powers at bay.

The Golden Throne is also connected to a massive psychic beacon known as the Astronomican, which makes faster than light travel possible by generating a signal by which the psykers known as Navigators are able to navigate through Warp space. The Astronomican signal is originated by the Emperor's mind, but is amplified and directed by a choir of ten thousand human psykers. These individuals are selected for their psychic prowess, their ability to control their power, and are put to the task only after undergoing a rigorous process that includes their soul-binding to the Emperor. The life force of these psykers is consumed over the course of several months, which means that replacements must constantly be found and brought to Holy Terra aboard the infamous Black Ships of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, the Imperial organization responsible for handling humans who possess the psychic mutation. The selected psykers are, for the most part, indoctrinated to accept their fate as their sacred duty, for they are too dangerous to those around them to be allowed to live, and that the sacrifice of their life is the greatest good that they can do in service to the Emperor. Those less willing are sedated and fed to the Golden Throne regardless. The Imperium must survive, regardless of the cost in lives.



It is said that the Emperor's existence is one of endless pain and suffering, and that it is only his utter devotion to the human race that keeps him from accepting death. Should the Emperor die then the Astronomican will become useless, and humanity will no longer be able to safely travel through the warp (although this may be disputed by the fact that humanity traveled the stars before the Emperor sat upon the Golden Throne, during the Dark Age of Technology and the Great Crusade). The Imperium would then become fractured and disintegrate into civil war. The reliance on the Emperor's life force, and the dedication of his subjects to prevent his death, is the foundation for the Emperor's divinity as held by the Imperial Cult and countless billions of human beings across the galaxy. Only the Space Marine Chapters do not believe the Emperor is divine, instead honouring his determination to free Mankind from the shackles of superstition and organized religion even as they revere him as the founder of the Imperium and the greatest human leader in history.



The Star Child
The concept of the Star Child was introduced first in the Realm of Chaos books and mentioned later in the 3rd Edition Warhammer 40,000 guide. The concept is similar to that of the Eldar's potential god Ynnead forming in the Infinity Circuit of Eldar craftworlds. The concept has two aspects: the first is that the Emperor's soul exists in the Warp where it will form a new entity upon the Emperor's death - the Star Child - who will become the Emperor reborn, and the second is that the Emperor during his long life on Terra had many children (Realm of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned). Over the almost 50,000 years the Emperor walked among mankind he formed many families and fathered many children. His male descendants have inherited the Emperor's gene rune and they are immortal like their father as well as sterile. Unlike the Emperor, who is the greatest psyker ever born in the galaxy, the Emperor's scions are actually psychic "blanks" possessing no presence in the Warp. As a result they are both undetectable by any psychic means and cannot be affected in any way by psychic powers. A hidden group within the Imperium that call themselves the Illuminati know of the existence of the Emperor's scions, and are also aware that the Emperor is failing as his life slowly gutters out despite the ministrations of the Golden Throne. They also know of the Fall of the Eldar which gave birth to the Chaos God Slaanesh and seek to prevent mankind's own fall to Chaos. The fall of man to the Ruinous Powers would create a new, fifth Chaos God in the Immaterium, and with its birth, the Warp would once again intrude into real space for a number of millennia, encompassing the entire galaxy in massive Warp storms once more, as during the Age of Strife. The Illuminati, who as a group are those incredibly rare individuals who managed to actually survive and defeat a daemonic possession of their bodies through sheer willpower, seek out the Emperor's descendants and tell them of their heritage. With the realization that this knowledge brings, the biological sons of the Emperor then become known as the "Sensei". The Illuminati gather the Sensei together, protect them from the Inquisition, and pave the way for the rebirth of the Emperor. Their plan is ultimately to sacrifice the Sensei to the Emperor, possibly at the moment the Emperor finally fails upon the Golden Throne; he will be renewed by the Sensei's life forces, and will be reborn as the Sensei-Emperor to again lead his race in person. While the Star Child background was introduced in the original version of Warhammer 40,000, and dismissed as heretical in the 3rd edition in favor of the more vague "Iron Men and Stone Men" history, the Thorian faction of the Inquisition believes in a similar concept concerning the Emperor's eventual rebirth and reincarnation.

The Emperor is the incarnation of the extinct shamans of ancient Earth who, with their prophetic powers and connection to the Warp in its natural and uncorrupted form, had guided the various peoples of ancient man. After Horus rebelled and destroyed the Emperor's mortal form, his body and soul could no longer remain as one; his soul melted into the Warp and only a tiny core of the Emperor's humanity remained whole. This spark of the Emperor's soul was like a small child in a tiny reed boat adrift in the storm of the Warp. Since the Emperor's soul survived, there was a possibility that his whole essence could be reborn into the physical world once more. In the same way the ancient shamans died together to reincarnate as the single man who would become the Emperor, the Emperor's death could herald a new savior for humanity. That time would lie far in the future, when mankind's collective desire for a new savior would strengthen the core of the Emperor's soul in the Warp and rekindle it to new life. The soul of the Emperor adrift in the Warp is the being referred to by the lluminati as the Star Child. The humans that were left in charge of the Imperium after the Horus Heresy had no real understanding of what had happened to the Emperor. Though the Emperor's body continued to live within the Golden Throne and his mind continued to be a beacon for humanity, his soul is a new, benevolent god of the Warp, waiting to be born. The Star Child is also suggested as being the compassion of his soul which the Emperor thrust from himself in order to destroy his most beloved Primarch and son, the Warmaster Horus. (Inquisition War Trilogy novel series, Ian Watson, Black Library Publishing)

The Imperial Inquisition (particularly its daemon-hunting Ordo Malleus) has always been at war with the Sensei, the "Emperor's Sons". In 997.M41, Inquisitor Fortez reported that he and his colleagues Alexio and Credo determined the Temple of the Star Child on Levilnor IV consisted of unwitting pawns of Tzeentch, so they eliminated it. It is noted in Rogue Trader that ammunition for the Inquisition's Psycannons and Psyk-out grenades derive their anti-psychic effect from being impregnated with extremely rare negative psychic energy - the only known source of this energy being the byproducts of the Emperor's metabolism removed daily by the Golden Throne. Realm of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned notes that the Inquisition has discovered this energy can also be produced from the rendered-down bodies of the Sensei.