The problem is that it's not worship which fuels the Chaos Gods but emotion. Someone doesn't have to actively direct his feelings towards the Chaos Gods, he merely has to experience them.

Look at the Eldar, they didn't actively try and create Slaanesh, or direct their energies to worshiping a pleasure god, they simply experienced excess to a degree which resonated in the warp. Slaanesh coalesced from all that raw emotion, not worship.

It's why Chaos is the great enemy, just through sentient life existing do the Ruinous Powers gain strength. A mighty space marine hero fuels Khorne through his exploits as war as much as a dedicated worshiper of Khorne. It's just another aspect of the grim darkness of 40k.

 

Exactly. So then why would the Imperial Truth affect the chaos gods?

 

I have no sources but I'm pretty sure that Chaos is so heavily invested in humanity because as a species we put alot of emphasis on emotion and its very powerful. I don't think there are many other species or civilizations that can deliver the same emotional punch.The Eldar are too few,plus they have dealt with chaos for aeons. The Orks aren't emotionally attached to war and such because they simply enjoy it, they don't suffer, their ambition is limited to smaller things. Tau aren't present in the warp for some reason. Necrons don't have autonomous minds and so on so forth. I think the Cabal (in Legion) said that the Chaos powers would be reduced to almost nothing if humanity was extinct or wiped out.

 

The Imperial Truth eliminates the common citizen from worshipping anything, alot of the cultures in the Great Crusade worshipped a crude version of some Chaos deity or Daemon. The Imperial Truth basically strips the Chaos powers ability have any effect because there is no emotion dedicated to them.

 

No your missing the point Longfang. You don't have to actively worship the Chaos Gods to empower them. You don't have to pray to Khorne, merely reveling in the joy of battle or taking pride in your martial skills is enough.

As to the purpose of the Imperial Truth i believe it's the best solution the Emperor could effect. You can't stop people from having emotions, but you can stop them from believing in deities and worshiping them (or at least attempt to and prevent widescale religiousness). It's better to have people unknowingly powering the Dark Gods as a side effect of existing, than having them preaching cults. Without the knowledge of the Gods and daemon's you can't summon daemons and such.

It's linked to the Emperor's attempts to build an Imperial Webway, it's making humanity less reliant on the warp and Chaos and giving Chaos less avenues to affect humanity. With no one to summon daemons and no ships traveling the warp there's a lot less Chaos can do to humans, it's limiting the damage and influence of Chaos.

 

^ Pretty much this.

 

I don't think the Imperial Truth was 100% devoted to starving the Chaos Gods of worship, since as you've said, they don't need to be worshiped (though it certainly doesn't hurt). I think the Truth was geared more toward minimizing the influence of the Chaos Gods while sheltering humanity through its transition into a psychic species.

The Emperor did everything he could to minimize the necessity of psykers, which at this point in humanity's evolution, were quite unstable. The Council of Nikea got rid of Librarians and practicing sorcery, and once the Imperial Webway got going, there would be no need for astropaths. Ships wouldn't need to take a shortcut through a demonic hell in order to get to other worlds. Meanwhile, the Black Ships bag 'n' tag every psyker they can get their hands on. All of this was because the Emperor knew that humanity wasn't ready for this radical evolutionary step, and without his guidance, there would be unchecked demonic invasions into physical space, possession, mad psykers going out of control. Basically everything that's happening in the year 40,000.

I don't think the Emperor was going so far as to starve the Chaos Gods, but he was definitely taking steps to protect humanity from their influence.

 

No your missing the point Longfang. You don't have to actively worship the Chaos Gods to empower them. You don't have to pray to Khorne, merely reveling in the joy of battle or taking pride in your martial skills is enough.

I disagree, the warp exists and is fueled by the existence of mortal life but the Chaos Gods require worship to sustain themselves you need to kill in the name of khorne or one of his countless demons with the belief that your killing is holy worship to the god of blood otherwise the gods wouldnt've been starved by the great crusade and wouldnt've joined forces to stop them, the crusade should've empowered the gods to pornographic levels but it did the opposite..

Killing for the sake of killing and/or to worship a demon fuels Khorne but killing for another purpose with no warp entity in mind wont give anything to khorne.

 

I disagree, the warp exists and is fueled by the existence of mortal life but the Chaos Gods require worship to sustain themselves you need to kill in the name of khorne or one of his countless demons with the belief that your killing is holy worship to the god of blood otherwise the gods wouldnt've been starved by the great crusade and wouldnt've joined forces to stop them, the crusade should've empowered the gods to pornographic levels but it did the opposite..

Killing for the sake of killing and/or to worship a demon fuels Khorne but killing for another purpose with no warp entity in mind wont give anything to khorne.

I am agreeing with redmapa on this one, at least for the most part. if everytime someone took pleasure in killing in the 40k Universe. Khorne would be by far and away the most powerful Chaos God....period. I mean you add the pleasure part, Slaneesh grabs some. now what I dont understand, is without worship how is Nurgle so powerful? people get diseases and he get's more powerful? People spread STDs and Nurgle gets more powerful?

I think the 'act of' feeling a certain way may fuel them, but not near as much as those who act with their chosen Chaos God in mind. That also brings up a question about Tzeentch. If things just happen to change, and he gets more powerful...yea I just don't buy that. He would not need to do anything what-so-ever. Things are always changing, on a literally constant second by second basis.

 

"For Khorne cares not wear the blood flows from, merely that it does." The Gods were created unconsciously from the emotions of sentient beings. This is consistently backed up from Nurgle (born from all mortals fearing death) to Slaanesh as mentioned above. The war between the old ones and the necrons started stirring up the warp and making it volatile and what was once relatively peaceful started to form into the entities we see in 40k now.

It is not clear if all killing fuels khorne or if killing FOR THE EMPEROR!!! might actually fuel him instead. At this point worship of the Emperor seems to empower him. The Imperial truth I think was more an intermediate step for the Emperor, a bandaid he could use to lessen the power of the gods in the short term (for worship does seem to empower them at least a little) and also as Rems said to protect his fledgling Imperium. Do I think that was his end game though? No, since humanity was (and still is) morphing into a more psychically active race like it or not. I suspect that he would have started working on a more permanent solution after he finished conquering the galaxy and got the webway running. Alas, it never got that far.

From a personal standpoint the inconsistencies within the Imperial truth seem to negate its veracity. While the Emperor might not have been a god at the time he surely had the potential to become one (as shown by his ascension) and gods such as the chaos gods, ork gods, and eldar gods exist and he KNOWS they exist. When people find that out the choice is a provably wrong atheism or pulling a Lorgar. Given the choice the many downtrodden and dispossessed would probably turn to chaos, hence why it is a closely guarded secret to this date.

 

well he is meant to be a paradox, he sends his emissaries to destroy one another just as much as he does, he has no goal, he just plots and schemes, for literally no reason, he is just as likely to destroy his allies as he is his enemies, he can never achieve any ultimate aim, because of he did then that would the end of ambition and so his end.

Its not, at least to my understanding, change in everything just the desire for change, domination and the mutability, evolution, desire for knowledge of sentient beings, not change, period.

again sorry if im not coherent i have a fever.

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Tzeentch#.UBwg3hx9CP0
http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Tzeentch

read these links.

 

As i have always understood it the chaos gods are fueld by certain specific emotions and anre themselves the extreme ends of the spectrum. Korne is fueld by rage, no need to explain why he is as he is. Tzeench is fueld by hope and himself embodies hope taken to such a degree that it becomes a constant need for change. Nurgle feeds from despair and is himself embodied by despair of such depth that it becomes a need for stasis and lack of change. Slaneesh is lust.

 

Gotta love the eldar. The only race to party a god into existence

 

My guess would be that while emotion fuels Chaos, direct worship allows the beings fed by emotion to affect the materium. Without worship the Chaos Gods still exist but are trapped within the warp, unable to influence the 'real' world.

 

That doesn't seem to be the case.

It is well documented that the Chaos Gods were born from "thoughts and emotions", rather than worship or servitude. But the entire purpose of worshipping a Chaos God is to gain a fraction of its attention and hopefully acquire gifts by doing so, with the ultimate gift being immortality. Simply praying to a Chaos God will not attract its attention, remember; "for the most part the Dark Gods care nothing for the affairs of mortals". It is only by affecting the "eternal flow of emotion across aeons" that will attract their attention, and practically, that is what worshipping a Chaos God constitutes: performing acts that benefit the Chaos God by promotion of their particular emotion. The World Eaters don't form prayer circles, they shed the maximum amount of blood possible in dedication to their patron, thus protecting and furthering the emotional output of anger and rage. The Death Guard don't form prayer circles, they spread their plagues and diseases throughout reality, thus protecting and furthering the emotional output of despair. And so on.

What I am getting at, is that worship of a Chaos God is only an extension of how a Chaos God protects and gains its power. The act of worship alone does not empower the Chaos Gods: "A Chaos God can only grow in power through the actions and thoughts of mortals."

Even without direct and intentional worship though, the Chaos Gods can still interact with the material.

(all quotes taken from Codex: Chaos Space Marines and Codex: Chaos Daemons)

In regards to the Imperial Truth, it was simply another system of control. Countless human civilisations were overrun with fear and superstition, many had even been preyed on by daemons and other warp entities throughout the Age of Strife. False belief in the divine was a tried and tested method by which entire civilisations could open themselves up to Chaos corruption. By enforcing a militaristic form of atheism, it became much easier to shun the warp and it's powers on a galactic scale. Without witless humans unknowingly corrupting themselves and embracing Chaos, it would no doubt have affected the influence of the Chaos Gods, even if it didn't directly affect their power source.

 

I did say it was a guess.

What I was thinking about was the like of the Daemon Princes, when Angron attacked the Imperium as a Daemon Prince his power was limited outside of the warp. He could still manifest but his time was limited and his power waned the further he got from the EOT.
The same, I think, applies to all daemons of Chaos, they can exist outside of the warp but not for long. With mortal worshippers this issue is somewhat negated, the Gods only need to expend limited amounts of power to interact with the materium.
Also, I don't think prayer circles are necessarily the right term, the Word Bearers may well pray to the Gods but worship of Khorne would be centred around violence and blood, Slaanesh would be acts of excess and so on. Instead of worship being structured forms of quiet contemplation, it is physical acts of violence and depravity.

 

I guess the Gods get their power from raw emotions; I think we've more-or-less covered that.

They can't exert that power without a way into the material universe, however, hence the need for followers (or "worshippers" if you like) to do their bidding. They could be totally all-powerful within the warp but still not be able to do anything to the material world.

Think of it this way. If the Big E called a system-wide orgy for his birthday, Slaanesh's power would grow immeasurably. If the Emperor is careful to kill everybody in the system before the climax (pun not intended!) then Slaanesh won't have any conduit into the universe so won't be able to use his/her/its newfound power.

Of course, the ensuing bloodshed would then empower Khorne, and the great array of rotting carcasses would empower Nurgle, and the complete utter "wtf?" surrounding the Emperor calling an orgy for his birthday then killing everybody would probably boost Tzeentch as well. So their power has increased, but they can't do anything with it unless they have servants.

Unfortunately there are plenty of servants to open rifts in the universe to let Warp energy spill through.

 

From Energy Australia, i guess.

Sorry i had to be the smart arse. Could not resist it.