Editing Warhammer Fantasy Gods (section)

=The Nature Of The Divine=
In early Warhammer lore gods simply existed and had their own faiths. Certain Chaos supplements suggested there were no gods and that only [[Chaos]] exists with the nature of the Chaos Gods being insane beings who pretend to be other personas in order to fight each other and themselves, like a giant 1000 character game of [[Dungeons & Dragons]] with no DM and only four people wearing blindfolds so nobody knows who is who other than [[Tzeentch|that one asshole with an actual case of multiple personality disorder who's peeking]]. As this only appears in a few Chaos supplements and nowhere else however, its authenticity is [[skub|questionable]] at best.

The nature of all the gods was explained differently over the years. In the earliest instances, when Warhammer was ''only'' Fantasy, gods didn't exist until the collapse of the Warpgates, and were more akin to extremely powerful angels and daemons than actual deities. Another one of the oldest tellings suggests there is one supremely powerful being at the center of the Warp, and that all gods, evil and good, originate from that single force. In others, the gods always existed, even before the Old Ones. As mentioned above, a few Chaos books suggested all gods were only fractions of larger Chaos gods, whose own origins were unclear. A few other explanations say the benevolent gods (Order) were made by or enserved to the Old Ones, while the malevolent gods (Chaos, Destruction) were rebels. If you take 40K as valid for both its own gods and Fantasy's, it states that gods are actually the coalesced belief and emotion of mortal beings, sort of a psychic gestalt. Whatever the source, it was always left intentionally vague and contradictive which explanation, if any provided, was valid, and there was a sense that the true nature of the divine was something beyond the understanding of the mortals "telling" the story (lore) of the world.

In truth, or at least according to the last entries of the setting, all non-material plane things are made of magic. Souls are magic, the Winds of Magic are magic, Daemons are magic, and so are all the Gods. This is apparently(?) the "truth" that Archaon learned, because the teachings of his faith are that magic is [[Heresy]] and apparently gods were just shitting miracles out of scientific stardust or something.

The End Times event revealed quite a bit, all of which is fairly skubby. The history of Warhammer is that the [[Old Ones]] descended from some unknown place, possibly another dimension, planet, or place in the timeline, on a primitive world full of [[Dinosaur]]s, [[Dragon]]s, and [[Neanderthal]] versions of the classic Fantasy races then created the [[Warp|Warp Gates]] to suck magic from the Warp which they used to alter the world and create a race capable of fighting Chaos (which would eventually come regardless) before the Gates collapsed causing Chaos to arrive much sooner on an unfinished world whereupon the Old Ones fucked off to who knows where or died. The new lore is that this isn't the first time this has happened; Warhammer existed in a time loop, with the Old Ones stealing magic from Chaos which causes the Chaos Gods to feel entitled to own the material plane like [[Slaanesh]] to the [[Eldar]] in 40k, where they spend the rest of their history draining magic from the local gods until a cataclysmic event where a handful of Elves survive on a world outside of existence and guide evolution until the Old Ones show up again, rinse and repeat. This cycle was broken finally by [[Be'lakor]] (who's time-travel and alternate universe fuckery is apparently something new to these timelines, despite the "it always existed because there is no time" nature to Chaos because GW writers can't into consistency) who did...''something'' to the new Elf gods in the next world which altered the cycle. The new cycle involves far more than just the Elves, as many characters survived the old setting and became gods in the new one (some didn't become gods, why isn't clear).

Gods exist that aren't part of the cycle as well. Sigmar for example was a mortal man who became trapped in the magic of the Heavens Wind, greatly limiting his power to affect the mortal world but giving him godhood. Gork and Mork ([[Meme|or is it Mork and Gork?]]) have no proper origin, but are somehow able to grant godhood to members of their own pantheon such as through the Spider God who was just an ordinary spider who bit Gork (or possibly Mork). Some of the Elf gods were survivors of the old setting, some have unknown origins and others were just an existing god mistaken as a separate entity. Ranald gambled his way into divinity after tricked some goddess to give him the blessing. Ulric probably became a god after accidentally tempted with one of the old one's warp devices (the one that house the flame of Ulric) as discovered by Archaon in the end times.