The God-Emperor of Mankind

Liberating the galaxy is one thing, but he was so powerful he never once stopped looking fabulous while doing it.

I have come to eradicate Religion as it is the bane of Man, warped in superstition, ignorance and fear! - The Emperor before the Treason of Horus

We believe in one Lord, the Emperor, the Almighty, ruler of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Emperor of Mankind, the only Lord of creation, eternally begotten of Humanity, Human from Human, Light from Light, true Lord from true Lord, begotten, not made, of one Being with Humanity; through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and came among us. For our sake he has faced down Chaos; he withstood death and was enthroned. To this day he lives on in accordance with the Scriptures; he resides upon Mother Terra and is seated upon the throne of Humanity. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Emperor, the giver of life, who proceeds from Humanity and from Terra, who with Humanity and upon Terra is worshiped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets. We believe in one holy true and divinely guided Ecclesiarchy. We acknowledge one path for the defense against Chaos. We look for the justice for our dead, and the life of the worlds to come.
++ Ayhmen ++

-- the Creed of the Mankind's Council of Nicene of Holy Terra

The God-Emperor of Mankind, also known as Emprah, Emps, Big E, E-Money, Augustus Imperator, Master of Mankind, Space Jesus, and also sometimes called The Great and Glorious Big Mac Daddy King Emprah of all things Epic and Awesome (ahem, ahem), or if you are not a fan of him, The Anathema, The Carrion Lord, The False Emperor, The Golden Shit Faggot, That Twat with the Chair and The Corpse on the Throne, is the figurehead ruler of the Imperium of Man in the Warhammer 40k universe and is the only sustaining Hope for Humanity as Faster than Light Travel is entirely dependent on Him. The Administratum He established, continues to govern the Imperium in His name, but it is generally accepted that the absence of the Emperor's proper guidance is what has turned the Imperium into the hellish mess that it is. In the Imperium, questioning whatever your superior yells at you, is "moronic" and heretical, and is typically punished by peace (at least in the material realm). It goes without saying that would The Emperor be up and about in the 41st millennium He would be very disappointed. Most fa/tg/uys expect Him to speak in a generic deep, stentorian voice.

Worship of the Emperor

What the Emperor looked like before Horus decided to bitchslap Him. Notice the giant skull. How did that skull get so big? Is it a plastic faux-skull, or is it an alien skull? (What He doesn't want you to know is that The E is actually a midget, the armor is a mech and that that's a regular-sized skull) Anyway, back to the topic. You don't get to see the Emperor out of armor very often.

Humans worship the Emperor as the one true God. Now, the only reason the Imperium worships the Emperor is that after His fight with Horus and His internment into the Golden Throne, they pretty much forgot what the Emperor taught them when He preached the Imperial Truth. Ol' Empy did not actually tell anyone of the Chaos Gods as part of His plan to starve them, withholding the information even from the Primarchs in hopes of protecting them from corruption by hoping that ignorance is bliss. Unfortunately, this became part of why the Horus Heresy happened in the first place. Some saw that the Emperor lied to them by holding the truth hidden, some did not know how to handle the temptation the Gods conveyed, some did not even know that they were manipulated all this time and by whom, some would try to seek out something to place their faith upon, not realizing what would needed to be done to become chosen in the eyes of the Gods. Plus, it's pretty damn hard to fight against something if you don't know that it exists. The Horus Heresy novels also mentioned the Interex, another atheist empire who understood that threat of Chaos, but treated that information secularly and scientifically: they told every citizen everything that was known about "Kaos", and thus resisted the taint altogether.

E-money wanted mankind to be a utopia of science and reason, by eliminating cultists (and thus summoning of daemons), uncontrolled psykers (and thus random daemonic possessions), and warp travel by creating the Human Webway (and thus eliminating all human contact with Chaos when traveling through the Warp). He wanted to isolate humanity from the Chaos Gods, cause who gives a shit about the Ruinous Powers if they're stuck in the Warp with no way of getting out?

Unfortunately, The Emperor did not realize that Chaos runs off emotion, all everyday emotion, and not just worship; the stronger the emotions, the stronger the Gods get. That's why The Imperial Truth was never destined to succeed in starving the Gods to death, but rather suppressed existing emotions in, for example, Lorgar before exploding and turning back on itself (and getting the Gods what they wanted).

Additionally, He made a critical mistake in disregarding the human need to believe in something greater than oneself, and despite His best efforts, nothing was enough to fill the place of religion in human society. Ironically, the best solution would be not to suppress faith but to redirect it towards something else, but because of his natural awesomeness, unmatched psychic powers and enigmatic nature, that "something else" ended up being the Emperor himself. After He went off being the most powerful psychic cucumber in the universe, and lost direct control of the Imperium, belief in Him sort of helped the Imperium stand together against all odds, even if it basically dropped 99.9% of humanity's IQ in the process. With the Warp being what it is, the act of worshiping the Emperor supercharged His power in the Immaterium to the point of being truly godlike, even while His body is still stuck in it's current physical state of near-death. The Imperium's faith in the Emperor is basically their biggest anchor of bravery and perseverance in a universe where humanity is constantly beset by:

• Unimaginably massive swarms of voracious space locust who exist only to feed and multiply it's biomass...
• Older-than-Chaos-itself zombie-terminator robots set on culling all life from the galaxy...
• Diabolical celestial beings literally as old as the stars, whose single desire is harvesting all living souls...
• A race of nigh-unkillable barbarians, genetically engineered to have pastimes, ambitions, job skills, and dreams only be about rip and tear...
• Technologically superior space communists wanting to assimilate everyone in their quasi Hindu-Communist empire and who take after Billy Mays...
• Snooty and uncaring space elves that can read minds and who eat, sleep, and to have Heterosexual Sex in the Missionary Position in planet-sized battle cruisers...
• Psychotic, hedonistic space elves who routinely torture others to the point of death for sheer amusement before grinding their remains into refined cocaine...
• Fanatical zealots that knowingly devote themselves to all that is insane...
• Nightmare horrors made real who will rape and eat, usually simultaneously, any sentient being they get their goat-hooves on...
• Deformed, demented traitors clad in power armor and aided by the evilest forms of weaponry and sorcery ever conceived...
• Homicidal alien, lizard, insect, cyborg type monster-pirates that horribly kill you for fun...
• Giant Swarms of Worms in cloaks who might be older than The Old Ones who are more sadistic that the Dark Eldar and More Manipulative than regular Eldar and Feed on Humans in the Most Disgusting and Painful way imaginable (Hint it Involves Maggots.)...
• Massive insectoid hive mind filled to the brim with heavy firepower and has a slow but growing empire that is one of the largest in the galaxy, dwarfing the Tau several hundred times over and is seen as the next successor of galactic domination after humanities potential fall...
• Malignant, omnipotent intelligence from beyond the cosmos, exerting all the power at their disposal to prevent any faction from breaking the stalemate or upsetting the dreadful status quo...
• And fuck knows who the guy in the cardboard box is...

Without their faith in the Emperor after His internment into the Golden Throne, the fragments of the Imperium would have fought against each other again like in the pre-Great Crusade days and subsequently devolved into what they were before the Emperor revealed Himself. So yes, much like IRL religion, it gives them hope and courage to fight on and survive in a universe that leaves the grimdark faucet running everyday and night.

It's worth noting that good ol' Empy wouldn't have had nearly as much of a problem with all this unwanted worship if He hadn't, just as a quick example, insisted on wearing horrifyingly ornate solid gold armour and a big glowy halo at all times. Or on carrying a flaming sword of righteousness. Or on building continent-sized monuments to His vanity. Or on decking all His personal troops and favored genetic experiments in as much bling as they could possibly carry. Or on being eleven fucking feet tall. If you look like space-Jesus and act like space-Jesus, people are going to take those observations to their extreme conclusions, like what Lorgar did when he wrote the Lectitio Divinitatus, which can be summarized as "Ordinary men can't blow up suns and carry big glowy halos at all times, only a God can, therefore the Emprah is God." This is made even more relevant given that the fluff very strongly implies that the Emperor was Jesus.

That said, to Games Workshop's credit His being buttfucked by His own hubris and disregard for the humanity He claimed to be guiding in this manner was probably intentional as a classic tale of Greek Tragedy.

The possible death of the Emperor

Badass and glorious.

With the Golden Throne being consistently worn out, and the Tech-priests too power-armor-on-head rebooted to do anything about it, it is certainly possible that the Emperor may die one day, which will obviously result in all of the Imperial worlds and factions to cry tears of disappointment and subsequently devolve into chaos (maybe even with a capital "C"). There are however, 3 possible outcomes of what can happen if the Emperor eventually dies:

The new Eye of Terror

Conventional wisdom and the Eldar, says that in the event that the Emperor dies, a new Eye of Terror will be created with Terra at it's center, plunging Holy Terra and all nearby planets/systems(?) into the Warp. The current main rulebook says that all of reality will be plunged into the warp if the Emperor dies. Even the Ecclesiarchy agrees that if the Emperor were ever to die, humanity would be FUCKED at the barest minimum.

This is supported by the fact that the Golden Throne (itself a portal to the Webway) was broken by Magnus, causing a warp tear to open on Terra, which the Emperor has had to spend every second for the last 10,000 years concentrating on to keep from getting any bigger (while the Adeptus Custodes have spent the same amount of time chopping up daemons that slip through the crack). They will not be able to stop a full daemonic invasion if the rift would open fully.

Additionally, a new Chaos God could be created (just like with the Eye of Terror and the Eldar), which will most certainly be a God of all the Grimdarkness in the galaxy, ensuring that it would eclipse all of the powers of the other Gods, as the Emperor would finally be the God of all. This is especially true, since nearly everything that is grimdark stems from Chaos and the entire WH40K setting is itself a massive pile of it... That or Malal would burst back into existence, which does have some possibility of happening, since Malal was/is the Chaos god of Atheism, which was the "truth"-part of the Emperor's "Imperial Truth" doctrine.

Some also fear that a fifth Chaos God's presence would just crush reality by merging the Materium (reality) and the Warp into a singular dimension. But that's unlikely, since the birth of the latest Chaos God, Slaanesh, did not destroy reality and he/she/it/xe was fueled by the near extinction of a race far more psychically powerful than humanity. On the other hand, Slaanesh was forced to battle Khorne and most of the Eldar Gods during it's first birth moments. That would not be the case if the 5th Chaos God would be born.

Regeneration

No, not the Doctor Who kind. The Horus Heresy novel 'Vulkan Lives', heavily implies that the Emperor is a Perpetual, just like John Grammaticus, Vulkan, Oll Persson and Anval Thawn, all of who were able to survive deaths that should have completely obliterated their bodies. So all He simply needs to do is for his current material body to die normally, and wait a couple of hours/days and He'd be reborn again (in the "get up off the ground and dust Himself off" sense (Though one has to wonder why the Emperor would have had Himself interred in the Golden Throne in the first place if He thought He'd heal. Probably to power the Astronomican?)). All of this is still speculation (duh). Vulkan, for instance, was driven mad by the torturous experiences he had endured thanks to Night Haunter, and they were child's play, compared to sitting in unthinkable agony, unable to move or speak for ten thousand years while feeling Himself rotting away. And don't you forget that nose itch. However, a more commonly held belief is that He will get up, re-establish the Imperial Truth, and just be a cool guy.

In fact, a whole faction of the Inquisition: Thorianism exists to investigate this possibility; looking for possible signs that the Emperor's consciousness can be transferred elsewhere, allowing Him to walk among his children once more. (That said, they don't know about the existence of Perpetuals and would rather look for a new body to place the Emperor's soul into.)

Opponents to Thorianism generally see that encouraging this is a terrible idea, as having the Emperor rise in a physical form would only cause a schism in the Imperium, as many people would not believe it to be true, having been ruled and brainwashed by the Ecclesiarchy over thousands of years, which would lead to another major civil war.

But think about it: when Malcador took up the Throne so that the Emperor could fight Horus, the device consumed his vitality; and Malcador was not as blessed as the Emps with regen abilities to recover. Now imagine a weakened, crippled being, who's top priority immediately after killing His son is to stop the Webway gate from spilling forth. You don't have time (and nor does the galaxy) to recover from your wounds. So you sit upon the Throne and it consumes you slowly from that point onwards. The chair is stopping any sort of healing factor.

The Star Child

Although years of GW-marketing and fluff "upgrades" have made the third claim rather dubious, many fa/tg/uys and optimists still hold out on the theory stating that when the Emperor screwed Horus's soul to the wall, part of the Emperor's soul was also cast into the Warp. This Soul Fragment is called the Star Child, a god waiting to be reborn, or perhaps be reincarnated back into a human body (anyone call for one scout Mkvenner). If the remains of the Emperor were ever to die, the tiny spark of soul left in his body would re-unite with the greater whole within the Warp, and according to prophecy, for the four Chaos Gods into stalemate, while the races of the galaxy would be left to battle it out in one last great Ragnarök scenario (called the End Times).

This theory is tied closely to the Illuminati, a group of either supremely enlightened individuals or dangerous mutant heretics (depending on which side of the Inquisition you're on). The Illuminati plan to catch all of the Sensei and sacrifice them upon the Golden Throne at the moment of Emperor's death.

In a bizarre fusion of new and old fluff, it has been revealed that the Illuminati were a minor Tzeentch cult and the Sensei were effectively brainwashed soon-to-be sacrifices in an attempt to bring Tzeentch to the materium. Needless to say, they have been purged by the Inquisition. The fluff in the Jac Draco books revealed that the Ordo Hydra (a small splinter faction of the Illuminati who seek to turn humanity into a psychic hive-mind) is a Tzeentch cult, but that the general Illuminati population - including many Ordo Malleus Inquisitors and the Exorcists Chapter (as well as their unknown successor chapters) are genuinely incorruptible by Chaos and are freely permitted to access the Black Library along with Harlequin Solitaires. The Inquisition Trilogy was retconned away. It's just like that frustrating moment you experience when you don't know if the Squats have been nommed by Tyranids or have never existed in the first place.

Gallery

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  The Big E upon the Golden Throne (before the decay set in)
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  The guiding light in the Imperium of Man shines forever bright
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  The Emperor protects man from all.
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  Son, I am disappoint.
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  Yearbook photo.
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  His groove, do not ruin it.
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  Emps laying down some rules, mid combat from the looks of it
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  That is EXACTLY the same look that's on Batman's face when he's about to put the beatdown on someone!
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  He makes for one helluva action figure
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  The Em-purr-or of all Catkind! Nyah!
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  Death is no excuse to stop bein' pimp.
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  Thinking to himself, "I really, REALLY hate Horus!"
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  Roll d6; stays on the field on seven or less
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  A real man never dies, even when he's killed.
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  Down but not out.
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  In all His miniature glory
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  The Carrion Lord with his two left arms. *BLAM* how the fuck did that heretic get past the custodes?
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  This painting sold for $900, that lucky ca/tg/url...
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  Probably the best model of him yet
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  Oh God-emperor, how did this get here? I am not good with computers.
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  Search your feelings, you know it to be true.
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  You all know you wanna see how this pans out!
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  How do you kill what can not die?
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  Emperor Rule 63! NO EXCEPTIONS!
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  Not actually the God-Emperor; besides it is Heresy to believe that The Immortal God Emperor looks like Cher.
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  Oh, give it a fucking rest...
• 
  Yeah. We get it. The Emperor sits upon the Golden 'Throne'.
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  Unbeknownst to many 40k fans, ol'Emps is fairly amicable when he meets an elf/eldar who isn't a complete failure.
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  Perhaps with a better armor design, Emps might not have been late for Horus's after school soccer games and things might have turned out differently.
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  The Emperor in Rainbow Form
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  The symbol of the town Konya in Turkey. In Central Anatolia. Emprah's birthplace. CONNECTION, BITCHES!
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  The symbol of ancient (1600BC) Hittite Empire from Anatolia, which, unknown to many, is Emperor's first try at conquering the world. CONNECTION, BITCHES!
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  In alternate universe 32-B, Mao Zedong rules the People's Republic of Mankind
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  The Emperor has just discovered Rule 34.
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  The Emprah is watching you Masturbate!
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  He might be the most powerful psychic vegetable in the universe but the Custodes can't give him a decent hygiene program.
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  Just imagine if the Chaos Gods didn't scatter the primarchs through out the galaxy... Wait where's that little scamp Omegon? (just off picture, sneaking up behind Guilliman)
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  "Why IS IT that hot dogs come in packs of 8, and hot dog buns come in packs of 12? So people will have to buy 3 packs of hot dogs and 2 of hot dogs buns, hereby promoting imperial production of course!"

See Also

• The Imperium, for the empire he founded.
• Sigmar Unbroken, his Warhammer Fantasy Battles counterpart.
• Emperor's To-Do List
• This thread which makes the Emperor even cooler.
• A series on Youtube, it shows what would happen if the Emperor had a Text to Speech device.
• If the Emperor had a Text-to-Speech Device article in 1d4chan.