The Master of Mankind

The Emperor of Mankind, often referred to by His faithful as the "God-Emperor," the "Master of Mankind," or simply "the Emperor," and who sometimes referred to Himself as "Revelation," known to the forces of Chaos as the False Emperor or the Corpse Emperor, is the immortal Perpetual and psyker who serves as the reigning monarch of the Imperium of Man, and is described by the Imperial Ecclesiarchy and the Imperial Cult as the father, guardian and god of Humanity. The Chaos Gods and the Daemons of the Warp refer to Him as "the Anathema" for He is the greatest embodiment of universal order in the galaxy today and the most potent foe of Chaos in existence. He was, and remains, the most powerful Human psyker to have ever been born. 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 at the end of the Horus Heresy in the service and protection of Mankind. To Humanity's countless trillions across the galaxy-spanning Imperium, He is nothing less than God. Through His Imperium, Humanity is united and remains one of the most powerful intelligent species 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 deadly threats it faces from aliens, the forces of Chaos and the Traitors, Heretics and mutants that lie within the Imperium's boundaries. The Emperor prepared extensively for the Great Crusade in the years after Unity was achieved on Terra; He created the special astro-telepath (astropath) corps to link his eventual interstellar dominion together through the use of telepathy, and engineered the creation of the Astronomican. This was a supremely powerful psychic navigational beacon powered by the Emperor's own will and psychic abilities that would allow simplified and safer interstellar travel through the Warp across far greater distances than before. Chief amongst His designs, however, was the creation of new legions of transhuman, genetically-engineered warriors, the logical extension of the gene-troopers already under his command, though they would be far superior to the gene-enhanced troops of the Imperial Army He had used during the Unification Wars. The Emperor first undertook 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 and statesmen for His armies. The primarchs would be beings of such great mental and physical superiority that nothing merely Human could stand against them. To enhance the primarchs beyond the capabilities that even genetic-engineering allowed, however, the Emperor also drew upon the powers of the Warp he had learned at Molech to enhance His creations, imbuing them with nearly godlike levels of charisma and capability, but also unintentionally making them susceptible to corruption by the entities of the Warp. However, this plan went awry with the intervention of the Ruinous Powers, who feared that the Emperor's designs to unite and improve Humanity might succeed too well, vastly increasing the hold of order over the universe and diminishing their own strength. It is for this reason that all of Daemonkind refers to the Emperor as "the Anathema," the embodiment of the metaphysical opposition to Chaos. While accounts vary as to exactly what happened, the end of the tale is always the same; the primarchs were cast into the Warp in their gestation chambers from beneath the Himalazian (Himalaya) Mountains in the Emperor's gene-labs despite the multiple psychic wards the Emperor had laid down upon the laboratory, and thought lost. In the aftermath of these events, the Emperor conceived a new plan. Using genetic samples that 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. After their creation, the Emperor led the 20 Space Marine Legions, all of their Astartes originally recruited from Terran-born adolescent males, in their first missions to give them experience in war and diplomacy through the reconquest of the rest of the Sol System. The Space Marines drove alien slavers from the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and most importantly, achieved peace and the eventual integration of Imperial Terra with the ruling Mechanicum of Mars. This crucial military and political alliance, formalised in 739.M30 with the signing of the Treaty of Mars, provided the Emperor with much of the technological means and materiel required to extend His crusade into the stars. At the same time, the alliance formalised the creation of the Imperium of Man and established the Imperial bureaucracy on Terra, integrating the Mechanicum as one of the myriad organisations that comprised the newborn Adeptus Terra, the massive government of the Imperium, the future Priesthood of Earth. Warhammer 40k Wiki Advertisement Warhammer 40k Wiki Emperor of Mankind The Emperor Protects... The Lectitio Divinitatus EmperorsWisdom The Emperor of Mankind during the Great Crusade. The Emperor of Mankind, often referred to by His faithful as the "God-Emperor," the "Master of Mankind," or simply "the Emperor," and who sometimes referred to Himself as "Revelation," known to the forces of Chaos as the False Emperor or the Corpse Emperor, is the immortal Perpetual and psyker who serves as the reigning monarch of the Imperium of Man, and is described by the Imperial Ecclesiarchy and the Imperial Cult as the father, guardian and god of Humanity. The Chaos Gods and the Daemons of the Warp refer to Him as "the Anathema" for He is the greatest embodiment of universal order in the galaxy today and the most potent foe of Chaos in existence. He was, and remains, the most powerful Human psyker to have ever been born. 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 at the end of the Horus Heresy in the service and protection of Mankind. To Humanity's countless trillions across the galaxy-spanning Imperium, He is nothing less than God. Through His Imperium, Humanity is united and remains one of the most powerful intelligent species 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 deadly threats it faces from aliens, the forces of Chaos and the Traitors, Heretics and mutants that lie within the Imperium's boundaries. The Emperor The Emperor at the time of the Horus Heresy, wielding the Sword of the Emperor. The Imperium's rule, carried on in the Emperor's name 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, and a regression into tyranny, superstition and religious obfuscation and intolerance that would have horrified the Emperor. Though He is no longer responsive to external stimuli, the Emperor still lies at the very heart of the Imperium's continued existence. Although He cannot be directly involved in the day-to-day running of Humanity's galactic government, His existence 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. GoldenThroneSiegeofTerra The Emperor seated upon the Golden Throne in the dungeons of the Inner Palace during the Siege of Terra at the time of the Horus Heresy. However, the maintenance of this beacon requires the aid of other psykers, whose lifeforces are slowly drained away by the Emperor to power the beacon. One thousand psykers a day give their lives to maintain the Emperor's psychic strength. He is said to still guide His race through the psychically-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 its 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... Quick Answers fandom logo What is the Emperor of Mankind often referred to by His faithful in Warhammer 40k?toggle section Who is the reigning monarch of the Imperium of Man in the Warhammer 40k universe?toggle section How is the Emperor of Mankind described by the Imperial Ecclesiarchy and the Imperial Cult?toggle section What does the forces of Chaos call the Emperor of Mankind in Warhammer 40k?toggle section What is the significance of the phrase 'The Emperor Protects' in the Warhammer 40k universe?toggle section Advertisement History Advertisement Original Origin Note: This section discusses material that was once considered canon but whose canonicity may now be questionable. The Emperor & Malcodor The Sigilite The Emperor and His most trusted advisor, Malcador the Sigillite, at the time of the Great Crusade. 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 become the four Great Powers of Chaos had not yet fully formed when the Emperor was born on Old Earth during prehistoric times before even the Age of Terra, 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 Immaterium began to become increasingly disturbed by the dark undercurrents of Humanity's collective psyche, and the shamans began to lose their former ability to reincarnate into new bodies. Instead, upon dying, their souls were consumed by the entities 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 the race, Humanity would inevitably fall prey to the corruptions of Chaos, just as eventually happened to the Aeldari. In these ancient days, all the shamans of Earth gathered in a grand conclave to decide what must be done to stave off the day when they had all been consumed by the Warp. In the end, the shamans decided to pool their collective psychic energies by reincarnating as a single soul in a single Human body to create an individual they called "the New Man." The thousands of shamans, as one, took poison, and as one, they died, their souls flowing into the Immaterium in a rush of psychic power that overwhelmed those Daemons who sought to feast upon it with a cleansing, purifying fire, a flame imperishable that became one soul out of many. A standard year later the child who would become the Emperor was born in a Neolithic settlement of Anatolian herders and farmers of a normal mother and father, with normal brothers and sisters. His psychic power was so great that its energies altered His genome and physiology in the womb 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. For thirty-eight thousand Terran years, He wandered over the Earth and throughout Human history. He travelled among the different peoples of Mankind. While He had first been only an observer of Mankind's triumphs and follies, He soon began to help where He could, using His ancient wisdom to spread efficient government, crop management, animal husbandry, technology and peace. He used His influence carefully, at first adopting only the guise of a normal man, and without revealing His true nature. As the millennia passed, the man who would become the Emperor watched the Human species develop. He travelled the entire globe, watching and helping, sometimes adopting the persona of a great leader or advisor. In times of trouble He became a crusader, a religious leader or even a messiah, at other times He remained a back-stage contributor to events, an advisor to kings, a court magician, a pioneering scientist. Many of the guises He adopted were humble, others became monumental figures of world history or religion. At times of crisis He would be there, steering Humanity along a narrow path to survival that only He could see. As Humanity prospered and advanced over the millennia, the Warp became increasingly disturbed. The man who would become the Emperor was aware of how the extreme sides of the Human character were feeding the nascent Chaos Powers. Despite His best efforts to promote peace and harmony across Old Earth, the instinctive values of martial honour, ambition, defiance, and self-satisfaction could never be eradicated from the Human character. Some of the New Man's plans proved less than successful; seeds of wisdom often failed to flourish or grew into uncontrollable monstrosities leading to eras of persecution and war. The Chaos Gods sensed the presence of the New Man, the "Anathema" as they would name Him, and His efforts to curb their own power and growth. Even before they became fully conscious in the Immaterium the Ruinous Powers recognised the man who would become the Emperor as their greatest enemy. Khorne was the first of the four major Chaos Gods to wake fully, and an era of wars and conflict soon raged across the globe to herald his birth. Tzeentch was the next, and nations and politics soon grew to maturity with all of their implicit intrigues and double-dealings. Nurgle was the third to awake and plagues swept across Old Earth's continents claiming many souls for the Lord of Decay. By the end of the European Middle Ages on Terra, all three of these Chaos Gods had awoken to full consciousness. The fourth, Slaanesh, still slumbered, to be awakened by the follies of a different species, the Aeldari. But as the New Man's psychic powers further developed, He became ever more aware of the terrible dangers that awaited Mankind in the broader universe and He resolved to do all in His power to defend and guide Humanity towards a future as the predominant species in the galaxy. As more and more Humans were born with the mutant psyker genes that granted them the ability to wield the potent power of the Immaterium in the last centuries of the Dark Age of Technology, and Humanity suffered from the deadly effects of uncontrolled psykers that heralded the onset of the Age of Strife, the Emperor realised that He would have to take a more direct and open role in Human affairs than ever before. Following the birth of Slaanesh after the Fall of the Aeldari in the 30th Millennium, and the end of the Warp Storms that had prevented interstellar communications and travel from the Sol System, the Emperor determined that the time had come to directly steer the history of Humanity once more, or see the Human race ultimately go extinct due to the troubles of Old Night. Advertisement Current Origin However, the above account is now considered largely apocryphal. In truth, the Emperor's origin and history prior to the start of His attempt to unify Terra during the Unification Wars is largely mysterious and unknown, though His immortality as a Perpetual and extraordinary psychic abilities still define Him. The first mention of the Emperor by that name in Imperial records is when He began the unification of Terra at the end of the Age of Strife in the late 29th Millennium. Horus once mentioned that the Emperor lived "in Anatolia, in his own childhood" when describing his own first meeting with the Emperor. It is known that He had been born an immortal Perpetual and ancient even before His ascension to the Golden Throne over 10,000 Terran years ago. The Emperor is the "New Man," the first and greatest of the new mutant subspecies of Human psykers. He is also the collective reincarnation of the extinct shamans, wizards and wise-men who had guided primitive Humanity during prehistoric times. As the Emperor grew older His powers began to manifest themselves and become more potent and He gradually remembered His thousands of past lives, adding all of their knowledge and experience to His own. One account of the Emperor's origin goes so far as to say that He had mortal brothers and sisters and claims that He was born in the 8th Millennium B.C. in a primitive, proto-Hittite Neolithic village along the banks of the Sakarya River in Anatolia. While He was still an adolescent, the Emperor's father was murdered by His uncle. While preparing His father's body for a primitive funeral ritual, He received a clairvoyant vision of how His father had been murdered. Later, the boy who would become the Emperor calmly approached His uncle and stopped his heart with a slight use of His telekinetic psychic abilities, displaying neither sorrow nor malice for the deed. According to the Emperor Himself, this was the moment He realised that Humanity needed law, order, and the guidance of a wise ruler to reach its full potential. At some time after His father's murder, He left His village for the "first city of Humanity," likely one of the [Sumerian] city-states of ancient Mesopotamia. For thousands of standard 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 darker 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 Old Earth and thereby curb the growth of the Ruinous Powers' strength. Whatever His true origins, the man who would become the Emperor was the most powerful psyker ever born among Humans. Before the Emperor began His rise to power, He was also an anonymous Perpetual, a member of a mutant branch of Mankind gifted with effective immortality due to extremely rapid and efficient cellular regeneration. Whether this ability of the Perpetuals came about naturally or was artificially induced by some outside faction is unknown, but the Emperor was present during the time of Humanity's prior star-spanning civilisation in the period now named the Age of Technology by Imperial historitors. He was known to associate with other Perpetuals like Himself in that era. Among these was a woman named Alivia Sureka. Together, she, several other Perpetuals and the man who would one day become the Emperor travelled to the Knight World of Molech aboard a one-way voidcraft. There, they discovered a Warp Gate into the Realm of Chaos which the future Emperor entered. Once within the Immaterium He forged an unknown bargain with the Chaos Gods and was imbued with new powers and the knowledge required to ultimately create the primarchs, superhuman beings whose creation would combine techniques of arcane genetic science with the energies of the Warp. The Emperor left Sureka behind to look after the Molech Warp Gate until such time as that world could be safely protected by the coming of the future Imperium of Man. Despite their willingness to strike a bargain with Him early on, the Chaos Gods themselves later recognised the Emperor as their greatest enemy among all the intelligent beings of the galaxy, naming him "the Anathema." Only at the end of 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 during the Unification Wars that began in the late 29th Millennium and ended in 712.M30 with the establishment of His direct rule over Old Earth. The Emperor accepted the deaths of the many 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 ancient Mechanicum government on Mars, who joined with the Emperor and the people of Terra in the Treaty of Mars in 739.M30 that formally founded the Imperium of Man in the late 30th Millennium, the Emperor created the first Space Marines and fleets of interstellar voidships that would carry His armies across galactic space. The objective was a Great Crusade that would unify all of the planets colonised by Humanity during the Age of Technology prior to the Age of Strife into one Imperium of Man. The crusade would also subdue, destroy, or force into exile all intelligent alien races of the Milky Way. The galaxy was to become the Imperial Domain, the manifest destiny of Humanity. Using the knowledge He had bargained for with the Dark Gods on Molech, the Emperor during the Unification Wars also created with the aid of the scientists of His Biotechnical Division the twenty superhuman primarchs from whom the Space Marines' gene-seed was later developed, using His own DNA as the foundation of their undifferentiated genomes. He intended them to serve as His primary military commanders, diplomats and consuls for the Great Crusade. The Chaos Gods, however, sought to thwart the Emperor's grand plan even before His gene-sons' gestation within His subterranean genetic laboratories deep beneath the future Imperial Palace on Old Earth were complete. The primarchs were sucked into the Warp through the will of the Chaos Gods while still in their gestation capsules and scattered across the Human-inhabited worlds of the galaxy. Even before their births, the primarchs had already been touched by the power of Chaos. During the course of the Great Crusade all but two of the twenty primarchs were successfully found and united with the Space Marine Legions that had been created after their disappearances from the genetic material that they had left behind. As the Emperor travelled 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 it from ignorance and superstition." However, Lorgar, the primarch of the Word Bearers Legion, desperate to find some outlet for his belief that Humanity must have a god to worship to be truly whole, gave in to 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 and their Legions. Just as the Imperium had reached its apex in the first decade of the 31st Millennium, the Emperor's most trusted son, Primarch Horus of the Luna Wolves Legion (later renamed the Sons of Horus), fell to Chaos as a result of his own pride, need and ambition. Horus betrayed the Emperor, and along with fully half the Space Marine Legions and Imperial Army regiments, 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 Legions' assault on Terra, He was all but slain in the battle after suffering a crippling loss of limbs and mortal systemic damage; only the life-supporting Golden Throne has sustained His living corpse in a kind of stasis, neither dead nor truly alive. Trapped within His prison of flesh, only the Emperor's mind is allowed to wander free within the Immaterium, still seeking to protect and guide Humanity to an increasingly distant better future. Advertisement Unification Wars Golden Throne-Imperial Webway The Emperor of Mankind before his internment within the Golden Throne. 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 in the early 29th Millennium. Beginning at that time, and with the aid of his great friend and collaborator Malcador the Sigillite, the Emperor undertook a series of military campaigns against all the other techno-barbarian warlords on the planet that would collectively later become known as the "Unification Wars." During these conflicts the Emperor employed several military formations -- such as the warriors of the unit designated Geno 5-2 Chiliad who would go on to serve in the Imperial Army -- that consisted of genetically-enhanced warriors to maximise His tactical prowess. The most powerful of these troops were the proto-Astartes known as the Thunder Warriors. Though physically the most potent of His creations, more deadly in combat than even the later Space Marines, the Thunder Warriors were far from perfect. Having been created from adult troops who had undergone a rapid process of genetic, bionic and chemical augmentation, many did have difficulty coping with the physiological changes. Metabolic collapse leading to rapid death was not uncommon, and many Thunder Warriors were also prone to mental instability and even psychosis as they aged. These warriors played a significant role in the Emperor's eventual victory over all the other warlords of Terra and led Him to believe that His future plans to reunite Mankind across the galaxy would require the creation of an even more potent core of genetically-engineered military commanders and warriors. Following the Battle of Mount Ararat in the Kingdom of Urartu, which was said in some sources to be the last battle of the Unification Wars, the Unity of Old Earth was at last achieved after standard centuries of blood, loss and fire. With this victory, the planet and population of Terra were at last unified under the single rule of the Emperor. But to make His dream of reuniting all of Humanity within a single galaxy-spanning empire possible, the Emperor knew that He would have to make some difficult, even immoral decisions. Their purpose having been achieved, the Emperor ordered all of the remaining Thunder Warriors to be liquidated. Their imperfections and propensity for mental decay rendered them a dangerous group of warriors to leave alive in a time of peace. They needed to be removed to make way for their eventual successors, the primarchs and the Space Marines. In truth, the Emperor was right to be worried about His creations. Another source claims that even before the Unification Wars had ended, the Thunder Warriors at last realised that their creator had cursed them with short lifespans as a result of their imperfect genetic augmentations, and turned upon Him for what they saw as His betrayal. It was a cadre of several hundred Custodians, even then believed to have been commanded by the legendary Constantin Valdor, and accompanied by several thousand prototype Astartes of the I Legion of the newborn Space Marines, that stood in the Emperor's defence, carrying out a merciless culling of the obsolete and rebellious gene-soldiers. Though some Thunder Warriors successfully escaped the cull, however it happened, the vast majority of those who survived the Unification Wars died at the hands of their own allies. Individually or in small groups -- like the self-stylised "Dait'Tar" Thunder Warriors present during the Cerberus Insurrection of the early Great Crusade era -- some Thunder Warriors would survive, living mostly anonymous and miserable lives amongst the population of Terra, all honours of the past forsaken, always fearful of being discovered. Fortunately for these survivors, the Imperium, believing them all dead, never truly sought to hunt them down, as all efforts were by now concentrated on the progress of the Great Crusade. Official Imperial propaganda proclaimed that the Thunder Warriors had heroically died to the last man during the Battle of Mount Ararat, the greatest of their number, Arik Taranis, surviving just long enough to raise the Emperor's banner when victory, and unity, was achieved. But the Emperor could not wipe away the stain entirely, for several Thunder Warriors managed to escape what they called "the Culling," including Arik Taranis, who would yet have a role to play in the fate of the Emperor's realm. With the Unification of Terra achieved, the Emperor next set in motion His plan to defend and better Humanity across the galaxy, by unifying those lost bastions of Mankind scattered across the myriad stars under the aegis of the newborn Imperium. This extraordinary undertaking would become known as the Great Crusade. EmperorSword The Emperor wielding the Emperor's Sword during a battle of the Great Crusade. Advertisement Great Crusade The Emperor prepared extensively for the Great Crusade in the years after Unity was achieved on Terra; He created the special astro-telepath (astropath) corps to link his eventual interstellar dominion together through the use of telepathy, and engineered the creation of the Astronomican. This was a supremely powerful psychic navigational beacon powered by the Emperor's own will and psychic abilities that would allow simplified and safer interstellar travel through the Warp across far greater distances than before. Chief amongst His designs, however, was the creation of new legions of transhuman, genetically-engineered warriors, the logical extension of the gene-troopers already under his command, though they would be far superior to the gene-enhanced troops of the Imperial Army He had used during the Unification Wars. The Emperor first undertook 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 and statesmen for His armies. The primarchs would be beings of such great mental and physical superiority that nothing merely Human could stand against them. To enhance the primarchs beyond the capabilities that even genetic-engineering allowed, however, the Emperor also drew upon the powers of the Warp he had learned at Molech to enhance His creations, imbuing them with nearly godlike levels of charisma and capability, but also unintentionally making them susceptible to corruption by the entities of the Warp. However, this plan went awry with the intervention of the Ruinous Powers, who feared that the Emperor's designs to unite and improve Humanity might succeed too well, vastly increasing the hold of order over the universe and diminishing their own strength. It is for this reason that all of Daemonkind refers to the Emperor as "the Anathema," the embodiment of the metaphysical opposition to Chaos. While accounts vary as to exactly what happened, the end of the tale is always the same; the primarchs were cast into the Warp in their gestation chambers from beneath the Himalazian (Himalaya) Mountains in the Emperor's gene-labs despite the multiple psychic wards the Emperor had laid down upon the laboratory, and thought lost. In the aftermath of these events, the Emperor conceived a new plan. Using genetic samples that 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. After their creation, the Emperor led the 20 Space Marine Legions, all of their Astartes originally recruited from Terran-born adolescent males, in their first missions to give them experience in war and diplomacy through the reconquest of the rest of the Sol System. The Space Marines drove alien slavers from the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and most importantly, achieved peace and the eventual integration of Imperial Terra with the ruling Mechanicum of Mars. This crucial military and political alliance, formalised in 739.M30 with the signing of the Treaty of Mars, provided the Emperor with much of the technological means and materiel required to extend His crusade into the stars. At the same time, the alliance formalised the creation of the Imperium of Man and established the Imperial bureaucracy on Terra, integrating the Mechanicum as one of the myriad organisations that comprised the newborn Adeptus Terra, the massive government of the Imperium, the future Priesthood of Earth. Emperor Great Crusade The Emperor at the outset of the Great Crusade. With the final abatement of the Warp Storms caused by the birth-pangs of the Chaos God Slaanesh and ended by the Fall of the Aeldari, the Emperor finally began the Great Crusade in ca. 798.M30 with the campaign remembered as the First Pacification of Luna. The Emperor's forces, concentrated amongst a rapidly growing cadre of expeditionary fleets, rediscovered long-lost Human colony worlds, cast out alien oppressors, and claimed vast new territories for the newborn Imperium to exploit across the galaxy. Perhaps most importantly, the Emperor, leading His crusade, rediscovered His lost sons, the primarchs, as the expeditionary fleets pushed out deeper into the depths of unexplored space. Scattered across the galaxy, the primarchs were found one-by-one, over a period of many solar decades, and reunited with their father and their own genetic sons in the Space Marine Legions. All were placed in command of the Astartes Legions created from their respective gene-seed and played a major part in forging their father's Imperium. Together they brought thousands of worlds into Imperial Compliance, establishing the rule of the Imperium over these worlds and inculcating in them the values of the Imperial Truth -- a materialist, atheistic faith in reason, science and technological progress that rejected all the vestiges of Human irrationality and superstition, including all forms of religious faith. Only by promulgating the doctrines of the Imperial Truth did the Emperor believe He could begin to weaken the hold of the need for faith and the other irrational aspects of the Human mind that birthed and sustained the power of Chaos in the Warp. The Emperor Himself declared that Mankind would never be free to progress and advance to its destined position as the pre-eminent intelligent species in the Milky Way Galaxy until "the last stone from the last church was cast down onto the last priest." He had already purged ancient Terra of all its ancient religions and superstitious beliefs by the time the Great Crusade began, even going so far as to personally witness the destruction of the final church on Terra's ancient soil after engaging its resident holy man, Uriah Olathaire, in a battle of ideas, wit and dogma. The Imperial Truth also held that Humanity was the species which should rightfully rule the galaxy since its physical form was both the most pure and all of the other intelligent alien races, such as the Aeldari, had already tried and failed to maintain galaxy-spanning civilisations. Now it was Humanity's turn to find a place amidst the stars. As almost all intelligent alien species encountered by Mankind had either proven to be irrevocably hostile to Humanity or presented a future threat to Human dominance and exploitation of the galaxy, xenos species were generally to be exterminated outright if they presented the slightest threat or obstacle to the Imperium. The Emperor believed the Imperial Truth needed to be brought to all the worlds of Humanity, peacefully at first but imposed by war if necessary, because the Emperor believed that true unity was the only way for Humanity to survive and prosper in the face of a very hostile universe. If this required the unfortunate use of force against those who refused to understand this necessity, then so be it. Just as He had during the Unification Wars, the Emperor again lamented the loss of innocent lives and the curtailing of individual freedoms that the fleets of the Great Crusade sometimes trod upon, but He could see no other way to safeguard Humanity and weaken the endless corruptive power of the Ruinous Powers at the same time. While the Imperial Truth upheld the light of reason and science, it did have one unbreakable proscription: Men must never develop machines capable of true thought, what scientists had once called artificial general intelligence. The Emperor remembered that it was the great war fought by Humanity against the thinking machines known as the Men of Iron that had helped to destroy Mankind's last united interstellar civilisation at the end of the Dark Age of Technology and He had no desire to see the Human race repeat its past mistakes. As such, when the expeditionary fleets of the Great Crusade encountered advanced Human civilisations in the dark of space that had developed artificial general intelligences, these worlds' populations were simply exterminated outright as potential dangers to the entire body politic of the newborn Imperium. Wargear: One True Armour - The One True Armour is the name of a specially-crafted suit of golden auramite power armour worn by the Emperor during the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy. After his wounding by Horus during the Siege of Terra it is said that the Emperor's armour was removed and melted down by His own order to create badges that would honour the Imperial Fists Terminators that had fought beside him aboard the Vengeful Spirit. Fragments of the One True Armour were placed inside the Crux Terminatus badges worn by especially honored Space Marine Terminators. Meanwhile, all of the Cruxes terminatus granted to the Astartes of the Grey Knights also contain a shard of the Emperor's armour. The right gauntlet of the One True Armour is currently in possession of the Dark Angels Chapter, who use it to create thousands of Crux Terminatus badges for themselves and their successors among the Unforgiven. Emperor's Sword - This famed sword was wielded by the Emperor Himself during the Great Crusade and was passed on to the resurrected Primarch Roboute Guilliman after he assumed the mantle of Lord Commander of the Imperium for the second time in 999.M41 in the wake of the 13th Black Crusade and the Ultramar Campaign by the Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl. The weapon had been kept safely in Cawl's possession on Mars for over 10,000 standard years, since the end of the Horus Heresy and Guilliman's first tenure as the Lord Commander. Touched by the Emperor's own psychic might, this finely wrought, master-crafted blade is lit from hilt to tip with leaping flames. When it is swung, the burning blade draws pyrotechnic arcs through the air, able to slice through the stoutest of armour with ease. Emperor's Shield - This auramite shield was once wielded by the Emperor Himself, and aside from its indomitable protective powers it reflects the force of any incoming attacks right back at its wielder's foe with a sonorous boom. It was later lost through unknown means and came to rest in the Warp. It was found there by the Dark Angels Primarch Lion El'Jonson after he recovered it from a shapeshifting Daemon that was guarding it within a domed structure the Lion found in the sub-realm of the Immaterium called Mirror-Caliban after he reawakened beneath The Rock in the Era Indomitus. El'Jonson then wielded it throughout his travels across the Human-settled galaxy to aid its people in defending themselves from the forces of Chaos and xenos. Emperor's Lightning Claw - The Emperor's Lightning Claw is a Lightning Claw that was usually seen wielded on the Emperor's left hand during the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy. Its appearance varies greatly in depictions and it may actually have had anywhere from between three to five claws. Appearance: The God-Emperor of Mankind has no single true appearance, as he is a powerful psyker who projects different forms, most famously as a towering, golden-armored warrior with a stern face for leading the Great Crusade, but also as an unremarkable man, a scientist in a hazard suit, or a hooded, radiant figure. His appearance is a psychic glamour, a "mask" to inspire or deceive, often depicted as a giant, strong-jawed man of Anatolian descent in golden armor with flowing hair, though his actual form is malleable and mysterious.