Warhammer 40,000 was not built in a cultural vacuum. Games Workshop emerged in late-1970s Britain, a milieu shaped by occult revival, chaos magick aesthetics, and the Law/Chaos cosmology of Michael Moorcock’s fiction, and the fingerprints are everywhere: the Warp as a metaphysical plane mapping onto esoteric conceptions of the astral or the collective unconscious, the Thousand Sons and their Hermetic-Egyptian architecture, and a cosmos where the boundary between immaterial and material reality is dangerously permeable, daemons operate according to recognizable esoteric logic, and supernatural agency manifests across a spectrum running from psykers and sorcerers to the sanctioned miracles of the Ecclesiarchy.
This paper applies Christopher Partridge’s concept of “occulture” to Warhammer 40,000. Occulture names the broad cultural reservoir of occult, esoteric, and mystical ideas that circulates in contemporary Western societies largely through popular culture (film, music, games, fiction) rather than through formal religious institutions. Partridge argues that popular culture is both a product of this reservoir and a transmitter that replenishes and redistributes it across new audiences. 40K is a near-perfect case study: it absorbed these frameworks from its founding context and has since transmitted them, often in their first recognizable form, to millions of players who may never encounter Western esotericism through any other channel.
The paper argues that popular games like 40K function as significant but understudied sites of occultural circulation, shaping the imaginative vocabularies through which people, including younger audiences with little exposure to formal religious institutions, come to conceptualize religion, cosmology, and esoteric thought in secular societies.
Author bio
Adrian Johansen Rinde is a PhD candidate from the University of Stavanger, Norway. He has published peer-reviewed academic articles on religious didactics and how pupils and students conceptialise religion. He is currently working as a teacher and researcher at the Norwegian Museum of Justice.
