The world's first academic conference dedicated to all things Warhammer
The Imperium of Mankind perpetuates itself through the mechanical reproduction of a vast number of social fantasies, the most universal being belief in the omniscience of the God-Emperor. To be an Imperial subject, one must, often under pain of death, publicly profess an obvious falsehood: that humanity is led by an all-powerful protector, whose will …
The Immaterium or Warp in Warhammer 40,000 functions as a chaotic, psychic realm that embodies both cosmic threat and metaphysical possibility. By looking at various external philosophical and religious sources, this paper seeks to approach 40k’s Immaterium as a liminal metaphysical space – and its internal lore applications of a collective unconscious realm shaped by …
The Warhammer universe, in its totality, has exploded in popularity in the twenty-first century, crossing the boundary from niche tabletop wargame to vast multimedia franchise, spanning novels, video games, and television. Yet with this increasing cultural cachet comes a significant question – why, in this particular historical moment, has this famously “grimdark” setting gained significant …
The world of 40k has forever been at war with the concept of Artificial Intelligence. The Imperium of Man ever wrestles with its fear of Men of Iron whilst simultaneously protecting and pacifying its myriad machine spirits. They preach against the return of ‘Abominable Intelligences’ while they battle the supernatural might of Daemon Engines. Even …
A major theme in the bestselling book series The Horus Heresy is fatherhood. The inciting incident of the series is the abandonment of Horus Lupercal by his father The Emperor, and many of the primarchs struggle with their positions as gene-fathers to the adeptus astartes, as well as to the various father figures in their …
The Imperium of Man is an explicitly eugenic state, pursing its obsessive campaign of purifying humanity at all costs. Both those with conventional disabilities and the crip-coded psykers and mutants are routinely either purged from the gene pool or are “cured” through super-science that erase disability as an identity category, including via the elimination of …