The Madministratum

TLDR: A survey of tonnes of quotes to showcase that the lore has often stated that the Chaos gods are composed of and empowered by both emotions and thoughts/beliefs, but that the nature of such thoughts and beliefs may be more subconscious rather than the result of conscious, rational thinking. I thought it would be useful to survey some lore about how the Chaos gods formed and are empowered, to showcase that this involved thoughts, not just emotions. This should hopefully be interesting, but also useful, as there is a lot of widespread misunderstanding about the metaphysics of how this works. Many believe that the Chaos gods are manifestations of fundamental forces of nature/reality, basically cosmic laws or principles. And this idea does have a basis in the lore, as we will see. Yet the Chaos gods are explicitly explained to have formed from, and grow in power due to, psychic energies produced by mortal beings with a Warp presence. And this is by far the most common explanation, and...

In part 1, I surveyed the now very old foundational lore about the relationship between the Warp, souls, and living beings within the Materium:  https://madministratum.blogspot.com/2026/08/souls-dont-enter-warp-after-death-they.html   This old lore which explicitly explained some aspects of the nature of souls and their place within and relationship to the Warp has come to often be stated far less explicitly in the decades since – but it still provides some foundational concepts which later lore built upon, and helps shed insight into why aspects of the lore take the form they do. And the later lore still (on the whole - as there are exceptions) conceives the souls of mortals as being situated within the Warp, but linked to mortal bodies. So, let’s cover some relevant material. First, psykers still remain dangerous because their souls attract attention from Warp entities, and the link between their body in the Materium and soul in the Warp acts as a conduit: If not properly tr...

TLDR: A look at relevant lore which conceptualizes souls as residing within the Warp while mortals are alive, how souls are anchored to their physical bodies, and how this underpins different metaphysical elements of the setting. I thought it would be useful to pull together lots of relevant lore about a specific aspect on the metaphysics of the setting: where souls reside, and their relationship to both the mortal entities which possess souls who reside within the Materium, and to the Warp. This has turned into a rather lengthy discussion, so I have had to divide it into two parts. For understandable reasons, there is a lot of misunderstanding about this this concept and how it works within 40k (and Warhammer more generally). The lore about such metaphysical issues is comparatively sparse and spread across lots of different sources. It is also often presented in a very ambiguous manner. Sometimes we get an in-universe perspective, which doesn’t explicitly explain the mechanisms behind...

The concept of an ancient progenitor race who seeded the galaxy/universe hundreds of thousand or millions of years ago is hardly unique to Warhammer. The general idea was evident in Scifi and Fantasy before the Slann were incorporated into Warhammer in such a role (because, of course, Warhammer lore was shaped by nabbing ideas from various sources of inspiration, sometimes quite wholesale, and mixing them together), and we have seen it become an ever more prominent trope, especially in computer games, what with the Precursors of Halo, the Xel'Naga in Starcraft, and many more besides. The Slann in Warhammer, who were the ancient precursors on both the Warhammer World of Fantasy and in the 40k galaxy (with the former being stated to be situated within the latter in the early lore, just isolated by Warp storms) were quite distinctive, though, in part due to their relationship to the Warp (and various hints their empire may have spanned different realities and across time). But also be...