Warhammer 40K: The Saturnine Nature Of the Emperor – PRIME-
Today let’s talk about a godly aspect of the Emperor of Mankind and its deadly implications for his children.
The Emperor has many aspects. As one of the most important parts of Warhammer 40,000 He is both one of the most written about characters, and also the most mysterious. One of His many aspects, brought up in recent books is His Saturnine aspect. Let’s talk about what that means.
From The Text
The idea of the Emperor having a Saturnine nature is bought up in, appropriately, the novel Saturnine. During a conversation between Erda and John Grammaticus, they have the following exchange:
“‘He has never listened, never learned,’ said Erda. ‘In the cycles of old lore, He is Saturn. Inflexible authority.
‘What?’ asked John.
‘He is Saturn. He is Cronus. He is Oanis. It depends on your pantheon.’
‘You don’t believe in gods.’
‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘But the symbols have always intrigued me, and through the ages He has styled himself on many of them, for effect. Mithras, the soldier-god, Tyr Hammerhand, the Wolf of the Romannii, Arawn, Enlil of Storms, Maahes the lion-headed, Seth. And Saturn, most of all. The father-god. The maker. In the acroamatic texts of alchemy, Saturn is glyphed as lead, the prima matera. it is heavy and it seals, and limits, and protects. It is cold authority. Saturn is a black, stone prison, caging all truth inside its chain of rings…’
‘He is Saturn,’ she whispered. The Saturnine aspect is lead. Lead is heavy. But lead, John. Lead can be molded.’
Advertisement
What Does It Mean
This passage is a very interesting one for a number of reasons. Let’s ignore the sort of contradiction in that Erda starts by saying the Emperor is inflexible and ends by saying He can be molded. Let’s focus, today, on the Emperor as Saturn. Erda says that throughout history the Emperor has styled Himself after various gods, normally the “Father” or head god of a pantheon. However there seems to be a deeper implication here. That is that the Emperor didn’t just style Himself after the gods, but was in fact those “gods” and the myths and legends about them were about the Emperor. “He is Saturn” she says. She directly equates the Emperor’s personality with that of the gods, which you would not expect her to do if the Emperor was merely acting a role and styling Himself after them. And indeed it makes sense, the Emperor has great powers, if He chose to act as a god, people would believe it and legends would grow up. So what can this tell us?
Why Saturn Is Important
Saturn is the Roman father god and one of the most important god’s in their pantheon. While Saturn was a king and father of the gods, he is not analogous to Zeus, but rather to Cronus. Saturn has a few interesting implications for us however. The first is his role as father of the gods. The Emperor of course plays this role as father of the Primarchs, but also seemed to have played it, though less literally with His Perpetual allies. Saturn’s period of rule, pre-Rome, was also generally known as a Golden Age, and we know the Emperor wanted to usher in a golden age with His rule, though Saturn also had a very bloody aspect, which the Emperor also has.
Saturn also has connections with time and cycles. The Emperor it is fairly well established does not experience time as mortals do, and so this connection also makes a ton of sense. Lastly of course there is the Roman connection. The Imperium has very heavy Roman influences, and it makes sense that the Emperor would feel closely tied to, and might possibly be, a Roman god.
Another God Is Important Too
Erda focuses a lot on Saturn, but there is another god she mentioned second who is perhaps more important, Cronus. Cronus is a Greek god, or Titan really, and while not the same as Saturn is often conflated with him. Like Saturn, Cronus is the father of the Greek gods (or at least many of them) and ruled during a golden age. And yet the story of Cronus has some interesting similarities to the Emperor. Cronus is most well known for eating his own children to prevent them from overthrowing him as he did to his father. Of course one of his children, Zeus, was hidden from him and eventually returned to free the others Cronus had eaten and become ruler of the gods himself. as a result Cronus was imprisoned in Tartarus, a Greek version of hell.
While the Emperor didn’t eat His children, there are strong indications that He planned to dispose of them at some point to prevent them turning on Him. They were of course hidden from Him for a time, and one of them Horus did return in his full power to overthrow his father. Though Horus/Zeus failed, the Emperor was indeed imprisoned. We can see some pretty interesting mirrors here. I think the connection here strongly supports that the Emperor would have turned on His children, not just the Primarchs, but the Marines as well, just as He turned on and “ate” the Thunder Warriors. We might also wonder if Cronus turned on his father to become king, who did the Emperor have to defeat? Was there a power on Terra before the Emperor that He overcame?
Well, that’s a question for a different time.
