The Monstrefact: Chaos Daemons of Khorne

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses the chaos daemons of Khorne from Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 universe… (Part 1 of 4)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hi,
my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Monster Fact,
a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
focusing in on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.

(00:23):
In this episode, I'm beginning a four part Monster Fact
series on the four main demonic factions in games workshops
Warhammer forty thousand universe. So first a little background. The
fictional far future forty case setting depicts an interstellar human
imperium with various dark, fantasy, and medieval elements. This aggressive

(00:47):
imperium is challenged on all sides by equally warlike alien societies,
but they also face the threat of chaos. In the
forty case setting, the demons of chaos exist a psychic
dimension called the Warp, but they can spill over into
what is called real space through various methods and exploits.

(01:10):
So in this setting, demons are not the mere creation
of religion or occultism, but an actual spiritual and physical
threat to humanity. Heretical drift on a far flung planet
can mean far more than just mere rebellion. It can
lead to a demonic incursion that consumes billions of souls.

(01:30):
There are various ways to divide up demonic factions in
a created world like this, but forty K largely swits
the forces of chaos into four distinct flavors, red, blue, green,
and purple, representing bloodthirst, chaotic change, pestilence, and hedonism, each
a major conduit of mortal emotions and mortal souls in

(01:51):
the fictional forty first millennium, with each conduit accreting into
a powerful entity known as a chaos god. They are Corn, Zinch, Nergal,
and Slanesh. There are other lesser CHAOSK gods as well,
but these are the four main factions, and while they
sometimes come to a working agreement with each other, they're

(02:13):
mostly at war amongst themselves in what is referred to
as the Great Game. In this episode, will start with
Corn as the so called Blood God is a lot
more direct. He's powered by mortal violence and war. He's
all about rivers of blood and pyramids of bone. His
favorite color is obviously red, and he's not big on subtlety.

(02:34):
His demonic hords and mortal followers dig horns and blades.
They spill blood for the Blood God, so really there's
not much to elaborate on here. However, in browsing through
the ninth edition Chaos Demons Codex from Games Workshop, I
simply couldn't let the unit known as a skull canon
pass without comment. There's a lot of talk of skull

(02:58):
harvesting with some of the other their corn units, and
this one amounts to a big honking heavy metal cannon,
A couple of red demons called blood Letters crew the weapon,
loading it up with the fresh remains of slain enemy soldiers.
The cannon breaks everything down and then fires flaming skulls
across the battlefield, again fittingly direct. Thus far, in actual

(03:22):
human warfare, skulls and heads have proven poor missiles, but
the presentation of decapitated heads to the enemy has a
long history, with plentiful examples to be found. In the
classical and ancient world. The heads of enemy dead might
be delivered directly to enemy lines, that might be placed

(03:43):
on spikes or what have you. Ruth Schuster, writing for
Harets in twenty eighteen, points out that Iron Age Galls
even developed a resin based embalming method to ensure the
captured heads of their enemies didn't rot too fast. As
Peter Franca Pant points out in his book The First Crusade,

(04:04):
The Call from the East, the Crusades saw a lot
of head taking on both sides, and there are Western
accounts of crusader heads being catapulted back into their siege
camps in order to hurt morale. The same terror tactics
were said to have been used by French crusader host
as well. This according to the French themselves in the

(04:26):
Old French Crusader Cycle. According to Sarah Grace Heller in
twenty eleven's Terror in the Old Crusade Cycle, various other
catapult age accounts described the launching of dead bodies into
camps and besieged cities as a means of terror and
or biological attack. The age of the cannon presented various

(04:47):
new ideas of how cannons might be used in one
way or another to spread human remains. None of these
methods use the remains as ammo against other combatants are
worth noting. Nonetheless, the execution method known as blowing from
a gun often entailed the strapping of a live victim
to the mouth of a cannon, resulting in partial or

(05:10):
complete scattering of the remains on the other end of
the spectrum, cremated ashes are on occasion spread by cannon
fire as a desired dramatic funerary right in modern times.
In a broader sense, however, the use of human remains
as weapons dates back to prehistory. Europeans were crafting human
bones into weapons at least ten thousand years ago, practice

(05:34):
that continued into recent centuries for other far flung cultures,
at least for symbolic and spiritual reasons. Now, as far
as the creation and veneration of artifacts made from human
bones goes, this is the kind of thing that's probably
lost on the chaos god Corn. All he cares about
is the hacking, of the stabbing, and of course the

(05:55):
occasional explosively propelled pyrotechnic human skull. We'll continue through the
chaos factions in this manner over the next three weeks,
so tune in to the Monster Fact on Wednesdays in
the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast fee As always,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is

(06:25):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
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