Last time, I know I promised to put something about Space Outlaws and politics up, but I won't. As I mentioned deamons and their possessing humans to achieve some goal in the last post, and as a comment on a post over at my main blog, Valkyrie Diaries, this forced me to think about why the deamons, and more specifically why the Chaos Gods do what they do.
In the stories about the Space Outlaws, this is never mentioned, more or less on the premise that it has little to no bearing on the goals of the protagonists. To sum up, all the Eds and the others needs to know is that deamons have fed on human minds for as long as Humanity has existed and it is their duty to kill the Immaterial beasties for the betterment of Mankind.
To be able to understand where I want to go with this, we have to know a little about the nature of deamons and the place where they come from: the Warp aka the Immaterium.
As the Space Outlaws is a semi-cross-over involving the Ed, Edd n Eddy show's characters and the "physics engine" of Warhammer 40'000, this means that most things in WH40k translate more or less directly over to the Space Outlaw universe. That which doesn't, gets tweaked to fit. This is the case with the origins of deamons, but not their nature.
In Wh40K, as well as in the Space Outlaws, deamons feed of human emotion, or more specifically, our dreams. And it is not only humans, it is any self-sentient creature, essentially. Self-sentient creatures, such as humans (and I'll use us as example in the rest of the essay), are multi-dimensional, or at least weakly so. Through our dreams and emotions, we enter another plane of existence, essentially. The Eldar, for example, have better control over this and can practically enter this dream-world through their own will.
This dream-world, known amongst humans as the Warp, is home to other, immaterial, but just as sentient creatures, deamons. Deamons feed of dreams and emotions, as said, but they are essentially gluttons, and will suck onto a particularly "strong" human presence and devour it all if given the chance. The bi-product of this is possession of a human mind, usually a psyker, as they are naturally strong presences in the Warp. The end result is that the human "soul" or personality is replaced with that of the deamon, which gains a material form which it can use and abuse as it pleases, the human mind gone.
And as deamons are immaterial creatures, they cannot comprehend the laws of physics (and anatomy) that hold the Materium's living creatures together, and rampant mutation is the result.
Now, this explains the why to deamons. They are not inherently evil, nothing in the Space Outlaw universe is actually, but from a human perspective, and a humanity slowly but surely becoming more "psychically aware", this is a danger to our very existence, hence the Imperial Inquisition's hate of renegade psykers and it's hunt for the same.
The origins of deamons and consequently the Chaos Gods can be traced back to a time when pretty much teh C'tan were the only sentient creatures in the Universe.
The C'tan are referred to as Star Gods at times in Wh40k. They aren't multi-dimensional like humans and Eldar in WH40k; they are purely Material. They get their names from essentially being sentient light, fly in the face of most established physics. I say most, there might be a possibility of this if string theory is to be believed.
Anyway, the Wh40k definition of C'tan does NOT apply to the Space Outlaw universe. In the Space Outlaws, the C'tan are multi-dimensional, self-aware creatures just like humans and Eldar, which they created. They are a species of master genetic engineers. And after having engineered themselves into immortality and multi-dimensional awareness, they set about making slave species to serve them, to cut a long story short.
Somewhere along the line, but before the creation of the Eldar (no I do NOT support Creationism, this is to be seen as a satire on it), four C'tan brothers, known as the Warrior, the Architect, the Destroyer and the Libertine, attained a fairly high level of multi-dimensional awareness, a level that made them potentially dangerous to the rest of C'tan society.
The other C'tan punished them for this perceived crime (being more powerful than any one else) by robbing them of their material bodies and banishing them to the Immaterial Realm that they coveted so much, forever.
Of course, the four wanted back to material world, and have wanted that since day one. But the only hosts fitting for their minds are other C'tan, and since other C'tan are aware of the four brothers, they had no other choice than to try to adapt to their new home.
As Jean-Paul Sarte once said, "Hell is spending an eternity in the company of your friends", the brothers soon started to hate each other, each one manifesting perversions of their major character traits, in what can be called a severe case of prison psychosis.
As they still were aware, and still C'tan, they started, with the onset of new, but "lesser" sentient beings in the Material Realm, to create creatures in the Immaterium to correspond with those in the Materium, like a twisted mirror. These creature were what is called deamons in the Space Outlaws.
Also, the names of the four brothers; Khorne, Tzeentch, Nurgle and Slaanesh, are most likely perversions over the years of their original C'tan names. But the names are old, very old. Older than the oldest of Eldar records of history.
This history/theory also explains why the Emperor, being C'tan, can resist deamonic possession, quite neatly.
I hope this has cleared up something as to the nature of Deamons and Chaos gods.
Next time, it'll be politics and the Space Outlaws. We'll also take a trip down memory lane and go back to explore sci-fi baddies and the stereotypes involved in this.
