Is the Warp "magical"? (WH40K)

[Stravo]

Having immersed myself in the Horus Heresy novels and some of the new Codices a question arises spurred on by a theme that was started in the begininning of the Horus Heresy series but seems to have been dropped in later novels.

The Emperor is creating the Imperium as a secular Empire based on science and reason. He frowns upon anything superstitious or supernatural - even going so far as berating a Primarch for worshipping him. He is also simultaneously trying to wall off any contact with the Warp by forbidding things like sorcery and librarians. My guess he hopes that cutting off potential contact with the Warp and knowledge of it would make them relatively safe from the predations of Chaos.

With the idea of secularism and reason being the watch words of the nascent Imperium we are then faced with the Warp resurgent and the growing influence of the Chaos gods who make no bones about being "magical". This dichotomy is played up well in the first few books of the Heresy as rational men based in a society of science face things like demons and black magic for the first time and are at a loss. Some people try to look at the works of Chaos through this lense and I tend to agree with them.

The Warp looked at through the dual views:

Demons

Magical - these are denizens of the Warp, creatures made out of the nightmares and dark lusts of sentients. They are eternal monsters creeping around lusting after souls.

Rational - "Aliens of the Warp" as described by someone in one of the first novels but this view is soon discarded. However it does make some sort of sense. Just as we are living sentient beings made out of the materials of this universe (the Materium) the demons are quite simply our analogs made out of the materials of their universe (the immaterium) The primary difference here is that the Immaterium grants them abilities far beyond what we have made out of simple Carbon chains and organic compounds. We'll get to the properties of the Immaterium itself in a moment to explain these magical abilities


The Warp

Magical - even in the more rational heresy era the Warp is at times described as the "Sea of Souls" indicating a more supernatural state. It is the immaterium portion of the universe that is highly influenced by psionic activity and the general emotional and powerful impulses of the sentient species of the materium. It is here that the Chaos gods dwell and demonic realms reside. Whenever the Warp and the Material universe interact - such as the Eye of Terror and the Maelstrom the laws of physics and such no longer seem to apply making it seem like a more "magical" realm.

Rational - the Warp is comprised of a material that is highly psychoactive. It essentially bends itself to form or create anything with a sufficient exercise of willpower and psykers have the greatest impact or cast a longer shadow in the Warp due to their higher level of psionic talent. It is not magic per se that occurs in the Warp but the energetic reactions of sentient will and especially psionic power on this psychoactive substance that creates magical effects like balls of fire or flesh crafting. The demons are more powerful and almost godlike when crafting the Warp because they have a home field advantage. They are made up of this material and have been living and breathing (so to speak) in it for untold millenia so obviusly they can outstrip anything that a single or even group of mortal psykers can do when manipulating this substance. Let us not forget however that it is the overwhelming power of collective sentience that created the Chaos gods themselves so over time who is more powerful and on whom do these gods depend on for sustenance?


Chaos

Magical - the Warp is essentially hell. It is the dark place where all sentient anger, lust, blood lust and fear gell and coalesce and give life to demons and their Chaos gods. It is all powerful and all corrupting. No matter how pure the motives any psyker that delves too deeply may be touched by Chaos suffering perils of the Warp or far far worse. In the end, the life of a psyker in 40K is pretty damn bleak. Chaos is the great natural force of entropy and it has a sort of vile sentience reflected in the Chaos gods and their agendas. Chaos may not be a singular entity or intelligence but it moves all of its pieces towards the same agenda - the breakdown of order and eventually complete destruction or corruption.

Rational - Chaos is in itself not a force or actual sentience in the Warp. With the contravening agendas of the various Chaos aligned factions but this is not itself a sign of a greater power out there at best one might theororize that since the Warp is a psychoactive dimension that reacts to sentient will then it might be stated that Chaos and by extension the gods are nothing more than sentient self loathing, fear and anger collectively represented by these archetypal forces. (whew)

OK. Now that was longer than I anticipated but the question is whether we can objectively state - going by WH40K literature and fluff - whether the Warp is actually magic or is it more likely a dimension that can be rationally explained but man has fallen back on tried and true stereotypes that have served them well when they don't fully understand something.

Or Are we stretching reason when we come up with bs terms like "psychoactive substance" to refer to something that is clearly supernatural and beyond human science and comprehension and hence why the Imperium of Man and Horus fell so utterly to their charms because they were trying to deal with a force that is beyond their ken?

Or perhaps a third option. Is the Warp what you say it is from a certain point of view? As a highly rational being can you look and say the Warp is a psychoactive dimension that reacts to the will of sentients but through a dark lense of subconcious fear and anger or conversely as a sorceror can you also be equally correct and say it is hell incarnate, a dark sea of souls where the Great Devourer waits for us all?

[Ghost Rider]

It's an interesting point, and something I've been meaning to chat with Connor about, but life interferes.

The warp from all indications isn't something very rational. Also one has to look towards the C'tan, Enslavers, and the Old Ones.

The C'Tan are beings of immense power and are considered to be the oldest being in existence of the 40K universe. And all jabbering aside, their goals were extremely simple. Devour and find new stars to devour. With the Old Ones we got goals with making the universe more favorable towards life. Somewhere along the line they offend the Necrotyr(Necronlord can likely fill in the blanks as I don't have the codex in front of me) and this sets off the war ultimately with them against the Necrons and the C'Tan by extension.

Apparently this is what disrupts the Warp into what it becomes today by the fact that this energy hurt the C'Tan. The Old Ones having no such technology here to affect them, use powers to draw from the warp and these powers and energy prove effective in hurting both parties. This also apparently opens enough of a passage for the Enslavers to come forth and invade the material universe. Now, because of this the warp gets more fucked as time goes on and beings keep influencing and grabbing and fucking with the Warp.

A further interesting point is the C'Tan believe they can restore the galaxy by walling off the warp and return it to it's Pre-Warp state. Which begs to mind...how? Ah well, it's just a few notions to take into mind when discussing this particular of the 40K universe.

[fgalkin]

The problem with using reason to understand the Warp is that its very presence defies it, twisting and breaking the laws of reality and causing madness by its very presence (literally- some Chaos symbols can drive you mad just by looking at them). That, as you can imagine, presents a rather significant obstacle.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Serafina]

The problem with using reason to understand the Warp is that its very presence defies it, twisting and breaking the laws of reality and causing madness by its very presence (literally- some Chaos symbols can drive you mad just by looking at them). That, as you can imagine, presents a rather significant obstacle.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

This.
The problem with the warp is, unlike magic in most other universes, that it's rules are not consistent. However, they are consistent enough that one might think he can understand them.
However, the warp is literary irrational - it is largely driven by emotion, and the other part of it is purely random.
Humans are most likely just not built to understand something purely emotional and random, and science is certainly not up to the task.

This is why the warp was not graspable with science, which destroyed the reputation of it.

[montypython]

The problem with using reason to understand the Warp is that its very presence defies it, twisting and breaking the laws of reality and causing madness by its very presence (literally- some Chaos symbols can drive you mad just by looking at them). That, as you can imagine, presents a rather significant obstacle.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

This.
The problem with the warp is, unlike magic in most other universes, that it's rules are not consistent. However, they are consistent enough that one might think he can understand them.
However, the warp is literary irrational - it is largely driven by emotion, and the other part of it is purely random.
Humans are most likely just not built to understand something purely emotional and random, and science is certainly not up to the task.

This is why the warp was not graspable with science, which destroyed the reputation of it.

This reminds me of a comment made elsewhere that said how apparent paradoxes were part of the ebb and flow of the Nasuverse cosmology, could one consider the Warp to be a similar conceptual framework?

[Rossum]

One thing that came to mind when I read this (keep in mind that I'm not really familiar with the Warhammer 40k material so I don't know all the data) is that things don't necessarily have to be 'magical' to be unfathomable to the human mind.

Anyway, in the fanfiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a rational Harry Potter comes across a wizards drink called Comed-Tea which is advertised such that whenever you drink it them something funny will happen that will make you do a spit take. He tries it a few times and each time runs across things like absurd headlines in newspapers, Dunmbledor giving a complete nonsense speech to the school, and some others.

His first hypothesis is that this cheap magic drink has some sort of absurd omnipotent reality warping power to create comedy situations (he finds the idea utterly absurd but each test seems to point to this being the case). However, he later gets access to a Time-Turner which lets him travel through time... but its apparently paradox free since all events get self-corrected by physics.

Thus, he decides that his reality warping drink doesn't cause reality to change to accomodate his sense of humor... it instead makes him drink it only when something is about to happen in which he would spit out his drink (if he was drinking something at the time).

This strikes him as logical but really hard to test since he can only perceive things in linear time, but time doesn't work only in a linear fashion and a sufficiently magical spell or effect could take into account stuff that hasn't happened yet.


So, I guess what I'm saying is that the laws that govern the Warp don't necessarily have to be formed of pure chaos thats being altered by the minds of people observing it. It could very well be that it operates on rules of physics that are literally unfathomable to linear human minds and in turn causes hallucinations or has mind altering effects (perhaps electromagnetic fields that alter a persons mind and cause delusions or fear). It could be that the warp changes due to things unrelated to human willpower, but it can effect a persons mind, and if its own rules of temporal causality differ from ours then an event could alter a persons mind before the event took place. This would make attempts at studying the Warp in a rational scientific way extremely difficult even for rational people, much less anyone who is constantly exposed to religious dogma in the Imperium.


It should also be noted that there are sapient beings like the Tau and the Orks who don't seem to have a 'Warp presence'. The Orks have some sort of anti murphys law field that makes things work for them and the Tau are scientifically advanced. If the Warp is altered by willpower then one would suspect that the Orks would have a really strong warp presence since they can apparently will ships into flying faster if they are painted red or will their shoddy ships and machines into working when they normally shouldn't.

So, there is obviously something going on but it could just be a case of the universe operating on physics to odd for its inhabitants to comprehend. Much of the magical aspect of what's going on would just be people trying to make sense of things they can't comprehend and provide explanations that would fit what they see.

[Simon_Jester]

It should also be noted that there are sapient beings like the Tau and the Orks who don't seem to have a 'Warp presence'. The Orks have some sort of anti murphys law field that makes things work for them and the Tau are scientifically advanced. If the Warp is altered by willpower then one would suspect that the Orks would have a really strong warp presence since they can apparently will ships into flying faster if they are painted red or will their shoddy ships and machines into working when they normally shouldn't.

I disagree. The Orks don't really want the Warp to act on the them, or on their behalf: they'd be just as happy if it did not exist, as long as they get someone to fight. Therefore, the orks' willpower goes into nullifying or reducing the effect of Warp entities, instead of actively harnessing it.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

That's assuming the Orks are even cognizant of the Warp on anything approaching an intellectual level, which they really aren't. Orky opinion on the Warp can generally be summed up as:

"Wot? You mean da great big whirlygig wot spat out da 'uge spikey fing wot ate 'alf da lads? Yeah, dat was great!"

And for the record, the Orks do have a very strong Warp presence. They've manifested a Warp God (or two), even. Orky psykers (weirdboyz) also tend to be pretty powerful.

[Ghost Rider]

That's assuming the Orks are even cognizant of the Warp on anything approaching an intellectual level, which they really aren't. Orky opinion on the Warp can generally be summed up as:

"Wot? You mean da great big whirlygig wot spat out da 'uge spikey fing wot ate 'alf da lads? Yeah, dat was great!"

And for the record, the Orks do have a very strong Warp presence. They've manifested a Warp God (or two), even. Orky psykers (weirdboyz) also tend to be pretty powerful.

Isn't it noted the a WAAAGH! is basically their collective thoughts in the Warp given form and having Gork/Mork then taking this to have fun?

[bogy_shashav]

The only certain thing about the Warp is that it IS. It exists and that's pretty much all that is 100% certain. Ships that travel through it rarely arrive on anything resembling a schedule, if at all. However, even if the Gellar field fails, they don't automatically get eaten, there are tiny exceptions so the Warp is not 100% fatal as well.

To give an example, the Warp is what lies under the carpet of whatever exists beyond the Minos Gate in the Salvation war. Really freaky stuff. No wonder the C'tan were intent on getting rid of it once and for all. They obviously have tech to "stabilize" reality - the Cadian gate being an example, and the overall strategy for eliminating chaos is mostly sound - exterminate all sapient and overly emotional life in the galaxy, and probably install said stabilizing pylons and their more charming life-exterminating devices that sterilize an area entirely to make sure no big damn demon comes out to ruin their lawn or no new bald monkeys evolve to summon it.

[Rye]

Demons

Magical - these are denizens of the Warp, creatures made out of the nightmares and dark lusts of sentients. They are eternal monsters creeping around lusting after souls.

Rational - "Aliens of the Warp" as described by someone in one of the first novels but this view is soon discarded. However it does make some sort of sense. Just as we are living sentient beings made out of the materials of this universe (the Materium) the demons are quite simply our analogs made out of the materials of their universe (the immaterium) The primary difference here is that the Immaterium grants them abilities far beyond what we have made out of simple Carbon chains and organic compounds. We'll get to the properties of the Immaterium itself in a moment to explain these magical abilities

Magic, if it existed, would presumably be something like the warp. The warp is natural (though its condition has been artificially fucked by old ones/eldar/etc), it's just a part of life that predominantly physical beings like ourselves don't have much of an experience of. Is there a point where a powerful alien becomes a demon or god?

"Supernatural" doesn't really make sense as a concept, and magic works a lot better; the natural ebb and flow of emotions, wills, minds etc as underlying physical phenomena with psychic physics. The physics are arbitrary to the setting and the whims of the author, meaning lots of horror staples, demons, weirdness, etc, but conceptually, it's not that bad. I like to think of the immaterium as a mixture of the quantum chaos that underlies all of the universe, b5 hyperspace and pure magic so it interacts with people and produces the setting's dynamics.

Or perhaps a third option. Is the Warp what you say it is from a certain point of view? As a highly rational being can you look and say the Warp is a psychoactive dimension that reacts to the will of sentients but through a dark lense of subconcious fear and anger or conversely as a sorceror can you also be equally correct and say it is hell incarnate, a dark sea of souls where the Great Devourer waits for us all?

I'd say that the religions of that setting have an empirical grounding. I wouldn't call it "supernatural" though, because the warp, chaos has a nature, even if it's unpredictable and contradictory to us and our material means of interaction. It's a real Hell and a psychoactive substance.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

I always saw the Warp in the same vein as the Krell maximizer from Forbidden Planet. The Old Ones found this other universe full of energy (?) ruled by physics completely alien to our own, so they learned how to harness it. Then, during the war, the Old Ones decided to hook up trillions of minds (or vastly more than that) to the Warp so that they could make whole species into living weapons, such as the Eldar, the Krork and the Hrud. Most of these species had violent natures and complex minds, and the only ones who knew what they were doing in the Warp were too busy dying out to keep things in check. Just as the Krell maximizer created the monster in FB from the mad doctor's subconscious urges, the Warp responded to the subconscious commands from its trillions of users, many of which were contradictory or even impossible, and created the whole mess that is Chaos, including the daemons and the sanity-snapping geometries of unreality that Chaos is known for.

[Connor MacLeod]

I can't say I'm terribly satisfied with what passes for "Logic" in the pre-HH Imperium. Its not so much real "reason and logic" as what the "average joe" thinks makes them logical or reasonable. The Iterators strike me as being just as priestly as the Ecclesiarchy, they just replaced "God" with "Truth." I mean the Imperial Truth basically IS the Imperial Cult in different clothing, and you gt the same stuff. Rote adherence to the policies and NO OTHER TRUTH EXISTS, lots and lots of cliches and propoganda, and denial of the acutal "truth" (at least regards to the warp) or at least its suppressed and glossed over.

Horus's little sidetrips with Gavriel and the stuff at the end when they meet the Interex kind of prove that point, I think. it only gets worse later on.

I do think the Emperor intends to be a "logical" being, but he's also a paranoid and obsessively secretive one, and one of his major flaws is that he finds it hard to trust people to give them the real data (or much of it.)

That said, the warp is "magical" but magical does not mean it cannot be explained to at least some extent (even if aspects of it are beyond us.) "Gods" "daemons" and "magic" are all just labels, they do not define something in and of itself.

[Connor MacLeod]

I can't say I'm terribly satisfied with what passes for "Logic" in the pre-HH Imperium. Its not so much real "reason and logic" as what the "average joe" thinks makes them logical or reasonable. The Iterators strike me as being just as priestly as the Ecclesiarchy, they just replaced "God" with "Truth." I mean the Imperial Truth basically IS the Imperial Cult in different clothing, and you gt the same stuff. Rote adherence to the policies and NO OTHER TRUTH EXISTS, lots and lots of cliches and propoganda, and denial of the acutal "truth" (at least regards to the warp) or at least its suppressed and glossed over.

Horus's little sidetrips with Gavriel and the stuff at the end when they meet the Interex kind of prove that point, I think. it only gets worse later on.

I do think the Emperor intends to be a "logical" being, but he's also a paranoid and obsessively secretive one, and one of his major flaws is that he finds it hard to trust people to give them the real data (or much of it.)

That said, the warp is "magical" but magical does not mean it cannot be explained to at least some extent (even if aspects of it are beyond us.) "Gods" "daemons" and "magic" are all just labels, they do not define something in and of itself.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Isn't it noted the a WAAAGH! is basically their collective thoughts in the Warp given form and having Gork/Mork then taking this to have fun?

More or less, if I'm understanding you correctly.

"WAAAGH! energy" (for lack of a better term) is indeed gestalt psychic ability, but this isn't particularly unique to the Orks -- the Orks just naturally excel at it. Mankind has similar abilities, especially in the form of the Grey Knights who use their psychic abilities much like Orks do, i.e., rather than being individual high-power blasters of lightning and brimstone, they are lower on the scale of raw psychic power and use their abilities as a sort of symbiotic group in more subtle, subconscious ways. Think the pre-cog group from Minority Report.

As for Gork and Mork, any race which has significant psychic potential and the numbers to support it (Mankind, Eldar, and the Orks, primarily) will generally manifest a Warp God in some form, though the processes for this seem to vary. Gork and Mork seem to be fairly discrete from the usual mess that is the Warp, and this is probably thanks to the Orky mindset and philosophy. As an in-universe Eldar philosopher muses*, the Orks are a perfect race in a perfect state of being -- they have no sorrows, loss, wasted ambition, despair, or even concerns of good and evil the way humans and the Eldar do. Or, as an Ork philosopher puts it: "Da reason for Orks... is Orks." They are utterly single-minded in their pursuit of 1) A good scrap, and 2) Goin' fasta. Combined with their psychic potential, this naturally props up a relevant Warp God without the interference of Chaos, which simply can't maintain any hold over Orks thanks to their (lack of) philosophical complexity.

Conversely, Gork and Mork, as Warp Gods, have no interest in the affairs of the rest of the Warp and reality for the same reasons. Unlike the Chaos Gods, their portfolios are simply irrelevant to non-Orks just as Chaos is irrelevant to the Orks. Hence, the Orks effectively have their own little "corner" of the Warp to themselves, which no one wants to enter and the Orks don't want to leave.

Ergo, Da Great Green (as it tends to be called) fuels and is fueled by Orky WAAAGH!


*The Orks are the pinnacle of creation. For them, the great struggle is won. They have evolved a society which knows no stress or angst. Who are we to judge them? We Eldar who have failed, or the Humans, on the road to ruin in their turn? And why? Because we sought answers to questions that an Ork wouldn't even bother to ask! We see a culture that is strong and despise it as crude.
- Uthan the Perverse

[Junghalli]

I disagree. The Orks don't really want the Warp to act on the them, or on their behalf: they'd be just as happy if it did not exist, as long as they get someone to fight. Therefore, the orks' willpower goes into nullifying or reducing the effect of Warp entities, instead of actively harnessing it.

Don't their warp abilities extend to a "clap your hands if you believe" effect that makes things in the real world work differently than they would according to "hard physics", e.g. an Ork believes his weapon is awesome and powerful so it works better than you'd think it would just looking at the physical mechanism?

If so, I'd say it's pretty accurate to say they harness the warp. That's not just cancelling out the effect of other warp influences, that's using it for your own purposes.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Don't their warp abilities extend to a "clap your hands if you believe" effect that makes things in the real world work differently than they would according to "hard physics", e.g. an Ork believes his weapon is awesome and powerful so it works better than you'd think it would just looking at the physical mechanism?

Not as much as people like to think. If enough Orks get together and unanimously decide that their particular trukk would go faster if they gave it a red paint job (as they are wont to do), then usually they have enough psychic power (see my post above), applied subconsciously and as a group, to get a slight increase in performance out of their vehicle.

That does not mean an Ork can pick up a bolter and instantly have its firepower double simply because he thinks it's "dead shooty wif lots of dakka".

Most Orky tech works the way it does because mekboyz build it that way. Meks intuitively understand technology the way you or I understand how to breathe; the exact mechanisms are not consciously considered or even understood, "it just works". Any psychic enhancement of Orky tech is a minor component at most to its overall feasibility.

[Night_stalker]

The only certain thing about the Warp is that it IS. It exists and that's pretty much all that is 100% certain. Ships that travel through it rarely arrive on anything resembling a schedule, if at all. However, even if the Gellar field fails, they don't automatically get eaten, there are tiny exceptions so the Warp is not 100% fatal as well.

To give an example, the Warp is what lies under the carpet of whatever exists beyond the Minos Gate in the Salvation war. Really freaky stuff. No wonder the C'tan were intent on getting rid of it once and for all. They obviously have tech to "stabilize" reality - the Cadian gate being an example, and the overall strategy for eliminating chaos is mostly sound - exterminate all sapient and overly emotional life in the galaxy, and probably install said stabilizing pylons and their more charming life-exterminating devices that sterilize an area entirely to make sure no big damn demon comes out to ruin their lawn or no new bald monkeys evolve to summon it.

Trying to describe the Warp is impossible. In it, the laws of physics and reality go right out the window. Then they come back in and try and rip you to pieces. The only thing that is constant in the Warp is that it exists, like you said.

[montypython]

The only certain thing about the Warp is that it IS. It exists and that's pretty much all that is 100% certain. Ships that travel through it rarely arrive on anything resembling a schedule, if at all. However, even if the Gellar field fails, they don't automatically get eaten, there are tiny exceptions so the Warp is not 100% fatal as well.

To give an example, the Warp is what lies under the carpet of whatever exists beyond the Minos Gate in the Salvation war. Really freaky stuff. No wonder the C'tan were intent on getting rid of it once and for all. They obviously have tech to "stabilize" reality - the Cadian gate being an example, and the overall strategy for eliminating chaos is mostly sound - exterminate all sapient and overly emotional life in the galaxy, and probably install said stabilizing pylons and their more charming life-exterminating devices that sterilize an area entirely to make sure no big damn demon comes out to ruin their lawn or no new bald monkeys evolve to summon it.

Trying to describe the Warp is impossible. In it, the laws of physics and reality go right out the window. Then they come back in and try and rip you to pieces. The only thing that is constant in the Warp is that it exists, like you said.

A singularity-level or higher entity could probably 'understand' the warp in ways that human-level sentients can't, but otherwise it's not different than magic in that sense.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

Proof of that? Heck, the C'Tan may actually be above "Singularity-level" intelligences.

[Rye]

Proof of that? Heck, the C'Tan may actually be above "Singularity-level" intelligences.

The Necron Pylons and the Old Ones/Eldar using the warp for all sorts seems to agree with the idea that it's something you can understand and utilise (or nullify) if you're advanced enough, in this case, beyond human scientists. I don't know if that counts as what he was saying, though.

[montypython]

I was thinking something along the lines of Culture Minds, AI-Archais, Organians, Q-continuum, Stargate Ancients, Uhl, Orz among others.