Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hi,
Speaker 1: my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Monster Fact,
Speaker 1: a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 1: focusing in on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.
Speaker 1: In this episode, I'm beginning a four part Monster Fact
Speaker 1: series on the four main demonic factions in games workshops
Speaker 1: Warhammer forty thousand universe. So first a little background. The
Speaker 1: fictional far future forty case setting depicts an interstellar human
Speaker 1: imperium with various dark, fantasy, and medieval elements. This aggressive
Speaker 1: imperium is challenged on all sides by equally warlike alien societies,
Speaker 1: but they also face the threat of chaos. In the
Speaker 1: forty case setting, the demons of chaos exist a psychic
Speaker 1: dimension called the Warp, but they can spill over into
Speaker 1: what is called real space through various methods and exploits.
Speaker 1: So in this setting, demons are not the mere creation
Speaker 1: of religion or occultism, but an actual spiritual and physical
Speaker 1: threat to humanity. Heretical drift on a far flung planet
Speaker 1: can mean far more than just mere rebellion. It can
Speaker 1: lead to a demonic incursion that consumes billions of souls.
Speaker 1: There are various ways to divide up demonic factions in
Speaker 1: a created world like this, but forty K largely swits
Speaker 1: the forces of chaos into four distinct flavors, red, blue, green,
Speaker 1: and purple, representing bloodthirst, chaotic change, pestilence, and hedonism, each
Speaker 1: a major conduit of mortal emotions and mortal souls in
Speaker 1: the fictional forty first millennium, with each conduit accreting into
Speaker 1: a powerful entity known as a chaos god. They are Corn, Zinch, Nergal,
Speaker 1: and Slanesh. There are other lesser CHAOSK gods as well,
Speaker 1: but these are the four main factions, and while they
Speaker 1: sometimes come to a working agreement with each other, they're
Speaker 1: mostly at war amongst themselves in what is referred to
Speaker 1: as the Great Game. In this episode, will start with
Speaker 1: Corn as the so called Blood God is a lot
Speaker 1: more direct. He's powered by mortal violence and war. He's
Speaker 1: all about rivers of blood and pyramids of bone. His
Speaker 1: favorite color is obviously red, and he's not big on subtlety.
Speaker 1: His demonic hords and mortal followers dig horns and blades.
Speaker 1: They spill blood for the Blood God, so really there's
Speaker 1: not much to elaborate on here. However, in browsing through
Speaker 1: the ninth edition Chaos Demons Codex from Games Workshop, I
Speaker 1: simply couldn't let the unit known as a skull canon
Speaker 1: pass without comment. There's a lot of talk of skull
Speaker 1: harvesting with some of the other their corn units, and
Speaker 1: this one amounts to a big honking heavy metal cannon,
Speaker 1: A couple of red demons called blood Letters crew the weapon,
Speaker 1: loading it up with the fresh remains of slain enemy soldiers.
Speaker 1: The cannon breaks everything down and then fires flaming skulls
Speaker 1: across the battlefield, again fittingly direct. Thus far, in actual
Speaker 1: human warfare, skulls and heads have proven poor missiles, but
Speaker 1: the presentation of decapitated heads to the enemy has a
Speaker 1: long history, with plentiful examples to be found. In the
Speaker 1: classical and ancient world. The heads of enemy dead might
Speaker 1: be delivered directly to enemy lines, that might be placed
Speaker 1: on spikes or what have you. Ruth Schuster, writing for
Speaker 1: Harets in twenty eighteen, points out that Iron Age Galls
Speaker 1: even developed a resin based embalming method to ensure the
Speaker 1: captured heads of their enemies didn't rot too fast. As
Speaker 1: Peter Franca Pant points out in his book The First Crusade,
Speaker 1: The Call from the East, the Crusades saw a lot
Speaker 1: of head taking on both sides, and there are Western
Speaker 1: accounts of crusader heads being catapulted back into their siege
Speaker 1: camps in order to hurt morale. The same terror tactics
Speaker 1: were said to have been used by French crusader host
Speaker 1: as well. This according to the French themselves in the
Speaker 1: Old French Crusader Cycle. According to Sarah Grace Heller in
Speaker 1: twenty eleven's Terror in the Old Crusade Cycle, various other
Speaker 1: catapult age accounts described the launching of dead bodies into
Speaker 1: camps and besieged cities as a means of terror and
Speaker 1: or biological attack. The age of the cannon presented various
Speaker 1: new ideas of how cannons might be used in one
Speaker 1: way or another to spread human remains. None of these
Speaker 1: methods use the remains as ammo against other combatants are
Speaker 1: worth noting. Nonetheless, the execution method known as blowing from
Speaker 1: a gun often entailed the strapping of a live victim
Speaker 1: to the mouth of a cannon, resulting in partial or
Speaker 1: complete scattering of the remains on the other end of
Speaker 1: the spectrum, cremated ashes are on occasion spread by cannon
Speaker 1: fire as a desired dramatic funerary right in modern times.
Speaker 1: In a broader sense, however, the use of human remains
Speaker 1: as weapons dates back to prehistory. Europeans were crafting human
Speaker 1: bones into weapons at least ten thousand years ago, practice
Speaker 1: that continued into recent centuries for other far flung cultures,
Speaker 1: at least for symbolic and spiritual reasons. Now, as far
Speaker 1: as the creation and veneration of artifacts made from human
Speaker 1: bones goes, this is the kind of thing that's probably
Speaker 1: lost on the chaos god Corn. All he cares about
Speaker 1: is the hacking, of the stabbing, and of course the
Speaker 1: occasional explosively propelled pyrotechnic human skull. We'll continue through the
Speaker 1: chaos factions in this manner over the next three weeks,
Speaker 1: so tune in to the Monster Fact on Wednesdays in
Speaker 1: the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast fee As always,
Speaker 1: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
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