The Emperor's True Goal

The Stated Doctrine

The Imperial doctrine: the Emperor woke in pre-history, lived through the rise and fall of every human civilisation, finally decided in M30 that humanity required a single shielded political order to survive long-term, and assembled the Crusade to build that order. The Imperium of Man is, by stated doctrine, exactly what He was making.

This is the public account. It is also what is taught to Astartes recruits. Most of the galaxy accepts it.

The Difficulty

The difficulty is several things at once. The Imperium He left behind — theocratic, terrified, technologically frozen, slow to react, sustained by His own physical death — does not look like the kind of institution a wise immortal would design. The contrast between the Emperor's known late-M30 statements (rationalist, materialist, anti-religious) and the M41 Imperium (a god-king religion) is too sharp to be incidental.

Which means either: His plan failed catastrophically and the Imperium of M42 is a deviation. Or: His plan succeeded and the Imperium of M42 is the deviation He intended.

I have no plan for the Imperium after Me. The Imperium after Me will be the proof of whether I had a plan.

— The Emperor, attributed pre-Throne

The Quiet Reading

A minority Inquisitorial reading, generally pursued by Radicals: the Emperor's actual long-term plan was the apotheosis of humanity as a whole — the species as a unified psychic phenomenon, capable of withstanding Chaos by collective spiritual mass. The Imperium of M30, in this reading, was scaffold work toward that goal. The Imperium of M41 is the scaffold left up after the work paused.

What would resume the work — and how — is not specified.

The Reconstruction Methodology

The Inquisition's reconstruction of the Emperor's actual goals has used three primary methodological approaches across the post-Heresy era. The first is forensic analysis of Heresy-era physical sites — the laboratories, archives, and meeting rooms where the Emperor conducted his pre-Throne work. These sites have yielded fragmentary evidence of specific projects and decisions but no overarching summary of intent. The second is psychic-reconstruction work conducted by Adepta Astra Telepathica sanctioned psykers — attempting to recover memory-impressions from witnesses who had encountered the Emperor in his pre-Throne form. The reconstruction work has produced inconsistent results.

The third methodology, classified at the highest Inquisitorial-only access level, has involved direct astropathic communication with what the Inquisition designates "echo-presences" — psychic remnants of the Emperor's pre-Throne self that the Inquisition believes persist in specific Imperial locations. The third methodology is theologically heretical by Imperial Cult standards (it implies the Emperor has psychic components separate from the Throne) but has been pursued by the Inquisition's most-classified Ordo Hereticus internal committees. Its results have been the most informative and the most disturbing.

The Four Goals

The most-confident Inquisitorial reconstruction proposes that the Emperor pursued four specific goals during his pre-Throne period: the elimination of Chaos as a stable presence in the warp through a method involving the Webway and the Astronomican; the unification of humanity under a non-theological administrative framework that would be theologically robust against the inevitable return of pre-Imperial religious sentiment; the preservation of human gene-lines across the galactic scattering by means of the primarchs and their legions; and a fourth goal that the Inquisition has identified only as "preservation against a future event the Emperor did not specify."

The four-goal framework has been the working hypothesis since approximately M37 and has been refined across subsequent Inquisitorial generations without being abandoned. The framework's stability is, by current Inquisitorial assessment, evidence that the framework approximately captures the Emperor's actual intentions. The fourth goal remains the most-debated element of the framework. The Inquisition has been unable to determine what the future event was — only that the Emperor's other three goals can be plausibly read as instrumental preparations for it.

The Sealed Reading

The "sealed reading" of the Emperor's goals — circulated within the Inquisition's highest-clearance internal literature and accessible only to a small committee of senior Ordo Hereticus Inquisitors — proposes that the fourth goal was the actual primary goal, and that the other three goals were instrumental subordinate goals undertaken to support it. The reading argues that the Emperor knew, from sources the post-Heresy Imperium has not been able to identify, of a future event of galactic-scale significance that would occur during the post-Heresy era; that the event would require a unified human polity capable of acting at galactic scale; and that the unified polity needed to be theologically robust enough to survive the contact with whatever the event involved.

The reading does not specify what the event might have been. The Inquisition's sealed reading notes that the candidates fall into three categories: a Chaos event of unprecedented scale (the Cicatrix would qualify); a xenos event of unprecedented scale (an undefined catastrophic Tyranid or Necron arrival); or a fourth-category event the Inquisition has not been willing to publish even at its highest internal-clearance level. The fourth category is, by the reading's authors, "the most interesting." The reading does not elaborate.

Guilliman's Perspective

Roboute Guilliman's personal log on the Emperor's actual goals, written after his Macragge resurrection, contains a single passage on the topic: "I knew my father better than any of my brothers. I knew the goals he stated to me directly. I knew the goals he stated to me indirectly. I did not know the goals he stated to no one. I do not know them now. The post-Heresy Imperium has reconstructed three plausible goals. The fourth, on which the Inquisition has produced its most-classified writing, may be the actual reason for everything. I have read the Inquisition's writing. I find it plausible. I do not find it conclusive."

The passage has not been declassified, but its content has informed every Indomitus Crusade strategic decision Guilliman has made since his resurrection. The Crusade's official purposes are the reclamation of Imperial worlds and the defeat of Chaos forces. The Crusade's unofficial purpose, by Guilliman's private log, is preparation for the unspecified fourth-category event whose nature he hopes — but cannot confirm — was the Emperor's actual primary concern. Guilliman has not, by his personal log, accepted the heretical reading that the Cicatrix Maledictum was deliberate Imperial Cult preparation for primarch returns. He has, however, "not ruled it out."