Emperor of Mankind - Current Origin: However, the above account is now considered largely apocryphal. In truth, the Emperor's origin and history prior to the start of His attempt to unify Terra during the Unifications Wars is largely mysterious and unknown, though His immortality as a Perpetual and extraordinary psychic abilities still define Him.The first mention of the Emperor by that name in Imperial records is when He began the unification of Terra at the end of the Age of Strife in the late 29th Millennium. Horus once mentioned that the Emperor lived "in Anatolia, in his own childhood" when describing his own first meeting with the Emperor. It is known that He had been born an immortal Perpetual and ancient even before His ascension to the Golden Throne over 10,000 Terran years ago.The Emperor is the "New Man," the first and greatest of the new mutant subspecies of Human psykers. He is also the collective reincarnation of the extinct shamans, wizards and wise-men who had guided primitive Humanity during prehistoric times. As the Emperor grew older His powers began to manifest themselves and become more potent and He gradually remembered His thousands of past lives, adding all of their knowledge and experience to His own.One account of the Emperor's origin goes so far as to say that He had mortal brothers and sisters and claims that He was born in the 8th Millennium B.C. in a primitive Neolithic village along the banks of the Sakarya River in Anatolia.While He was still an adolescent, the Emperor's father was murdered by His uncle. While preparing His father's body for a primitive funeral ritual, He received a clairvoyant vision of how His father had been murdered. Later, the boy who would become the Emperor calmly approached His uncle and stopped his heart with a slight use of His telekinetic psychic abilities, displaying neither sorrow nor malice for the deed.According to the Emperor Himself, this was the moment He realised that Humanity needed law, order, and the guidance of a wise ruler to reach its full potential. At some time after His father's murder, He left His village for the "first city of Humanity," likely one of the Sumerian city-states of ancient Mesopotamia.For thousands of standard years before becoming the Emperor, He guided and watched Humanity develop over the course of its history, assuming the guise of a large number of historical personages. He was aware that the darker extremes of Human nature were feeding the growth of the Chaos Gods in the Warp, and so He sought to promote peace and harmony on Old Earth and thereby curb the growth of the Ruinous Powers' strength.Whatever His true origins, the man who would become the Emperor was the most powerful psyker ever born among Humans. Before the Emperor began His rise to power, He was also an anonymous Perpetual, a member of a mutant branch of Mankind gifted with effective immortality due to extremely rapid and efficient cellular regeneration.Whether this ability of the Perpetuals came about naturally or was artificially induced by some outside faction is unknown, but the Emperor was present during the time of Humanity's prior star-spanning civilisation in the period now named the Age of Technology by Imperial historitors. He was known to associate with other Perpetuals like Himself in that era. Among these was a woman named Alivia Sureka.Together, she, several other Perpetuals and the man who would one day become the Emperor travelled to the Knight World of Molech aboard a one-way voidcraft. There, they discovered a Warp Gate into the Realm of Chaos which the future Emperor entered. Once within the Immaterium He forged an unknown bargain with the Chaos Gods and was imbued with new powers and the knowledge required to ultimately create the primarchs, superhuman beings whose creation would combine techniques of arcane genetic science with the energies of the Warp. The Emperor left Sureka behind to look after the Molech Warp Gate until such time as that world could be safely protected by the coming of the future Imperium of Man.Despite their willingness to strike a bargain with Him early on, the Chaos Gods themselves later recognised the Emperor as their greatest enemy among all the intelligent beings of the galaxy, naming him "the Anathema." Only at the end of the Age of Strife did the Emperor emerge from obscurity to take a more direct hand in the future of Humanity, conquering the warring factions of Mankind's homeworld during the Unification Wars that began in the late 29th Millennium and ended in 712.M30 with the establishment of His direct rule over Old Earth. The Emperor accepted the deaths of the many innocents that resulted from His conquest with great remorse in order to achieve the greater good of unifying Humanity and protecting it from the manifest predations of the Warp.With the assistance of the ancient Mechanicum government on Mars, who joined with the Emperor and the people of Terra in the Treaty of Mars in 739.M41 that formally founded the Imperium of Man in the late 30th Millennium, the Emperor created the first Space Marines and fleets of interstellar voidships that would carry His armies across galactic space.The objective was a Great Crusade that would unify all of the planets colonised by Humanity during the Age of Technology prior to the Age of Strife into one Imperium of Man. The crusade would also subdue, destroy, or force into exile all intelligent alien races of the Milky Way. The galaxy was to become the Imperial Domain, the manifest destiny of Humanity.Using the knowledge He had bargained for with the Dark Gods on Molech, the Emperor during the Unification Wars also created with the aid of the scientists of His Biotechnical Division the twenty superhuman primarchs from whom the Space Marines' gene-seed was later developed, using His own DNA as the foundation of their undifferentiated genomes. He intended them to serve as His primary military commanders, diplomats and consuls for the Great Crusade. The Chaos Gods, however, sought to thwart the Emperor's grand plan even before His gene-sons' gestation within His subterranean genetic laboratories deep beneath the future Imperial Palace on Old Earth were complete. The primarchs were sucked into the Warp through the will of the Chaos Gods while still in their gestation capsules and scattered across the Human-inhabited worlds of the galaxy. Even before their births, the primarchs had already been touched by the power of Chaos.During the course of the Great Crusade all but two of the twenty primarchs were successfully found and united with the Space Marine Legions that had been created after their disappearances from the genetic material that they had left behind.As the Emperor travelled across the stars, some Humans wanted to worship Him as a god, however He forbade this, proclaiming, "I am not a god; rather than enslaving Humanity I want to free it from ignorance and superstition." However, Lorgar, the primarch of the Word Bearers Legion, desperate to find some outlet for his belief that Humanity must have a god to worship to be truly whole, gave in to the constant whispers of the Chaos Gods and, after corrupting his Legion to their service, sent his First Chaplain Erebus to poison the minds of the other primarchs and their Legions.Just as the Imperium had reached its apex in the first decade of the 31st Millennium, the Emperor's most trusted son, Primarch Horus of the Luna Wolves Legion (later renamed the Sons of Horus), fell to Chaos as a result of his own pride, need and ambition. Horus betrayed the Emperor, and along with fully half the Space Marine Legions and Imperial Army regiments, initiated a massive civil war for control of the galaxy.This rebellion is known to history as the Horus Heresy. Though the Emperor ultimately defeated Horus during the Traitor Legions' assault on Terra, He was all but slain in the battle after suffering a crippling loss of limbs and mortal systemic damage; only the life-supporting Golden Throne has sustained His living corpse in a kind of stasis, neither dead nor truly alive.Trapped within His prison of flesh, only the Emperor's mind is allowed to wander free within the Immaterium, still seeking to protect and guide Humanity to an increasingly distant better future.