earc-magus

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finished my reference for merrylegs, with those sexy uncolored inks for good measure :3

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I’ve been thinking about the Chaos Gods from Warhammer again, not that I ever really stop. Specifically, I’ve been thinking of how they line up with real world depictions of evil and genres of horror.

Slaanesh is probably the closest out of all the Ruinous Powers to the Christian idea of Satan, particularly a Puritan one. This whole thing actually got started when I was thinking about what animals are thematically appropriate for each Chaos God, and that between goats and snakes, Slaanesh lines up pretty well with the Devil. Slaanesh is a tempter, a trickster, a slow and steady seducer. While we associate Slaanesh most with lust, the truth is that Slanny offers EVERY kind of worldly pleasure and power; wealth, strength in battle, political influence, etc. Anything to offer you some respite from the Puritan hellscape and forfeit your soul.

Tzeentch is where I start thinking in terms of genre more than specific entities. Particularly, I associate Tzeentch with cosmic horror the most out of all the Chaos Gods. While all the Chaos Gods cause some form of madness and offer otherworldly knowledge, Tzeentch is the one most tied with the very nature of reality and gnostic ideas of how the material world is ‘lesser’ or ‘a lie’. Tzeentch tampers with ideas of identity and evolution, offering a slim chance of transcendence into a higher being. Succeed, and you can become a god yourself; fail, and you face a fate worse than death. (And the line between success and failure aren’t always clear.) At the same time, Tzeentch always serves as the constant reminder; material reality is a soap bubble in The Warp, a placid island of ignorance if you will, and it can be erased and recreated at any time.

On the opposite side of both of them is Nurgle, who seems to be an embodiment of Puritan ideas of pagan divinity and who I can’t help but associate with folk horror. While one can certainly point to Nurgle as being associated with the Mesopotamian god Nergal (King of the underworld, god of disease) who he got his name from, Nurgle feels bigger than that. Nurgle is about death, and therefore also life. Nurgle brings disease and takes it away, raises the fertile crops and summons the famine that kills them. Nurgle is both the mighty Horned God who collects souls and the nurturing Mother Goddess who holds the babe at her breast. If Tzeentch is the exaltation of the empyreal, then Nurgle focuses on the material world humans live in. Nurgle can’t take the pain of living and dying away, but he can make it easier for some; all he needs is supplication.

Khorne is… honestly the one where I run into trouble on this. Khorne doesn’t match with any specific entity or genre beyond ‘unrelenting violence’. At first I thought that if Slaanesh is the Christian Lucifer, then Khorne is the Old Testament Satan, until I was reminded that there barely is an Old Testament Satan. Ultimately, all I can think to call Khorne is ‘The Beast’, that inborn human instinct for violence and conflict, that primal simian urge towards bloodshed. (I think it was in a Punisher comic a couple of times.)

Confounding all this of course is that all the Chaos Gods are interlinked with each other and constantly deliberately transgressing against each other. Slaanesh can be a rampaging berserker as much as Khorne can be the quiet voice of temptation. Tzeentch’s constant cycle of change is a mirror of Nurgle’s constant cycle of entropy. A Changer of Ways can offer eldritch knowledge, but so can a Keeper of Secrets. Both a Bloodthirster and a Great Unclean One offer a kind of immortality. In fact it can be a great way to think of new Chaos Daemons by making them contrary aspects of their own Chaos Gods. Who does Khorne send when violence CAN’T solve everything? How does Slaanesh dole out disease? Does Tzeentch have a special force for when he needs things to STOP? The point is that while I’ve been talking about categorizing the Ruinous Powers into specific genres, they really are the entire broad spectrum of ‘horror’.

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The Dark Tongue, from the Realm of Chaos book 2.

The official language of Chaos in Warhammer.

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Nurgle (Warhammer) is the metaphysical embodiment of an anticapitalist ontology of welcome.

I refuse to elaborate further. Fight me.

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Some @thesiltverses themed tattoo flash in roughly an American traditional style.

This summer, I want to make a lot of flash-like art to build out a more thorough illustrative portfolio.

If, by chance, one of these catches your fancy enough to make into a real thing, all I ask is you donate at least $10 to a local (to you) nonprofit of your choosing, or RAWtools or The Trevor Project if you need suggestions, and send me a pic of the finished artwork.

[earc-magus]

Daughter of the void Left out and annoyed Vengeant, quick to resent

Torch and snake and knife Controverse and strife For my pleasure and merriment

Morlocks - "The Golden Goddess"

My version of Eris was inspired both by the Greek myths and by Discordianism, a belief system from the 1960s in which chaos and discord are thought to be just as important as order. When I recently heard the song "The Golden Goddess" (about Discordian Eris) by the industrial rock band Morlocks, I just had to draw my version of Eris.

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Sometimes I still get to play at being religious in the ways I used to be.

May 15th, 2025 seems a must for some sort of Discordian art

What a fun art style.

Speed painting, think I started around ten and ended around midnight. Not bad for my first retablo

All hail our lady of chaos!

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Good gods, what a hard day.

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The eschaton’s been immanetized folks. What will YOU do about it?

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The apocalypse is always yesterday

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The United States has more than 15000 plutonium pits- the primary component for nuclear warheads.

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every day millions  of  fish r violently wripped from the ocean by birdkind and as they die they exoerience such transcendent altitudes  their brains level up like crazy

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I don’t think essays are necessarily an efficient way to learn. I can write you twelve pages any old day if I have to. It has no significance if sixty other people write on the exact same topic every single semester for the next decade.

Fascism is rising, the earth is aching, I can’t afford my groceries, why do you want to read 60 essays on why we should tear down confederate monuments professor? Of course we should tear down confederate monuments professor.

I’m annoyed that I can’t just make art about it. Hell I’ll go find an Oñate somewhere and cut off his foot about it.

Let me research and write essays about mythopoeticism and gods and magic and shit, we don’t have time for this

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In a mad scramble of a creative day, I made this shoulder cape. I’ve been stewing on specifically a phoenix cloak for months, but I’ve wanted to make a wing-like cloak for years.

I’m so pleased with myself 😂 it’s such an impractical garment, kinda like wearing a soft warm octopus on my shoulder, but I’m so happy, I have wings

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Don’t mind me crying to the Spirit Stallion of the cimmaron soundtrack at the airport

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Inktober Day 9 • Sun

Sun Eater