Little is known about the majority of the Emperor's life; of who he was and what he

did before he emerged as the great Emperor of Mankind, only the Emperor himself
remembers.[2] A few pieces of information have come to light, from various
different sources, and present some small parts of a coherent whole; however, their
reliability is often disputed, especially as the Emperor's tale changes somewhat
with each retelling. There is a source from 1st Edition Rogue Trader (that being
the now-outdated Realm of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned) which details the
Emperor's backstory. It is said that the Emperor's birth while a natural process,
was actually the result of a scheme created by the wisest and most powerful of
living humans at that time; the conclave of Shamans. These men, termed 'shamans' by
their society, were powerful psykers with great experience of the Warp. Finding
their souls - and those of humanity - endangered by the growing perils of the Warp-
gods, these psykers decided to pool their power into one human, a being they called
'the New Man'. Already having gained the power to reincarnate themselves (upon
death, the shamans' souls would transfer to the Warp, accumulating power enough to
reincarnate as human) the shamans entered a suicide-pact. Thousands of them
poisoned themselves and sped their souls to the warp at the same time. Presumably
pooling their soul-energy and using their reincarnation ability, they brought about
the birth of their New Man - the Emperor - one year later.[3c]

This same source states that the Emperor was born to mortal parents on Terra in the
8th Millennium BC[3b] in a primitive proto-Hittite village along the banks of the
Sakarya River[14c] (in Anatolia),[31] manifesting his powers as a youth. While a
young adolescent, the Emperor's father was murdered by his uncle. While preparing
his fathers body for a primitive funeral ritual, he received a vision of his
murder. Later, the boy who would become the Emperor calmly approached his uncle and
stopped his heart with his psychic abilities, displaying neither sorrow or malice.
According to the Emperor himself, this was the moment he realized that humanity
needed law, order, and the guidance of a ruler. Shortly after, he left his village
for the first city of humanity (likely ancient Sumeria).[14c] Sometime later the
Perpetual Erda met the Emperor, already a warlord attempting to accelerate Human
evolution and guide the race into a superior species. Erda became one of the
Emperor's followers as He attempted to seek out and recruit every Perpetual on
Earth to His cause. During this ancient time, the Emperor was known as Neoth.[30]

The immortal being who would become known as the Emperor proceeded to haunt the
history of humanity as a ghost; watching, waiting and occasionally influencing.[3c]
Living secretly amongst mankind, he developed his abilities until his psychic might
allowed him to gain knowledge of not only his own world, but of the dangers beyond
it. Aware then of the vast predations awaiting humanity, the being that would
become known as the Emperor resolved to guide and protect humanity. Eventually,
over ten thousand years before his current circumstances, he took his struggle out
into the open, primarily because of the ever-increasing number of psykers, whose
very existence endangered their species.[2]

During the Dark Age of Technology Alivia Sureka traveled with the man who would
become the Emperor to the planet Molech, where there was a gateway into the realm
of Chaos. The Emperor entered the Gateway, and there made a bargain with the Dark
Gods and emerged wielding a measure of their power, including the ability to create
the Primarchs. However for some reason, the Emperor did not keep his end of the
bargain to spread Chaos to humanity, and he became the anathema of Ruinous Powers.
The Emperor was able to clone the energies he was imbued with, giving them to his
Primarchs[11] after combining his own genetic material with that of Erda's.[30] At
some point in Earth's history the Emperor discovered an ancient device beneath the
ruins of Asia's deserts and became determined to completely cut off humanity from
the malignant influence of the Warp. The first step of this grand project was to
substitute warp travel with the Webway, and the final phase would see the Emperor
shepherd humanity's evolution into a truly psychic race independent of Chaos,
ascending to a level not even the Eldar were able to. This grand ambition was to
guide all of the Emperor's undertakings and would be the culmination of his
planning.