Thanks to our excellent friends at Lexicanum. This unwholesome land is rife with every ailment and plague conceivable, as well as the stink of decay. This âgardenâ is a macabre paradise of death and disease, not a desolate wasteland. A dense layer of buzzing swarms of black, hairy flies blankets the sky, while twisted, decaying boughs intertwined with grabbing vines cover the mouldering ground under an insect-ravaged canopy of leaves. Plain and spectacular defiled fungus burst through the leaf-strewn muck of the forest floor, spewing forth nasty clouds of spores. Rivers snake across the mucky terrain. Nurgle's house of rotten timbers and crumbling walls sits in the midst of the garden, decrepit and old yet forever powerful at its foundations. Nurgle toils at his cauldron inside these crumbling walls, a container large enough to hold all the seas of the galaxy's planets.
Those who serve Nurgle must accept their imminent death, even as they seek to appreciate each day of life left to them. They must also have faith in the certainty of reincarnation. The Plaguefather has shared with them the immense consolation of hope for something fresh and magnificent. It is a hope formed on Nurgle's grasp of the universe's workings. Just as his followers have embraced their lord's teachings, Nurgle has long recognized that decay puts an end to all things, but that through such decay, life starts again. Decay is the victor in all wars in which there is no opposition.
Origin
Nurgle, like many other characters in the Warhammer universe, was inspired by a real-world example. The god âNergalâ was revered across Ancient Mesopotamia, and he even appears in the Hebrew Bible. His worshipers saw him as the deity of battle, sickness, death, and illness, with many parallels to Nurgle from Warhammer.
