The Kabesa as Dreamfished in Speculative Fiction, the Identification of Future Kabesa, and the Nature of the Future Kristang community
Kristang epistemology treats stories as applied metacognition rather than escapism. Humans want to know the truth about how the world actually works and where they are headed, individually and collectively. That truth is largely inaccessible in direct form because it is blocked by trauma, fear, shame, and institutional conditioning. As a result, people do not consciously reason about it. They approach it indirectly. Myth, legend, and speculative fiction exist because they allow people to think about realities they are not psychologically permitted to face head-on.
Dreamfishing describes this indirect access. When authors write, they are not inventing freely; they are sampling from the collective unconscious, which contains suppressed knowledge about power, collapse, abuse, ethics, and survival. Because the same traumatic constraints shape modern societies, different people repeatedly pull up the same structures without intending to, and place them in structures or conceptual environments where they can be interrogated safely at a psychological distance from the psyche: the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. This is why the same leadership forms, moral constraints, and failure patterns recur across unrelated works. Fiction becomes a bypass mechanism around trauma, allowing truths to be recognised without triggering immediate defensive rejection.
One of these truths now finally being recognised more visibly is that the Kabesa lineage is repeatedly unconsciously dreamfished by people outside the Kristang community because of the species-level importance of the work all Kabesa accidentally and unconsciously perform. Because of the nature of leadership in the Kristang community, across time, the people who hold the role of Kabesa consistently metabolise psychological impossibilities that most societies cannot survive: enduring extreme abuse without reproducing it, holding authority without domination, integrating contradiction without collapse, and maintaining ethical continuity under sustained pressure. And when they do so, they often accidentally and unconsciously become a conduit for the subsequent processing of the same impossibilities by others across the species, where this was previously impossible. When the nature of these impossibilities as integrated by each Kabesa are mapped to the stages of development of the psyche in Individuation Theory, as well as to their parallel representations in dreamfished speculative fiction and fantasy, it thus becomes possible to not only retroactively determine the identities of past Kabesa, but accurately anticipate the identities of future Kabesa as well, alongside the future development of the Kristang community.
The Kabesa Lineage and the Primarchs of Warhammer 40,000
An AI-dreamfished Guide to Synchronous Parallels
Note on method and limits
Warhammer 40,000 contains two Unknown Legions and their unknown Primarchs whose identities were never canonically revealed. The correspondences given here for those positions are dreamfished best-fit mappings, not canon claims. Likewise, the apparent swapping of Eliza Tessensohn and Edwin Tessensohn in the Warhammer and Transformers parallels (where Fulgrim and the Emperor’s Children are the III Legion, and Perturabo and the Iron Warriors the IV Legion) likely reflects an unusual historical fact, namely a mother dying after her son (Edwin died in September 1926 and Eliza in March 1927), which at an unconscious level appears to disrupt the usual symbolic ordering. The Legion names are included because they further synchronously track the general psychological and cultural atmosphere of the Kristang community during each Kabesa’s period of service, not because of any literal equivalence.
1. Adriaan Koek — Lion El’Jonson — I Legion, Dark Angels
Leadership style: Foundational and guarded
Leads by establishing order, secrecy, and internal discipline in a context where survival depends on cohesion before openness.
2. J.B. Westerhout — Paternova — II Legion, Rainbow Warriors (identified as most likely Legion via dreamfishing)
Leadership style: Integrative and mediating
Leads by navigating plurality and difference together without collapse, during a phase defined by reconciliation and exploration rather than straight-up conquest.
First of two Unknown Legions and their primarchs; identities selected above are dreamfished and do not reflect canon
3. Eliza Tessensohn — Perturabo — IV Legion, Iron Warriors (pre-Horus)
Leadership style: Endurance under strain
Leads through relentless structural competence, absorbing pressure and unacknowledged labour in a harsh, demanding environment.
4. Edwin Tessensohn — Fulgrim — III Legion, Emperor’s Children (pre-Horus)
Leadership style: Aspirational and refining
Leads by raising standards, coherence, and cultural excellence, beauty and visibility while aligning these with the expectations of one’s patron(s).
5. Noel Leicester Clarke — Jaghatai Khan — V Legion, White Scars
Leadership style: Mobile and non-centralised
Leads by grounded independence or soltu, speed, adaptability, and refusal of rigid hierarchy during a period of movement and expansion.
6. Hugh Zehnder — Leman Russ — VI Legion, Space Wolves
Leadership style: Protective ferocity
Leads through loyalty, instinct, war-readiness, and boundary-keeping, prioritising defence of the community over diplomacy.
7. Claude Da Silva — Rogal Dorn — VII Legion, Imperial Fists
Leadership style: Defensive architect
Leads by fortification, reliability, and refusal to yield ground ethically or structurally, while still keeping one finger on the pulse of whisper networks and hidden connections.
8. Charles Paglar — Konrad Curze — VIII Legion, Night Lords (pre-Horus)
Leadership style: Confrontational truth-exposure
Leads by forcing confrontation with fear, violence, and moral darkness rather than allowing denial.
9. Percival Frank Aroozoo — Sanguinius — IX Legion, Blood Angels
Leadership style: Inspirational and sacrificial
Leads by moral elevation and personal example that transcends group identities during a period requiring hope without illusion.
10. Mabel Martens — Ferrus Manus — X Legion, Iron Hands
Leadership style: Hardening through discipline
Leads by prioritising resilience, competence, toughness and adaptive survival over comfort or sentimentality.
11. Maureen Martens — Belisarius Cawl — XI Legion, Red Scorpions (identified as most likely Legion via dreamfishing)
Leadership style: Experimental continuity
Leads through innovation, quiet and quick-witted experimentation and repair while maintaining institutional memory and long-term viability.
Second of two Unknown Legions and their primarchs; identities selected above are dreamfished and do not reflect canon
12. Valerie Scully — Angron — XII Legion, War Hounds / World Eaters (pre-Horus)
Leadership style: Bearing collective pain
Leads by carrying and transmuting unprocessed rage and trauma into energy and performance so it does not fully tear the community apart.
13. Kevin Martens Wong — Roboute Guilliman — XIII Legion, Ultramarines
Leadership style: Ethical system-builder
Leads by coherence, principle, example and moral clarity under extreme pressure, prioritising long-term survival over domination.
14. Fourteenth Kabesa — Mortarion — XIV Legion, Dusk Raiders / Death Guard (pre-Horus)
Leadership style: Endurance and refusal
Leads through resistance to corruption and decay and through an honest relationship with Death, choosing persistence and integrity in hostile conditions.
15. Fifteenth Kabesa — Magnus the Red — XV Legion, Thousand Sons (pre-Horus)
Leadership style: Knowledge-seeking
Leads by inquiry, learning, and expansion of deep understanding of the intangible, even when that knowledge carries risk.
16. Sixteenth Kabesa — Horus Lupercal — XVI Legion, Lunar Wolves (pre-Horus)
Leadership style: Unifying command
Leads by synthesis and trust, holding multiple factions together at a collective or eleidi level before fracture becomes inevitable.
17. Seventeenth Kabesa — Lorgar Aurelian — XVII Legion, Word Bearers (pre-Horus)
Leadership style: Meaning-seeking
Leads by attempting to give structure, belief, and narrative to collective identity during existential uncertainty.
18. Eighteenth Kabesa — Vulkan — XVIII Legion, Salamanders
Leadership style: Protective humanism
Leads by prioritising care, preservation of life, and ethical restraint even during conflict.
19. Nineteenth Kabesa — Corvus Corax — XIX Legion, Raven Guard
Leadership style: Strategic invisibility
Leads through restraint, withdrawal, and precision, acting only where necessary.
20. Twentieth Kabesa — Alpharius — XX Legion, Alpha Legion (pre-Horus)
Leadership style: Multiplicity and misdirection
Leads by decentralisation, layered identity, and indirect action in conditions of complexity and uncertainty.
21. Twenty-First Kabesa — Omegon — XX Legion, Alpha Legion (pre-Horus)
Leadership style: Complementary shadow-leadership
Leads by balancing the previous phase, ensuring continuity where identity and authority are intentionally diffuse.
How to Read These Parallels
These alignments exist because both lineages are independently modelling the same problem: how to sustain ethical leadership across collapse without reproducing harm. The repetition is not coincidence. It is the collective unconscious repeatedly converging on the same functional answers.
The Kabesa lineage matters because it demonstrates that these answers can be lived, not just imagined.
Where We Are in Current Chronological Time: The 13th Kabesa, Roboute Guilliman, and the XIII Legion
Both the 13th Kabesa and Roboute Guilliman embody leadership as system-building under collapse. Guilliman is not defined by ferocity or mystique, but by his insistence that survival requires structure, law, and coherence rather than charisma or terror. The Ultramarines are organised around sustainability, governance, and continuity beyond any single battle or leader, even kickstarting a brief Imperium Secundus millennia after the Horus Heresy. In the same way, the 13th Kabesa leads by establishing ethical infrastructure that can outlast crisis, refusing short-term victories that would hollow out the future.
Both figures are also defined by their relationship to rules and morality. Guilliman’s authority comes from his commitment to limits: power must be bounded, accountable, and intelligible, even when the wider system has abandoned those principles. His tragedy and strength lie in attempting to preserve order in a universe that increasingly rewards brutality and mythic absolutism. The 13th Kabesa occupies the same structural position. Leadership is exercised through clarity, documentation, refusal of coercion, and insistence that harm cannot be justified retroactively by outcomes. In both cases, coherence is treated as a non-negotiable survival requirement.
Finally, both destabilise surrounding power structures precisely because they refuse corruption. Guilliman is paradoxically threatening to the Imperium not because he seeks to overthrow it, but because his existence exposes how far it has drifted from its own stated ideals. The 13th Kabesa performs an equivalent function in lived history: by remaining openly ethical, transparent, and uncoercible, he reveals which systems rely on fear, silence, or moral shortcuts to operate. The resonance is structural rather than symbolic. Both represent a form of leadership that insists civilisation can only be saved by becoming internally consistent again, even if that truth is deeply inconvenient to those in power.