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The Lord God and the Elder God

Peel

Peel

You all know the story: The Elder God lurks beyond the stars. It is beyond human power and beyond human thought, invincible and incomprehensible. Its cultists convene in their temples and call to it. And one day, when the stars are right, it shall descend and destroy the world.



This is a modern horror story. It's popular in some circles these days, which raises the question of why.

A starting point is to note that while it is a modern horror, it isn't a modern story. The story itself is an old one: The Lord God waits in heaven. He is beyond human power and beyond human thought, invincible and ineffable. His priesthood convene in their temples and call to Him. And one day, when the prophesies are fulfilled, He shall descend and destroy the world. We've been predicting the apocalypse at the hands of the beyond for millennia, the difference is the ancients thought it was a good thing.



This isn't a correspondence that has escaped observers. There's the obvious fact that the paraphernalia of the Lord God also attends the Elder God: It has temples, priests, signs and ancient texts and the descriptor 'god' just like He does, and these things gain their horrific resonance because It corresponds so well to Him. Anno Hideaki famously drenched his opus Neon Genesis Evangelion in Christian and Kabbalist imagery not for any deliberate theological purpose, but because it looked cool, and of course he was right. Evangelion is, besides other things, a cosmic horror, and the apparatus it takes from the Abrahamics - the secret texts revealing the future, the crucifixive torture of cosmic significance, the angels confronting mankind at the apocalypse - cannot be called anything but eldritch. Western derivative texts like Children of an Elder God and Cthulhutech have taken up the relation and reframed the story explictly around the gods of Lovecraft, the iconic figure of modern cosmic horror. And it's a commonplace observation now that the descriptions of angels in the Bible can be incredibly strange.



So what's going on here? Why has the figure of awesome glory become a figure of awful horror? Two angles come to mind.




The Failure of the Enlightenment


The Elder God and the Lord God aren't just big humans. They are beyond humans, beyond the limits of our power but also our thought. A commonplace attribute of the Elder God is that it is incomprehensible. Its speech is babble. Those who understand it go mad. It manifests strange angles, demonstrating that mathematics itself, the most certain element of our thought, turns out a provincial illusion in the face of the beyond. Gods are not in the scope of things that can be apprehended by human minds.



This is, again, nothing new. The neoplatonists constructed an elaborate system of rational theology and at the top placed the One, an empty signifier pointing at the ineffable ultimate reality, which was beyond anything a mortal mind could grasp. Medieval Catholic scholastics built systems no less impressive, but nontheless threw up their hands when they confronted the Incarnation and the Trinity and declared that human reason could go this far, but no further. Further East the Orthodox churches had long had relative disdain for systematic theology. Alongside these drawings of limits there are the many traditions of accessing God through mystical, experiential practices rather than discursive reason. That God is ineffable does not mean He is inaccessible (for Christians of course there is always Jesus). But access to Him goes outside reason and cannot be explained by reason.


Suffusing all this was a great sense of the limitations of humans. The cosmos was circumscribed and so was humanity's place in it, and the place of humans relative to other humans. All things are linked but also bound by the great chain of being. There are places man is not meant to go, and things man is not meant to know.



The Enlightenment put all these systems to the torch. Through systematic criticism and the power of reason we would overturn mendacious tradition and find for ourselves truth and freedom. Reason was not small but sovereign. This project did in fact pay dividends. Monarchy was overthrown and the astonishing achievements of physical science transformed the world. But the promises of the enlightenment are open-ended and cannot pay off forever. We still labour under capitalism, and the socialist revolution either never came or was a bit shit when it did. Our investigation of fundamental science has given us a range of possible cosmoses we can't choose between even in principle. Our investigation of applied science is threatening to blow us all up or cook us to death. Our investigation of our own selves, far from securing truth and freedom, is revealing how bad we are at seeking truth and how unfree we are.



So the possibility of error and the limits of thought returns with a vengeance, this time not as a figure of humble reverence but one of terror. We expected more, and so our not getting it turns from an inevitability (consider a trinity: death, taxes and ignorance) to a brutal disappointment. We have failed and the Lord, now Elder, has returned to punish us. Enlightened atheists see a Catholic appeal to the 'mystery' of the Trinity and scoff at such evasion. It doesn't make sense because it's obvious nonsense and not worthy of concern. But the strange angles of R'lyeh keep them up at night nonetheless.



Emblematic of this is the question of mystical access. Those with mystic access to the beyond are no longer holy, but deluded, deceptive, or in the worst case mad. A human who accesses the Lord God gains wisdom beyond reason, but when reason becomes sovereign, a human who accesses the Elder God goes insane. Which is all well and good, so long as we posit that they are merely insane. But the horror of the Elder God is that it is not a delusion. It is very real, and the 'insanity', inimical to reason as it is, is the real truth. Our reason is the lie, and all the achievements of our minds are but a colossal error.





The Loss of Harmony With the Universe



Similar to the failure of reason is the loss of universal harmony.


For a long time it was commonplace in educated opinion to think that normative principles - what is best, what we should do - had objective validity. 'Murder is wrong' could be true in a similar way to '2 + 2 = 4' or at least 'the sky is blue', whether because God had made things so or because they manifested from undeniable principles according to which God acted. This was a powerful comfort when it came to confront the things in the world greater than us. It's true that we are nothing before almighty God, but we know that since God is the greatest of beings in all ways, he must also be the most moral, as morality is objective and a function of wisdom and virtue. And we ourselves tend to morality as we gain wisdom. So while the cosmos surpasses us, it is also in harmony with us, or at least with how we should be. We were made in God's image.



Related is how small the cosmos used to be. By our standards the world of the ancients was a pokey place. A few celestial spheres and then the fixed stars, over a world made for us, if corrupted by our errors. Six thousand years of history with the end of days just over the horizon. When that end of days came, the world would be set aright. God would manifest his power in all its plenitude, punish the wicked, reward the just, and turn the world from something corrupted by error into something in line with what was right and what we really want and need.



Then along comes the Enlightenment. With the new philosophy comes new morality. We cannot rely on tradition but we can develop our own rational systems. Utilitarian calculus and the categorical imperative sprout and flower. But there's a problem: none of these go anywhere. They cannot legislate a new universal morality and do not produce a new age of enlightenment. The real spirit of the age comes from Hume's is-ought gap and religious liberalism - there is no real standard of morality and we are, in the end, free to make our own meaning.



Which isn't so bad. But the figure of God still looms in the background. He is the architect of the universe, and the universe is changing. He did not make it six thousand years ago, but twice six billion years ago. He made hot gas and cold dust and we sprouted on a backwater rock out of the red-toothed gnashing of natural selection. He is an It and we are not in Its image. So while we can make our own meaning, we do so in a universe cold and barren and preposterously ill-fit for humanity. And this removes our guarantee that God's interests align with ours. Without objective morality, there is no reason to suppose the Cosmos thinks in line with us, and in the face of the reality of our place in it, there is every reason to think it does not. So when the end of days comes and the Cosmos manifests its absolute power, it will not set the world aright. It will set it according to its own logic, which the meaning we have created has nothing to do with. This is one of the classic attributes of the Elder God: It does not care about us*. The divine apocalypse changes from a restoration of morality to a destruction of it.



So: The Elder God is the return of a nightmare monster from a forgotten past: the Lord God of Abraham and others, banished by the Enlightenment, back to defy human reason and legislate norms binding upon us. This is the same thing it was doing before, of course, but we thought we were free, and so these things appear as a terrifying imposition. In this, again like the Lord God, it is metaphorical for the cosmos sublimely beyond us as a whole.

This gives us a look at why the Elder God is popular where and when it is. It's popular most prominently in secular, scientistic geek circles. Those are the circles that hold to Enlightenment values most strongly and for whom defying those values is most horrifying. The Elder God makes a mockery of progress, scholarship, and humanism. It's a much more effective foe for those attached to them than a mere Satan, who implies the Lord.


*This isn't a mandatory attribute, however. The Elder God, or its servitors, can take an interest in humanity. But it must be somehow alien to what we typically desire or claim to desire. This is different from Satan and his demons, who are deeply involved in human morality by being defined in opposition to the true morality of God, and which are avatars of the very human tendency to sin. The Elder God is not inverted but different.

 
When I was writing this I originally envisioned a section on racism and religion, but I ended up not happy with its internal structure or its relation to the main thesis, so I'm posting it here as a kind of addendum:


Integration with the Other





What are the two most famous things about Lovecraft?




First, he invented Cthulhu and cosmic horror.




Second, he was incredibly racist.




It's a commonplace observation that the rich vein of paranoid terror in his writing revolves significantly around the existence of people who aren't white. Sometimes it's not even subtext but text-text, as in Medusa's Coil which famously ends with the terrifying eldritch revelation that a woman is black. And the link of this to the fear of the terrifying, alien Elder God is equally commonplace. The problem of humanity's place in the universe as considered in Europe and European-derived civilisation isn't just one of the general human in the general cosmos, but also of the white man in the world full of people who aren't.



But racism of course is a modern phenomenon. Which isn't to say what we would identify as racial prejudice didn't crop up all over the place back in the day, but that 'racism', a categorisation of the human world along lines of mass biological heredity with a powerful structuring effect on society, was largely developed in the wake of imperialism.
 Back in the days of the Lord God you of course had the Moors peering over the border into Christendom, but this was an Other of a different kind. They were dangerous, but this was because they worshipped wrong. They were in thrall of Satan. They made reference to the wrong absolute. And implicit in this is that they could change their minds. A moor could convert to Christianity and join the club, and the day was dreamed of that all would bend knee to Jesus. The ineffable is something which can link the self and the other together in community.





By modernity this had given way to a different way of looking outside Europe. Race is permanent. That which is outside Christianity can be redeemed but that which is outside whiteness always will be. Racial categories are moved around, and populations (Irish, Italian, Slavic) are even be moved in or out of whiteness, but after the Irish became white they always were white, retroactively. So the confrontation of whiteness with nonwhiteness cannot be resolved like the confrontation of Christendom with the heathen, through conversion and integration, people moving between categories. When people do that in religion it's conversion and all well and good, when people do that in racism it's miscegenation and an Innsmouthian nightmare. The categories are fixed and must either coexist with, segregate from, dominate or destroy one another. Since racism was invented to justify domination and destruction, it's natural that that option tends to be present in the mind. But the era of imperialism is ending. Whites don't rule the world (as much) any more and are having to come to terms with the fact that there's an awful lot of people of colour and they aren't going away. And the ongoing success of Christian mission around the world is to no avail when you already tossed Christianity as your structuring relationship with the other.
 So the prospect of relating to the other can no longer take place under the rubric of a universal Lord God (Christ was, after all, an oriental Jew). Instead the concept of unification is 'miscegenation,' and horrific. Racism structures the relation to the other in terms of irremediable existential fear.



Connected to this of course is that the modern use of the Elder God theme is focused in secular and atheist communities. If you never got rid of your god in the first place, there is no terror of His reappearance as an It. But the gradual fading of religion from public view (not so much in America with its loud religious right, granted) means that religious observance itself takes on a the air of alien horror*. The acme of this is the convergence of religious and racial hostility in the form of Islamophobia. But Islamophobia is definitely a racism - the fear is not that people will be converted to Islam**, but that 'arabs' will outbreed 'whites'. Islam becomes a creed in content but a racial attribute in form. In the eyes of European bigotry, Allah is an alien god, no matter how genealogically stupid this construction.



This connection of belief to heredity is a significant one for the Elder God. It isn't just that it happens to be alien to human minds as they happen to be right now. That we'd be fine if we took a degree in Eldritch Studies. Our inability to be one with the Elder God is inherent to our mental constitution and cannot be overcome without warping that constitution. Congress with the Elder God sends you mad. Religion is bound to heritage, and humans have the wrong one.

*In Neoreaction a Basilisk Phil Sandifer notes that Nick Land posits racist hicks as figures of 'abstract horror', so it seems worth noting that the American right with which they are associated is noted for being loudly religious.

**Nor is there an opposing hope. Islamophobia is always buttressed by declarations that Muslims won't 'integrate', because if the religion is considered to act like other religions the whole idea falls apart.
 
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The direction I'd most like to explore is probably the interface of this with cultural forms outside the West. While you can find correspondences, this is a western/near eastern (say 'mediterranean') premodern religious conception transformed through a western cultural event. But like, I referenced Evangelion in the introduction, and maybe the most famous recent cosmic horror is Bloodborne. And while modern Japan has a lot more in common with modern Europe and North America than either has in common with either of their premodern cultures, and myths have a life of their own, it still has a distinct philosophical inheritance.
 
Let's see, how do I put this. . .

Islamophobia is not racism. It's irrational, as is racism, but it's founded on rational fears. ::shrug::
There are millions of people who want to eradicate the west. Not all Muslims are terrorists, but Islam is a huge religion. It's fifteen percent, or five percent of terrorists out of one a couple billion people is an alarming number of murderous thugs.
 
I don't want the thread to become an argument about this, but racism was considered 'rational' in its time too. That's the whole basis of 'scientific racism'. Their conception of what was rational was incorrect and rooted in bigotries justifying imperial expansion, and your conception of Islam and Muslims is wrong and derives from racialised narratives in modern society about the oriental horde.

However, I won't be continuing to argue about this in this thread.
 
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Peel said:
I don't want the thread to become an argument about this, but racism was considered 'rational' in its time too. That's the whole basis of 'scientific racism'. Their conception of what was rational was incorrect and rooted in bigotries justifying imperial expansion, and your conception of Islam and Muslims is wrong and derives from racialised narratives in modern society about the oriental horde.

However, I won't be continuing to argue about this in this thread.
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Alright, but I agree about how interesting the comparison between YHWH and Azathoth is.
 
Azathoth in particular is interesting because it's specifically a 'blind idiot' god. It doesn't have a vast and terrible intellect but none whatsoever. However I don't think this is a feature shared by the abstract idea of the Elder God, which is more like a turbocharged Cthulhu than Azathoth (or Nyarlathotep, who is too human). Founding figures of a trope often diverge from whatever the stereotype eventually settles on.
 
The popularity of the horror genre generally is fascinating. Like why is it that people are watching movies and playing video games with the intention of feeling scared? I would agree with the thesis presented here that cosmic horror is popular with the SF crowd because of its similarity to classical religion, just presented as bad, but why are people actually into that? Is it confirming an existing prejudice (I sure as heck would want to meet the angel Af on a dark night, let me tell you)? Is it really just as simple as enjoying that adrenaline rush?

Well, probably. In that way it's not really so different to enjoying action films or violent video games, but it feels a little unsatisfying. :V
 
Peel said:
The Enlightenment put all these systems to the torch. Through systematic criticism and the power of reason we would overturn mendacious tradition and find for ourselves truth and freedom. Reason was not small but sovereign. This project did in fact pay dividends. Monarchy was overthrown and the astonishing achievements of physical science transformed the world.
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Honestly, this entire section is a bit overblown I think. Humanistic Enlightenment liberalism was affected and partly shaped by medieval scholaticism, Renaissance humanism, and a range of dissenting Reformed churches of English, Dutch, and German origin; just because it departed from and criticised traditional Christianity in other ways doesn't mean it put what preceded it to the torch (and sometimes the criticism replaced it with a watered down version. Deism anyone? Or the Cult of Reason?). There was a continuity there, the Enlightenment didn't spring from the aether radically different from everything that preceded it.

And a lot of Enlightenment thinkers were wacky mystic kooks, just wacky in a different direction. Scientific magical ideas, like animal magnetism or phrenology, tell me that the divide protrayed didn't really happen.

We could also talk about how many Enlightenment thinker had a severe problem with race. Voltaire had significant interest in the plantations, Hume wrote about the savagery of the Blacks. Diderot warned there would be a Black Spartacus, but this was a warning, not a statement of solidarity. Not a single person in France could understand the Haitian Revolution because a mass slave revolution, led by slaves, to create a free state of blacks was utterly baffling. Even the most left-wing of thinkers still saw blacks as part of a patrimonial relationship with white people.

As for monarchies overthrown, I have to ask, which ones? The American Revolution didn't really wound the British monarchy all that much (it would, in fact, attain the apex of its power in the following century), and the revolutions of 1848 saw only the Danish monarchy abolished. The French Revolution fits, if we ignore how it went back and forth between regaining a monarchy and losing it again for decades. Unless we count the Russian Revolution, which happened beyond the time period of the Enlightenment, there wasn't that much overthrown monarchies.

A more accurate assessment would be that absolute monarchies were made to disappear thanks to Enlightenment, in favor of parliamentary democracies and constitutional monarchies. And even then, there is the case of the Enlightenment producing Enlightened absolutism, or monarchs with absolute power embracing the philosophy and favoring education and religious tolerance, like Frederick II of Prussia, Napoleon Bonaparte, Catherine the Great, etc.

(I'm not counting Robespierre because he was more of an Enlightened despot, trying to enforce his values on everyone and killing those opposed to him or disagreed with some of his positions. Ironically, in doing so, the Reign of Terror killed more people than the Inquisitions, organizations also dedicated to enforce orthodoxy and conformity, except in the opposite direction.)

Really, the Enlightenment was a good thing, but let's avoid romanticizing it as having overall been for "freedom", "truth", and "reason".
Janus said:
Let's see, how do I put this. . .

Islamophobia is not racism. It's irrational, as is racism, but it's founded on rational fears. ::shrug::
There are millions of people who want to eradicate the west. Not all Muslims are terrorists, but Islam is a huge religion. It's fifteen percent, or five percent of terrorists out of one a couple billion people is an alarming number of murderous thugs.
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The oft-recurrent attacks on Sikhs on the basis that they "look" like Muslims tell me otherwise, because apparently "swarthy bearded men with strange attire" is an indicative of Muslims for many people. A fun game to do is find someone going into anti Muslim rants and ask them to name one Muslim majority country that is not part of MENA or Central Asia.
 
I would have waited for the answer to be Indonesia personally.
 
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all fictions said:
The oft-recurrent attacks on Sikhs on the basis that they "look" like Muslims tell me otherwise, because apparently "swarthy bearded men with strange attire" is an indicative of Muslims for many people. A fun game to do is find someone going into anti Muslim rants and ask them to name one Muslim majority country that is not part of MENA or Central Asia.
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A man was murdered at a gas station here where I live just for having a turban. Sad sad sad. Yet all that should tell you, imho is that people are ignorant. All racists may be ignorant, but not all ignoramuses are racist.
 
all fictions said:
Honestly, this entire section is a bit overblown I think. Humanistic Enlightenment liberalism was affected and partly shaped by medieval scholaticism, Renaissance humanism, and a range of dissenting Reformed churches of English, Dutch, and German origin; just because it departed from and criticised traditional Christianity in other ways doesn't mean it put what preceded it to the torch (and sometimes the criticism replaced it with a watered down version. Deism anyone? Or the Cult of Reason?). There was a continuity there, the Enlightenment didn't spring from the aether radically different from everything that preceded it.

And a lot of Enlightenment thinkers were wacky mystic kooks, just wacky in a different direction. Scientific magical ideas, like animal magnetism or phrenology, tell me that the divide protrayed didn't really happen.

We could also talk about how many Enlightenment thinker had a severe problem with race. Voltaire had significant interest in the plantations, Hume wrote about the savagery of the Blacks. Diderot warned there would be a Black Spartacus, but this was a warning, not a statement of solidarity. Not a single person in France could understand the Haitian Revolution because a mass slave revolution, led by slaves, to create a free state of blacks was utterly baffling. Even the most left-wing of thinkers still saw blacks as part of a patrimonial relationship with white people.

As for monarchies overthrown, I have to ask, which ones? The American Revolution didn't really wound the British monarchy all that much (it would, in fact, attain the apex of its power in the following century), and the revolutions of 1848 saw only the Danish monarchy abolished. The French Revolution fits, if we ignore how it went back and forth between regaining a monarchy and losing it again for decades. Unless we count the Russian Revolution, which happened beyond the time period of the Enlightenment, there wasn't that much overthrown monarchies.

A more accurate assessment would be that absolute monarchies were made to disappear thanks to Enlightenment, in favor of parliamentary democracies and constitutional monarchies. And even then, there is the case of the Enlightenment producing Enlightened absolutism, or monarchs with absolute power embracing the philosophy and favoring education and religious tolerance, like Frederick II of Prussia, Napoleon Bonaparte, Catherine the Great, etc.

(I'm not counting Robespierre because he was more of an Enlightened despot, trying to enforce his values on everyone and killing those opposed to him or disagreed with some of his positions. Ironically, in doing so, the Reign of Terror killed more people than the Inquisitions, organizations also dedicated to enforce orthodoxy and conformity, except in the opposite direction.)

Really, the Enlightenment was a good thing, but let's avoid romanticizing it as having overall been for "freedom", "truth", and "reason".
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This is true, but I think you mistake my point if you think I'm saying the Enlightenment was all those things. I think the Enlightenment sold and perceived itself as being those things, but of course they didn't actually work, at least as to the extent dreamers wanted. And even by the early 19th century you had the Romantics reacting against the Enlightenment on the intellectual level. But I think those ideals in all their propagandistic inaccuracy have nontheless become a major part of the ideology of our current age and you can read art in that context.
 
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I think religion is an attempt by humanity to face the existential question of their own mortality.

The "ineffable" nature of God would be the admission that everybody won't live forever, while the worship of a transcendent state that overcomes the fear all of us have with the gaining of our human consciousness.

We strive to transcend into states beyond us. We are above animals in our awareness, but below the angels that we wish and act to become. Finding enlightenment is a transcendence of one's own ego, of the barriers burdened by people normally. Of the fears of death that we have.

Deities and the supernatural are that symbol, of an evolved perception of the universe greater and more seamless through our constructions of ego in concert.
 
I don't really see God as a Pure Horror. There are Limits to Reason as is to Faith, So I keep both in Balance. That is why I don't really see Such Beings as truly Horrifying. Just my two cents.
 
If this thread is about pointing out parallels, the relationship communication plays is interesting.

Elder Abominations are show to be powerful, unknowable, and divorced from speech that we can understand. Cthulhu never says anything, unless it's to drive the listener mad with the incomprehension of his speech. The Star Kings are never given a voice, because the giving them a voice would make them approachable, and give a level of familiarity that is divorced from the tone of the work.

Contrast with the Lord. Fundamentally his speech is comprehensible. His first words in the book are "Let their be Light" and the story continues in a digestible fashion. Indeed the history of understanding the bible is the history of the Church. The printing press made his texts widely available, and meant that more people were able to read and interpret the books' contents.

And yet The Lord is portrayed as mysterious, greatly in part because we can understand some part of him. Knowing of him does not make him less powerful, but makes what we don't know the greater because of it.

The Elder does not communicate, and becomes something bestial and monstrous through the inaction. The Lord communicates clearly, and to all people in their native language, and becomes Regal through influence. One shows no intent, the other obvious intent.
 
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Baron Ouroboros said:
I think religion is an attempt by humanity to face the existential question of their own mortality.

The "ineffable" nature of God would be the admission that everybody won't live forever, while the worship of a transcendent state that overcomes the fear all of us have with the gaining of our human consciousness.

We strive to transcend into states beyond us. We are above animals in our awareness, but below the angels that we wish and act to become. Finding enlightenment is a transcendence of one's own ego, of the barriers burdened by people normally. Of the fears of death that we have.

Deities and the supernatural are that symbol, of an evolved perception of the universe greater and more seamless through our constructions of ego in concert.
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While certainly a popular definition for religion, it seems to ignore that one of the longest-lasting and robust religions (Judaism) ultimately cares very little about the afterlife.
 
Lovecraftian horror is a mixture of "fear of other" and "existential horror", both of which are deeply pertinent concerns of religion, which seeks to convert or destroy otherized groups and seeks to provide tolerable answers to existential questions. Lovecraftian horror is thus the converse, the failure state, where the other is superior and stronger, or the answers aren't ones you want to hear.

While we're on the topic, I might note that transhumanism basically espouses the same goal as most religions, the achievement of an immortal and transcendent state, just achieved through science rather than spiritual introspection and the like. They don't call the singularity "Nerd Rapture" for nothing. Which I think would go against the claim that Lovecraft is just "Abrahamic Religion as seen by Avernus". Its just taking old spiritual fears and repackaging them under science rather than religion.
 
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Ford Prefect said:
The popularity of the horror genre generally is fascinating. Like why is it that people are watching movies and playing video games with the intention of feeling scared? I would agree with the thesis presented here that cosmic horror is popular with the SF crowd because of its similarity to classical religion, just presented as bad, but why are people actually into that? Is it confirming an existing prejudice (I sure as heck would want to meet the angel Af on a dark night, let me tell you)? Is it really just as simple as enjoying that adrenaline rush?

Well, probably. In that way it's not really so different to enjoying action films or violent video games, but it feels a little unsatisfying. :V
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Eh... I think that horror, like tragedy, is meant to arouse a certain emotional context for the purpose of catharsis. Horror is meant to elicit terror, to allow us to confront and overcome our own sense of fear and hopelessness in the face of the inexplicable and the uncontrolled cutting us away from the mundane world we are used to, in a .... Well, in a 'safe space', rather than actually stepping into a terrifying position in real life.

Of course, just my opinion, and all that. I'm sure there are people who've done, like, actual research and stuff on this.
 
Posting about the actual subject now: while I can certainly see the analogy with the Abrahamic concept of God, there are also tons of analogy to be made between the cosmic horror genre and what is called paganism.

One only has to look at one of the inspirations of Lovecraft, the author Arthur Machen. An Anglo-Catholic, his best known stories "The Great God Pan" and "The White People", if you have read them, painted terrifying portrai of horror stories as a mix between paganism, Satanism, and sexuality. In The Great God Pan, a woman becomes insane from a brain surgery allowing her to "see Pan", being raped by the entity, and giving birth to an ungodly girl, who goes on to become a seductress who drives men insane by sleeping with her and taking them "to the woods". In The White People, a young girl writes about her summer days and going outside with her governess, before it is revealed her caretaker is subtly manipulating her and takes her to Roman ruins in the woods, where a goat man is worshipped and it is implied the girl is to be made to bear its child (fortunately, she kills herself before it).

This sounds a lot to me like the old medieval Christian fears of the pagan religions, with the unbelievers in remote regions of the world and the heretics at home believed to be worshipping terrible gods like Termagant and Baphomet, and the fear of the witches, their covens, and their Sabbaths on Walpurgis Night on mount Brocken, where they coupled with the Devil and he gave them powers for it. I don't know if there is a connection, but some in the Middle Ages were probably aware and inspired by things like the Maenads/Bacchae, the women in Dionysus' escastic retinue, who sometimes were women who refused to worship him and thus driven mad by him in order to be forced to participate in horrific rites, like tearing their own children apart limb from limb.

This interpretation of the Elder Gods would, I think, fit with Lovecraft's fears of foreigners and their strange, non-WASP ways. The Cthulhu Mythos (or Yog-Sothothery as Lovecraft actually called it) might then be seen as a weird collection of pagan tales, in which the horrifying pagan pantheons are real but not the Christian framework, which would be the real horror for a WASP audience. There is even two historical pagan gods among the deities of the Cthulhu mythos: Dagon, the god of the Philistines mentionned in the Bible, and Nodens, an obscure Celtic deity (which, incidentally, was mentionned in The Great God Pan as another name for Pan).

At the same time, another of Lovecraft's inspirations, Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow, didn't seem to dabble that much into religious imagery. The titular entity is more of an alien being than a god, coming from the city of Carcosa beneath twin suns in another planet/universe, and the play based on it makes people mad, but there is no cult following. The religious symbolism is in the short story In the Court of the Dragon, where the narrator visits a church and, at the end of the story, when they are fatally caught by the King in Yellow in Carcosa, it whispers to them a Biblical quote, "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (from Hebrews 10:31).

But more than that, I personally see Lovecraft's works as if it were from a form of materialistic and nihilistic atheism that considers that "there is no God, and that's terrifying" rather than "there is a God, and he is monstrously incomprehensible".
 
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Cetashwayo said:
While certainly a popular definition for religion, it seems to ignore that one of the longest-lasting and robust religions (Judaism) ultimately cares very little about the afterlife.
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I suppose so, but religion is essentially a process in which the human seeks to transform from the mundane into something greater. That is attempted through symbolism and myth constructions, that are parallel to our own beings really. It is an exercise in meaning, done through a myriad of cultural processes, some more-so drawn through history and tradition than others.

Our collective unconsciousness can be seen through myth, legend, and ritual, and in that regard I respect religion, even though I don't take its proclamations about the state of the universe as true. The tyranny of religion is essentially the same as the tyranny of ideology, the ceasing to question what is beyond one's own value system, because of the fear of contradiction and crisis. It's an attack on the ego itself, and it takes patience and strength to go beyond that border. But it can be done, and people can grow wise.
 
These two posts are probably relevant to this thread.
Wade Garrett said:
I know the theme A Shadow Over Innsmouth is generally characterized as "No! No! Don't breed with that!" but...well...

The Deep Ones find a coastal settlement and promptly win the loyalty of its inhabitants with trinkets it is trivial for them to obtain.

They supplant the local religion with their own, take the men and women of their new outpost for carnal pleasure, and the offspring of such unions are taken back to the Deep Ones homeland to have any traces of their human parents culture scrubbed out of them.

While the humans band together and destroy their outpost, the only response is a calm assurance that said humans have trifled with a polity whose power overshadows theirs to an unimaginable degree, who wield weapons and tactics that make the greatest creations of mankind look like toys.

I think I've heard stories like this somewhere before.



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Wade Garrett said:
Alternatively....

Howard Phillips hammered furiously at his typewriter, muttering to himself.

"Swarthy primitives. Swarthy, foreign primitives! I must denigrate them!"

"No, Howard." said Dagon, laying a batrachian flipper on his shoulder. "You are the swarthy primitive!"

And then Lovecraft was a progressive.

:p
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I'm copying two potentially relevant ideas from /tg/ into this thread in the hope of restarting discussion.
Let me post a moral question for you /tg/. In our long running Call of Cthulhu game, we have an unusual creation of our DM.

Eldritch Savants. People who, through some deformity in the brain that we don't really understand, are naturally unaffected by things that would cause most people SAN damage. Now not to say they are immune, they just are much MUCH more resistant than normal people. They don't get off scot-free though. They are, by the very nature of their ability, sociopaths to some degree. They also tend to be very uncanny-valley and clearly don't have a normal human point of view.

We've run into a number of them during our campaign, some helped us and some hindered. They tend to get wrapped up in the supernatural by shear virtue of being the person in the room who's brain doesn't just go 'NOPE!' the moment things get freaky. Now we've run into one who has discovered that one day "The Stars Will Be Right" and the Old Ones will return, and mankind as we know it won't survive this event.

The guy's solution? Mankind had to evolve. So using a mix of advanced medical science and sorcery, he's performing experiments to create a way to transform humanity into a shape that can survive the Old Ones rising. We can't FIGHT them obviously, but we can live like the cockroaches of the new world, too resilient and numerous to wipe out.

So what's the issue? Well first off his work would make a Nazi medical experiment look like getting a booster shot in comparison. More importantly, the things we would have to become would not be human. Not in body, not in mind. He used the Eldritch Savants as a STARTING point for the mentality needed.

Now the question is, do we stop him? He's made it clear he honestly is doing what he sees as the only way to save us from extinction, but is it worth it?


So, you've been told by a sociopathic genius that the world's going to end, but he's got a plan to save humanity, and it involves doing utterly monstrous things, but has a good chance of working, but you'd have to give up your humanity?

Welcome to the winning side, you're a new cultist.


Think about it, this guy is no different than a clued in fish fucker, a man selling us out so the Yith will put his mind in some primordial slime, or those guys who keep trying to tell you how great it is living in a brain cylinder.

Sure, they or their descendants may have a shot at outliving us but look at them.

More to the point, his solution is to turn us into horrible vermin that'll be tough and virile enough to survive, all he's doing is making CATTLE for Cthulhu's stake brunch (or the polyps, or the Mi-go).

We wont be human, we wont qualify for more alive than a thousand starved, steroid fueled swine packed so close together they practically bathe in each others shit while inhuman butchers pick the best out with a crane and casually grind them to shoggoth fuel, never even caring what these THINGS used to be.

He'll I'd prefer the cultists who worship Cthulhu just so he'll eat them first over this guy.

And besides, his baseline is savant right? He's not saving mankind, he's looking to save himself and his ab-human kin, and take us all down screaming with him.


...you know what guys? I've made a decision. I was on the fence, but after reading everything I know my course. The Old Ones are so strong; the only way we'll live is if after our evolved selves aren't wiped out indirectly they decide we aren't worth the effort of taking out directly. What will become of us then? Then it hit me, slaves, livestock, and pets. What future is that?


One day, worlds across the stars would recoil in fear and dread at the sight of mankind. Both because they are horrid, and because they herald the coming of their masters.

"When the Old Ones sleep, the Hu-Mun pets guard them by building their foul nests around the resting places. And when the Old Ones are awake the Hu-Man precedes and follows them, scavengers for larger predators feeding on their scraps. Beware the Hu-Man, for they herald doom."

I don't want that for mankind, I don't want that period. Because it's not just about survival, it's about being WORTHY of survival. It's about what being human is, what it represents. So come next session, I'll say my peace.

"NO! What you're doing is inhuman, what you're creating is inhuman, and you sir are surly inhuman! If you are our future then I want no part of it! We'll try and find another way, without losing who we are. If we can't then it's our time, but NEVER will we become this just to hide from death like a shivering rodent!"

"We know who we are, we're human. And we'll live, die, and choose our own fate as human! It's our one right in this mad universe. So this experiment is over; it's over because we decide it's over! Now are you coming quietly or not?"


The man spoke at length of our uncertain future and the forced evolutionary process that would
ensure our place in, it came to me, as part realization, part vision. Surely it was influenced
by something beyond ordinary perception, for what I was granted was a jaunt into the future
this scientist had promised.

---

On a foreign sphere beneath strange stars innumerable filthy creatures toiled in the shadow of
a massive and malignant, as yet unfinished, ziggurat. Long lines of these degenerates came
wriggling from the horizon carrying stone, clay and bones. All individually there to heed the
siren call of whatever malevolent entity that slept beneath the ziggurat.

The creatures were of vague humanoid shape, having two rugged limbs for locomotion and two more
crooked and long sinewy appendages, ending in stumpy fingers crowned by nails, cracked and dirty
Between their shoulders sat sunken heads with hideous pig-like faces and jagged lamprey-like maws,
from which hung globs of thick viscous drool and gurgling breathing sounds emanated.

But what struck me as most hideous of these things was their eyes, malplaced and strangely
familiar. The dreamy absentminded, nay hypnotized look they had about them fell just short of
shrouding the still human glimmer that faintly shone through.


They walked, or slouched towards the distant monolith, weighed down by their burdens. Some
would, apparently heedless of their own ailments, collapse in mid stride. As they fell they were
trampled without care by their companions, the only exception being the few that would momentarily
stop to feed on this putrid mash.

As these corpses were trampled and kicked out of the way for the unending stream of wandering
swine-men they would fall into pits and ditches that carved up the barren lands beside the roads,
where in hundreds of their young festered in the rot. These slug like spawn with deformed dwarf
like arms had heads with a sickening likeness to children, if not for the constantly gorged
mouth-holes. What manner of reproduction could yield such horrible offspring i dared not dwell
upon.

I looked away, feeling sick i began to notice some of the stones they carried was reminiscent
not of boulders dug or carved from the earth, but ordered, even decorated masonry. So too I noted
that some of the bones they carried was not their own. Indeed they seemed to carry with them the
remains of civilization, however inhuman.

My heart sank further as I saw more remnants in the barren waste around me. Worse still among the
endless masses I began to notice strange scaled creatures bound in chains or frayed rope, and
dragged along by the degenerate pig-kin. I felt pity, even sorrow then for those creatures,
however alien and perhaps primitive they may have been, none deserved the fate that awaited them in the shadow of that jagged pillar ahead.

It was then I felt my gaze being drawn ahead, towards that jagged structure that dominated the
horizon. My consciousness drifted closer to the shadow that blotted out the alien sun and
i passed into the oppressive twilight under it.

The winding paths of the toiling masses closed under me into one gargantuan tide that wound up
a highway of trampled bone. As the road neared the base of the Ziggurat it became apparent that
these creatures made no distinction between building with mortar and stone, or with bones and
rot of the fallen.

Here at the base the creatures shook of the mindlessness of their walk and their dreamstate was
infused with sudden purpose, each somehow knowing exactly where their piece fit into the greater
structure. I saw then the overseers. Like their kind but bigger, fatter, and with muscles so
infused with power their skin looked set too burst open, clad in strange occult vestments and
covered by ritual scars. These had not the mindless eyes of their kin but rather their eyes
burned with the foul enlightenment of secrets not meant for any creature of our world. Indeed
the power that filled them hung in the air about them as ephemeral whisps of black smoke.

It was there I saw, an apparent ruler of the scale folk, dragged before one such overseer. Forced
to its knees by its captors it made a wailing sorrowful sound as it looked at the megastructure
and as it turned to face its executioner, it uttered one word.

"Hu-Mun."

"Ia, Cao-thour!" the overseer replied.

In a cacophony of gurgling voices the crowd repeated the exclamation, as if by an inbred compulsion,
and the overseer let out a strangely human like laugh before devouring this scaled king whole.

Beneath the world I could feel a malevolence shift in its sleep.

---

As I woke from my trance I saw the scientist stand silent before me, and around me the concerned
faces of my friends and colleagues. I righted myself and straightened out my suit. I cleared my throat
and told the madman what i thought of his plan.
There's a Paladin after us.

This requires context. Paladins in this setting are the servants of a terrifying entity, a god they call "He Who Will Be," whose domains are confusing, expansive, and apocalyptic. He has other deities enslaved to his will--and they aren't pushovers, they're evil gods who we fought multiple campaigns ago and banished from our world. We're talking Lovecraft stuff here, creatures that were going to eat the world. In the heavens, the gods of our world are doing battle with this monster's servants, but on the ground, it's everyone against the Paladins, who are forging a path of followers and temples so that He Who Will Be can enter our world and fucking punk us.

They're monsters. They don't die of age. They have magic that bypasses the Hollow. They have flaming swords that can touch the spirit world as well as the physical, and people they kill cannot be resurrected. Speaking with the dead brings forth a cacophony of screams, suggesting that those they slay are locked in some eternal prison of suffering. This setting doesn't have a hell. Or it didn't, it seems to now.

Anyway, we ran afoul of one of these guys. We shot him with a hand-bombard, and we thought we'd killed him. But he didn't die, and he's chasing our asses down with an army of converts promised a free pass into paradise for whoever brings him one of our heads.

Stories to follow.


We first encountered the Paladin in a shitty little fishing village in the southern state of Ilegon, where we were supposed to be recovering an artifact some tools had dredged up out of the ocean.

What we found instead was a huge guy in plate with a bunch of jackbooted thugs storming through the village, beating the shit out of people to try and find an "Icon of Sin." I'm sure you can guess that we were looking for the same thing.

There were four of us, plus two guides we had hired, and about thirty of them. We met our contact at the appointed spot, but he refused to give us the item unless we saved his family from the Paladin and his men. They were under suspicion, and would probably be killed if the item wasn't found.

So we poled out a raft to their ship in the night, climbed on board, and busted the folks out, minimal fuss. We went back, and the man told us that he'd put the item in a safe place, but that he couldn't recover it because of some foul magic. He directed us to a cave near the village. We had to get in and out right as the tide was coming in--a clever mechanism lifted heavy gates using the tide with buoyant floats. It'd drown smartasses who didn't understand the system, but would let us through.

So we went in, and found that the 'safe place' was an ancient temple to some sort of dark sea god, with a chest millennia old. The fisherman can't have possibly installed it, and the inscriptions suggested a high degree of eldritch lore required to open the damn thing. Knowledge that we, of course, had. We opened it, and found a totem made out of whale bones and gold, and made our way out of the facility.

Who was waiting for us on the beach, you ask? Who else, the Paladin and his men. Thankfully, Chippy was a clever lad, and had kept his cannon above water.


So Chip tells us to hold them off while he preps the match. The three of us step forward. The Paladin says, you know, 'kill them,' and then our fisherman contact comes up and starts giving him the "this wasn't part of the deal!" line.

So we fight some fanatics, who are actually not pushovers at all. There are only ten of them to our four, but they killed Barque and Dyson, and I got a level 4 to the lower abdomen (which is actually about as good as dying) before Chip burns a bunch of Luck to press the bombard right up against the last dude's back, and then shoot through him to hit the Paladin, who, in the middle of his own conversation, picked up the fisherman and moved him into the way.

Still, two bodies isn't enough to stop a hand cannon, and the Paladin was thrown right off his feet onto his ass, with a honking big hole in his chest. Chip tries to help me, but his surgery score is shit. The only reason I survived was, it turned out, because the Icon of Sin prevented me from dying until he could get me to a surgeon. In the fuss, we forgot to check the Paladin. That came back to haunt us later.


They call themselves Paladins, and there are no... Other Paladins, really. There are some holy warriors here and there, but the term in this setting refers to them very specifically.

They've also got a lot of powers typical of ye olde D&D Paladins, they can lay on hands, they can smite (oh God can they smite) and they can detect 'evil,' except that evil seems to mean 'stuff we don't like' rather than the more commonly accepted concepts of Good and Evil as defined by the rest of the setting.

I don't know where they keep getting converts. I actually suspect that they're bringing people over from their world, but they have to have some locals because they have guys who speak the language and know the terrain and the history and such.


That's a major plot point. I'll give you the short version now, but one of my stories does relate to how we discovered this.

The Paladins aren't actually powered by their own deity (if what we know now is true,) they're powered by ours. They're like leeches, sent to kill off all opposition by absorbing divine energies. They do this, basically, via iconoclasm. Destroying our temples, burning our holy books, breaking our relics, and killing our priests gives them power, and worse, gives them powers related to the deity they're mugging.

A lot of them have sun-related powers because they basically sacked the Vatican of a country that worships the Unconquerable Sun. The older, more dangerous ones have a recurring theme of magic hammers, nets, and shapeshifting, suggesting that they took it from the Norse.


So, after this first encounter, we were marked. The Paladins' henchmen didn't know us by face or name, but the Paladins themselves could tell that we were 'bad guys.' I figured it's some sort of faction thing, they could just tell if you had fucked with their shit before.

Anyway, I was down and out for a few sessions, so I took on a temporary PC in the form of my character's uncle, and went off with Chip to try and get the artifact to our employer. The employer was a wealthy patron in a wealthy trade city, also in Ilegon but further north. We didn't want to risk going by ship, especially since the artifact might've been connected to water somehow, so we went by land.

We figured out that we were being followed, and fast. We saw fires appear in the treeline, and sometimes even right off the paths we were walking on. Spontaneous fire is a big sign that He Who Will Be is watching, so we hustled up and went to grab some new meat sh-FRIENDS, I mean friends, yes.

We picked up some more muscle in a city that I think had a name, but I can't remember. Our dead friends' players, as a badass halberdier named Dutchie, and a Viking looking for revenge against the people who had slaughtered his fleet in the Battle of Black Day (which none of us were present for, but we got a brief poem on it) which, obviously, were the Paladins.

We made it to the city unmolested, but for the grace of god, and even to our employer's house before things started getting fun.


Anyway, we go in to his manor, and turn in our find, and our employer has this flock of inventors and scholors and scribes there to receive it. They all start prattling on about 'from the deep' and 'bones of the ancients' and 'echoes of the hollow' and just everything else that you'd expect people trying to make a find sound impressive to their boss would say.

I say "I got stabbed in the stomach and it kept me alive." and the aristocrat raises an eyebrow. Like, he didn't actually expect it to do anything. But it does, in fact, when he puts it in seawater, it begins letting out this creepy sound, like a whalesong played with way too much bass.

He frowns at it, and says that this wasn't what he asked for, we were supposed to bring him a fake that we was having smuggled in, it was supposed to be full of silkworm cacoons. He then looks up, and he's horrified, and says "you brought a Deep Charm into my house!?"

And then there's a crash from downstairs, as the door breaks in, and there's shouting and the clashing of steel. Chip and I get this feeling like our tongues are being pulled on by some invisible force. This, I would later discover, was the sign that Paladins are tracking you.


The aristocrat takes a bag of gold (our pay) and puts it on the table, and tells us he'll pay us double if we take the charm and get the fuck out of his house before the gestappo gets upstairs. Chip is already loading his gun. I take the money and the charm, and our dear employer flees behind a bookcase on tracks into a panic room, along with two maids and some of his scribes. The rest flee further upstairs while we prepare to fight our way out.

The first men into the room are flunkies, same as we fought before. This time we were a bit better prepared. We took them out, and pushed our way downstairs, and then out into the courtyard and towards the stables.

And lo and behold, who comes around the corner the second after Chip fires off his shot?
It's Paladin Bane. Up until this moment, we've only heard him speak once, and the GM paraphrased him. This time he does a voice. The Bane Voice.
"A firearm is an effective tool... When loaded." he says. Chip hefts the thing like a club, and gets ready to fight as more of the Paladin's flunkies arrive. We're not even hurt yet (I think the Viking got hit once, but it was a low level bludgeoning wound, those don't do anything really), but we're outnumbered and this time, Chip doesn't have a bullet to save us.

"Give me the charm, and I will kill you." we don't bother going through the "don't you mean OR you'll kill us?" Shtick with him. We know damn well what he means. He gives the signal for his men to attack, and they do. He hangs back, watching. The callousness of the Paladins towards their own mens' deaths might actually be intentional, maybe they like winnowing out the weak. Maybe it's how they recruit. Hell if I know.

We fought for a few rounds. The numbers were less stacked against us this time, but when we vanquished them, the Paladin was still there, and we were all cut up and bleeding. I've got the charm, my character at the moment wasn't even at the original event, I don't care enough to die over this.


So I threaten to break the damn thing if he doesn't let us go. I was sure it wouldn't work, but the Paladin actually hesitates, and says "I mean to break the item anyway." But he's not very convincing. So I start making like I'm going to snap it in half, and he relents, moving out of the way of the stables so that we can go.

However, as we're mounting up, more of his men arrive, and some of them have guns. I hold the item up in front of me, and look at the Paladin. He tells his men to discharge their weapons into the air, as a show of faith. I'm actually pretty impressed with that, so I toss him the item. We already got paid for it after all.

The instant, the INSTANT it is in his hands, he tears it in half, seriously wrenching these golden eels apart like licorice twizzlers. And something happens. He starts smoking, this black ashy soot starts floating off of him, and he lets out this keening, inhuman howl. His men start freaking out, the horses start freaking out, and we start freaking out because of all the fucking Willpower tests we're making at difficulty 12.


So, we roll, and I succeed. Chip fails, and starts screaming about being made of worms. The Viking succeeds, gets off his horse, and rushes the Paladin. Dutchie passes and his ass is out of there instantly, spurred and gone. I want to help the viking, but Chip's guy isn't thinking straight, and his horse is hurring and durring it up. So I grab his reins and bolt, leading him to safety while the Viking fights.

Now I wasn't present in character for that fight, but I was present OOC, obviously. Whatever breaking that amulet had done gave him some sort of aura of insanity. The Viking, however, flew into a berserk rage, and wasn't about to let a little thing like madness slow him down. He failed round two, didn't give a fuck.

What he did give a fuck about was that the Paladin's combat pool was at least ten higher than any of ours, and he was wielding a burning sword. Ever tried parrying a burning sword? It sucks! The man got a hit in, and dented in the Paladin's armor. Maybe it was the insanity (it was described as making the world look bizarre, red-coated, like a combination of a Dali painting and Geiger's nightmares) but the guy bled yellow light instead of blood.

The Viking's hair and furs had been on fire for a few rounds now, and the next one set his beard ablaze. The Paladin's final act of cruelty was, somehow, sucking all of the rage out of the defeated Viking, switching off his berserk fury. He died terribly aware of his own anguish, and totally insane.


We fled for two days. We caught up with Dutchie, and made our way back to where my character was still recovering. My Uncle (thank God he lived, he was the source of my character's wealth!) departed, with the intent of finding a stiff drink to help him forget what he'd just seen, and we were left with the haunting notion of our new enemy.

Chip, Dutchie and I sat at the table, planning our next move, and one by one, we each felt that pressure on our tongues, as the Paladin turned his gaze to us again.

Shit be real yo. And that's all for my stories tonight, but I'm gonna be back. This is such a nice board.


So you have an amulet that OBVIOUSLY venerated Cthulhu or Dagon or something, and you gave it to a monster that absorbs power by breaking holy artifacts if I'm reading >>22578783 right. You guys are a bunch of geniuses.


>He Who Will Be (What He Will Be)
>Lovecraftian Horror Servants
>Destroying and absorbing other religions
>Created Hell
>Their default power is flaming swords
>Invading from another world

It's Yahweh isn't it.
 
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