Cosmic horror is when a 1900s guy crosses out every mention of irishman in his story and replaces it with shoggoth or ghoul, which was hard at the time because word processors did not exist.
I had an idea for a Cthulhu Mythos story where the Necronomicon gets widely published, almost anyone can find it anywhere. But absolutely nothing happens. People might read it, go "ooh, scary", and then go on with their day. Commentary on how cosmic horror doesn't really work anymore, because we're all too desensitized to the idea of our lives being fragile and pointless to a cruel, uncaring universe.
we're all too desensitized to the idea of our lives being fragile and pointless to a cruel, uncaring universe.
yeah it's called capitalism I'm familiar
i mean while capitalism is certainly horrifying, you can understand its methods and material constraints and even study them and write a whole 3 tome book about how it instrumentalizes life itself. cosmic horror has a sublime trait to it, it's not just that the universe is cruel, is that its reasons why it subjects terror onto you are just beyond your grasp, and so you imagine that maybe there's even more unfathomable cruelty on its ways that you haven't been subjected to yet. in lacanian terms, it's an otherness so radical it resists symbolization, in a way capitalism just does not. only someone as racist as lovecraft, so neurotically terrified of the abstract otherness of foreign people could've authored this cthulhu crap lol. i think our lives are just becoming very secular and cynical. maybe materialism has really taken over everything, even over the hapless mystics who have turned spirituality into a commodity, and we can wonder no more. in itself a horror, yes.
the universe isn't cruel it can't be it lacks an animating spirit. The universe is no crueller than a rock on the side of the road
"Now your dreams will never again be so peaceful. You will see capital in your nights, like a nightmare, that presses you and threatens to crush you. With terrified eyes you will see it get fatter, like a monster with one hundred proboscises that feverishly search the pores of your body to suck your blood. And finally you will learn to assume its boundless and gigantic proportions, its appearance dark and terrible, with eyes and mouth of fire, morphing its suckers into enormous hopeful trumpets, within which you’ll see thousands of human beings disappear: men, women, children. Down your face will trickle the sweat of death, because your time, and that of your wife and your children will soon arrive. And your final moan will be drowned out by the happy sneering of the monster, glad with your state, so much richer, so much more inhumane."
—Carlo Cafiero, Summary of Marx's Capital
Alright, but is there anything to the story that wasn't just in that comment?
Nah, biblically accurate angels aren't really that scary tbf.
I've met a few and while they do emanate an incomprehensible aura they aren't scary per say. It's more like reality is breaking as your human mind struggles to comprehend. It's not a pleasant sensation at first but you can get used to it surprisingly quickly.
They do feel bad and try to make it as painless as possible for humans. They don't take pleasure in scaring you and would prefer to just appear as humans. The problem is that monkey brains just wouldn't listen as much to a humanoid telling you to do things.
It's not a joke, I'd highly recommend you try talking to one if you want their perspective on the issue.
While they aren't that hurt by you thinking of them as eldritch monsters, you still shouldn't do it. They're not a monolith of course, but I've never met one that enjoyed the fear they create in people. The old Abrahamic "unfeeling servants of God" is only half true. Some are like that but most are surprisingly sensitive to suffering. They just try not to make it about themselves because they're the ones overstepping, even though it's for a good cause.
Sure, I do magic, astral projection, and lucid dreaming. This doesn't mesh well with communism so I usually hide it. I may also just be delusional or have some sort of undiagnosed condition. That makes more sense logically and is what I personally think is happening. But I have fun and it doesn't intrude on my personal life so who cares.
I've met a few and here's what I've been told. They're essentially non-human spirits with some allegiance to a higher power. Not a God per say but a "piece of god" as they've described it. What we describe as Gods are entities with some sort of connection to the Eternal Source of all things from which all souls and energy comes from. Certain gods claim to be "the whole" of this power but others are more hesitant. Angels are spirits contracted under one of these gods and are usually created by the god in question. As opposed to "demons" who either spring up naturally from energy or are separated from their creator god.
Their interest in the material realm is two-fold. One, they seek to harvest earth energy, which we can think of as matter, because it is a valuable resource in the astral plane. It acts as a ground in which harmful/unnecessary energy can be directed. This is also why magic is weaker on the material plane. Anything you could do on the astral would require a shit ton more energy in the material. This has also given us protection from the outside astral. Their second interest is in following the human scientific process of understanding the universe. Like I mentioned earlier, the Eternal Source is a big deal in the astral. Their magicians are constantly seeking new ways to use and understand it. They hope that by us studying the universe, we'll reveal more about their portion of it.
As for personal interactions, they're pretty friendly for the most part. I can't describe exactly what I've seen because they request anonymity. I can say that biblically accurate angels are largely accurate. I would describe them differently, but I can see how someone without an understanding of particles/waves would come up with that description.
Or I could just be delusional ymmv.
I just use my dream powers to get horny dreams. Maybe I should be more ambitious.
My mind literally prevents me from getting horny dreams.
I had a lucid one last night and saw a nice girl who looked like a crush I had in school. I could literally feel the dream ending until I said I just wanted to talk about our time in high school. It immediately stabilized and we had a nice chat for a few minutes.
What methods do you use to lucid dream? I've tried to fulfill my dreams of shooting up trenches full of nazis in my sleep (video games just aren't the same!!111!) but failed, are there any specific things you do?
I wake up an hour early in the morning and immediately roll on to my stomach to sleep. I can't sleep on my stomach usually but when I'm half asleep it's a breeze. I still feel some connection to the body which enables me to enter a dream lucidly. I've gotten about 2-3 lucid dreams a week this way and I stumbled upon it completely unintentionally.
MILD and WILD also exist but I've never found success in those. Dreams are unstable by design, you need to learn to be present but still calm enough. Get a dream journal, try some techniques, but don't really make it an obsession. You ultimately can't control when you lucid dream as a beginner, I can't even control the when as a more experienced person. All you can do is make the right conditions and wait. You'll get the hang of it if you try, but getting there is hard.
Keeping a dream journal is a classic one, just write your dreams first thing when get up in the morning. Then there's methods, an easy one is reality checks for example if you can breathe through a pinched nose, break laws of physics or have really weird hands/whatever versus normally it's a good chance you're in a dream. Do note dreams are ruled by expectations if you expect xyz you will get xyz.
Gotcha. I had a dream journal but I keep forgetting to write in it lol, same goes for reality checks.
When I really want to put effort into LDing I keep a scrap of paper like a receipt etc (or I guess a phone would work) and I just scrawl my memories first thing on waking up on that then transfer to a dream journal if I feel like it.
Lucid dreaming may be socially odd but should be fine, Caudwell wrote about it hypothetically (guy didn't know it existed) as a tool to explore potential praxis but worried when they weren't shared it'd recreate all the errors of old fashioned religion (and ofc escapism). Neurosci/psych agree on lding being existent, the question 10 years ago was were really conscious during them or just remembering so, some of the older neuropsychs are still adamant we're not really conscious during them (Damasio comes to mind for a famous one), imaging studies looked promising, and since this is story telling by the campfire, tbh I've been more lucid in some dreams than I have at work or trips to the grocery store, then again I'm an lding natural, so its like twice a week with next to 0 effort for me.
Rest heck if I know, I'm pretty hard materialist but I'm of the mind if the bourgeois use all sorts of symbolism etc as a tool as should we, no tool should be off the table. There was an old USSR film where Mullah Nasreddin pretended to be an astrologer to avoid the king's wraith. Now, I wouldn't do that in current conditions since there's as many laws still in the books against astrologers and similar in the west esp Burgerland as there are against reds, but there shows some potential use.
This is the thing that always bothers me about magic is that I know I can't do it.
well they must be feeling because lucifer's rebellion was a result of his wounded pride which is a feeling
Can confirm, though that projection of fear is a real common things like them do, if you do any APing you'll run into all sorts of things that do it, though theirs is ngl quite a bit extra and matched with their unique appearance, wild auras and brightness there's no room for imitation. Anyway, figuring out that fear thing it's an illusion its easier not to be rocked with it. They also project love, mercy etc. They have all sorts of emotions, human like and very very different, hard to tell if those are projections as well or some mirroring done to understand us better. If you do extensive AP they and machine elves are super easy to spot in places way beyond that net, usually encounter them guarding shit and learned to not fuck with what they are nor them since if you see them guarding since it's like messing with the guards of the emotional equivalent of a nuclear wastes pit most of the time.
They also don't really seem to talk much, they prefer to do images, basically the guy talking in memes meme, though one tried to speak to me in Aramaic and I don't know that , and they didn't care I didn't know it was some deep symbolic thing. Glossolalia is another thing they do, especially when singing.
I doubt they are 'angels' they're some strange Jungian collective unconscious psychological benevolence thing at standard or some sort of other dimensional being to be fun. For the later they'd be like corvid researchers and we'd be the crows, that 'demon' thing they do is one of the masks they put on to study us more. They do share a lot of 'comradish' stuff and good will, but the former makes me think more of middle age peasants rebels/nonsci comrades ala Thomas Muentzer, its just simply too ideal but they appear to be beautiful creatures of the ideal that like to help us mostly (or believe they are helping us ultimately, they are very alien and we are nothing alike), so that checks out.
Your experiences check out almost 1:1 with my own when I was doing DMT and other substances. I think most of what you're interacting with have been the back-end angels who mostly stumble upon or are stumbled upon by humans.
I've found them to be a little less incomprehensible if you meet some more human-facing ones. Although, since they mostly communicate with emotions/meanings, we could also be talking about two different entities that both translated as "angels." I've mostly spent my time concentrated on spirits within earth and have only taken minor forays into the Astral. Even then, it's been under watch and protection.
Sounds good to me, I figure I usually meet the weird background ones because I'm poking around AP where I probably shouldn't, or so some have told me. Can't explore RL too much, too broke, can explore weird stuff a whole ton since that's free. I'm too broke for drugs, I do meditation that has similar effects though and probably had 1 too many traumatic events to counter that.
The main 3 I've encountered are hyperspace gemstone wheels with eyes (they move weird, makes me think of Sagan's hypercube), 'holy creatures', these weird 4 parted things folded like paper fortune tellers that also have super fast hyperspace movement part minotaur, big cat, bird of prey with an incredibly bright nuclear-blast glow aura, they love to stare deep into your soul-mind, or give that sense, and speak in incomprehensible languages and if you do comprehend them its cause they had it with you and want to be clear, and snakes with like 6 wings that warp space around them so they're usually a ball telling me to
. Snakes and wheels are cool, the 'holy creatures' are on business and have 0 chill, I get the sense they very rarely interact with people, they're also rare to encounter.
While not scary it would appear they have left fragments of being Douglas Adams in your mind
Being buried alive in a submarine at the bottom of the sea is the closest thing I can think of to anything that encapsulates cosmic horror
In a certain sense you are right, but on a more literal level there is little practical difference between that and being put in a hydraulic press. Contrast with prion infection or even just dementia
I think living in that submarine for years blissfully ignorant until one day you realize that fate has you in a mate-in-one scenario, so you run around your 2 feet of space horrified would be more cosmic horror-y as I know it.
You still remember Stockton's Titanic submarine ventures?
In hindsight, I'd give critical support to his ass... except for drowning as well a teenage billionaire's son...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stockton-rush-titan-submersible-implosion-b2378494.html
proper study of marxist theory means you can easily comprehend the horrors
I love the metagame of just making your character totally oblivious in order to preserve their sanity
dumbest mf alive saves the world - when asked for comment, proclaims "I did what now? what monsters?"
This is how I feel about cosmic horror and its cousins like cosmic wonder tbh. It feels like a little kid whispering the b-word in my ear and looking guilty or giggling because they just said the word "butt" when someone is trying to explain cosmic horror/wonder
Being told "just looking at this makes you lose your mind ooooooooooooooooo" does nothing for me.
yeah cause I can look at his face and feel fine. skill issue on the protagonist part
I feel like one could play with that theme in a lot of interesting ways in a way that all the "wow sure is spooky innit? you can't even comprehend the spookiness! [cliched spooky mouth noises]" ones completely and utterly fail to. Weave in a little narrative fiat via "magic"/paracausality and you can get a solid exaggerated allegory for all sorts of real revelations about how fucked things are, like people being "driven mad" by the discovery that everything's collapsing around them and no one is lifting a finger to mitigate it in the least, or that the entire system is a monstrous horror that could stop if people would just stop doing that but they won't and they'll kill you for telling them to stop. Or just played straight like Disco Elysium does, since some of its most iconic quotes (like the mask of capital or the mazovian socio-economics thought) fit the bill perfectly.
Or just make it a big shitpost where the maddening text is just "things don't have to be this bad, they can actually be better than this," but the reader doesn't get to know that until the end when a communist sees it and goes "no shit" without any of the effects that befell the liberals that read it.
People say Lovecraft was a bad writer, and they aren't totally wrong, but his century of imitators have demonstrated how much worse he could have been.
I was very surprised when I read "The Call of Cthulhu" for myself and learned that Cthulhu actually appears in the story, in person. I would've bet money that Lovecraft wouldn't actually show the monster like that. I kinda thought that was the entire point, to keep it vague, looming and intangible.
It is a little odd, but there is a lot (almost everything) about cthulhu that remains unexplained. You get very little of its actual perspective because its effect on the plot has been from mental noise rather than conscious efforts. It clearly doesn't care much for people, but its broader intentions are left unexplained. You learn a fair bit more in Mountains of Madness (also about the Mi-Go), but there the main monster are the Elder Things, and while you literally get a biologist doing an examination of an Elder Thing corpse in the second chapter, the question of what they are like when they are alive is very different.
ooh yeah I remember that book, it was creepy for me too.
I think you and some others here got it right, being told what to feel is just not a great narrative strategy. Better to let the reader/audience figure it out themselves.
tbqh it has mostly been well-written children's books that have made me feel things someone in my situation shouldn't feel ie fear, sorrow, melancholy, horror...The Series of Unfortunate Events and that one plot in Percy Jackson with Circe being some examples
It is up to the author how well they write it. The cosmic horror isn't from that you can't comprehend a thing. It is thst you comprehend that everything you thought was important is a lie. Nothing you have or will do has any meaning. You have never been safe, you will never be safe. All your problems could be easily fixed if you could understand the real nature of things. However, you never will. Also rent is still due
It is kinda like getting dialectic materialism actually
It is the kinda fear that speaks to a downwards mobile middle class white guy. So that is why it was the scariest thing to literature types. Alot of work in that genera specifically of modern times point put thst is just the minority experience in America. One I like recently, the winter's tide series, has the story of innsmouth folk getting sent to internment camps in ww2 along side the japanese. The author is Ruthanna Emry and it is really good if you are interested in a modern take on lovecrafts stuff.
alright lets maintain our convivial and comradely manner here
Have you ever played Outer Wilds? In my mind that game has the best cosmic horror/wonder I've ever experienced. It's possible you might feel it if you play it. Possibly not though, and, of course, not everyone enjoys Outer Wilds. But if you're at all curious and have the time/desire to play Outer Wilds, I wholeheartedly suggest it! Go in blind and just see where the experience takes you!
I haven't but it's on my wishlist! I do enjoy exploration games like that so I'll give it a try
Now your dreams will never again be so peaceful. You will see capital in your nights, like a nightmare, that presses you and threatens to crush you. With terrified eyes you will see it get fatter, like a monster with one hundred proboscises that feverishly search the pores of your body to suck your blood. And finally you will learn to assume its boundless and gigantic proportions, its appearance dark and terrible, with eyes and mouth of fire, morphing its suckers into enormous hopeful trumpets, within which you’ll see thousands of human beings disappear: men, women, children. Down your face will trickle the sweat of death, because your time, and that of your wife and your children will soon arrive. And your final moan will be drowned out by the happy sneering of the monster, glad with your state, so much richer, so much more inhumane.
—Carlo Cafiero, Summary of Marx's Capital
