The Campaign Builder's Guild

So I've managed to basically complete my Small animal fantasy, and this gave me a boost about world building. So I turned back to some of my older settings. I was thinking about giving Dynama another go.

One idea for a world that occurred to me was a gas giant surrounded by several moons with life supporting climates. And before you ask, the idea came from a NatGeo special, and not from Avatar. It seems like one of those ideas that if you don't work yourself too much, you can create a vast world of content.

I began reading Lovecraft a while ago, and I've read through one of his stories to completion. The one about the guy who one day goes crazy and it last's for years, and then finally one day, he finally just snaps out of it. I didn't really understand what was going on. Probably the first sign that I shouldn't be trying to incorporate Lovecraftian elements into a setting. But Dynama was always a world inspired by the early 20th century, and I feel like not using Lovecraft was a huge mistake considering all of it came out of that era.

So here is Lovecraftian horror as far as I understand, which is not a whole lot...

1. There is an entity of unfathomable power, it couldn't care less, and is utterly ruthless.
2. Humans are puny mortals who can't handle the presence of the entity, and often go mad because of what they had witnessed.
3. It's often impossible to tell if the people had actually seen a horror beyond anything they can comprehend, or they just simply went crazy and should be locked up.

Yeah that's pretty much as far as I can understand it. I don't know why I have such a hard time grasping Lovecraft. But there are plenty of good people on this forum who have been using Lovecraft for years. So can you guys help me understand what mentality I should be in when reading Lovecraft, and what's important and what's not?

I would say the first question is, do you want your setting to have Cthulhu Mythos gribblies (or gribblies that resemble those of the Mythos) but otherwise conform to conventional heroic adventure genre norms - or in fact any other genre norms - or do you want to make a Lovecraftian Horror setting?

I think the former option is a lot of fun, and I do it with Dark Silver myself. It doesn't necessarily require as much philosophical buy-in, but lets you use all the fun words like squamous in your monster descriptions and adopt a lot of the evocative trappings of Lovecraft or pseudo-Lovecraft while still letting your PCs be larger-than-life capital-H Heroes and allowing a more kitchen-sink approach to adventures; sure, one week you might be poring over musty tomes of sanity-shattering knowledge and disrupting cult rituals to summon tentacular abominations, but maybe the week after you might jump into political intrigue or a military invasion or a tournament or a sea voyage through corsair-infested waters. The Cthulhoid gribblies can still be there in the background (or even the foreground - maybe the knights in your tournament joust from the backs of byakhees or the pirates are deep one hybrids), but as they're essentially set-dressing as much as anything else in this format, it's more optional how and when you choose to engage with them.

The latter option will probably require more of a ground-up approach and a focus of the entire theme of the setting to be around not just Cthulhoid entities but Lovecraftian Horror. A big part of that is to do with Otherness. People have written before about Lovecraft's racism and how it influenced the themes of his work, his seeming terror of the alien, and while he was undeniably bigoted, I think fear of the unknown and incomprehensible transcends the repugnance of race-theory.
The Otherness in Lovecraftian horror is not simply to do with the Weird - though it is that - but also the fact that the artefacts and entities and so on of the Mythos, by their very existence, disprove the world-view held by the mainstream of modern humanity. There are beings older than we can fathom, who do not fit into any possible interpretation of what we know of history, whose technologies and abilities, indeed whose very physicality, cannot be explained by our science, and whose motives are so alien to our own philosophies, emotions and moralities as to be terrifying in their very strangeness. They, not we, are the true powers in the universe, and in that realisation lies the horror and the trigger for the madness that so often overtakes Lovecraftian characters. Essentially, everything we think we know is wrong.

A well-executed "straight" Lovecraftian Horror setting could be great, but in my opinion might struggle to avoid redundancy. This isn't to say it couldn't be done, or that it would be futile to try, but I suppose a part of me would be thinking "well, why not just play Call of Cthulhu?"

Quote from: Love of Awesome
But Dynama was always a world inspired by the early 20th century, and I feel like not using Lovecraft was a huge mistake considering all of it came out of that era.

That seems pretty illogical. Although Lovecraft wrote his short stories during the early 20th century and set most of them in that era, they didn't actually become influential until much later. It's not at all difficult to invoke an early 20th century aesthetic and spirit in any work of fiction without making any references whatsoever to HPL's works.

Quote from: Love of Awesome
So here is Lovecraftian horror as far as I understand, which is not a whole lot...

1. There is an entity of unfathomable power, it couldn't care less, and is utterly ruthless.
2. Humans are puny mortals who can't handle the presence of the entity, and often go mad because of what they had witnessed.
3. It's often impossible to tell if the people had actually seen a horror beyond anything they can comprehend, or they just simply went crazy and should be locked up.

Although these are common themes, they're not ubiquitous. Some of HPL's stories feature entities far less powerful than the godlike Great Old Ones. The ways in which humans react to encounters with mythos elements are also quite varied.

One of the key aspects of Lovecraftion horror IMO is the downward spiral of horrific discovery: the protagonist starts out in a state of blissful ignorance, then gradually discovers increasingly unsettling facts, and finally putting all the pieces together arrives at a conclusion that undermines his self-image or worldview in a very fundamental and terrifying manner. It's not so much about what that particular conclusion is, but about what it means to the character and the reader.

One thing to remember about Lovecraft is that he sees himself as an anachronism, and much of his fiction reflects this. He saw "conflict with time" as one of the great  conflicts of all fiction, and weird fiction especially. This is seen in a number of his different works. It sounds like you might have read "The Shadow Out of Time," which deals with this directly in some ways. If you're still eager to give Lovecraft another try, I'd suggest reading "The Call of Cthulhu" and "At the Mountains of Madness." They're very quintessential Lovecraft.

My point about time is that you shouldn't feel pressured to use Lovecraft because he fits the period, because in so many ways he doesn't. Although many of Lovecraft's stories are set in the then-present day, they almost always hearken back to an extreme primordial past. In style he's emulating the 18th century in many ways (Xathan has an interesting treatment of this) as well as Classical sources.

Your description of Lovecraftian horror isn't too far off, though as Ghostman suggests it's perhaps a bit too generalized. I'd say the core of Lovecraftian horror is best summed up by Lovecraft himself in his landmark essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature":

Quote from: H.P. Lovecraft[Weird fiction] must not be confounded with a type externally similar but psychologically widely different; the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome. Such writing, to be sure, has its place, as has the conventional or even whimsical or humorous ghost story where formalism or the author's knowing wink removes the true sense of the morbidly unnatural; but these things are not the literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense. The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain - a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the dæmons of unplumbed space.

In many ways that sums it up, although he tends to stray away from the "defeat of fixed laws of Nature" in his later works, where we rather get the feeling that his works aren't imagining the defeat of science or scientific laws but rather a sense that the laws of nature are simply far stranger and unfathomable than we had ever imagined (partly he came to such conclusions after scientific advances in the 20s and 30s). But the bits about "dread of our, unknown forces" is spot on, and of their very conception being hazardous in its incomprehensibility. The key thing to remember about Lovecraft is that for him, humans are chance arrangements of elementary particles adrift on a ball of rock. We're not important, we're not part of any divine scheme or telos, and we have no great destiny waiting for us. The universe is indifferent to us so completely that it can appear malign. But his Great Old Ones, Elder Gods, etc - no matter how much Derleth and others want to moralize them - are essentially uncaring towards humanity. We are, at most, cattle or slaves; really, though, we're more like insects. Lovecraftian fiction is frequently oriented around such sickening revelations. I think Kindling is right that Lovecraft's racism isn't the core his fiction, it's more like a manifestation or symptom of his underlying hatred/disgust at the grotesquery of life and the universe themselves.

He's also got some badass monsters, easily looted for the Lovecraftian-gribblies option that Kindling mentions.

Something I have been running into some trouble with in trying to adopt a sense of Lovecraftian Horror to one of my settings is that so much of the essence of Lovecraft's work does seem to be rooted in that they take place in the modern world of science.  The elder gods, great old ones, and their kith and kin violate our understanding of the world.  And he was a bit out of his era, but it's very much about the very ancient and the very modern, and we can't cope with that.  I personally am having trouble evoking an appropriate vibe because my setting is very old; roughly medieval at its most advanced, though half the setting is the equivalent to far older than that.  The gribblies feel less out of place; and less horrific for their lack of shock value.  In a world of gods and faeries, witches, spirits, and spells, they seem more like the far end of a spectrum of baddies, rather than the maddening forces of extreme otherness they are in Lovecraft's works. 

Seraflumph, my two low-denomination monetary units:

As I said I tend to use Lovecraft-style entities more as a set dressing in Dark Silver - evocative monsters and nemeses for what is essentially a dark sword and and sorcery setting rather than a horror one. However I do try to keep at least a token element of their Otherness and Wrongness for atmosphere's sake.
I think the key to maintaining this in a medieval/ancient type fantasy setting is to make sure there is a clear divide between the stuff that humans (and demihumans, if present) believe in and the stuff that is Mythos or pseudo-Mythos.
So, in Dark Silver, I have human beliefs centre around the Gods of the Earth; various aspects of the Triple Goddess and the All-Father. Entities from the Beyond are simply not a part of human belief systems or world-views, and so are Other and Wrong to humans - maybe not in the same way as to humans from a modern, scientific age, but there is still an element of something similar; the confrontation of a fundamental belief with a reality inimical to it.
In a real-world medieval setting of course this principal belief system would be Christianity, which would actually work really well, perhaps even better than your typical polytheistic fantasy cosmology, as a world-view to be shattered when confronted with eldritch abomination.

Yeah, I think Kindling's right. Lovecraftian horror not only doesn't care about the human moral order and the divinities associated with it, the Great Old Ones actually undermine that kind of binary thinking: they're sublimely powerful but utterly alien, so they make a mockery of the idea that the universe runs on anything like a system of absolute morality.

It's trickier with paganism, though, where nature and fate kind of are these unfeeling, all-powerful forces that are beyond human morals. There's something rather Lovecraftian about a lot of the "chthonic" deities of various non-Christian religions in particular, both in appearance and in character. In a lot of older world-views and even in some Christian cosmologies a kind of undifferentiated flux precedes the world as we know it, and there are often creatures born of or associated with that chaos - so in Norse myth there's Ymir, the first Giant, who was eviscerated to create the universe, but his descendents, the Giants sort of want to return to the undifferentiated state. In Greek myth there's the primal void of Chaos that births Nyx and Erebus and all that. For all that Lovecraft's outer horrors scorned direct mythological cognates, there's more than a trace of Chaos, Ymir, Nyx etc in beings like Azathoth ("the amorphous blight of nethermost confusion"), Yog-Sothoth (the "All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self—not merely a thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence's whole unbounded sweep"), and, my personal favourite, Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young (both male and female, endlessly and horrifically fecund).

Okay, so I found a reading of Call of Cthulhu on youtube, and had a listen through while dealing with chores, and trying to beat the Portal challenges for the first time. Man I have got some nerdy catching up to do...

I like it! I'll give Mountains of Madness a go when I can. Also Shub-Niggurath (also how do you pronounce that?) S/he sounds... interesting... I don't know if I mean that in a good way, or a morbid way... How about both?

Also I really like reading this discussion. I don't know I still feel like there's something I'm not grasping here. I've listened through CoC, and yeah, it was disturbing seeing what those cultists were doing, but I never felt like my skin was crawling.

Also, yeah Lovecraft is uber-racist... Is it true that he was anti-semitic WHILE being married to a Jewish woman?

Quote from: Seraflumph
In a world of gods and faeries, witches, spirits, and spells, they seem more like the far end of a spectrum of baddies, rather than the maddening forces of extreme otherness they are in Lovecraft's works.

Going slightly off topic here, but I'm musing that an effective way of inserting alienness into a low-civ fantasy could be via elements rooted in the modern-age scientific/speculative ideas. For example, things such as helicopters, tablet computers and 3D printers would not only appear as hideously strange and frightening to a medieval person, but the implications of their functions could also be potentially deeply disturbing. All the more so if you don't call them by their names but merely describe them in IC terms: A spinning machine that lifts men from the ground and spirits them up to the heaven. A glowing booklet that conjures visions and voices from the past and beyond untraversable distances, and contains more knowledge than all of the world's libraries put together. A box that imitates the miracle of creation.

Of course, in a setting where magic is so commonplace and convenient that it allows the population to effectively live like modern-age people, this effect would be largely lost.

Quote from: Love of AwesomeI like it! I'll give Mountains of Madness a go when I can. Also Shub-Niggurath (also how do you pronounce that?) S/he sounds... interesting... I don't know if I mean that in a good way, or a morbid way... How about both?

Also I really like reading this discussion. I don't know I still feel like there's something I'm not grasping here. I've listened through CoC, and yeah, it was disturbing seeing what those cultists were doing, but I never felt like my skin was crawling.

Also, yeah Lovecraft is uber-racist... Is it true that he was anti-semitic WHILE being married to a Jewish woman?

Shub-Niggurath is featured in a lot of Mythos tales that aren't by Lovecraft (this being a central feature of Lovecraft's work - the creation of a shared universe). As for pronunciation, I don't know if there's an approved one. I don't know if the similarity in sound to the racial slur is intentional; it's possible, I suppose, although the word had far less stigma in Lovecraft's time (Lovecraft owned a cat he affectionately named "Nigger-man"; even a very racist person today wouldn't name their cat that).

Try reading through At the Mountains of Madness while listening to the soundtrack to Alien - that film owes an immense debt to Lovecraft's novella.

Lovecraft was very racist, even admitting for his time. His racism was rooted in a deep cultural conservatism; he saw racial miscegenation as undermining the precious Anglo-American traditions he cherished. While he was certainly anti-Semitic and had to sometimes be reminded by his wife that she was Jewish, Sonia was probably "assimilated" enough that Lovecraft didn't perceive her as threateningly Jewish; that said, there's some evidence that his racism contributed to the decline of their marriage.

It's perhaps worth noting that while he certainly harboured racist views, Lovecraft never condoned racial violence and was thoroughly disgusted at the way Nazis treated Jews leading up to WWII. To all he met - including those of non-white ethnicities - he seems to have been a complete gentleman, compulsively polite. This isn't to pardon or defend his racism/xenophobia, but it's easy to conflate his views with some even uglier ones held at the time.

Incidentally, At the Mountains of Madness is probably one of the least racist of Lovecraft's works, either overtly or tacitly. Towards the end there's a moment I'm tempted to read as almost anti-racist. This probably has a lot to do with its Antarctic setting, but perhaps also how late it was written in Lovecraft's life.

I'm just posting real quick to say three things:

1. I've been reading through At the Mountains of Madness. Not finished yet, because that story is kind of a monster compared to CoC. This time I read in the dark and I took Steerpikes advice and listened to the Alien soundtrack while reading it. I finally figured out what I was missing, and that was atmosphere! I was at the edge of my seat during part 1 of AtMoM and nothing bad was happening yet... Any other scary music to recommend? I was thinking of the PI soundtrack while listening to a couple of the Alien songs, but I don't think that would fit.

2. One of my favorite directors is Guillermo Del Toro, and I watched Hellboy again tonight. Man I cannot believe how I missed the fact that this man was a Lovecraft nut, but now I began seeing just how heavily he draws on the genre.

3. This post really opened my eyes.

Good link.

For Mountains, you could try the soundtracks to Alien: Isolation, The Descent, The Thing, Penumbra, and Dead Space.

Other good music for Lovecraft: the Amniesa soundtrack, the Outlast soundtrack, the Call of Cthulhu soundtrack (of course), the Hellraiser soundtrack, and the Alan Wake soundtrack, to list a few.

I agree it's kind of remarkable how the addition of something like a little background music enhances horror! I'm always listening to something creepy when I read weird fiction.

Del Toro has been trying to get a movie of Mountains done for like 10, 15 years. Some of his work, particularly Pan's Labyrinth, is quite influenced by Arthur Machen's stuff as well. Machen is a strange trip all his own, though probably less accessible than Lovecraft (imagine if Lovecraft was British, was really into Anglo-Catholicism and the occult, and picked fairies instead of sea-creatures as the basis for his monsters... that's kind of Machen, every bit as revolted with the world and twisted as Lovecraft and very similar stylistically, but from a very different perspective).

Ooh, well the occult & fairy stuff sounds interesting to me.  Not necessarily the Anglo-Catholicism, but I might have to check out Machen.

As far as music, I like to go to cryo chamber's channel on youtube.  They've got lots of dark ambient music.  One is even a "Cthulhu" list, though there are a couple others that tap into my own fear centers more.

That cryo chamber channel is amazing! I'm going to use some of that for Fimbulvinter and lots of other things.

Quote from: SeraflumphNot necessarily the Anglo-Catholicism, but I might have to check out Machen.

The Anglo-Catholicism stuff isn't at all, like, stern morals or dogma or parables of Christian virtue; think more like mysticism, and black sacramental wine turning people into daemoniac ooze and unhallowed ecstasies. As Machen's characters put it in "The White People":

[spoiler]

Quote from: Arthur Machen"SORCERY and sanctity," said Ambrose, "these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life."

Cotgrave listened, interested. He had been brought by a friend to this mouldering house in a northern suburb, through an old garden to the room where Ambrose the recluse dozed and dreamed over his books.

"Yes," he went on, "magic is justified of her children. There are many, I think, who eat dry crusts and drink water, with a joy infinitely sharper than anything within the experience of the 'practical' epicure."

"You are speaking of the saints?"

"Yes, and of the sinners, too. I think you are falling into the very general error of confining the spiritual world to the supremely good; but the supremely wicked, necessarily, have their portion in it. The merely carnal, sensual man can no more be a great sinner than he can be a great saint. Most of us are just indifferent, mixed-up creatures; we muddle through the world without realizing the meaning and the inner sense of things, and, consequently, our wickedness and our goodness are alike second-rate, unimportant."

"And you think the great sinner, then, will be an ascetic, as well as the great saint?"

"Great people of all kinds forsake the imperfect copies and go to the perfect originals. I have no doubt but that many of the very highest among the saints have never done a 'good action' (using the words in their ordinary sense). And, on the other hand, there have been those who have sounded the very depths of sin, who all their lives have never done an 'ill deed.'"

He went out of the room for a moment, and Cotgrave, in high delight, turned to his friend and thanked him for the introduction.

"He's grand," he said. "I never saw that kind of lunatic before."

Ambrose returned with more whisky and helped the two men in a liberal manner. He abused the teetotal sect with ferocity, as he handed the seltzer, and pouring out a glass of water for himself, was about to resume his monologue, when Cotgrave broke in--

"I can't stand it, you know," he said, "your paradoxes are too monstrous. A man may be a great sinner and yet never do anything sinful! Come!"

"You're quite wrong," said Ambrose. "I never make paradoxes; I wish I could. I merely said that a man may have an exquisite taste in Romanée Conti, and yet never have even smelt four ale. That's all, and it's more like a truism than a paradox, isn't it? Your surprise at my remark is due to the fact that you haven't realized what sin is. Oh, yes, there is a sort of connexion between Sin with the capital letter, and actions which are commonly called sinful: with murder, theft, adultery, and so forth. Much the same connexion that there is between the A, B, C and fine literature. But I believe that the misconception--it is all but universal--arises in great measure from our looking at the matter through social spectacles. We think that a man who does evil to us and to his neighbours must be very evil. So he is, from a social standpoint; but can't you realize that Evil in its essence is a lonely thing, a passion of the solitary, individual soul? Really, the average murderer, quâ murderer, is not by any means a sinner in the true sense of the word. He is simply a wild beast that we have to get rid of to save our own necks from his knife. I should class him rather with tigers than with sinners."

"It seems a little strange."

"I think not. The murderer murders not from positive qualities, but from negative ones; he lacks something which non-murderers possess. Evil, of course, is wholly positive--only it is on the wrong side. You may believe me that sin in its proper sense is very rare; it is probable that there have been far fewer sinners than saints. Yes, your standpoint is all very well for practical, social purposes; we are naturally inclined to think that a person who is very disagreeable to us must be a very great sinner! It is very disagreeable to have one's pocket picked, and we pronounce the thief to be a very great sinner. In truth, he is merely an undeveloped man. He cannot be a saint, of course; but he may be, and often is, an infinitely better creature than thousands who have never broken a single commandment. He is a great nuisance to us, I admit, and we very properly lock him up if we catch him; but between his troublesome and unsocial action and evil--Oh, the connexion is of the weakest."

It was getting very late. The man who had brought Cotgrave had probably heard all this before, since he assisted with a bland and judicious smile, but Cotgrave began to think that his "lunatic" was turning into a sage.

"Do you know," he said, "you interest me immensely? You think, then, that we do not understand the real nature of evil?"

"No, I don't think we do. We over-estimate it and we under-estimate it. We take the very numerous infractions of our social 'bye-laws'--the very necessary and very proper regulations which keep the human company together--and we get frightened at the prevalence of 'sin' and 'evil.' But this is really nonsense. Take theft, for example. Have you any horror at the thought of Robin Hood, of the Highland caterans of the seventeenth century, of the moss-troopers, of the company promoters of our day?

"Then, on the other hand, we underrate evil. We attach such an enormous importance to the 'sin' of meddling with our pockets (and our wives) that we have quite forgotten the awfulness of real sin."

"And what is sin?" said Cotgrave.

"I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?

"Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is."

"Look here," said the third man, hitherto placid, "you two seem pretty well wound up. But I'm going home. I've missed my tram, and I shall have to walk."

Ambrose and Cotgrave seemed to settle down more profoundly when the other had gone out into the early misty morning and the pale light of the lamps.

"You astonish me," said Cotgrave. "I had never thought of that. If that is really so, one must turn everything upside down. Then the essence of sin really is----"

"In the taking of heaven by storm, it seems to me," said Ambrose. "It appears to me that it is simply an attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner. You can understand why it is so rare. There are few, indeed, who wish to penetrate into other spheres, higher or lower, in ways allowed or forbidden. Men, in the mass, are amply content with life as they find it. Therefore there are few saints, and sinners (in the proper sense) are fewer still, and men of genius, who partake sometimes of each character, are rare also. Yes; on the whole, it is, perhaps, harder to be a great sinner than a great saint."

"There is something profoundly unnatural about Sin? Is that what you mean?"

"Exactly. Holiness requires as great, or almost as great, an effort; but holiness works on lines that were natural once; it is an effort to recover the ecstasy that was before the Fall. But sin is an effort to gain the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels and in making this effort man becomes a demon. I told you that the mere murderer is not therefore a sinner; that is true, but the sinner is sometimes a murderer. Gilles de Raiz is an instance. So you see that while the good and the evil are unnatural to man as he now is--to man the social, civilized being--evil is unnatural in a much deeper sense than good. The saint endeavours to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall."

"But are you a Catholic?" said Cotgrave.

"Yes; I am a member of the persecuted Anglican Church."

"Then, how about those texts which seem to reckon as sin that which you would set down as a mere trivial dereliction?"

"Yes; but in one place the word 'sorcerers' comes in the same sentence, doesn't it? That seems to me to give the key-note. Consider: can you imagine for a moment that a false statement which saves an innocent man's life is a sin? No; very good, then, it is not the mere liar who is excluded by those words; it is, above all, the 'sorcerers' who use the material life, who use the failings incidental to material life as instruments to obtain their infinitely wicked ends. And let me tell you this: our higher senses are so blunted, we are so drenched with materialism, that we should probably fail to recognize real wickedness if we encountered it."

"But shouldn't we experience a certain horror--a terror such as you hinted we would experience if a rose tree sang--in the mere presence of an evil man?"

"We should if we were natural: children and women feel this horror you speak of, even animals experience it. But with most of us convention and civilization and education have blinded and deafened and obscured the natural reason. No, sometimes we may recognize evil by its hatred of the good--one doesn't need much penetration to guess at the influence which dictated, quite unconsciously, the 'Blackwood' review of Keats--but this is purely incidental; and, as a rule, I suspect that the Hierarchs of Tophet pass quite unnoticed, or, perhaps, in certain cases, as good but mistaken men."

"But you used the word 'unconscious' just now, of Keats' reviewers. Is wickedness ever unconscious?"

"Always. It must be so. It is like holiness and genius in this as in other points; it is a certain rapture or ecstasy of the soul; a transcendent effort to surpass the ordinary bounds. So, surpassing these, it surpasses also the understanding, the faculty that takes note of that which comes before it. No, a man may be infinitely and horribly wicked and never suspect it. But I tell you, evil in this, its certain and true sense, is rare, and I think it is growing rarer."

"I am trying to get hold of it all," said Cotgrave. "From what you say, I gather that the true evil differs generically from that which we call evil?"

"Quite so. There is, no doubt, an analogy between the two; a resemblance such as enables us to use, quite legitimately, such terms as the 'foot of the mountain' and the 'leg of the table.' And, sometimes, of course, the two speak, as it were, in the same language. The rough miner, or 'puddler,' the untrained, undeveloped 'tiger-man,' heated by a quart or two above his usual measure, comes home and kicks his irritating and injudicious wife to death. He is a murderer. And Gilles de Raiz was a murderer. But you see the gulf that separates the two? The 'word,' if I may so speak, is accidentally the same in each case, but the 'meaning' is utterly different. It is flagrant 'Hobson Jobson' to confuse the two, or rather, it is as if one supposed that Juggernaut and the Argonauts had something to do etymologically with one another. And no doubt the same weak likeness, or analogy, runs between all the 'social' sins and the real spiritual sins, and in some cases, perhaps, the lesser may be 'schoolmasters' to lead one on to the greater--from the shadow to the reality. If you are anything of a Theologian, you will see the importance of all this."

"I am sorry to say," remarked Cotgrave, "that I have devoted very little of my time to theology. Indeed, I have often wondered on what grounds theologians have claimed the title of Science of Sciences for their favourite study; since the 'theological' books I have looked into have always seemed to me to be concerned with feeble and obvious pieties, or with the kings of Israel and Judah. I do not care to hear about those kings."

Ambrose grinned.

"We must try to avoid theological discussion," he said. "I perceive that you would be a bitter disputant. But perhaps the 'dates of the kings' have as much to do with theology as the hobnails of the murderous puddler with evil."

"Then, to return to our main subject, you think that sin is an esoteric, occult thing?"

"Yes. It is the infernal miracle as holiness is the supernal. Now and then it is raised to such a pitch that we entirely fail to suspect its existence; it is like the note of the great pedal pipes of the organ, which is so deep that we cannot hear it. In other cases it may lead to the lunatic asylum, or to still stranger issues. But you must never confuse it with mere social misdoing. Remember how the Apostle, speaking of the 'other side,' distinguishes between 'charitable' actions and charity. And as one may give all one's goods to the poor, and yet lack charity; so, remember, one may avoid every crime and yet be a sinner"

"Your psychology is very strange to me," said Cotgrave, "but I confess I like it, and I suppose that one might fairly deduce from your premisses the conclusion that the real sinner might very possibly strike the observer as a harmless personage enough?"

"Certainly, because the true evil has nothing to do with social life or social laws, or if it has, only incidentally and accidentally. It is a lonely passion of the soul--or a passion of the lonely soul--whichever you like. If, by chance, we understand it, and grasp its full significance, then, indeed, it will fill us with horror and with awe. But this emotion is widely distinguished from the fear and the disgust with which we regard the ordinary criminal, since this latter is largely or entirely founded on the regard which we have for our own skins or purses. We hate a murder, because we know that we should hate to be murdered, or to have any one that we like murdered. So, on the 'other side,' we venerate the saints, but we don't 'like' them as well as our friends. Can you persuade yourself that you would have 'enjoyed' St. Paul's company? Do you think that you and I would have 'got on' with Sir Galahad?

"So with the sinners, as with the saints. If you met a very evil man, and recognized his evil; he would, no doubt, fill you with horror and awe; but there is no reason why you should 'dislike' him. On the contrary, it is quite possible that if you could succeed in putting the sin out of your mind you might find the sinner capital company, and in a little while you might have to reason yourself back into horror. Still, how awful it is. If the roses and the lilies suddenly sang on this coming morning; if the furniture began to move in procession, as in De Maupassant's tale!"

[/spoiler]

Machen has a whole crazy aesthetic philosophy based on this stuff, that's all about regressing into a sort of primordial way of looking at the universe. He considered himself a Catholic, but he also considered the ancient pagans dancing around a heathen fire and drinking wine "Catholics" of a certain type. What he really believes is that the universe is a great mystery, that the material is but a shell, or rather a sacrament of a more transcendental reality. For this reason (unlike Lovecraft) he was very much against materialism, and thought that science and education were ruining everything, unweaving the rainbow and substituting a shallow, material world for the truer, numinous world.