I prefer the ant on a circuit board, that briefly gained human understanding allegory.
Yeah…
And the chaos causing Lovecraft’s overwhelming sense of dread was black people moving into his New England neighborhood lol
Kind of a lesson on its own… Like look how exhaustively terrifying it can be to be bigoted. I mean, it must be, right?
But unironically, I can see how it makes inroads toward white supremacy. They’re being ground down by the weight of inescapable change that they aren’t keeping apace with when someone comes and says “hating this group will fix it”.
They’re the crazy person who “knows” Nyarlathotep is coming…unless they manage to kill all the cats.
Also the fact that he might be Welsh.
Cthulhu is just the name of his aunt
That got kind of increasingly oddly specific the longer it went on.
This is probably less accurate to Lovecraft’s intent, but I like to think of “cosmic horrors” as being more literal. The universe, by and large, does not care about life - and the fact that it continues to exist at all, let alone so peacefully, is largely just chance or luck. It’s almost absurd that we go about our lives so mundanely, given how chaotic and inhospitable the universe at large largely is.
Events at scales large enough to completely destroy Earth’s biosphere happen on the regular and without reason in the universe. The Earth doesn’t “owe” us a stable and habitable environment, it just happens to have one largely by chance - one cosmic catastrophe and we’re out. One collision of sufficient size, or nearby supernova, or gamma ray burst aimed right at us, or front of vacuum decay, or solar superflare. A rogue planet could pass near our solar system at an odd angle and destabilize our orbit (or those of millions of asteroids).
Even our own actions - man-made climate change and ocean acidification could trigger a phytoplankton die-off, disrupting the global oxygen cycle, slowly suffocating most life over a span of decades. Or we could pass a tipping point and actually have Earth’s biosphere run away into a Venus-like state, no longer habitable at all (there’s on the order of 10x-50x more methane trapped in polar ice, than is in the entire atmosphere). A supervolcano could erupt today and send us into a decade-plus of freezing temperatures, famine, and overall civilization-collapsing conditions.
And in the very long term, an end of this nature is completely guaranteed. Life on Earth will one day end, because we’re entirely dependent on the sun - one of those unfathomably large and powerful cosmic entities that could, at any point, destroy us or our civilization with a single random event. We’re just a lucky ant on the cosmic dance floor that hasn’t been stepped on. Yet.
Ok, now read that in Stephen Fry’s voice.
per se
Immediately thought of the vamp kids from South Park…
That being said, they completely miss the point.
Lovecraft was one of the few authors that got the utterly incomprehensible aspect of it right. If higher dimensional beings interacted with a human it would completely break our minds and leave as a complete mess.
It’s not just that the human isn’t the main character, it’s a small stone that’s never mentioned or shown, that gets stepped on 27% of the way through a story and has absolutely zero effect on anything.
Nothing about us would matter and if the higher dimensional being did pay attention to us, it would be like us skipping a stone across a pond. A peaceful mindless thing a human would do to kill time without a single thought that the stone was even alive let alone what it would think about the act, or during it.
vamp kids from South Park…
Urgh, we’re not vamp we’re fucking goth!
You are the stones that Merry and Pippin thew into the Sirannon that were minding their business, not a soul in sight, and then splash you’re at the bottom of a river that got dammed up. Never to be seen again, nobody caring about you at all.
One day everything you knew and we’re got completely upended by something that didn’t give you a second thought, and now you’re just supposed to deal with it.
This is really well written, and nails how I’ve felt my whole life since n ways I could t even explain. I’m going to save this and send it to anybody who has never been able to understand me, because there is no way in Hell I’d ever be able to articulate my feelings as well as this Internet stranger just did.
I feel that way about at least 3 things. Camus called it “the absurd”. The universe, he said, essentially does not make sense. You can dig and dig and there is no meaning at the bottom. We really are just atoms. The absurd is the interface, when humankind presses their hand against the meaningless and tries to make too much sense of it.
There isn’t going to be an achievement screen when you die.
Terry Pratchett in Hogfather can be read as a direct response - You can live a good life anyway if you believe in “the big lies” - Truth, justice, love, etc.
There isn’t going to be an achievement screen when you die.
I’m about to leave a negative steam review over this shit
I’d ask for a refund, but I’m a few hundred thousand hours beyond that point…
I think there will be an achievement screen when we die but it will be for someone else and in a language we can’t read.
The essay Meditations on Moloch is powerful reading on this topic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
For the record, I don’t endorse Scott Alexander’s opinions in general.
He is also a fantastic fiction author though.
His advice for people with depression is also broadly probably pretty good - my wife has issues with it and we tried a couple of his recommendations she hadn’t tried before, and supplementing OTC l methyl folate helped her significantly despite not having the mutation that commonly results in it being prescribed. And his talking about ketamine being a prospective treatment with some good indicators in research led to the best drug commercial ever, for spravato - esketamine nasal spray for treatment resistant depression.
He’s a psychiatrist by profession so his opinions in that field I would hope were reasonable. His opinions on society and politics are another matter. I think his earlier writing is in general more reasonable than where he’s ended up.
Was an interesting read!
I think about that essay probably once a month at least.
Maybe “Moloch Horror” would be a good Schelling point, since Lovecraft was a racist- oh wait that poet was a pedophile. Shit… “Cosmic horror” it is?
It had a profound impact on me when I read it years ago. It was a key influence on me constructing a personal religious cosmology and practice, with the purpose of reconciling my strong urges towards the spiritual with my reflexive scientific skepticism.
I like the cut of your jib, SamuraiBeandog. 🤘🏼
You have my respect, sir! (non-gendered “sir”)
I think climate change and the extreme weather it causes are the closest we have to eldritch horrors. The impending doom and helplessness of a hurricane or wildfire terrify me. There is literally nothing in my power that I can do to prevent it from happening and there is little I can do to ensure my survival if it gets really bad. I think of storms as these collosal titans tearing through everything we have built and destroying lives without even the knowledge that we exist.
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That’s just regular fear and anxiety. We know what’s happening and why. We understand that in theory it can be stopped and with the power of friendship we can change our outcome.
Cosmos horror is something happening beyond our understanding. Beyond our ability to understand. Like the ant that has a flash of human sentience and experience, seeing the world change due to their decisions and our existence utterly meaningless to them - only to lose that capability but not the memory of what they witnessed. To the ant they saw the answers to so many questions but those answers created more questions and now they will never have closure or understanding.
They will never again be able to know. They are instead cursed with the knowledge that there are bigger things out there and they can change the world without caring about ants at all. The world outside them moves on uncaring. And at any moment it can change and no one would be able to do a thing.
There is a reason a said close to but also a lot of the examples given in the original post are things that can be understood or explained but have an outsized affect on our lives that can’t be fully quantized. Natural disasters can be explained and described but experiencing them is completely different. I have been through a few hurricanes and nothing has made me feel more dwarfed. I am entirely at the whim of nature’s mercy. There’s nothing in this world that is more stunningly beautiful and utterly humanizing. It isn’t exactly eldritch horror but I think the perspective shift from normal life to feeling like a mouse dancing around the pounding feet of an elephant.
Edit: also I don’t humans are capable of grasping climate change that well
I think this is overly literal and simplistic. Sure a person can understand on paper what causes a cyclone or flood. But being in one is an experience completely outside of usual human norms. I would describe the power of a big cyclone or tsunami as “incomprehensible” in precisely the way that a cosmic entity wiping out a city would be; you can read about how many miles per hour the winds are in a cyclone but you don’t really understand what the reality of that kind of force is and just how insignificant you are in the face of it.
TLDR - it’s the fear when you first realize you’re a nihilist
I’m not a nihilist tho.
I think, generally, a lot of people have poor literacy and analysis skills. Like, they might know how to read the words but pulling any deeper meaning out is a reach. I’ve seen too many people that think stories are just stories, and or they have secret meaning for you to find like a puzzle with one or two “correct” answers.
So I think a lot of people read Lovecraft and latch onto “oh yeah squid monster cool”, very literal, and don’t really think about what this post is about. Kind of a shame.
There was a book for an RPG I liked that talked about horror. It said something like yeah monsters with tentacles can be scary but also that’s very mundane, really. You can see and understand that, and probably shoot it. But horror can come in other forms. Like, how would you fight an enemy that is a song?
Lovecraft adaptations can be cool, but unless you’re reading his written words, it just doesn’t hit.
You might be able to get close to portraying it, but I feel like you’d always be missing an integral part of what makes it so terrifying.
Antimemes are dangerous, and we don’t understand them; therefore, they are part of the Problem. Hence my division. We can do the sideways thinking that’s needed to combat something which can literally eat your combat training.
Aw snap, aw snap! Come to our macaroni party and we’ll take a nap!
um, i was promised tentacles?
Sooo… Donald Trump is a cosmic horror?
No. You could argue the system that brought him to power is though.
A system that’s sole purpose is to empower a few kid diddling degenerates. A system that has been intentionally perpetuated by those who embody the worst aspects of human nature. Those who prostrate themselves at the alters of greed and power. Those whose actions are driving our whole species to destruction. The plots and gears of this system were well in motion before any of us were born, and the window to stop it before is destroys us all has passed. The system is biological life’s self-destructive nature made manifest.
In the end we are naught but mere animals. Like all other animals in a system where there are no natural predators and they are allowed propagate unrestrained, it will inevitably lead to the collapse of our ecosystem. We are just deer without hunters on a global scale. Cursed to be clever enough to realize we have brought about our own destruction, but not clever enough to stop it.
A Cosmic Doom has come for us all. The universe will go on without us.
While reading this I kept expecting it to degrade into madness like the html regex explainer
we are naught but mere animals
Speak for yourself, I naught AND a mere animal
To truly understand cosmic horror, look no further than a mathematician.
They get a small (smaller than most will admit) look at something barely comprehensible to human understanding, and it is beautiful, and they dedicate their lives in search of this beauty.
To those outside falls the cosmic horror, the (culturally implied) madness of the mathematician. To those who see, only cosmic bliss exists (seriously, go explore mathematics WITHOUT exams, it will bring you joy).
Consider that HP was writing at a time when we were first figuring out that the Milky Way wasn’t the only galaxy, just figuring out how unfathomably HUGE the universe is. Knowing this and looking deeply into the night sky kinda freaks me out, even in 2025. This was all new to Lovecraft’s generation.
And that’s not even touching on the other scientific advances of the time. We were hit in the face with the fact that what we thought was reality was nowhere even close. Lots of room for unimaginable horrors!
Consider this pic from 1927. All those minds were active at once, tearing down our past conceptions of truth!
Attendees
Auguste Piccard, Émile Henriot, Paul Ehrenfest, Édouard Herzen, Théophile de Donder, Erwin Schrödinger, Jules-Émile Verschaffelt, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Ralph Howard Fowler, Léon Brillouin, Peter Debye, Martin Knudsen, William Lawrence Bragg, Hendrik Anthony Kramers, Paul Dirac, Arthur Compton, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr, Irving Langmuir, Max Planck, Marie Skłodowska Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Paul Langevin, Charles-Eugène Guye, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Willans Richardson
And I’m only highlighting the scientists I’m familiar with!
HP actually describe in his lore the universe as infinite and part of a higher multiverse
Ants on a leaf drifting towards the Niagara Falls.
idk, ants are pretty tough on account of the square-cube law.
We’re more like monkeys in a rainforest being logged
