Eldritch Abominations in Real Life

On another note, the idea that madness is the natural response to seeing some eldritch horror is somewhat problematic. Because what is madness? Madness, put simply, is the mind's inability or unwillingness to accept reality as it is. A person who knows that there are things that exist out there and they are watching us isn't mad if what they know is in fact true. When Marie and Pierre Curie discovered that some substances exude an invisible energy field that can penetrate solid objects and cause cancer, they weren't mad. They discovered that radiation is real.

If I came to the realization that the world that everybody lives in isn't the real world, then I wouldn't be the madman; I would be the one who actually sees things the way that they truly are. Everybody else would just be ignorant. Naturally, I would probably be perceived as mad, of course, by the lucky fools who go about their daily lives blissfully unaware of the horrifying truth.

The sanity thing is the finicky bit. When someone saw an Elder Thing or Great Old One, they'd be reduced to a glibering wreck, mind broken by what they saw. However, the human mind doesn't work like that. When our eyes see something our brain can't understand, we get confused and perhaps frustrated but that's by no means mind breaking. When we're forcefully reminded of our insignificance in the cosmos, we get depressed, but are still functional.

There are more definitions of madness than just irrationality. For example: a panic attack. I say someone exhibiting PTSD, or uncontrolled fear and panic is mad. By some standards.

This type of unhelpful behaviour can be induced in many people when they witness stuff they previously thought impossible. So "Go mad from the revelation" could be a fair degree more mundane than some here are probably imagining.

They don't look very human, though.

a lot of concpet have change over the year and is dificult to portray this days, for example Madness here is not the mental illness kind of thing but someone mind being broke after wittness thing man should not know

"However, the human mind doesn't work like that. When our eyes see something our brain can't understand, we get confused and perhaps frustrated but that's by no means mind breaking. When we're forcefully reminded of our insignificance in the cosmos, we get depressed, but are still functional."

Think uncanny valley in crack, in the momento your mind see that is more "NO,NO,NO,N FUCK SHIT NO!"

also people are funcional and many protagonist of lovecraft leave...in a way

Well, the Deep Ones start off as being able to pass as human, and even big C himself has some humanoid traits. Presumably, for a guy not too keen on miscegenation, the horror would stem from realizing humanity might actually be related to such monstrosities.

What I like about the Cthulhu mythos is that, with its multi-writer nature, it can offer vastly different reactions to relatively similar elements. The Challenge from Beyond is an excellent example, with the Lovecraft section of the story describing the protagonist being sent, in spirit, into the body of a gruesome alien, and recoiling in fear and disgust... yet as the next chapter is written by none other than Robert Howard, the character quickly sheds this unease and is instead filled with lust for adventure and conquest.

For that matter, Howard's mythos stories feature objects that influence the mind directly, either transporting it to another body or inducing a berserker rage. All in all, my conclusion is that there are elements of the mythos that can cause insanity, but they are only tangentially related to the various multi-tentacled creatures that also inhabit the world.

edited 22nd Jun '16 10:48:40 PM by indiana404

to ne fair, that is because lovecraft itselft wasnt shy of fan medding in his work, so not surprise that Howard shred the disgust into aventure and conquest

The problem is that Cosmic Horror works tend to act like the revelation is some kind of Brown Note, which it wouldn't necessarily be. The Anti-Nihilist would likely come out relatively unfazed, for example.

One way to get around it is that the abominations actually create waves of psychic energy that interfere with someone's ability to reason (or they intentionally use this to torture their enemies-causing hallucinations and such. One in my work communicates telepathically with people in a voice that sounds like their own thoughts-so the poor individual isn't even entirely sure what they're thinking any more). However, that might be a bit of a cop-out, though.

There's also the issue with the mythos books. Simply reading the Necronomicon or the King in Yellow was supposed to have a corrupting influence. This is fine if the book was made of human skin and had all of your innermost secrets in the dedication but in many cases the text alone was supposed to drive a man insane.

We also know a lot more about how the human mind works today than we did a hundred years ago. Probably the most predictable reaction to receiving an unpleasant revelation is denial. Whether you just try to ignore what you just learned or you collapse on the ground repeating, "No no no no no no no" over and over again.

There's also the question of how receptive the person would be to the revelation. If an atheist started hearing unexplained voices, they would probably assume they were the symptoms of a mental illness and go to a doctor. On the other hand a fervent religious believer may think that a god or an angel, or even a demon, was talking to them and go to their local priest or whatever.

In a lot of these types of stories, especially those set in the modern western world, it's often the person "afflicted" who is convinced that what they're experiencing is supernatural, while everybody around them asserts that "there's a rational explanation for this." I would think that the reverse has been done; where an eldritch being is contacting a person, but the victim keeps insisting that there is something physically wrong with their brain, while everybody around them becomes convinced that it's a demon or whatever.

Speaking of religion, another thing to consider is the prominence of explicitly religious elements in the mythos, as opposed to just supernatural occurrences. Both atheists and devout believers would be rather unnerved to realize that the world is not only manipulated by gods, but that these gods are nothing like the relatively benevolent cornerstones of most major religions, instead being cruel and uncaring. Seeing a cultist ritual actually summon such a being into existence, even if it were merely a weak and grotesque frog monster, would likely be more than enough to break a few mental gears. Though again, the likes of Conan would be logically immune to such revelations, since he's already living in accordance with them.

Interesting fact: As far as we know, all the visible matter of the universe (basically, the atoms that make up humans, animals, air, planets, galaxies, etc) only makes up about 5% of the known universe.

As such, everything we can know and percieve make up only a tiny fraction of what actually exists in the universe. This doesn't even go into the existence of things like alternate universes or extra dimensions.

Problem is: Dark matter and dark energy doesn't interact with normal matter in a way we expect and doesn't seem to interact with light.

As such, if there are things like real-life Eldritch Abominations and they are made up of dark matter or dark energy... then they would at the very least be completely invisible to our senses and most likely we would be invisible to them. We don't know how they would interact with us, even if they could. For all we know, there could be star-sized dark matter squid things flying through our milky way galaxy on a regular basis gobbling up dark-matter planets like whales eat krill... but they barely interact with us at all since they can't eat us, touch us, see us, interact with us, and even if they could... we only make up at best 5% of the matter in the universe so it simply isn't worth investing the energy into finding out how to interact with us.

Our whole reality would be like a couple lily pads floating at the top of a giant lake while all sorts of fish, squids, bugs, and other stuff are flying around below the surface.

But, then again, dark matter beings can't interact with us because they are made of dark matter... and dark matter's inability to interact with regular matter seems like one of it's primary properties. So it's not like they are going to suddenly start invading our reality... and if they try they would be more likely to die horribly as every particle in their body gets transmuted into something that their weird species has never interacted with before.

If we ever do encounter something truly incomprehensable... it's less likely to drive us insane (well, I guess it depends on how panicky you are) then it would be to just leave us going "Huh?" as we use our scanners to detect this big invisible thing floating around in space.

Imagine someone making a scanner that detects them, they find out that space is absolutely teaming with giant planet-sized monsters... and after a couple months or whatever of the media freaking out and people panicking, the scientist just says "Dude! There's literally nothing to worry about. Sure, there's a bunch of weird monsters out there... and they have been there since before our ancestors discovered tools... but they can't interact with us. Let's just study how they move and maybe use it to make a perpetual motion generator or FTL travel or something."

Honestly, I think we would be just as alien to them as they would be to us.

Schlock Mercenary did a good tentacled dark matter monstrosity. And Giant planet sized dark matter aliens would be extremely dangerous to us. If one were to travel through the earth, the earth would be ripped apart due to gravitational effects.

My two bits: How about something that does not follow the rules science has discovered, it's very existence breaking every law of thermodynamics. If a discovery ripped apart everything we understood about the way we have discovered reality I don't really think that it would require much more effort to make it truly alien.

Do your homework about how the world works and then create a thing that spits in it's face.

And something man-made can't be an Eldritch Abomination? let's say for example some sort of genetic experiment gone wrong (or right depending on what was the intention). In any case, there should be EA in real life, probably alien life forms that we cant fully understand or that exists in some locations that we dont

The challenge with a man-made eldritch abomination is that an EA by its nature is able to ignore the natural laws of the universe as we understand them. Even a genetic experiment would start with existing genes or strands of DNA and then be modified into something else. Meaning that it would still be confined by the normal physical laws of reality. Sure you could create some sort of horrible gribbly tentacled monstrosity, but that would just qualify as a garden-variety abomination. In order to be truly Eldritch it would need to do something that the laws of physics as we understand them say is impossible.

The idea of "junk" DNA has been used in some stories I've heard about. Supposedly by "re-activating" dormant genetic information we can unlock some sort of hidden potential. In reality that's a bunch of nonsense, since junk DNA is nonfunctional. That's why it's called junk. But in your story, who's to say what's really in there? After all, we're only 1% different from chimps.

edited 5th Jul '16 10:13:33 AM by Lawyerdude

Junk DNA is actually responsible for a number of mutations. Every so often, a chunk of junk DNA become functional and starts churning out proteins. There's even some grounding in reality as we don't entirely understand all the factors for activating genes.

That's not to say you can make an eldritch horror out of junk DNA, just that labeling junk DNA as nonsense is a bit hasty.

What I meant was that it's nonsense to think that junk DNA contains some kind of hidden supernatural potential. The ability to warp reality would have been really useful to an organism, so such an ability would very likely have been passed on to its descendants. Kind of like how Europeans wouldn't have been able to conquer or wipe out native peoples if they actually had the kind of magical powers that they have in some fiction.

Actually that kind of "Forgotten Ancient Knowledge" thing is problematic, as it implies that ancient people knew more about the world than we do today. But again, I'm sure there are ways to justify it. Maybe something happened that cut off our world from the world of the Outer Gods, like cutting a phone line.

Not surprising, many writer in ficcion use certain thing here and there as magic source, nothing wrong wit that

and ancient knowlage is that: ancient people SAW something or know something that get lost, depending of how it beneficial or horrying and consider what genre we are taking about

A lot of time knowledge is lost because it's simply useless. For example, there was this thousand year old antibiotic that apparently fell out of favor because the infections became resistant to them. Because the scholars of the day didn't understand what they were looking at their research would fall into obscurity.

How does this apply to Lovecraft? Not very well. We wouldn't understand the Old Ones much better than our ancestors and it's doubtful that they'd have learned anything that we'd be able to apply. More to the point, most of these old records are incomplete, inexact, and sometimes misleading. Sure, an egyptian scholar might have seen something cool but if they don't know what it was then it's not immediately useful.

Maybe but with lovecraft at least they KNOW something, we are far worse than that.

Indeed. Moreover, I find it a lot more enticing for the strange otherworldly creatures to be semi-unknown, essentially mythical in status. An old scroll here, a bizarre stone carving there, and you have something that's not quite tangible, not quite understood, but substantially different than just any old Giant Space Flea from Nowhere. All in all, I'm more partial to Howard's take on the mythos, where the eldritch abominations dwell in far and exotic places, and while not easy to comprehend, they're still far from the invincible and insanity-inducing flanderizations of the mythos in general. To me, the actual scary bit - well, scary in a pulpy adventurous sort of way - is precisely the fact that these creatures were not only known in the past, but actively worshiped. Space squid aren't scary. Space squid gods are scary, because of all the possible ways they could have gained worshipers in the first place.

Maybe they offered them food.

Do we know of any historical examples of people or societies who worshipped what we would call an Eldritch Abomination? Most ancient civilizations that I'm aware of had pantheons of gods, but their gods were largely anthropomorphic and their motives were largely understood. (That is to say, their worshippers made up understandable stories about them).

Going from just Classical Mythology, about half the Titans count; and according to the Five Ages of Man, they were worshiped as gods well before the Olympians. We're talking full-blown Genius Loci here, living embodiments of the Earth, the ocean, the sky, and even Hell. The Titanomachy alone features beings that could easily give Cthulhu a run for his money - the hecatonchires and Typhon being prominent examples, the latter essentially being a natural disaster made flesh. Even the Olympians are noted as bringing madness to whoever they disliked, while the name of a certain goat-legged god is where we got the word for panic.

Also note that the plays and poems starring these gods - from which we get the impression of neat hierarchies and humanoid relationships - still reshape them into a form audiences would be more comfortable with, a far cry from the original totemic and animist cults. Religion itself serves to ascribe human-relatable motives to natural phenomena, so it's not inconceivable to have progressively humanizing mythical accounts of originally very inhuman and barely comprehensible beings and related incidents.

i'm one of them.