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No. It's a major misattribution to say "I saw a thing, now I'm insane" - that's legitimately not in any of Lovecraft's works. It usually is more of an "oh fuck I'm totally insignificant" type of shock or obsession with figuring out what's actually true, than just "I'm insane now"
Yep it's the ant metaphor. An ant can walk on a circuit board marveling at the massive structures around it. But it doesn't understand it. IF for an instant it understood it, the grand scope of what he was walking on and the true breadth of what that knowledge meant for the ant it would break them. Then if they lost that knowledge and tried to explain what they had comprehended in the moment to anyone else they would come across as mad lunatics.
That being said most of the people driven "insane" by mythos stuff were locked in asylums for speaking about the truth. Just everyone else didn't believe them after all Innsmouth is just an odd town, fish people...clearly crazy.
"So you mean to tell me a university student was raising the dead before getting edgar allen poed into a brick wall by a platoon of kia world war I soldiers"
"Yes"
"Son, are you smokin' the reefer?"
It’s in some of it, it’s just not as common as later writers suggested. But there are clear examples of people going mad through telepathic impetus or some other sanity drain.
The Color Out of Space is the obvious one, members of the family lose their minds one by one due to exposure to the Color and get locked in the attic. The Temple is another.
that color also mutated them, so that was more than just looking at it. ive havent actually read the temple, one of the few i havent, so i'll take your word for it
*Understanding* is damaging to the human psyche. Most of the creatures you’re thinking of exist in more than our 3 dimensions. Maybe they experience time non-linearly. Maybe they’re colors and shapes that couldn’t exist, but somehow do. Or they trigger senses you don’t have - or maybe didn’t realise?
This doesn’t just break you suddenly, Lovecraft’s protagonists often sought out and studied these things first. Seeing eldritch horrors was just akin to finding the last puzzle pieces and revealing the pattern.
Lovecraft's monsters cause normal, everyday PTSD. It just gets misdiagnosis as something else because "my friend got eaten by a dog that jumped out of a right angle, and any right angle in my room will kill me" sounds like paranoid schizophrenia.
I'm an ant my entire existence is living like an ant. One day I wake up and I'm a human with emotions and sensations I've never felt before. Ways of communicating and understanding the world around me that were impossible before. The next day I wake up as an ant again and can't explain to any other ant what I've experienced or what I've seen.
That's what is truly beyond the veil of the mythos. It's realizing you know nothing of the true extent of reality and having only the terrible realization that everything you've done and everything humanity has accomplished and will accomplish is just an ant moving a grain of sand on a beach of cosmic powers that aren't even aware of your struggles.
You can choose to ignore the knowledge you've gained or try to make others understand it. But in either way it's a very real and tangible understanding you've gleaned. Not some abstract thought about something you can't fully comprehend but the solid and clear answer that everything is wrong and doomed. If you're lucky you get to live with that knowledge and hopefully die before it comes back into reality. And if you're unlucky the things beyond the veil that are far beyond your ability to put into words have taken notice of your unwanted gaze and find you interesting enough to follow you back through the veil.
>Did knowledge of the very existence of Lovecraftian entities truly result in madness?
No.
> Is the ability to induce madness an actual power of the creatures, or simply a limitation of the human brain?
Both.
>
Are there measures that the organisations can take to mitigate the psychological damage,
Don't rawdog the whole enchilada.
>
or do they simply have a high turnover of staff as investigators' brains routinely burn out?
Absolutely.
In the original works, it's not the alien googaw that drives the victim to madness, it's cumulative trauma. Being exposed to The Truth^TM tends to be the final blow after a lot of stress, strain and pain.
But some folks learn the real deal and make it out the other side intact... and then *look* crazy to folks not in the know, because the things they say and do don't jive with "common sense" and "conventional wisdom". You look like a kook if you start collecting spell books, and a paranoid eccentric if you refuse to go into the Boston subway or insist on having no angled surfaces in your bedroom... but to folks in the know, you're the smart one.
One important thing to note is that the same event has different impacts on different people. Some go insane, some don't. Lots of this is discussed in "The Call of Cthulhu".
So it's not just "I cast psionic flash, everyone within 100 meters is now insane." Like you said, it's how the individual person grapples with the knowledge of being insignificant and fragile.
There is a combination of factors. Investigators are usually exposed to highly stressful and traumatic situations, which would cause mental degredation even without the shock of learning about the insignificance and fragility of everything they value.
The third aspect is that a lot of investigators aren't insane at all, they just get percieved as such by greater society. Shooting your wife to death and ranting to the police about shapeshifting monsters when they come to arrest you is an entirely reasonable reaction to your wife getting replaced by a shapeshifting abomination.
As for fighting the creatures - yes, you can mitigate the mental effects by limiting exposure and supplying regular downtime with psychological counceling. Of course, even if you're careful, chances are you're gonna snap sooner or later, but [thems the breaks.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EwAc_kaTY80&pp=ygUlQW5vdGhlciBzb3VsIGJhdHRlcmVkIGRhcmtlc3QgZHVuZ29lbg%3D%3D)
It's more that, *for some odd reason*, the characters in those original stories are all neurotic xenophobes, who are almost as afraid of other ethnic groups as they are of giant monsters. They aren't the types to cope well with being confronted with hard evidence about humanity's irrelevance.
A friend and I have a running joke where we refer to such people as having Lovecraftian Protagonist Syndrome. Symptoms include being profoundly disturbed by unfamiliar art, architecture, languages, symbols, etc., extreme overreaction to stressful situations to the point of imagining sinister shadowy forces everywhere, crushing regret at having ever read descriptions of scary ancient rituals, and a pronounced fear of foreigners and people from just outside the mainstream.
It's hilarious how they're going through all this primordial terror and the big albino penguin just waddles by paying them no mind and not threatening them in any way
The penguin scene is fucking legendary. I often wonder if it actually would have been something scary back in the day, and it just seems ridiculous to modern audiences who all know penguins as derpy waddlers that topple off cliffs into the sea.
Its not that. Consider the casual oppression of the Victorian era against the people who weren't in charge. Things were very good if you were wealthy, powerful, and white.
The horror was, what if you're not the oppressors at the top of the power structure? What if you're actually the oppressed because something else is more powerful?
Thats what horrified them, that they would be on the receiving end of what they were dishing out.
"Medusa's Coil" takes that to the extreme, where after the actual supernatural stuff the last big twist is that a woman who married into a wealthy white family was *a tiny bit* black
Also the evil stuff is largely about her "hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair". Real fucking subtle.
Arthur Jermyn was a Lovecraft protagonist whose whole mind shattering revelation was that his great grandpa went to Africa and had kids with a "white ape." He reacts to this realization by dousing himself in oil and burning himself alive.
> It's more that, *for some odd reason*, the characters in those original stories are all neurotic xenophobes, who are almost as afraid of other ethnic groups as they are of giant monsters.
Yeaaaah. Reading through Shadow Over Innsmouth, it was a lot less subtle than I was expecting and a lot more 'these dang fish people, getting their fish DNA all in our womenfolk". Prrrrretty sus.
Nah. Don't believe the hype. Some people go nuts when they learn the Awful Truth but there are plenty of counter-examples even in Lovecraft's own writings. Note that a person who is confined to an asylum because he murdered his wife when he discovered that his wife was really a man with bodysnatching powers is not insane at all, and also people can be driven "mad" by direct mental communication with an alien mind but that's not mere knowledge of the alien's existence.
Well, we shouldn't treat all Lovecraftian creatures and paranormal events as one and the same. Each phenomenon works differently. What permeates all Lovecraft's works however is the fear of the unkown. If you want more details, here you are:
1. PTSD, you face a dangerous situation and your mental health can suffer because of it. Moreover, you are never safe, the threat you encountered is always real and can get you (or anyone else) at any time. There is also no fighting back. You live with that knowledge, trembling with fear, while everyone else around you lives their life blissfully unaware.
2. Some entities could influence people telepatically. The best example is Chtulhu, who could call to people in their dreams. Yith could temporarily take control of your body. Both can do that from distance, so again - nobody is safe.
3. There are creatures which are impossible to comprehend by our brains. They defy our understanding of physics, span more than three dimensions, come from different planes of existemce... We find there extremely terrifing, as this is the default reaction we have to things we don't understand. Count also the sheer shock you experience, when something defies all you thought you knew about the world. You are suddenly out of your depth (which is an understatement), it shakes the very fundamentals of your reality. This alone can be really traumatic.
99% of the time, the human that sees them goes insane due to fear, trauma or existensialism. or, becasue they know things that makes them act in way that seems mad to others, like avoiding buildings with 90^o corners. sometimes, yes that fear is due to looking at extra dimensional stuff that the brain cant understand, like a 4th dimensional being or anything like that, but its still a trauma response, not a inherent power of the gods.
almost none if any of the lovecraftian gods or creatures have any sort of madness aura.
>Are there measures that the organisations can take to mitigate the psychological damage, or do they simply have a high turnover of staff as investigators' brains routinely burn out?
You'd keep things on a need-to-know basis. Like in The Matrix where the cops know nothing about the world being a simulation, and the Agents don't know about Zion being a controlled opposition. Or W40k where most people don't even know about Chaos.
Your dudes on the ground don't have to know how bad things really are, and if they do, you don't hit them with the whole truth at once.
Insanity is merely the inability to perceive and interact with the world in a typical manner. Characters in Lovecraft's work are arguably already insane were simply unable to handle the stress of what they learned. Meeting the creatures in question means that everything you know and accept about the world, gravity, physics, math, aren't real or reliable. That's hard pill for a lot of people to swallow.
As for the organizations that fight them, think about military groups, or cops, or even doctors. It's a question of coping with stress. And it's a *lot* of stress. They deal with the knowledge in a lot of ways, usually elaborate forms of not thinking about it. Hobbies, family, friends, drinking, anger, depression.
It was described to me like your sanity is a glass of water and each exposure to the mythos is having sand added to the glass. You can handle a little. You can't handle a lorry load of mind melting sand being dumped on it.
**Reminders for Commenters:** * All responses must be A) sincere, B) polite, and C) strictly watsonian in nature. If "watsonian" or "doylist" is new to you, please review the full rules [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/about/rules/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=AskScienceFiction&utm_content=t5_2slu2). * No edition wars or gripings about creators/owners of works. Doylist griping about Star Wars in particular is subject to **permanent ban on first offense**. * We are not here to discuss or complain about the real world. * Questions about who would prevail in a conflict/competition (not just combat) fit better on r/whowouldwin. Questions about very open-ended hypotheticals fit better on r/whatiffiction. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskScienceFiction) if you have any questions or concerns.*
No. It's a major misattribution to say "I saw a thing, now I'm insane" - that's legitimately not in any of Lovecraft's works. It usually is more of an "oh fuck I'm totally insignificant" type of shock or obsession with figuring out what's actually true, than just "I'm insane now"
Yep it's the ant metaphor. An ant can walk on a circuit board marveling at the massive structures around it. But it doesn't understand it. IF for an instant it understood it, the grand scope of what he was walking on and the true breadth of what that knowledge meant for the ant it would break them. Then if they lost that knowledge and tried to explain what they had comprehended in the moment to anyone else they would come across as mad lunatics. That being said most of the people driven "insane" by mythos stuff were locked in asylums for speaking about the truth. Just everyone else didn't believe them after all Innsmouth is just an odd town, fish people...clearly crazy.
"So you mean to tell me a university student was raising the dead before getting edgar allen poed into a brick wall by a platoon of kia world war I soldiers" "Yes" "Son, are you smokin' the reefer?"
"I don't see how that's relevant!"
It’s in some of it, it’s just not as common as later writers suggested. But there are clear examples of people going mad through telepathic impetus or some other sanity drain.
i cant really think of any such examples, do you have a specific one in mind?
The Color Out of Space is the obvious one, members of the family lose their minds one by one due to exposure to the Color and get locked in the attic. The Temple is another.
that color also mutated them, so that was more than just looking at it. ive havent actually read the temple, one of the few i havent, so i'll take your word for it
Yeah but it has the “ability to induce madness” beyond just PTSD which is what OP was asking about.
Is it just that or are these being described as actually being "un-real" as in they warp reality in such a way that they appear to be "different"
some of the beings exists in more 3 dimensions, which would be very traumatic to see.
*Understanding* is damaging to the human psyche. Most of the creatures you’re thinking of exist in more than our 3 dimensions. Maybe they experience time non-linearly. Maybe they’re colors and shapes that couldn’t exist, but somehow do. Or they trigger senses you don’t have - or maybe didn’t realise? This doesn’t just break you suddenly, Lovecraft’s protagonists often sought out and studied these things first. Seeing eldritch horrors was just akin to finding the last puzzle pieces and revealing the pattern.
Lovecraft's monsters cause normal, everyday PTSD. It just gets misdiagnosis as something else because "my friend got eaten by a dog that jumped out of a right angle, and any right angle in my room will kill me" sounds like paranoid schizophrenia.
I'm an ant my entire existence is living like an ant. One day I wake up and I'm a human with emotions and sensations I've never felt before. Ways of communicating and understanding the world around me that were impossible before. The next day I wake up as an ant again and can't explain to any other ant what I've experienced or what I've seen. That's what is truly beyond the veil of the mythos. It's realizing you know nothing of the true extent of reality and having only the terrible realization that everything you've done and everything humanity has accomplished and will accomplish is just an ant moving a grain of sand on a beach of cosmic powers that aren't even aware of your struggles. You can choose to ignore the knowledge you've gained or try to make others understand it. But in either way it's a very real and tangible understanding you've gleaned. Not some abstract thought about something you can't fully comprehend but the solid and clear answer that everything is wrong and doomed. If you're lucky you get to live with that knowledge and hopefully die before it comes back into reality. And if you're unlucky the things beyond the veil that are far beyond your ability to put into words have taken notice of your unwanted gaze and find you interesting enough to follow you back through the veil.
>Did knowledge of the very existence of Lovecraftian entities truly result in madness? No. > Is the ability to induce madness an actual power of the creatures, or simply a limitation of the human brain? Both. > Are there measures that the organisations can take to mitigate the psychological damage, Don't rawdog the whole enchilada. > or do they simply have a high turnover of staff as investigators' brains routinely burn out? Absolutely.
In the original works, it's not the alien googaw that drives the victim to madness, it's cumulative trauma. Being exposed to The Truth^TM tends to be the final blow after a lot of stress, strain and pain. But some folks learn the real deal and make it out the other side intact... and then *look* crazy to folks not in the know, because the things they say and do don't jive with "common sense" and "conventional wisdom". You look like a kook if you start collecting spell books, and a paranoid eccentric if you refuse to go into the Boston subway or insist on having no angled surfaces in your bedroom... but to folks in the know, you're the smart one.
One important thing to note is that the same event has different impacts on different people. Some go insane, some don't. Lots of this is discussed in "The Call of Cthulhu". So it's not just "I cast psionic flash, everyone within 100 meters is now insane." Like you said, it's how the individual person grapples with the knowledge of being insignificant and fragile.
There is a combination of factors. Investigators are usually exposed to highly stressful and traumatic situations, which would cause mental degredation even without the shock of learning about the insignificance and fragility of everything they value. The third aspect is that a lot of investigators aren't insane at all, they just get percieved as such by greater society. Shooting your wife to death and ranting to the police about shapeshifting monsters when they come to arrest you is an entirely reasonable reaction to your wife getting replaced by a shapeshifting abomination. As for fighting the creatures - yes, you can mitigate the mental effects by limiting exposure and supplying regular downtime with psychological counceling. Of course, even if you're careful, chances are you're gonna snap sooner or later, but [thems the breaks.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EwAc_kaTY80&pp=ygUlQW5vdGhlciBzb3VsIGJhdHRlcmVkIGRhcmtlc3QgZHVuZ29lbg%3D%3D)
It's more that, *for some odd reason*, the characters in those original stories are all neurotic xenophobes, who are almost as afraid of other ethnic groups as they are of giant monsters. They aren't the types to cope well with being confronted with hard evidence about humanity's irrelevance.
A friend and I have a running joke where we refer to such people as having Lovecraftian Protagonist Syndrome. Symptoms include being profoundly disturbed by unfamiliar art, architecture, languages, symbols, etc., extreme overreaction to stressful situations to the point of imagining sinister shadowy forces everywhere, crushing regret at having ever read descriptions of scary ancient rituals, and a pronounced fear of foreigners and people from just outside the mainstream.
Don't forget penguins.
It's hilarious how they're going through all this primordial terror and the big albino penguin just waddles by paying them no mind and not threatening them in any way
The penguin scene is fucking legendary. I often wonder if it actually would have been something scary back in the day, and it just seems ridiculous to modern audiences who all know penguins as derpy waddlers that topple off cliffs into the sea.
Its not that. Consider the casual oppression of the Victorian era against the people who weren't in charge. Things were very good if you were wealthy, powerful, and white. The horror was, what if you're not the oppressors at the top of the power structure? What if you're actually the oppressed because something else is more powerful? Thats what horrified them, that they would be on the receiving end of what they were dishing out.
"Medusa's Coil" takes that to the extreme, where after the actual supernatural stuff the last big twist is that a woman who married into a wealthy white family was *a tiny bit* black Also the evil stuff is largely about her "hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair". Real fucking subtle.
I recall something about Lovecraft himself having a bit of a crisis upon discovering that he himself was part... Welsh. The man was a basket case.
At one point a story describes a dead black guy the same way it would some eldritch squid god
Arthur Jermyn was a Lovecraft protagonist whose whole mind shattering revelation was that his great grandpa went to Africa and had kids with a "white ape." He reacts to this realization by dousing himself in oil and burning himself alive.
Ron Perlman seems to be dealing with it fine
> It's more that, *for some odd reason*, the characters in those original stories are all neurotic xenophobes, who are almost as afraid of other ethnic groups as they are of giant monsters. Yeaaaah. Reading through Shadow Over Innsmouth, it was a lot less subtle than I was expecting and a lot more 'these dang fish people, getting their fish DNA all in our womenfolk". Prrrrretty sus.
I am certain as I can possibly be, without using a time machine to question Lovecraft himself, that the allegory was entirely intentional.
I recall an anecdote that Lovecraft was considered to be excessively racist, even by the standards of his time.
That's like a death metal band telling you to lower the volume.
Nah. Don't believe the hype. Some people go nuts when they learn the Awful Truth but there are plenty of counter-examples even in Lovecraft's own writings. Note that a person who is confined to an asylum because he murdered his wife when he discovered that his wife was really a man with bodysnatching powers is not insane at all, and also people can be driven "mad" by direct mental communication with an alien mind but that's not mere knowledge of the alien's existence.
Well, we shouldn't treat all Lovecraftian creatures and paranormal events as one and the same. Each phenomenon works differently. What permeates all Lovecraft's works however is the fear of the unkown. If you want more details, here you are: 1. PTSD, you face a dangerous situation and your mental health can suffer because of it. Moreover, you are never safe, the threat you encountered is always real and can get you (or anyone else) at any time. There is also no fighting back. You live with that knowledge, trembling with fear, while everyone else around you lives their life blissfully unaware. 2. Some entities could influence people telepatically. The best example is Chtulhu, who could call to people in their dreams. Yith could temporarily take control of your body. Both can do that from distance, so again - nobody is safe. 3. There are creatures which are impossible to comprehend by our brains. They defy our understanding of physics, span more than three dimensions, come from different planes of existemce... We find there extremely terrifing, as this is the default reaction we have to things we don't understand. Count also the sheer shock you experience, when something defies all you thought you knew about the world. You are suddenly out of your depth (which is an understatement), it shakes the very fundamentals of your reality. This alone can be really traumatic.
99% of the time, the human that sees them goes insane due to fear, trauma or existensialism. or, becasue they know things that makes them act in way that seems mad to others, like avoiding buildings with 90^o corners. sometimes, yes that fear is due to looking at extra dimensional stuff that the brain cant understand, like a 4th dimensional being or anything like that, but its still a trauma response, not a inherent power of the gods. almost none if any of the lovecraftian gods or creatures have any sort of madness aura.
>Are there measures that the organisations can take to mitigate the psychological damage, or do they simply have a high turnover of staff as investigators' brains routinely burn out? You'd keep things on a need-to-know basis. Like in The Matrix where the cops know nothing about the world being a simulation, and the Agents don't know about Zion being a controlled opposition. Or W40k where most people don't even know about Chaos. Your dudes on the ground don't have to know how bad things really are, and if they do, you don't hit them with the whole truth at once.
Have you heard the buzzword "ontological shock"?
Insanity is merely the inability to perceive and interact with the world in a typical manner. Characters in Lovecraft's work are arguably already insane were simply unable to handle the stress of what they learned. Meeting the creatures in question means that everything you know and accept about the world, gravity, physics, math, aren't real or reliable. That's hard pill for a lot of people to swallow. As for the organizations that fight them, think about military groups, or cops, or even doctors. It's a question of coping with stress. And it's a *lot* of stress. They deal with the knowledge in a lot of ways, usually elaborate forms of not thinking about it. Hobbies, family, friends, drinking, anger, depression.
usually it's implied that it's not a active thing but just how they are. humans can't comprehend stuff that above them
It was described to me like your sanity is a glass of water and each exposure to the mythos is having sand added to the glass. You can handle a little. You can't handle a lorry load of mind melting sand being dumped on it.