Eldritch rabbit holes

Between research for Skeptophilia, my choice of reading material, and natural curiosity, I go down some deep rabbit holes sometimes.

This latest plunge into the netherworld of knowledge happened because I decided to reread The Lurker at the Threshold by H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth.  It's the umpteenth time I've read it, and although I'm well aware of its flaws (especially the overuse of words like "eldritch," the fact that every damn character in the story lives in an "ancient gambrel-roofed house," and the seemingly rushed/thinly-plotted final section), that book has some serious atmosphere.  I swear, I'll never see a stained-glass window again without thinking of the scene where the main character looks through the clear central pane of the crazy circular window in the library of the house where the story takes place -- and sees not the woods and stream lying outside, but a vista of an alien planet.

Near the end of the story, the scientist/historian Dr. Lapham is trying to convince his assistant that there's something supernatural going on, and goes through a bunch of examples from history of inexplicable occurrences.  I recognized one of them as being an actual event -- the disappearance of British diplomatic envoy Benjamin Bathurst in Perleberg, Germany in 1809 -- although the way it's described makes it sound way weirder than it actually was, and it's almost certain that Bathurst was simply robbed and murdered.  (This didn't stop me from giving the event a passing mention in my own novel, Sephirot.  Hey, if Lovecraft can get away with it, so can I.)

The fact that the Bathurst incident has at least a basis in reality made me wonder about a couple of the others Dr. Lapham mentions.  Several are references to other (fictional) Lovecraft stories, but I did wonder about his mention of sightings of mysterious undersea lights by the crews of two British ships, the light cruiser H. M. S. Caroline and the second-class cruiser H. M. S. Leander, in 1893.  So I did a bit of digging, and although the ships themselves were 100% real, I couldn't find any reference to odd sightings from either one.  

Anyhow, in The Lurker at the Threshold, the lights were supposedly the hallmark of the evil "Great Old One" Yog-Sothoth, who appeareth unto mankind as congeries of iridescent globes, so although I hath no idea what the fuck a "congery" is, I googled "real sightings of Yog-Sothoth," and that's when the bottom fell out of the rabbit hole.

The Invocation of Yog-Sothoth [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Demodus, Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, Template:Other free]

This is how I ended up at a site called Lovecraftian Science, about which I can't for the life of me tell if the owner is serious.  Apparently the guy is a legitimate limnologist/ecologist, so it could well be that he's just having a bit of fun trying to apply the methods of science to the world of the Cthulhu Mythos, but damned if he doesn't seem entirely in earnest.

Amongst the entries I saw therein:

• "Cryptobiosis in Elder Things: Drifting Through Interstellar Space" -- in which we find out that the "Elder Things" in Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" go into stasis when they're in outer space, and are propelled from one planet to another by dark energy.  We also read speculation that the members of the Elder Things have a similar protein structure to tardigrades, and that's how they manage to survive the trip from one planet to the next.
• "Stephen Hawking's Ideas in a Lovecraftian Cosmos" -- wherein we learn that the titular musician in "The Music of Erich Zann" prevented an invasion of our universe by "extra-dimensional beings" by "generating micro-scale gravity waves of a very specific disturbance within space-time to link our universe with another."  Whatever that means.
• "Lovecraftian Scientists: Astronomers from 'Beyond the Wall of Sleep'" -- musings on how the spirit of Joe Slater, main character in the short story mentioned in the title of the post, could have done battle with the evil entity residing near a star in the constellation of Perseus resulting in a spectacular nova observed in 1901 -- when the nova is 1,500 light years away, so the actual explosion happened 1,500 years ago.  "We do not know if the luminescent being that possessed Joe Slater could travel through time as easily as space so its existence was not limited to strictly linear time as it is with us," the author writes, apparently with a straight face.
• "Lovecraft's 'Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family:' What of the Piltdown Man?" -- because there's nothing that strengthens an argument about the factual nature of a fictional story like drawing evidence from a blatant hoax.
• "'The Dunwich Horror:' Meet the Whateleys" -- in which I found out way more than I wanted to know about the mechanics of Yog-Sothoth having sex with Lavinia Whateley, along with, I shit you not, Punnett squares for the offspring thereof.

I encourage you to peruse the website, because this is barely scratching the surface.  Whatever you can say about the guy's level of seriousness, there's no doubt that he's dedicated.

Being a writer, I've often joked about the FBI keeping a file on my google search history, but there are times I'm guessing that even the FBI would take the whole file and dump it in the trash and say, "Okay, never mind, this guy is a fucking loon."  I guess it's an occupational hazard of the combination of (1) being a speculative fiction writer, (2) owning a blog that frequently focuses on beliefs in weird stuff, and (3) having insatiable curiosity.  On the other hand, I'm not sure if it's disturbing or reassuring that there are people who go way further into the rabbit hole than I do; some of them, in fact, seem to have taken up permanent residence.

Anyhow, I'm going to try to go back to topics from science tomorrow.  I think one day of investigating eldritch giant interstellar tardigrades and what it'd be like to get laid by "congeries of iridescent globes" is enough to last me for a long time.

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It's kind of sad that there are so many math-phobes in the world, because at its basis, there is something compelling and fascinating about the world of numbers.  Humans have been driven to quantify things for millennia -- probably beginning with the understandable desire to count goods and belongings -- but it very quickly became a source of curiosity to find out why numbers work as they do.

The history of mathematics and its impact on humanity is the subject of the brilliant book The Art of More: How Mathematics Created Civilization by Michael Brooks.  In it he looks at how our ancestors' discovery of how to measure and enumerate the world grew into a field of study that unlocked hidden realms of science -- leading Galileo to comment, with some awe, that "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  Brooks's deft handling of this difficult and intimidating subject makes it uniquely accessible to the layperson -- so don't let your past experiences in math class dissuade you from reading this wonderful and eye-opening book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The attraction of the terrifying

The advent of the internet gave a whole new life to the phenomenon of urban legends.  When I was a kid (back in the good ol' Ancient Babylonian Times) those strange and often scary tales -- like the famous story of the choking Doberman -- were transmitted word-of-mouth and in-person, limiting the speed and scope of their spread.

Now that the world is connected electronically, these bizarre stories can spread like a wildfire.

This has given rise to "creepypasta" -- scary, allegedly true, first-person accounts that spread across the 'web.  (If you're curious, the name comes from "creepy" + "copypasta" -- the latter being a slang term for the practice of copying blocks of text between different social media platforms.)  Some have become pretty famous, and have inspired books and movies; in fact, I've riffed on two creepypasta in my novels, the legend of the Black-Eyed Children (in the Boundary Solution trilogy, beginning with Lines of Sight), and the terrifying tale of Slender Man (in Signal to Noise).

So obviously I have nothing against a good scary story, but a line is crossed when you add, "... and it really happened."  In fact, the topic comes up because of an interesting article by Tom Faber that appeared last week in Ars Technica looking at a specific subcategory of creepypasta -- stories that involve the supposedly supernatural (and terrifying) effects of certain video games.

Not being a gamer myself, I hadn't heard about most of these, but there's no doubt they're pretty scary.  Take, for example, the tale that grew around the Pokémon game "Lavender Town," which has an admittedly eerie soundtrack (you can hear a recording of it on the link provided).  Supposedly, the music contained "high-pitched sonic irregularities" that induced an altered mental state so severe that after playing the game, dozens of children in Japan committed suicide by climbing up on their roofs and throwing themselves off.

Needless to say -- or actually, evidently it does need to be said -- that never happened.  There is no evidence to be had online, from official documents, or in newspapers or television news that gives an iota of credence to it.  Even so, lots of people swear it's all real.  Sometimes these stories become oddly recursive; a game-inspired, supposedly true creepypasta called "Ben Drowned," about an evil spirit trapped in the game The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, became so widespread that a new game -- The Haunted Cartridge -- was published based on it.

So a made-up scary story about a video game that people claimed was real inspired another video game.

Delving through these layers can be tricky sometimes, but what strikes me is how easily people accept that these tales are true.  For a lot of people -- and I reluctantly include myself in this category -- there's a part of us that wants that stuff to be real.  There's something oddly compelling about being frightened, even though if you think about it rationally (which I hope everyone does), there's really nothing at all attractive about a world where ghosts and monsters and zombies exist and video games can make a noise inducing you to kill yourself.

It's like the people, apparently numerous, who think that the H. P. Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos is substantially true.  (I couldn't resist playing with that idea, too, giving rise to my short story "She Sells Seashells" -- which you can read for free at the link -- and I encourage you to do so, because all modesty aside, it's cool and creepy.)  But the question remains about why would you want Cthulhu et al. to exist.  Those mofos are terrifying.  Even the people who worship the Elder Gods in Lovecraft's stories always seem to end up getting eaten or dismembered or converted into Eldritch Slime, so there appears to be no feature of these beings that has any positive aspects for humanity.  Okay, I live in a pretty placid part of the world, where I frequently wish something would happen to liven things up, but even I don't want Nyarlathotep and Tsathoggua and Yog-Sothoth and the rest of the crew to show up in my back yard.

Despite all this, I still feel the attraction, and I'm at a loss to explain why.  I remember watching scary television and movies as a kid, and not just being entertained but on some level wishing it was real, even though I was well aware of how much more terrifying it would be if it were.  One example that stands out in my memory is the episode of Lost in Space called "Ghost in Space," wherein an invisible creature has arisen from a bog, and Dr. Smith becomes convinced he can communicate with it via Ouija Board.  Okay, watching it now, the whole thing is abjectly ridiculous (although I am still impressed with how they made the footprints of the creature appear in the sand without anything visible there to make them).  But other than being scared, I remember my main reaction was that I would love for something like that to be real.  Because of that, it's still one of the episodes I remember the most fondly, despite how generally incoherent the story is.

So (speaking of incoherent), I'm not even entirely certain what point I'm trying to make, here, other than (1) life would be a lot simpler if people would stop making shit up and claiming it's true, and (2) even people who are diehard skeptics can sometimes have a wide irrational streak.  It's fascinating how attracted we are to things that when you consider them, would be absolutely horrible if they're real.

Yet as the poster in Fox Mulder's office said, "I Want to Believe."

Anyhow, I should wind this up.  Not, of course, because there's anything interesting that I need to deal with.  When the most engaging thing in your immediate vicinity is watching the cows in the field across the road, it's perhaps not surprising that I sometimes feel like a good haunting or invasion by aliens would break up the monotony.

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Author Michael Pollan became famous for two books in the early 2000s, The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which looked at the complex relationships between humans and the various species that we have domesticated over the past few millennia.

More recently, Pollan has become interested in one particular facet of this relationship -- our use of psychotropic substances, most of which come from plants, to alter our moods and perceptions.  In How to Change Your Mind, he considered the promise of psychedelic drugs (such as ketamine and psilocybin) to treat medication-resistant depression; in this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week, This is Your Mind on Plants, he looks at another aspect, which is our strange attitude toward three different plant-produced chemicals: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.

Pollan writes about the long history of our use of these three chemicals, the plants that produce them (poppies, tea and coffee, and the peyote cactus, respectively), and -- most interestingly -- the disparate attitudes of the law toward them.  Why, for example, is a brew containing caffeine available for sale with no restrictions, but a brew containing opium a federal crime?  (I know the physiological effects differ; but the answer is more complex than that, and has a fascinating and convoluted history.)

Pollan's lucid, engaging writing style places a lens on this long relationship, and considers not only its backstory but how our attitudes have little to do with the reality of what the use of the plants do.  It's another chapter in his ongoing study of our relationship to what we put in our bodies -- and how those things change how we think, act, and feel.

[Note:  if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Quantum-thluhu

Because the universe has a peculiar sense of humor sometimes, my comment to a friend yesterday that it'd been a good long while since I'd run into a purely insane claim was followed up nearly instantaneously by a different friend sending me a link to an article called "The Dimensionality of Cthulhu."

Yes, Cthulhu, as in the octopoid monster-god in the mythos of H. P. Lovecraft.  The link led to a blog entitled "Lovecraftian Science: Scientific Investigations Into the Cthulhu Mythos."  When saw the title, I thought at first that this was just an example of a scientist having a little bit of fun, rather in the same vein as the hysterically funny fake scientific papers in The Journal of Irreproducible Results, or the way legitimate historians will play around with (and argue over) analysis of the timeline and backstory of The Lord of the Rings.  But upon reading the entire entry, and several other posts besides, at the cost of countless brain cells in my prefrontal cortex which cried out piteously as they dissolved into the amorphous, bubbling nether-slime of the darkest eldritch reaches of time and space, I have come to the conclusion that this dude is actually serious.

[Image is courtesy of the artist, Dominique Signoret, and is licensed under the Creative Commons BenduKiwi, Cthulhu and R'lyeh, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Consider, for example, the following passage:

Based on... references made by HPL, Cthulhu and its spawn are not from our space-time continuum.  This explains how these entities can function beyond the confines of our physical laws, such as its fluid movement and apparent plasma-like structure.  Indeed, further study of Cthulhu and its spawn may provide the evidence needed to support the M-theory.

Yes, M-theory, that impossibly abstruse mathematical construct that attempts to unify all consistent string theoretical models of quantum gravity.  The introduction to the Wikipedia article on the topic, which despite my bachelor's degree in physics represents the limit of my understanding of the subject, says the following:

Investigations of the mathematical structure of M-theory have spawned a number of important theoretical results in physics and mathematics.  More speculatively, M-theory may provide a framework for developing a unified theory of all of the fundamental forces of nature.

"Spawned."  Sounds like a Cthulhu reference already.  So there you are, then.  Seems like q.e.d. to me.

The author of the article apparently agrees.  He goes on to say:

M-theory describes a reality of vibrating strings, point particles, two-dimensional membranes, three-dimensional blobs and other multi-dimensional objects we can not perceive (Hawking and Mlodinow; 2010).  In fact, M-theory allows for many different internal spaces – as many as 10500 different universes, each one with their own particular set of laws of nature.  Is Cthulhu and its spawn from one of these universes?  Did this entity find a means of exuding itself into our universe, bringing with it R’lyeh, with some of its native laws of nature seeping into our universe?

Yes.  He actually cited Stephen Hawking in order to explain why R'lyeh is such a crazy-ass place.

He concludes with a teaser:

From a theoretical standpoint such inter-dimensional travel to other universes may be feasible but the limitation to this is the amount of energy needed to accomplish this.  While this is a huge obstacle to us, maybe Cthulhu and its spawn can harvest the energy from antimatter and travel to other universes – and one of those universes may be ours.  But such travel to other universes with different physical laws of nature may pose some limitations onto these inter-universal travelers.  It is these potential limitations on entities from outside of our space-time continuum we will be discussing in the next article.

So there may be a way to stop these monsters!  Hallelujah!  Alert Henry Armitage!  Wilbur Whateley is going down!

Ahem.  Yeah.  What's funniest about all of this is that Lovecraft himself was a staunch rationalist.  He used to reply to the fans who wrote to him, asking for directions to Dunwich or Innsmouth, "Those places do not exist.  I know that for certain.  You see, I made them up."  This didn't stop people from looking, of course, and it spawned (there's that word again) theories that he was covering up his knowledge to protect himself from retribution by the Abominable Mi-Go, or whatever.  (In fact, I riffed on that very idea in my short story "She Sells Seashells," which, should you choose to read it, I feel duty-bound to point out is fiction as well.)

And apparently there are people who are sold enough on his worldview that they'd like to use it to prove string theory.  Or vice-versa, I'm not sure.  Which is also kind of peculiar, because besides Lovecraft's fictional universe being a pretty bleak place, he was also a raving racist, a feature that pops out with cringeworthy regularity in his stories.  (So while I count him amongst the inspirations for my own writing, I can't really in good conscience read about half of what he wrote.)

Anyhow.  That's our excursion into the Deep Places for today, and I'm off to get some coffee and then to fight my way through the Insanely Gibbering Hordes that populate the Loathsome Monolith-Crowned Citadel where I shall Reside in Nuclear Chaos Until The End Of Time.

Respectively, "my dogs," "my office," and "fucking around on social media."

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Astronomer Michio Kaku has a new book out, and he's tackled a doozy of a topic.

One of the thorniest problems in physics over the last hundred years, one which has stymied some of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced, is the quest for finding a Grand Unified Theory.  There are four fundamental forces in nature that we know about; the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity.  The first three can now be modeled by a single set of equations -- called the electroweak theory -- but gravity has staunchly resisted incorporation.

The problem is, the other three forces can be explained by quantum effects, while gravity seems to have little to no effect on the realm of the very small -- and likewise, quantum effects have virtually no impact on the large scales where gravity rules.  Trying to combine the two results in self-contradictions and impossibilities, and even models that seem to eliminate some of the problems -- such as the highly-publicized string theory -- face their own sent of deep issues, such as generating so many possible solutions that an experimental test is practically impossible.

Kaku's new book, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything describes the history and current status of this seemingly intractable problem, and does so with his characteristic flair and humor.  If you're interesting in finding out about the cutting edge of physic lies, in terms that an intelligent layperson can understand, you'll really enjoy Kaku's book -- and come away with a deeper appreciation for how weird the universe actually is.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Quantum-thulhu

Because the universe has a peculiar sense of humor sometimes, my post considering the misapplication of the scientific term "dimension" was followed up nearly instantaneously by my stumbling upon an article called "The Dimenionality [sic] of Cthulhu."

Yes, Cthulhu, as in the octopoid monster-god in the mythos of H. P. Lovecraft.  The article was posted a couple of days ago on a blog entitled "Lovecraftian Science: Scientific Investigations Into the Cthulhu Mythos."  When I happened upon it, I thought at first that this was just an example of a scientist having a little bit of fun, much the way legitimate historians will play around with analysis of the timeline and backstory of The Lord of the Rings.  But upon reading the entire entry, and several other posts besides, at the cost of countless brain cells in my pre-frontal cortex which cried out piteously as they dissolved into the amorphous, bubbling nether-slime of the darkest eldritch reaches of time and space, I have come to the conclusion that this dude is actually serious.

[image courtesy of artist Dominique Signoret and the Wikimedia Commons]

Consider, for example, the following passage:

Based on... references made by HPL, Cthulhu and its spawn are not from our space-time continuum. This explains how these entities can function beyond the confines of our physical laws, such as its fluid movement and apparent plasma-like structure. Indeed, further study of Cthulhu and its spawn may provide the evidence needed to support the M-theory.

Yes, M-theory, that impossibly abstruse mathematical construct that attempts to unify all consistent string theoretical models of quantum gravity.  The introduction to the Wikipedia article on the topic, which despite my bachelor's degree in physics represents the limit of my understanding of the subject, says the following:

Investigations of the mathematical structure of M-theory have spawned a number of important theoretical results in physics and mathematics. More speculatively, M-theory may provide a framework for developing a unified theory of all of the fundamental forces of nature.

"Spawned."  Sounds like a Cthulhu reference already.  So there you are, then.

The author of the article apparently agrees.  He goes on to say:

M-theory describes a reality of vibrating strings, point particles, two-dimensional membranes, three-dimensional blobs and other multi-dimensional objects we can not perceive (Hawking and Mlodinow; 2010).  In fact, M-theory allows for many different internal spaces – as many as 10500 different universes, each one with their own particular set of laws of nature. Is Cthulhu and its spawn from one of these universes?  Did this entity find a means of exuding itself into our universe, bringing with it R’lyeh, with some of its native laws of nature seeping into our universe?

Yes.  He actually cited Stephen Hawking in order to explain why R'lyeh is such a crazy-ass place.

He concludes with a teaser:

From a theoretical standpoint such inter-dimensional travel to other universes may be feasible but the limitation to this is the amount of energy needed to accomplish this.  While this is a huge obstacle to us, maybe Cthulhu and its spawn can harvest the energy from antimatter and travel to other universes – and one of those universes may be ours.  But such travel to other universes with different physical laws of nature may pose some limitations onto these inter-universal travelers.  It is these potential limitations on entities from outside of our space-time continuum we will be discussing in the next article.

So there may be a way to stop these monsters!  Hallelujah!  Alert Henry Armitage!  Wilbur Whateley is going down!

Ahem.  Yeah.  What's funniest about all of this is that Lovecraft himself was a staunch rationalist.  He used to reply to the fans who wrote to him, asking for directions to Dunwich or Innsmouth, "Those places do not exist.  I know that for certain.  You see, I made them up."  This didn't stop people from looking, of course, and it spawned (there's that word again) theories that he was covering up his knowledge to protect himself from retribution by the Abominable Mi-Go, or whatever.  (In fact, I riffed on that very idea in my short story "She Sells Seashells," which, should you choose to read it, I should point out is fiction as well.)

And apparently there are people who are sold enough on his worldview that they'd like to use it to prove string theory.  Or vice-versa, I'm not sure.  Which is also kind of peculiar, because besides Lovecraft's fictional universe being a pretty bleak place, he was also a raving racist, a feature that pops out with cringe-worthy regularity in his stories.  (So while I count him amongst the inspirations for my own writing, I can't really in good conscience read about half of what he wrote.)

Anyhow.  That's our excursion into the Deep Places for today, and I'm off to get some coffee and then to fight my way through the Insanely Gibbering Hordes that populate the Loathsome Monolith-Crowned Citadel where I shall reside in Nuclear Chaos Until The End Of Time.

Better known as my classroom.

Cheerleaders for Miskatonic University

New from the "Let's Review The Definition Of Fiction, Shall We?" department, apparently there are people who think that whole pantheon of gods dreamed up by H. P. Lovecraft is real.

Never mind that Lovecraft himself was a staunch materialist.  Never mind that he used to respond to nutcases in his own day who'd write to him, claiming to have visited the ruins of Dunwich and Innsmouth, with, "Those places don't exist.  I know that for certain.  You see, I made them up."  Never mind that if you go to your local high school's counseling office, and peruse the bookshelf for a college catalog for Miskatonic University, you will find it goes from "University of Minnesota" directly to "Mississippi State."

You'd think all of that would lead people to the conclusion that Elder Gods were figments of Lovecraft's fevered imagination.  You'd think that people would focus on the "myth" part of "Cthulhu mythos."

You'd be wrong.

There are apparently whole cults devoted to the worship of the Elder Gods, amongst whom Cthulhu seems to be the favorite.  Yog-Sothoth, who is inevitably described as "congeries of iridescent globes," is also popular, which raises a question:  what the hell is a "congery?"  I looked it up, and supposedly it means "collection, group, or assemblage."  I think you all need to make a point of using this word in a sentence today, such as, "look at that cute congery of puppies," or "that's a mighty nice congery of Star Wars action figures you got there, Bob."

Anyhow, the cultists faced a problem; being that the whole thing was made up, so were all the trappings -- especially the books and so on, such as "the cursed Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred."  Undaunted, they simply got into the spirit of things, and made that up, too.  A guy who is known only as "Simon" wrote (well, he claims he translated it) the version of the Necronomicon that currently is used by most of your better Cthulhu cults.  It's available on Amazon (no, I'm not kidding) and apparently sells quite well.

And, of course, if you're going to have cultists, you'll have people who preach against them.  Jack Chick, who is the leader of a nominally Christian fringe group and who seems to be a raving wackmobile, claims that (1) Cthulhu and all the other Elder Gods are real because he's seen them, and (2) they're all minions of Satan so you better be careful.  In fact, he published a series of graphic novels about how Satanism is undermining American society, and one of them specifically deals with Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, and the rest of the gang.  It's named, "Who Will Get Eaten First?"

You'd think that anyone who made these kind of claims would be guffawed at.  And I live in the hope that 99% of people are rational enough to have exactly that response.  But sadly, all you have to do is to Google "Cthulhu cults" and you'll have tens of thousands of hits.  So I wondered, what is it about these ideas that people are so attracted to?  While I like a lot of Lovecraft's stories, notwithstanding his tendency toward purple prose ("loathsome, amorphous, bubbling slime from the nethermost darkness of the eldritch depths of space and time!") and predictability (why does everyone in his stories live in a house with a "gambrel roof?"), I really would prefer it if his view of the universe was fiction.  What with earthquakes, leaking nuclear reactors, rebellions and uprisings, we have enough to worry about these days without there also being evil monsters lurking around trying to eat us for dinner.  Of course, the stories are also full of characters who are drawn in by the powers that said monsters allegedly grant their followers, and honestly, I can see how that might be a temptation.  If I could chant a magic formula in my classroom and make a misbehaving student or two melt, I think I might be willing to join the Esoteric Order of Dagon, too.

The downside, of course, is that being fiction, it isn't real, which is a distinction these people seem to have trouble with.  You'd think the first time they tried to summon up Nyarlathotep, and nothing happened, they'd basically sit back and say, "Well, I guess it's all fake.  What a bunch of goobers we are," and go back to their jobs and houses and so on.  But that never seems to happen with Believers, does it?  All you need is conviction, and a grim determination to hold on to your ideas in the face of contrary evidence, and you're set for life.