Mage’s premise assumes humanity and the characters matter. What if the universe doesn’t care? Terry Robinson and Josh Heath, COO of High Level Games and host of Werewolf: The Podcast discuss cosmicism, the belief that there is no divine presence and that humanity is particularly insignificant. How to combine the epic and indifferent?
Show Notes
- The deeply problematic H.P. Lovecraft and his best critic, S.T. Joshi
- “The Call of Cthulhu”
- “The Dunwich Horror”
- At the Mountains of Madness
- “Herbert West–Reanimator”
- “The Colour Out of Space”
- “Dagon”
- “The Horror at Red Hook”
- The Shadow over Innsmouth
- “Pickman’s Model”
- The Whisperer in Darkness
- The Void
- Event Horizon
- Pandorum
- Life
- Nietzsche on nihilism
- Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
- Harlem Unbound by Chris Spivey
- Heirs to the Mountains of Madness by Josh Heath
- Mage: The Podcast Myth in Mage interview with Josh Heath
- Nephandi
- Werewolf: The Apocalypse
- The Triat of the Wyld, the Weaver and the Wyrm
- The Umbra Realms
- The Flux Realm
- Demon: The Fallen
- Baali
- Gnosticism
- Avatars
- The Call
- Albert Camus’s The Stranger, A Happy Death, Exile and the Kingdom
- The myth of Sisyphus
- Neoplatonism
- The Zigg’raugglurr
- Void Engineers
- Ka Luon
- Far Cry 5
- Preppers
- Harano
- Arch-Spheres
- Psychopomps
- Lord Dunsany, originator of weird fiction
- The anti-natalism of Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror
- Complete H.P. Lovecraft, some available free through Project Gutenberg
- Anti-natalism
- Benign Anti-natalism and AI
- The Book of the Fallen
- S.T. Joshi’s How Not to Read Lovecraft
- August Derleth
- Book of the Wyrm
- Twin Cities by Night’s Brian Diaries: Nihilism in the World of Darkness
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
- Penny Arcade’s Nyarlathotep comic
- The King in Yellow by Robert William Chambers
- The Fisherman by John Langan
- True Detective, seasons 1 & 2
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Cover image by Image by Waldkunst from Pixabay
There were 168 umms removed from this episode.
An excerpt from the forthcoming Book of the Fallen, provided by Satyros Brucato on the Mage: The Ascension Facebook group:
“Oh, there ARE gods. I can attest to that. Or at least things you might call a god if you were desperate enough to believe that a spirit cobbled up from human thought-stuff is somehow worthy of worship just because it’s stronger than you’ll ever be. That stuff exists. I’ve seen it. Whether or not you’d call those beings “loving” or “just,” however, depends on just how badly you want to get in their good side and how much you’ll justify in order to stay there if you manage it. You can worship those things if you like—I won’t try and stop you. Why should I? You’re cattle to your gods. You’re meat. They feed on you. Religion is the butcher-block. Faith is the axe. Belief is meat and bone and blood.
And you call us the evil ones?
Seriously? Wear an instrument of torture around your neck if that makes you feel more holy, folks. Celebrate your god by eating his flesh and drinking his blood in order to escape the hell he made for you, and then tell me how I’m the one who’s sick in the head. Hey, if that’s your game, go play it. Maybe you can even go old-school and burn me alive after torturing me for weeks. That’d sure teach me what peace and love and justice are all about!
Now, gods ARE real, at least in the astral sense. People believe in them, and that faith fuels astral energy, gives it form, and lends it power and identity. Thing is, the gods are parasites—not creators or saviors but jackals made of spirit-stuff.”
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