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Chaosium Digest Volume 25 Number 04
Chaosium Digest Volume 25, Number 4
Date: Sunday, April 12, 1998
Number: 3 of 4
Contents:
Gathering Darkness, Part One (Evan Franke) CTHULHU NOW
--------------------
From: Evan Franke <erf98@uclink4.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Gathering Darkness: A Keynote Address, Part One
System: Call of Cthulhu
Author's note: This piece was originally written to be included with
Chaosium's "1990's Handbook" as the opening piece. In the end,
however, it was cut for reasons of space and style. I have somewhat
revised it from the version which was cut. I wrote it because the lead
author, Gregory Rucka, asked me to give a brief summary of the history
of the world's political, social, and religious systems to provide
Keepers some context for creating adventures in the 1990's. I did my
best to provide a narrative imbedded with ideas which might tease the
reader's imagination and provide the starting point for some research
and writing. I sill hope that it can serve that role.
Evan Franke
===========
"Gathering Darkness"
1994 Keynote Address
by Dr. Walter Black
The Annual Convention of the
International Metaphysics Society
Introduction
The collection of extraterrestrial and extra-dimensional beings known
to some scholars as the Chtulhu Mythos has been an ever present menace
to Humanity since anatomically modern humans arose some 100,000 years
ago. If some texts are to be believed, these alien beings may have had
a hand in the development of all life on Earth. Without a doubt, the
beings of the Mythos has exercised some degree of influence over human
society from its first development. Given this history, I suggest that
we must recognize that Humanity bears within it seeds, planted and
cultivated throughout its history, which threaten the destruction of
our species. We each have within us what the author Joseph Conrad
termed "the Heart of Darkness", and only by looking within ourselves
may we seek to confront that which exists to destroy us. Paradoxically,
our inward journey requires first an outward exploration of our
species' role in the history of our planet so that we may start to see
the web of events in which our species is trapped.
To do what we can to postpone our prophesied doom, we must seek to
understand our place on Earth in relation to these unfathomable
powers, to see how we have been shaped by their proximity, and to
learn what we can from all of Humanity's past in the hopes of
surviving that much longer. The extent of direct control the Mythos
may exercise or may care to exercise over Humanity has been uncertain
throughout our history, but individual events indicate that the Mythos
has empowered both the fringes and the hearts of human societies at
one time or another. The history of this influence is the secret
history of our species, which each of us, regardless of the risks,
must seek to expose.
It would seem that Mythos influence has lurked, from the beginning,
latent in any human creation to one degree or another, waiting to take
over. The truly terrifying element to this is that now, as we approach
the end of the Twentieth Century, technology and social organization
has allowed human beings to diffuse ideas, organizations, and
artifacts worldwide. There is no isolated society anymore; everyone is
touched by the world system, and there is no telling to what extent
the various powers of the Mythos manage that system. We must now look
at all human creations as potentially suspect, potentially corrupted
or corruptible by the powers of the Mythos. As we all are moved
towards a world wide conformity, we must beware of what or whose
vision we conform to.
In seeking to defeat, deflect, and diffuse the influence of the
Mythos, we must always consider our own species' involvement
first. The beings of the Mythos themselves are powerful and have goals
that humans can only try to interpret. All too frequently, however,
our fellow human beings have convinced themselves that these creatures
are means to power. To thwart our alien foes, we must strike at the
weakest links in the chains with which the Mythos seeks to bind our
species: human beings. Otherwise we face an imminent doom which we may
be unable to comprehend. The only defense against the incomprehensible
desires of these beings is knowledge. To this end we must explore
where we may find the human element of Mythos influence throughout the
world because therein lies the Achilles heel of our foes.
To begin with then, I will structure my discussion geographically,
using the continents of our plant as reference points to order my
observations. For each continent, I offer a survey of the social,
historical and political character of each in very broad terms and
follow with an overview of the occult elements known or suspected to
exist in each region. This can only serve as a primer for research, an
index with which deeper investigations can go forward. The sheer
weight of 100,000 years of human history, not to mention the churning
variation in almost five billion people, cannot easily be summed
up. In the end each investigator will need to probe deeper for
specifics, utilizing personal experience and the information
accumulated by worthy experts.
AFRICA
This continent is the cradle of Humanity. From our species' infancy,
Africa was our first testing ground, the first area where we sought
out and adapted to diverse habitats. While the earliest civilizations
are attributed to the Fertile Crescent in Mesopotamia, basic social
relations and social forms came from the small bands of wandering
humans who walked across the African continent and eventually wandered
out into Asia and Europe.
Of such a vast and important continent, rich in minerals, wildlife and
diverse environments, the average person remains remarkably ignorant.
The messages that popular culture has given us have been largely from
the perspective of the colonialists and imperialists. Much is thought
of ancient Egypt, yet rarely is it connected with the vaster African
continent whose history is both deeper and wider than that long lived
and changing civilization.
To begin to understand we must forget what we think we know about
Africa and begin to learn anew. Humanity has a long history here, from
our origin, to the heights of ancient civilizations, to our most
barbaric cruelties, all played out across this vast continent.
Human Geography
There is a basic dichotomy between North Africa, the continent above
and including the Sahara Desert, and Sub-Saharan Africa. North Africa
has had a long relationship with Europe and the Mediterranean. It has
always attracted a diverse population and has played host to
multi-ethnic societies for thousands of years. Black Africans, Arabs,
Phoenicians, Germanic Vandal barbarians, Berbers, Jews, Romans,
Greeks, and Egyptians, all have settled at one time or another among
the hot sands and verdant river valleys of North Africa. This area has
been for many centuries part of the Islamic world, though its past in
the Christian, mystic, and pagan traditions has never entirely
disappeared or been forgotten.
Sub-Saharan African is that Africa portrayed in the colonialist
propaganda. This was the land of Black Africans, where hundreds of
languages and many rich and diverse societies lived, prospered,
migrated, fought, and traded. There were sedentary kingdoms built on
trade, agriculture, and animal husbandry and there were slash and burn
agriculturalists, slowly moving across the settling temporarily, using
the land, then moving on to new land while the old regenerated. There
were nomadic pastoralists who also raided and traded with surrounding
tribes, and there were nomadic hunters and gatherers in every kind of
marginal environment, living where more settled people thought there
was nothing. All of this was arbitrarily parceled up by European
colonizers.
The Portuguese, English, French, Germans and Italians seized vast
territories, co-opted or destroyed native leadership, and administered
large colonies whose boundaries were drawn arbitrarily, without
consideration for allied or adversarial relationships between ethnic
groups. During the many conflicts between colonial powers, most
notably the two world wars, local populations were frequently pressed
into fighting for ideals and goals that had nothing to do with their
realities, yet they were forced to kill their neighbors (sometimes
their enemies, sometimes their friends) because of a line drawn on a
European map.
In the Post-World War Two era, continuing up to today, Black Africa
has sought to emancipate itself from its colonial past. Vast problems
continue because of colonial lines. Many African countries contain
ancient tribal conflicts and ancient tribes and kingdoms remain
divided by old colonial lines turned to national borders. Traditional
life has been forever changed and few people are able to carry on
their old way of subsistence. Colonial occupation left relatively
little industry and infrastructure, and the raw materials that Africa
can produce do not sustain vital economies. The old political
structures left by the Europeans, rather than helping to enfranchise
the populations and allow for fair governing under difficult
circumstances, have generally left an elite vulnerable to corruption
and detached completely from the common people.
Mythography
Because of the disturbing inference that the Mythos may have had some
influence on the origin of our species we must look to Africa for
early intervention by elder races and other alien influences. It is
not impossible that millions of years ago this continent was inhabited
by a variety of non-terrestrial creatures, attracted by the
biodiversity and mineral wealth. Evidence of this my be buried deep,
or may in fact be virtually eradicated by time. Evidence of their
influence on the development of our species should come from East
Africa, however.
Later influence of the Mythos focused on the larger conglomeration of
Humanity on the continent. This influence may have begun in Egypt, to
which Nyarlathotep seems to have almost intrinsic ties, and later
seems to have spread to the Phoenician colony at Carthage, and perhaps
can be seen in the darker sides of Hellenic, Roman, and Islamic
occupations. In both West and East Africa there were vast trader
kingdoms such as Ghana, Mali, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe. These places
brought travelers and traders from all over the Islamic world and from
Asia to exchange goods and ideas.
Their creation was through human inspiration, but the human heart of
darkness undoubtedly fell prey to the insinuations of the Mythos. In
the end, however, European intervention felled each of these states.
The resources for the Mythos in Africa are vast, for Humanity is old
here. Consequently traditions, mythologies, and social relations among
the many peoples in Africa are highly complex. Unfortunately, wherever
Humanity has been able to create wonderful and complex things, the
Mythos has been able to crawl in, to hide behind masks, and to subvert
and manipulate human culture to bend towards the inscrutable ends of
the Great Old Ones. Tribal culture has always seemed to have ways of
dealing with Mythos interference, of discovering it and casting it
out, or at worst just escaping from it. However, this tribal life has
been marginalized over much of the continent.
Tribal wisdom which has protected generations of Africans from the
Mythos is dying, or perhaps better put, is being exterminated by the
expansion of "civilized culture" in which human beings have lost their
way, falling prey easily to the forces that lurk in the shadows.
Certainly, there is a truly dark and corrupt side native to
Africa. Africa houses sinister ruins and there are ancient dark
ceremonies still practiced. However, the struggling art of tribal
shamanism has done more to keep these people clear of the Mythos that
civilization has, and there are horrors more terrifying in the
security ministries of many governments on the continent that one can
find in the most blasphemous ruins.
ANTARCTICA
To our knowledge, Humanity has only begun its invasion of Antarctica
within the period of recorded history. Antarctica was first approached
by an expedition led by the English sea Captain James Cook between
1773 and 1775. The actually continent was not set foot on until a
Norwegian led party landed in 1895. Most exploration of Antarctica
came in the 20th century and it continues today.
Human Geography
While various private concerns and national entities (most notably
Argentina and Chile) have advanced claims on the resources and
territory of Antarctica, an international compact currently guarantees
the integrity of the continent, reserving it as a place of cooperative
international research. There are several permanently maintained
research facilities on this harsh continent, and while there remains
many mysteries about its geology, ecology, and biology, its topography
has been thoroughly mapped, the last major survey having ended in
1964.
The climate is forbidding and harsh over the entire continent. There
is a base maintained at the South Pole, however, and both women and
men from several nations have proven it possible to walk, sled and fly
from one end of the landmass to the other. Still, Antarctica has been
the death of many expeditions, some forever lost to the icy embrace of
the frozen landscape and slow surging glaciers.
Mythography
This area is perhaps the most obscure, most forbidding, and most
mysterious on the planet. While the continent has been photographed
from the air and from space, while tiny expeditions have seen the land
up close and plumbed the depths of icy lakes inside glaciers and
viewed the life clinging to the underside of twelve foot thick sea
ice, Humanity has had almost no impact on the continent. In this
landscape is no history of a human heart of darkness. What lingers
below the glacial ice, what hides in the blistering eye of the snow
storm, what has been taking advantage of continent wide mineral
resources we cannot know until we are confronted with it.
In the 1930's an expedition from the Miskatonic University made
outlandish claims upon their return from the continent, recorded in
the narrative "At the Mountains of Madness." The narrative described
an interior mountain rage over 30,000 feet high, and claimed that at
one time it had been occupied by an ancient race alien to Earth. That
no such range has ever been found and the maps and satellite photos
now in existence would seem to conclusively prove than such a range
does not exist in Antarctica. The true facts about these "Mountains of
Madness" remain unknown. Perhaps knowing that he could not truly hope
to discourage further exploration of Antarctica, the author
fictionalized their height or their exact location to keep them from
the curious. The truth may be that something beyond our comprehension
lurks here at the bottom of our world, but whether it be from the
beginning of time or from beyond time we can only pray we never find
out.
ASIA
Asia is vast. Asia was the crucible of human endeavor. If Africa was
the cradle of the human race, Asia was the cradle of human
civilization. Here Humanity built the first cities; here humans first
domesticated the horse; here humans first wrote; and here Humanity
began to divide up and develop social complexity. It is almost too
much to try to comprehend Asia at a glance, for history, culture,
topography, and societies are virtually numberless.
Human Geography
One cannot sum up the physical geography of Asia. Mighty deserts,
great rivers, vast mountain ranges, deep forests, and jungles. The
scope is enormous. In terms of human geography, it was in Asia that
Humanity found itself capable of great organizational feats, of
building vast physical and social infrastructures, to discover secrets
about the universe, to glorify beings greater than themselves (the
gods, ancestors, the Buddha, and eventually God as known to Jews,
Zoroastrians, Christians and Muslims).
They converted a subsistence agricultural economy to surplus
production so that the vast majority of people could produce enough
extra for a small segment of the population to become scribes,
warriors, priests, and, of course, rulers. Cities spread throughout
Asia and also sparked civilizations in adjacent areas (such as Egypt)
not long after. Great centers arose and remained influential in
Mesopotamia, China, India, and Anatolia. Other populations took to the
vast plains and steppes on horseback, and groups such as the
Scythians, the Huns, the Mongols, and the Turks remained a menace to
urban civilization for millennia.
Out of the vast and varied physical geography of Asia, incredible
forces of human geography were brought to bear on almost all of the
other continents of our world. Innovative ideas, revolutionary
technologies, sweeping migrations and invasions, all born somewhere in
Asia, sparked vast changes in the world and can be seen as fundamental
factors motivating the modern world as we know it. Pulses and trends
from Asia continue to shape our world, from developments in marketing
and technology, forms of government and terrorism, and methods of war
and peace.
Asia in the modern world offers us a most bewildering and varied
panoply of ethnicity, religion, politics, and societies. From the
seemingly clockwork society of Japan, to the vast forces of China and
India, from the recovering nations of Southeast Asia and the armed
camps of the Korean Peninsula, ancient island traditions of Indonesia
and the Philippines with their groaning modern ills, to the
contentious states of the disintegrated U.S.S.R., to the young and
mistrustful states of the Middle East, Asia presents us with Humanity
rising to its heights of technical innovation and in its depths of
misery and meanness. Here, in our modern world, are the human
resources for every dream of peace, and the nightmarish capacity and
expertise for the final Armageddon of our species.
Mythography
Irem, the City of Pillars; the Plateau of Tsang; the Nameless City;
all these and more are rumored to be somewhere on the continent of
Asia, as are many other mythic places such as Shangri-La, Xanadu, and
Shamballah. These outlandish and otherworldly places may hide secrets
and hold the future or the past of Humanity in their hearts, but the
time has largely passed for lonely explorers to seek those distant
fables.
Today we find our unspeakable secrets and our secretive cults not far
from the centers of population, but rather within them. While some of
the familiars of the Elder Gods may still live out in the lonely
wilderness and the haunted ruins, the teeming continent of Asia hides
its heart of darkness in plain sight. Power is now exists where the
people are and, as the modern world has dismissed the mystic with the
wand of science, the slaves of the Mythos now organize Humanity into
gangs and criminal organizations, into political parties and
religions, into businesses and corporations. We can hope that they are
competing against one another to betray Humanity, but their influence
is world wide. What was a short time ago a loose set of uncoordinated
global conspiracies, may now be selling us our televisions as it spies
into our weaknesses by satellite and prepares to sell us all to the
forces which lurk beyond space and time.
AUSTRALIA
For all that it looks like an island on the map, Australia cannot be
seen as an unvariegated whole. The continent is as diverse as any
other and, in many ways, is much more unique. The landmass of
Australia was separated from the other continents in such a way that
the flora and fauna of the continent developed without the impact of
many species common throughout the rest of the world. Thus Australia
has, for example, a vast supply and variety of marsupials (kangaroo,
koala, etc.) which do not, and could not exist in other environments
due to competition from other life forms.
Humans came to Australia between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago and they
diversified into hundreds of cultural groups speaking thousands of
languages. Many entire peoples and traditions died out in the first
onslaught of the world system, headed by Western "Civilization." Most
of the world now see the original immigrants to Australia, vast
diversity and long tenure not withstanding, as a marginalized and
undifferentiated group they call Aborigines. Now the members of the
conquering peoples define much of the Australia realities, and it is
their human geography that is dominant. But many of the old ways are
not forgotten, and the land does not forget.
Human Geography
While there are many popular images projected of Australia, none can
truly compass the complexity of this continent. This continent can be
seen in its relation to the sea, because it has an enormous coastline
with access to tropical and Antarctic waters and includes the great
barrier reef surrounded by waters teeming with life. This continent
can also be seen as the wild frontier fit for cattle and sheep
grazing, where there is mineral wealth, verdant mountains, and fertile
valleys. Through this wild frontier lies the passage into the great
interior, the Outback. There in the vast, diverse, and arid wilderness
is an untamed land, a land that can be traversed, a land that demands,
a land familiar to few "recent" arrivals but well known to the
original inhabitants.
Around the rim of the continent is an overlay of European
"civilization." Great urban metropoli, small agricultural towns,
suburbia, all exist united around access to the coastline, looking
outward. Here live the proud descendants of convicts and their
warders, here also are most of Australia's immigrants, and finally
here live some of the remnants of Australia's original people, most
trying to bridge two worlds in conflict.
On the undefined edge of "civilization" there exist the wild mining
towns, the corporate mineral interests, the agro-businesses, and the
far flung cattle and sheep stations. This is a land of rugged people,
from horsemen in the mountains to migrant workers traveling from
station to station on the wide planes. Here is a world held together
by radios; flying mail and medical services; scattered one street
towns; and long dusty roads. Some Aboriginal tribes have places in
this land to continue their traditions and identity, but they are more
and more being detribalized and assimilated in some way into the
dominant European culture.
Beyond the fringe of European influenced areas is a vast landscape of
mostly arid lands. Few Europeans come here except for geologists,
anthropologists, biologists and other social misfits. Some Aborigines
still walk the great outback, but even here the influence of European
society has intruded into the ancient and natural rhythms which
Aboriginal culture developed to exist in this harsh landscape which
can be both forbidding and rewarding.
Mythography
Because of its original human inhabitants, residents of this island
continent for the last forty thousand years (or more), Australia has
been a unique mythological landscape in Humanity's struggle for
survival against the Mythos. Though we should not dismiss the modern
Europeanized Australians, their realities, backgrounds, and mythic
experiences are quite parallel to contexts known in Europe and
America. The Aboriginal experience of Australia is quite another
thing, however.
While the clans and tribes of Australia are as heterogeneous as the
different tribes of Native North American, they have certain shared
experiences, the most notable of which is the Dreamtime. Much of this
has been detailed already in the monograph _Terror Australis_, but it
can be summarize here. Dreamtime is a complex concept: Dreamtime is
both the mythic past, and an alternate reality of the present.
Dreamtime is a timeless place of myth, and reflects the physical
reality of Australia some 40,000 years ago. It may be derived from the
collective unconscious of the inhabitants of Australia interacting
with the land. While this timeless dimension exists as a resource for
inspiration and a receptacle for collected wisdom, it also houses the
horrors and trials of humankind's past, with a unique mix of spiritual
and demonic forces indigenous to Australia. It may be that other
similar myth/dream dimensions exist throughout the world, but
Australia's Dreamtime seems the most potent.
One possible influence in the Dreamtime, as well as in present day
Australia, is the presence of an immensely ancient city, reported in
the Miskatonic University publication "The Shadow Out of Time." This
city apparently existed in the Great Western Desert of Australia and
vastly predates the human occupation of the continent. According to
the report, the builders were travelers through space and time. These
beings eventually abandoned the city because to save themselves from
creatures which had been long-trapped under the city, but which broke
through the barriers which the city-builders had erected. The exact
location and total contents of the city, as well as its extent are
unknown. It is in fact uncertain whether it necessarily completely
occupies our dimension.
[continued in V25.5]
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