The Madness of Understanding (Plato's Cave and Cosmic Horror)

Most of us have heard of Plato's Allegory of The Cave, but if you haven't here's the simplified version. Imagine there are people chained in a cave, facing the far wall. Behind them is a fire. Objects are paraded in front of this fire, and their shadows cast on the wall. To the people chained in the cave, those shadows are all they know. It is their truth, and the totality of their understanding of the world.

Now imagine that someone gets free of their chains. They can walk backstage, so to speak, and they see that they haven't been looking at truth. They've just been seeing the shadows that presenters want them to see. Then they walk out of the cave, and into the light of day. There they see the world as it truly is, and their minds are filled with real understanding. Can they go back into the cave and explain what's happening to those who are still in chains? In one sense they can, but to those who have only known the cave, and who accept the cave as truth, they sound like raving madmen.

That's where the allegory usually stops, but imagine this final addition. If they stay in the cave long enough, surrounded by those shadows and the surety of the ignorant, they may even begin to lose their recollection. They might start to wonder if it was all a dream, or some wild imagining. They may regress back into the darkness, and ignorance.

And this is a perspective that I think can help a lot of us when it comes to writing cosmic horror.

Come with me, and I will show you the truth of the world.

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Of Ants and Smartphones

The idea that staring cosmic truths in the face can drive one mad by shattering their understanding of the universe is one of the central conceits of cosmic horror. However, too often we fall back on the age-old, "Gah, the monster was so hideous it has broken my mind!" trope. While that has its place in the foundation of the genre, a lot of writers have come and gone since the 1920s, and readers are a little more sophisticated than that.

Enter the ant, and the smartphone.

Social media... speaking of cosmic horror...

Ants are extremely intelligent creatures, in their own way. However, ants walking through our houses don't understand our technology. Now picture an ant stopped on your kitchen table, staring at your smartphone. In that moment, it recognizes that those shapes are letters, and that letters put together represent words, and meaning. That inputting those words can allow them to communicate with unfathomable beings across the world, to find information about any knowledge they desire, or to see images or moving pictures that depict nearly anything. That understanding is so crisp, so perfect, that it transcends everything the ant knew until that moment... but then it begins to fade. Soon the ant is just staring at this huge monolith with its bizarre symbols. The ant knows there's a deeper meaning, and a more important understanding, but it can no longer grasp it.

What would it do to recapture that knowledge?

This is an alternative way to look at the concept of cosmic horror, and the effects it can have on the minds of those exposed to it. The difficulty you face as a creator, of course, is that whatever truth it is the characters are faced with, it usually shatters the normal paradigms by which we understand the universe. Whether it's breaking the boundaries of linear time and experiencing everything all at once, seeing into dimensions our senses cannot perceive, existing eternally in a consciousness not meant to handle that experience, or something else entirely, it can sometimes feel difficult to express these massive concepts in a way that starts to crack one's sense of the world around them.

As the writer, that is your challenge. To conceive of something that would drive a person to madness, and then to ask how their obsession to understand it once more would push them outside of the Overton Window of reality. Then, at the end of it, ask how someone would look walking back into the cave, their eyes dazzled from the light, trying to explain to those who live in the dim, dreary reality of shadows and lies what really waits beyond the firelight.

Speaking of Cosmic Horror...

If you're interested in some of my own work that falls into this subgenre, consider checking out my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, since it walks a steady path into ancient gods and lost truths. If you enjoy the Call of Cthulhu TTRPG, and you've been looking for a little extra flavor to add to your map of Lovecraft Country, you might want to get a copy of 100 Businesses to Find in Arkham. I've even included a short audio drama of the introductory fiction, for those who enjoy such things!

If you enjoyed that little sample, and you'd like to check out other pieces to pass the time, consider subscribing to the Azukail Games YouTube channel. Or if you enjoy longer pieces, come check out my Dailymotion channel as well!

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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