Satan as Harvey [of the eponymous 1950 Jimmy Stewart movie]! I love it!
I own the CoC game for research purposes, but have never played it. I agree with Brian: the whole point of Lovecraft’s stories, for the most part, was to plumb the depths of horror, despair, and insanity arising from the discovery that the universe is not benign, that the gods would as soon squash us like bugs as look at us, and that their emotions, interests, and drives have nothing in common with ours. Taking out Nyarlathotep with a .45, or even just screwing up the Old Ones’ timetable by interrupting some of their followers’ worship sessions seems to violate that premise, somehow.
I suspect that if Brian wants to think of Satan as a giant talking bunny, then for most intents and purposes, it would be so, for him. In so far as gods or other figures may derive some of their substance or reality [whatever THAT is!] from human belief, it may well be a question of numbers.
Is anyone here familiar with the concept of morphic resonance, as described by Rupert Sheldrake? This is an increasingly popular concept in biological evolution that neatly explains both behavioral evolution in species, and certain concepts of morphological evolution that are not easily explained by classical natural selection.
It seems that in the years before WWII, a study was made of certain birds in southern England, a species of tit, I believe, that had learned how to peck through the foil cap then used to seal bottles of milk delivered to people’s doorsteps in the early morning. Since bottles of milk had not been on the birds’ menu when they evolved millions of years ago, it was clear that birds were learning the behavior from one another. The phenomenon was studied, and could be seen to be growing, slowly, within a certain geographical area [the south of London, I believe it was.]
And then, seemingly overnight, the behavior was seen to be spreading, and very quickly indeed. Tits in Scotland and on the continent were performing the same behavior, and seemed to be doing so beyond the radius expected if ordinary diffusion was at work.
WWII came along. Milk was rationed, and not delivered to doorsteps for a number of years. [I don’t believe it resumed until the early ‘50s.] By that time, all of the original milk-drinking tits had died off. [They don’t live more than a very few years.]
And yet, to everyone’s surprise, tits began drinking from milk bottles as soon as they were re-introduced, and the behavior continued to spread too quickly to be explained by diffusion, at least until they stopped using foil caps for the things!
Morphic resonance suggests that there is a kind of substrate upon which behavior can be played out and which accumulates experience. [Interestingly, this is an increasingly popular and useful concept now being presented in quantum physics as well—a substrate to reality upon which all realities are played out.] For a number of years, tits learned from one another about the joys of drinking milk from bottles . . . but at some point a kind of critical mass was reached. Suddenly, all tits had access to the behavior, which was a genuine survival mechanism, of course, at least to the extent that they could pick it up much more easily than could their forbearers.
Experiments conducted on human subjects supports this idea. One study compared the ease of memorization by groups of school children of two sets of poems . . . one learned by generations upon generations of Japanese school children, the other nonsense syllables created to sound like real Japanese, but carrying no meaning. American students repeatedly memorized the genuine poem much more readily, and retained it better, than they did the nonsense rhyme.
The gods and goddesses may indeed draw some aspect of their reality from our worship. Large numbers of believers may make it easier for those deities to manifest themselves, or to communicate with their followers. There may be a critical mass involved; get enough people believing in Brian’s talking rabbit, and the talking rabbit will find it’s own reality. It’s certainly an interesting idea.
I’ve often debated the point with Wiccans who—in an effort to distance themselves from Satan-worshippers [with whom they’re too often confused by the media and others]—often say they don’t believe in Satan. Well, that’s fine . . . but that doesn’t mean Satan doesn’t exist. The misguided belief in and worship of Satan by hundreds of millions of people through a couple of thousand years, not to mention the fear and other strong emotions of devout Christians in regard to Hell, could, in my opinion, have given life to this being whether he’d existed before or not.
As for consensus reality—Brian and I have debated this one before—that is one of the big problems of quantum physics today. Each of us creates our own reality, but what happens when separate realities overlap? Is there, in fact, a “base reality” to begin with? Does created reality persist? Or, as Einstein complained once [he didn’t care for some of the weirder notions expressed by quantum physics] does the Moon cease to exist when we’re not looking at it? [And there ARE times—once a month, in fact—when NO ONE is looking at the Moon, because it’s between the Earth and the Sun, the time of the new moon. Does simple belief keep it chugging along in its orbit? Are gods and angels and other extra-planar beings observing it, and so keeping it intact? Is the Moon a kind of propagated wave effect, with persistence, the way a wave at the beach maintains its existence even though individual water molecules are not traveling as a part of it?]
However you slice it, it does appear that the more people you have observing or believing in something, the more “real” that something is.
Now, if we could just understand what “real” is.
In any case, I don’t think all THAT many people believe in Chthulu today, but you never know. . . .
--Bill