Professor Cognoscente's Caliginous Charms Carnival
Christopher Slatsky, "Professor Cognoscente's Caliginous Charms Carnival" in The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature (Grimscribe Press, 2020). Cosmic horror often features sorcerers in possession of powerful, dangerous, cursed, and ancient texts that reveal our lives to be shams and that what we believe to be important is not really important. Those who have glimpsed the secrets discover that we live in a world of shadows, that the real world sits behind our illusions of reality. Such forbidden knowledge, such truths, often drives such a seeker to madness. Sometimes images of stage magic, ventriloquism, and puppetry are invoked to suggest that our sense of reality is just a kind of trick. The subtext is that we live in a world of illusion. We go on with our lives, just playing a role and taking it to be all-so-important, when really it amounts to nothing—a mere shadow of what is truly real. This familiar line of thought expresses a kind of philosophical pessimism that evokes ...