Alternate take: Fair Folk Cosmic Horror

[Raymond Arnold]

Cy from Boston had an alternate take on Lovecraftian Horror: a holiday delving into Fae mythology. They began a brainstorming document here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zsGeLjwQgatWpZUgHe6BzbFa9xgO620MBsw4jGGxDg4/edit

Rough gist being:

The Fair Folk are an excellent metaphor for gnon. The Fair Folk are beautiful, horrific, amoral, capricious to human eyes and operate under counter-intuitive, arcane laws that are difficult to comprehend. The fae are powerful but not all-powerful. There are many stories where humans outsmart the fae and many folk traditions based around defending against the fae. Furthermore, many diseases and disabilities were historically blamed on fairies!

I think this would accomplish fairly different things that better known Lovecraftian stuff, but points in a lot of interesting directions, any of which I think would make for a cool experience

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[Raymond Arnold]

One thought I have is a comment of Eliezer's (somewhere on Facebook, I can't find it) that there's a difference between the "Inner Gates" and the "Outer Gates" that separate us from the Cosmic Beyond. Naive transhumanists get excited about all the ways humanity could transform into something majestic and inspiring even if alien and weird. This is what you get when you cross the Inner Gates. Whereas if you cross the Outer Gates you get paperclips everywhere, or [if you're lucky] elephants slowly starving to death when they loose their last teeth.

I'm not sure how aligned my own thoughts on Fair Folk are with Cy's, but to me it feels like a Fair Folk ritual is more about the Inner Gates, while a Cthulhu/Azathoth ritual is more about the Outer Gates.

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