You get wrapped up in a Lovecraft story(RAR)

[Zixinus]

Is there in Lovacraft's work any society or anyone who would oppose cultists?

[Elheru Aran]

Is there in Lovacraft's work any society or anyone who would oppose cultists?

Sort of. In the titular Call of Cthulhu, we have some cops breaking up a cult assembly in the Louisiana swamps; knowing Lovecraft it's questionable whether or not they might actually have been a white-power mob attacking black settlements...

Apart from that, there doesn't seem to be anything particularly organized, mostly because the cults are few and far between, and tend to hide in the dregs of society. When Wilbur Whateley's brother shows up at the end of the Dunwich Horror, the people mustered to oppose him are pretty improvised-- a professor from Miskatonic (perhaps more than one?), the local sheriff and maybe one or two of his men, and some villagers.

[Zeropoint]

Is shooting yourself not a useful thing to do when facing Nyarlothotep ?

You're absolutely right; I completely forgot about that. Being able to give yourself a quick, merciful death IS extremely valuable if you're in a mythos story!

[NecronLord]

Is there in Lovacraft's work any society or anyone who would oppose cultists?

Sort of. In the titular Call of Cthulhu, we have some cops breaking up a cult assembly in the Louisiana swamps; knowing Lovecraft it's questionable whether or not they might actually have been a white-power mob attacking black settlements...

Which is why I'm more open to seeing what the cult has to offer, and taking Lovecraft's talk about it all being madness inducing with a large grain of salt. The existance of the gods of Lovecraft doesn't mean that he himself is a reliable narrator.

I'd happily vote for a black prime minister after all, and I'm pretty sure HPL would have called that madness.

[Zixinus]

Yeah, one of Lovecraft's themes is "man is not meant to know", which is hard to be taken seriously today. In one story there is a doctor that managed to learn how to increase his lifespan by a procedure that requires cold. He fairly casually cures the heart condition of the protagonist, who in return tries to help operate his machinery. IIRC, there was no real hint of the doctor's expertese being derived from supernatural, it was just strange, unknown science. Naturally, he burns everything once the doctor dies.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, it's hard for it to be taken seriously by us, but we're a science fiction forum with a fairly xenophilic collective outlook, with a generally accepted belief that the worst thing you can get from learning a lesson is a bruised ego.

If it even makes sense to say you're in a Lovecraft story, it is probably a good idea to be cautious, because it may well be that the bizarre revelations actually can drive you mad and make you behave in counterproductive or unethical ways.

[Zixinus]

Reading up a bit, there is also entities that actively hunt down individuals who have learned something said entities want to keep a secret.

[Adam Reynolds]

Yeah, one of Lovecraft's themes is "man is not meant to know", which is hard to be taken seriously today. In one story there is a doctor that managed to learn how to increase his lifespan by a procedure that requires cold. He fairly casually cures the heart condition of the protagonist, who in return tries to help operate his machinery. IIRC, there was no real hint of the doctor's expertese being derived from supernatural, it was just strange, unknown science. Naturally, he burns everything once the doctor dies.

This is why I have to say to hell with the ideas of Lovecraft. Knowledge in and of itself is never really a problem, and the process of discovery itself is nothing but positive in reality. Throwing out the candle only makes the darkness stronger.

Even real technologies with dangerous potential, like nuclear physics, also have immense potential benefits. The trick is about keeping the good and reducing the impacts of the negative.

[Simon_Jester]

To be fair, even in the precedents of Lovecraft's own setting, the most successful 'normal' intelligent beings are ones that were knowledgeable and learned to cope with some very weird stuff. The Elder Things of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness lived on the Earth for hundreds of millions of years in deep prehistory, held their own against Cthulhu and his star-spawn (well, mostly held their own) and had a pretty good run, all things considered. Moreover, the Elder Things aren't even native to Earth; they're an interstellar species whose colonies elsewhere in the universe are alive and well today, even though on Earth they went extinct thirty million years ago.

The Elder Things are impressively weird, especially by 1930s standards, but if you picked them up and dropped them verbatim into, say, Mass Effect or Star Wars, I'm not sure anyone would notice you'd done anything 'strange' by introducing them.

Well, except for the part where in their distant past they were independently capable of interstellar flight without a ship. Skip that.

Anyway. There's actually a very large niche for intelligent life as we know it, or at least as we are capable of knowing and imagining it. The catch is that there are also very real capital-P powers. Powers that are truly cosmic forces (e.g. Azathoth and Shub-Niggurath), and which nothing even vaguely humanlike can meddle with in any semblance of safety, because the equivalent of them reflexively twitching is enough to destroy your world, without them even noticing they've done so or caring. The gap between them and us is like the gap between humans and bacteria, or even broader.

But it's worth noticing that the world isn't actually a bad place for bacteria, by bacteria standards, and that humans are unlikely to ever make it so. The 'gods' of Lovecraft are likewise not going to be destroying the universe any time soon or wrecking everything for everyone.

...

To be fair, humans, specifically, are perhaps in grave danger in Lovecraft. But honestly, that's because we're in a position that lets us interact with the truly dangerous entities of the Mythos, while not having an accurate enough understanding of the universe to do so safely. We're like random unschooled children traveling in a dangerous wilderness. It's not that nobody can live here or that there's no place we could be safe, it's that we don't know enough to secure ourselves and could easily cause ourselves grave harm through a combination of ignorance and ill-advised foolishness.

[streetad]

Lovecraft does sort of undermine himself a bit by presenting more than one non-human species in his stories that have managed to contain or hold their own against the more alien cosmic abominations by virtue of having a better understanding and more advanced science than humans. It suggests that humans COULD co-exist with Cthulu etc if we were allowed to advance far enough in our understanding of the universe. Kind of the opposite of 'there are some things that man was not meant to know'.

Still, in this scenario, 'dont mess about with horribly dangerous stuff that you don't understand' is probably a good lesson to bear in mind. So I'm still probably for burning the book and trying to get on with my life...

[Zixinus]

The problem with burning the book is the cult. At the very least, they will be very angry with you and demand compensation for the book. If they are more unhinged, they will demand and exact worse.

Simply giving them the book may not be the stupidest idea possible. What evidence do you have that there is only one copy of the book? What evidence do you have that they don't already have a copy and this one was someone's personal copy? Destroying it might do nothing but anger the cult.

Whereas returning it personally might get you a step in the door to make polite inquiries about what the cult is doing. The book might be full of crazy but the cult not so much.

If you want to have insurance, scanning in the book beforehand might be beneficial. If there is a summoning, there might be a dismissal or a counter-spell or whatever (I never read it but I heard that's what got the actual Cthulhu). At worst if there is no such thing, you can destroy any rituals that directly summon Cthulhu or equivalent, leaving the cult with lesser powers.

[Elheru Aran]

If you want to have insurance, scanning in the book beforehand might be beneficial. If there is a summoning, there might be a dismissal or a counter-spell or whatever (I never read it but I heard that's what got the actual Cthulhu). At worst if there is no such thing, you can destroy any rituals that directly summon Cthulhu or equivalent, leaving the cult with lesser powers.

That's Dunwich Horror, not Cthulhu. The Big C showed up when the stars were right, and then they weren't, so R'lyeh went back under the water and he went back to sleep or something after suffering a mild headache from a steamboat running through his noggin. During the Dunwich Horror, Wilbur Whateley's demonic half-brother attempted to contact Yog-Sothoth but Professor... Armitage? or whomever he was, managed to use incantations from the Necronomicon to banish him.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

If you want to have insurance, scanning in the book beforehand might be beneficial. If there is a summoning, there might be a dismissal or a counter-spell or whatever (I never read it but I heard that's what got the actual Cthulhu). At worst if there is no such thing, you can destroy any rituals that directly summon Cthulhu or equivalent, leaving the cult with lesser powers.

That's Dunwich Horror, not Cthulhu. The Big C showed up when the stars were right, and then they weren't, so R'lyeh went back under the water and he went back to sleep or something after suffering a mild headache from a steamboat running through his noggin. During the Dunwich Horror, Wilbur Whateley's demonic half-brother attempted to contact Yog-Sothoth but Professor... Armitage? or whomever he was, managed to use incantations from the Necronomicon to banish him.

It was Armitage. Doctor Henry Armitage, head librarian at Miskatonic University.